It’s my second year seeing nesting season out in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s certainly an amazing area to see the large number of bird species and how they live throughout the year.
I wasn’t able to see the start of the season (see nesting season post 1 and nesting season post 2 from 2016), but there were still a few active nests on this visit. A few birders whom I ran into had been out to Golden Gate Park almost every day. I hope they got some good pictures. This year, Stow Lake had 11 active heron nests, but almost all of the babies had since flown off. A red-tailed hawk family had settled into one of the nests and was actively hunting small prey to feed the already large young.
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- Mallard
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- Pied-billed Grebe
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- Red-tailed Hawk Nest
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- California Towhee
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- Goslings
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- Great Blue Heron
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- Great Blue Heron Nest
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- Steller’s Jay
Bird Facts: Male and female Great Blue Herons work together to build and maintain nests. Males gather the majority of nesting material and bring them to the nesting site where females assemble it into a nest. Like other large birds, herons reuse nests if they can as the resources needed to build a new one can be quite large.
