This is pretty much how it looked at Jenner this morning as I crossed over to Penny Island in my kayak. The great white egret was fishing along the bank. It was overcast with fog waffling in and out, but the wind was down, so it was nice.
Conditions were about the same as I headed on up the river.
The fog was clearing out, at least for a bit as I sat here at dead deer gulch, working my way up the river.
The fog did clear for just a bit and the sun almost came out as I paddled along here, just below the highway one bridge.
Old boards in the river
I paddled up the river as far as this spot, just below the highway one bridge. Did you notice the old lumber in the view here? I think this is left over from an old lumber mill that was here sometime before 1900. These are the not so good boards from the outside of the logs, which were discarded, sometimes burned. I think the mill threw them over the river bank to get them out of their way, as they continue back under the bank dirt that is here now.
Headed to the turkey vulture nest
I turned back down river and decided to check on the turkey vulture nest to see how things are going and if indeed there is really a turkey vulture nest at this spot.
I pulled into this spot and eventually went to shore here. There’s a couple of surf scoters there on the rock that took off as I approached.
I found a nice gravelly spot here to land, no mud.
From there it was up the hill to this rock which I call Buzzard rock.
This was my view from the rock looking down river towards the town of Jenner.
Some white is at the nest for sure
The nest is down over the side of the rock, about fifty feet, so I could look down on it. I did see something white just in front of the nest just as I arrived and I saw something white moving back in the rocks several times while I watched, but was not able to get a picture.
This was looking over the side of the rock down towards the vulture nest, about in the center of the picture, under a rock down there. It’s nest is on the ground.
While I was watching the nest area, , this scrub jay popped up by the nest and preened for a bit.
When I looked down river I could see some biologists had landed down near Paddy’s rock and were doing something. I thought they might be taking samples, but I was wrong.
They turned out to be biologists from the Bodega Marine Lab. They maintain some kind of sonar current measuring device that they have to dive down to, as it’s on the bottom of the river. This spot they are in below is about thirty feet deep. They are installing these devices today for the summer.
Here’s the biologists just getting ready for a dive to the bottom.
Vultures stayed hidden
I watched the nest for about an hour, but the birds stayed pretty much hidden. Eventually, the biologists headed on up the river to plant some more devices. I watched them go by here.
I was pretty sure I was being watched
It was time to head on back to the river, so I hit the trail watching to see if an adult vulture would return to the nest when I left. Here is an adult vulture coming in just after I left the rock on the left. I was pretty sure it was watching me from way up in the sky.
Surf Scoters came back
These two surf scoters were back on the rock as I got back in my boat and now they weren’t going to take off this time, so I did my best to get some decent pictures of these critters. I find things that are black like these ducks are real hard to get decent clear pictures for some reason. Lately, I’ve been seeing quite a few of these scoters around. This is the first time I’ve noticed any surf scoters since I’ve been coming down here for about eight years. They’ve been around for the last week or two.
I worked my way down the the river. The wind came up a little, which just means I got a little more exercise paddling back to the ramp.
Yard work
I made it home for a nap then went over to my brothers place and put a piece of PCV pipe in the spot we had moved his water filter from on the old well.
After that, I moved some rock around the driveway patching some low spots to make things smoother.’
The rest of the evening, I just sat around in my chairs and enjoyed the day.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
