Early in January unusually cold weather struck the American Midwest and East. A few worms in December's batch of a thousand super worms started to die off each day. They only lasted a little more than two weeks. The worms come from Illinois by overnight FedEx. A new order of worms on January 5 arrived with fifty or a hundred worms already dead. Two heat packs were included in the box, but didn't seem to do much good.

Over the next few days several worms continued to die every day. The amount of dead worms shown in the picture to the right were picked out of the worm farm twice a day.

The company that raises worms also raises crickets. Some of them seem to have been mistakenly included with the worms last summer, and by November full size crickets were appearing every evening around the house. By the end of the first week in January, however, all the crickets disappeared.

The osprey have struggled to raise a family here for many years. This year's attempt comes on G Street by the boat yard. The picture (right) shows quite an advanced effort. There seems to be three adult birds using this nest.

This particular family of birds has been trying to nest and breed here for several years. The Port of San Diego and now Goodrich have been trying to exterminate them with only partial success. The following pictures document the recent history.

The osprey nested here (right) at Goodrich at the closed portion of Marina Parkway in the spring of 2009. It was uncertain whether any chicks were hatched at this location.

The osprey also nested here in 2008.

Now, in 2010, spikes have been installed on this utility structure (shown right and above) to stop the birds from nesting.

In 2007 the osprey attempted a nest on G street. This was across the street from their current nest. This nest was destroyed early in its construction, presumably by a winter storm and they did not attempt another nest there until now.

This nest was used by the osprey at least through the spring of 2005. It was located on the Rohr parking lot across the street from the marina on Marina Parkway. Two or more chicks were hatched and fledged from this site. Rohr Industries later became part of Goodrich.

This nest and all of these light fixtures were destroyed by the Port of San Diego. The birds then moved to the nest site above.

This remarkable sign was installed at the southwest corner of Chula Vista Bayfront Park by the Port of San Diego. It extolls the wonders and virtues of the osprey, and claims to hold an osprey nest platform. This is one of the high points of the "Stupid Sign of the Month" Tour. It is less than six feet tall.

The lawns at Bayside Park that the Port of San Diego employees sprayed with herbicide to kill the clover last year are now thriving. The grass was pretty much dead over the summer, but now that spraying has stopped, it has recovered nicely. The following link applies:

Beneficial Clover in Lawns
This link popped up first on a Google search, but there are plenty of others.

A Corvus brachyrhynchos or American crow, looks into the sunrise over Interstate 5 in the morning.

Crows were never seen in the city until about twenty years ago. Now they are common everywhere.

Beaky Coot can be fed late in the morning after Marvin wanders away. Usually this attracts other wild coots. Beaky becomes vicious and aggressive toward the other coots, and seems to have turned feral. In the picture at the right, he holds this male coot's head under the water with his foot and beak.

The gulls recover all sorts of objects from the bay and bring them onto the dock for study. The items in this example are (left to right) a mussel shell, a cork from a bottle, and an elephant squeaky toy (that still squeaks).

There was some hope that the red spike ice plant that had started to return around the marina would provide a small amount of nutrition and moisture for the migrant birds. Unfortunately, it was once again sprayed with herbicide on or about January 15.

This was just before the large rain storm that started January 18.

This tiny female is the size and shape of a football. Cute.

This spotted bay bass was found dead near the riprap where the iceplant had been sprayed with weed killer. This was discovered after the second big rainstorm of the year. The fish may have been killed by runoff from the weed killer, bare soil exposed by removal of the iceplant, or just all the toxic waste coming down the storm drains from the parking lot.

The weather caused problems for birds: Dozens of disoriented pelicans recovering from storm's effects

I would hate to be the latest one seen dumping more chemicals into the bay.

The winter coot population around the three parks reached almost one hundred coots in January. These birds eat the grass and take advantage of puddles of drinking water (under the park bench) from the rainstorms.

Fifteen migrant wild coots are fed every morning. Click on this link to see feeding.wmv, and how the wild coots eat. (15 seconds long, 4 Megabytes)

Feeding is always difficult in an environment of limited resources and political restrictions. But giving all the birds once chance to eat something every morning must give them at least a hopeful start to the day. Later they disperse to forage.

This also attracts the fish up to the surface to eat the crackers. One of the blue herons has become aware of this and one morning caught a rather large fish here. The fish stop feeding after sunrise.

Big Picture:

Click on the image to view it full size. Use your browser's Back button to return.

The white heron comes to visit at rare times during the year. There seems to be only one of these big birds.

Index:

Home

Background

Coot Food

Recipe for Coot Pudding

Coot Misinformation

Bibliography of Research

Coot Calls and Movies

Historical Summary

Links to Important Sites

Opinion