DAY 1 OF MY VACATION. Around 8:00 am I headed out to the Cache Creek Conservancy’s nature preserve.
They only open up the preserve on a weekend about once a quarter, so when it opens up, I try to get over there. I got there just as they were opening the gates, so I got first pick of a parking space in the very-limited-parking lot adjacent to the walking trails. I don’t usually see a whole lot when I’m there. Their riparian area is pretty small and is mostly willows and cottonwood trees (with only a few scattered oaks). I knew they were working on expanding their trail system, though, so I thought I’d check it out.
CLICK HERE for an album of photos.
In and around the small wetlands area, I saw Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons along with a few Pied-Billed Grebes and lots of blackbirds, some Northern Flickers, and White-Crowned Sparrows. I got a little video snippet of a young grebe trying to eat a crawfish.
At one point along the trail I saw a big Red-Tailed Hawk strafe and knock down a Cottontail rabbit. It hit the rabbit so hard it broke its neck. By the time I got close enough to it to take photos, the hawk flew off into the nearby trees, but left his meal behind. I checked out the rabbit to make sure it was suffering and, nope, it was dead. Eyes still open. It only had a few bites taken out of it from the hawk – which I’m sure went back to the rabbit as soon as I was away from there.
I also saw a Northern Pike in the wetlands area. It was moving around in a shallow pond, so I could see the water being slowly agitated but at first I couldn’t see clearly what was causing the agitation. I took a few videos and watched them all in slow motion when I got home. The dorsal part of the fish would come to the top of the water – a slightly humped back and sort of yellowish-olive patterned body — then I’d see the tip of its tail fin poke out above the surface. The fish must have been 2 feet long, easily. Those guys are super-efficient predators that eat just about anything. I wonder if the conservancy knows they’re in the pond.
It’s just about the end of the gall season, but there were still some clinging to the leaves of trees and scattered on the ground. There were two I hadn’t seen or photographed before, so that was cool. The little round ones were called – duh — Round Galls (Besbicus conspicuous), and the other one I saw was along the edges of the leaves of the Cottonwood Trees. Now, I’d seen the Petiole galls before (lots of them) that form at the base of the leave and are caused by a species of aphid (Pemphigus populicaulis), but I’d never seen the ones that formed along the edges. I took a bunch of photos and when I got home, I looked them up in my trusty galls books and I actually had some trouble finding it. It’s a kind of “leaf curl” gall also caused by an aphid (Pemphigus sp.) but the exact species wasn’t specified. I’ll have to do more research. There were also a lot of Jumping Galls (Neuroterus saltatorius ) still clinging to the leaves of some of the oaks. Along with the willows, cottonwood trees and Valley Oaks, I also came across some very late-blooming Rock Phacelia (Phacelia egena), Vinegarweed (Trichostema lanceolatum), Cocklebur, Chicory and Tree Tobacco (Nicotiana glauca) – an invasive species.
I got to see a pair of mule deer, but couldn’t get very close to them before they were off, dashing toward the river side… I walked for about three hours and then headed back to the car.
