I arrived at Jenner this morning to an overcast day, with just a breeze in the air. I put my boat in the water and headed on up to the east end of Penny Island. It was nice out.
White Pelicans
As I was paddling along, these white pelicans flew over my head several times before heading off up the river.
What’s that seagull up too?
I was taking my time putzing along, when I passed the east end of the island and saw a couple seagulls in the water. One of them was sticking it’s head under the water and eating something and being very protective not to let the other seagull near where it was working.
This is my view as I was paddling along and saw the two seagulls in the water. The one on the right is doing the eating.
When I approached the feeding seagull, it stopped what it was doing and swam off a ways, while still making sure the other seagull didn’t get too close to it’s spot.
This is the seagull that was eating something in the shallow water and being very protective of it’s spot.
Here, the seagull has just popped it’s head back to the surface and is swallowing a small fish, or is about to swallow it.
I thought there must be a big school of the little fish for it to be catching and eating so many of them.
I approached it’s spot and it moved back a bit. I could now see what it was eating. It appeared that some small fish had, had a die off and the seagull had found the spot where they piled up.
Here is a picture of some of the dead fish. They mostly just seemed to be in this one spot, about a six foot circle of them.
Die offs
Most of the time I see a die off of some kind down here, it’s usually related to the changing water from the oceans tides. Some fish are fresh water only and some fish are ocean water only and some fish can do both. When the tide changes, fresh water can be replaced with ocean salt water or the other way around. If a fish or a crab, get caught in the wrong water and can’t make it back to the right kind, they die and something will eat them.
I left the seagull eating and protecting it’s find and continued on up the river on the south side.
Great Blue Heron
I paddled past this great blue heron sitting on a rock just past eagle’s landing. It flew into the air as I passed.
I continued paddling on up to the Indian rock trail and rested there for a bit, before starting back down the river.
This was my view as I started back down the river towards the town of Jenner.
Checked out the north shoreline
I decided to paddle over to the north shore just below Paddy’s rock to see what birds might be resting on the shore there?
These are the first two birds I ran into paddling along the shoreline.
And then some geese and a great egret.
An osprey lands, twice
I crossed back over the river to the north side of Penny Island and was paddling along with this osprey landed on a tree branch just ahead of me.
It stayed on the branch until I passed it by, then flew down and landed on the shore just ahead of me where I took this picture of it.
White Pelicans
There where about twenty white pelicans resting not far from where the osprey landed on the west end of Penny Island.
Here’s a few of the white pelicans preening.
Sat around the river’s mouth area
I headed on down to the river’s mouth where I sat around for awhile just inside the mouth.
There were the usual harbor seals on land and swimming around in the water and a large flock of cormorants resting too, on the beach.
It was going to high tide, so the water was coming into the river fairly fast. Eventually, I let it take my boat back up the river.
I passed these two merganser ducks resting on the shore.
Pelicans
This was my view as I approached the west end of Penny Island, where the white pelicans were taking it easy.
Eventually, another kayaker got too close to the pelicans and they flew off up the river.
I worked my way slowly over to the take out ramp and went on home for the day.
I had a good long nap when I got home, and then went outside and puttered in the yard for awhile, not really doing much, but just enjoying the evening.
Another nice day paddling around in the Russian River estuary.
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.
