Kayaking Monte Rio Down with Marty and the Birds

Monday June 30, 2014 Monte Rio CA.

Marty came by this morning to go kayaking. I asked him where he wanted to go, knowing he’d likely say Monte Rio, so we went on down to Monte Rio to kayak for the day after loading another kayak on my car.

It looked like it was going to be a warm day as we put our boats in the water and headed on down the river at a very leisurely pace, stopping often under trees.

There was a nice breeze blowing that kept things at a nice temperature as we started down the river. This is just below Monte Rio, going down the river.

I saw something off to my right in the brush move so went over to investigate. A green heron was sitting there watching us.

As we continued on down the river, I saw this great blue heron and went over to check it out .

After taking it’s picture, I turned around to see Marty with his camera on another great blue heron.

We weren’t moving very fast at all as we worked our way down the river. We stopped and sat a lot and saw a lot of bird life moving around us.

We moved along this nice green weed patch with real nice yellow flowers starting to bloom and tucked in for a bit over on the left in the trees.

I went by this great blue heron on someone’s dock. I was close and it didn’t fly, so I was able to get a fairly good focus on it..

Villa Grande Hole

We eventually made it down to just above the Villa Grande hole and sat and had lunch in our boats in this spot, under the trees and in the shade. That’s the Villa Grande hole down the river.

After lunch we continued on down the river, not very far. Marty got some good pictures of these ducks as he went by as they were a bit on the friendly side. This was in the Villa Grande hole.

We sat at the Villa Grande hole for awhile, then moved on down to the bottom side of the hole and sat under the trees and shot the bull.

This little mallard duck came by and swam right up to us, paddled around our boats a few times and hung around for awhile, like it was our buddy. I quacked a few times at it, as that’s what you do kayaking around ducks.

Turned around

That was as far down the river we went and after a good break there under the trees, we started back up the river towards Monte Rio, still at a leisurely pace, but not stopping as often.

There seemed to be a lot of green herons on the river today. Here is another one we passed as we paddled by.

As we left the Villa Grande hole, this was our view up the river towards Monte Rio.

We were taking our time and enjoying the river and are almost back at Monte Ro in this picture. It’s pretty easy to paddle up the river right now as there is very little current.

Preening mallards

We passed these preening young mallard ducks that didn’t seem to mind us going by hardly at all. They just preened away as we passed, rather close too. Monte Rio has a lot of people friendly birds, more so than most other places I’ve been.

And just as we approached the take out ramp, I saw this same green heron over in the trees, still there right near where I saw it earlier today. They catch small fish from the trees and bushes along the river’s edge.

We took our boats off the water around four PM or so and headed on home. I was tired out, so I mostly napped the rest of the day, until just before dark when I went out in the front yard and sat in my chair and just enjoyed the evening until a bit after it got dark on me.

That’s it for another day on the Russian River kayaking.