THE EGGS HAVE HATCHED!

It finally happened. Yesterday when we walked by, the mama killdeer was sitting all fluffed out on the nest - like she had something to hide - and she did. All four eggs hatched. From a distance of, perhaps, a hundred feet, I saw one little bird running around; although, when we got up close, he was gone - perhaps hidden under his mama's skirts, er, wings. I took the picture below. The male killdeer walked right up and tried to run us off with as mean a look as he could muster, but I stuck around long enough to get this picture:

I didn't have the heart to stick around any longer yesterday, since the parent birds were obviously upset that we were there. We did walk around the block and, when we came back, both parent birds were walking around and all I could make out in the nest was feathers. Again, the birds were upset, so I left without taking a picture - which I now regret. This morning, when we came back by, the nest was empty and the birds were gone. We hunted around a bit and finally spotted two mature killdeers in the field across the busy road. I sneaked around behind a wooden fence and finally got within about 40 or 50 feet of them when I spotted the two babies in the picture below. Don't know if there were any more. The parent birds were lucky to get even two day-old babies across that road without getting them run over by a car or truck anyway. Now, if they can just keep the horses and crows that live in that field away from those babies for a few days, the little ones might even get big enough to fly. It amazes me how quickly these birds mature. Imagine a human baby getting up and running across a busy road after one day of living!

That's the latest in the continuing saga of Dickie and Carl and the killdeer. Keep tuned!

STILL FOLLOWING THE BIRDS

Dickie and I went to see "The Parrots of Telegraph Hill" yesterday. What a great documentary! As Dickie said, you don't really expect to shed tears in a documentary, but I guess we both did. I didn't know about these parrots in San Francisco until I saw the movie. As the movie explains, they're not native to these parts. In fact, exactly how they got here is still a mystery. In any case, I'll be watching for them on my trips to the city from now on.

A bird that is native to our area is the California quail. We see them on our daily walks here in Windsor all the time. The California quail with its curved black crown feather has a little more pizzazz than the quail I knew as a boy in Missouri. Here's a couple we saw sitting in a tree on today's walk:

We're still watching that killdeer nest in the front yard of a neighbor down the road. Nothing has happened yet. The four eggs are still unhatched. Both birds were there when we passed by this morning. One of them buzzed us and the other one ran at us on the ground as if to drive us off. They really don't know their own strength or non-strength, I guess. We think there may be another nest again on the edge of the school parking lot, but we haven't been able to locate anything new there yet. There were three mature birds milling around where we think the nest may be. We'll keep watching.

DUCKS ON THE POND

In baseball, a bases loaded situation is described as having "ducks on the pond". That's not what I'm referring to in the headline above. I'm just being very literal. Dickie and I dropped by Sonoma State University the other day and took a walk around the campus. In a pond behind the commons, we came upon this bedraggled mother duck and her five little ducklings. They were busy chowing down on whatever they could find in their moss-filled water home. They hardly bothered when I walked up to them with my trusty camera. And, wouldn't you know, there was a black sheep/duckling in this family, too:

I caught this one moving away from the pack:

This fellow below lives in a lake in our gated community here in Windsor.  He
almost always takes a good picture:

ANOTHER KILLDEER NEST

Dickie and I discovered another killdeer nest the other morning. As I've mentioned before, they're not easy to spot - even when you know about where they are. Just the day before we spotted the nest which is in the front yard of a home in our neighborhood, I had said to a man who lived across the street from the nest that I knew there was a nest there someplace, because the bird was always there and was doing her broken wing act whenever we walked by. Then, lo and behold, the next day I took a careful look at the place where I first spotted her and there was the nest with four eggs in it not more than five feet from the edge of the sidewalk, in plain view.

Your heart has to go out to these beautiful creatures who don't seem to realize how risky it is to put their nest in plain view in the front yard of somebody's home, where cats and dogs are bound to pass by occasionally. Somehow they seem to manage. The first nest we saw this year hatched four live birds, two of which are still hopping around in the schoolyard when the kids aren't around and in the nearby park when they have to escape any other danger.

I took a picture of the new nest this morning. Here it is:

I'll let you know if the birds make it.


A BIG WEEK FOR SPORTS

You'll have to go a long way to find a better week for sports fans than this present one. The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament will be played this evening between Illinois and North Carolina. Dickie and I are rooting for Illinois. For baseball fans there's the opening of the Major League baseball season this week. I'm hoping my Cardinals will get off to a good start. For golfers there's the Masters Tournament that begins on Thursday down in Augusta, Georgia, where they tell us the dogwoods and azaleas are bursting in bloom. I'm a Tiger Woods fan when it comes to that game.

ANOTHER MUSEUM

Dickie, our daughter Gretchen, and I made a trip to the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum on the last day of March. We wanted to see the Alfred Bruyas collection of French masterpieces that is presently on display there.

It was a beautiful day and we lucked out on the parking, finding a space right at the entrance on the far side of the relection pool that stands there. Here's what it looked like there:

Before we entered the museum, we toured the holocaust memorial just to the west of the reflection pool. The artist who executed the memorial was George Segal, with whom we were acquainted in East Brunswick, N.J. It's a moving and fitting work, as you will see in this next picture.

As we entered the quadrangle of the museum building which is wonderfully placed high on the hill there overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we passed a statue of Rodin's "The Thinker". I took a shot of that, too.

The museum was featuring Alfred Bruyas' collection of French masterpieces, including many by his close friend and associate, Gustave Courbet. The picture below is called "The Meeting". It was painted by Courbet and shows Bruyas (in the green coat with his servant behind him) talking to Courbet, the larger figure on the right. We were told that this painting caused a falling out between Courbet and Bruyas, who apparently considered his being a smaller figure in the painting a kind of slight.

It was a fun day! We recommend the museum on your next visit to San Francisco.