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California Quail
25 Mar 1995 in Golden Gate Park |
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 The
City
and County of San Francisco is the only unified county/city government
in California. The county and city limits are exactly the same, and both
of them include the Farallon Islands (which is on another
page of this project). San Francisco has a population of about 745,000
but is part of the Greater Bay Area with millions of people. The City itself
is often considered one of the most lovely cities in the world. It is,
however, still a city. Birding locales are often small urban parks and
scattered here and there, except for the much larger Golden Gate Park and
the rather extensive lands of the Presidio, now protected by the National
Park Service. New wetlands near Crissy Field have become a productive spot,
and there still is much good birding along the Pacific Coast (Ocean Beach),
around Lake Merced, and at Candlestick Pt.
County birding statistics and links are on Joe Morlan's site. Details about local birding spots are on the San Francisco Field Ornithologists' web site. A Breeding Bird Atlas project has been completed, but has not yet been published. |
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For San Francisco City & County, I feature
a dust-bathing California Quail. It's a nice male; the species is our State
Bird. Quail were once common in Golden Gate Park, but populations have
declined seriously in the past decade, in part because of feral cats. Some
were reintroduced in 2006 [and the entire episode has been featured in
the Farley cartoon in the S.F. Chronicle]. Golden Gate Park
is one of the prime birding spots in The CIty; my other two photos are
also from there: a just-fledged Anna's Hummingbird (note the really short
bill it has at this age; 25 Mar 1995) and some American Coots jostling
for position at one of the ponds (20 Dec 1983). Note that the left-hand
coot has an entirely white shield, a character once thought to identify
Caribbean Coots in North America. The late Luis Baptista and I published
a paper [Roberson & Baptista, 1988, White-shielded coots in North America:
a critical evaluation. Am. Birds 42: 1241-1246] debunking this theory and
all U.S. claims of "Caribbean Coot." Rather, male American Coots with excess
testosterone may possess the all-white, high shields that match Caribbean
coots. The San Francisco coot was one of the ones we featured in our article.
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| All photos & text © 2006 Don Roberson; all rights reserved. | ||
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