Tuesday March 10, Jenner CA.
A turkey sort of day
As I drove down to Jenner today, I could see the fog wasn’t as heavy as yesterday, but the chill off the ocean was still about the same, a bit on the chilly side with the light breeze.
I put my boat in the water and paddled across the river to Penny Island where I was sitting when I saw John coming down the road in his truck with his boat in the back. He saw me and beeped his horn so I waited for him to catch up.
He joined me and we started up the river intending to go for a hike to warm up, but first we had to find a place to land our boats that wasn’t too muddy.
This is what the morning looked like as we headed on up the river.
These geese honked as we went by them.
Looking for a place to land
We paddled up to Muskrat Nest beach, but there was too much mud at today’s water level, so we back tracked to the Indian rock trailhead and were able to get out on a gravel beach.
We decided to walk along the river a bit starting out, so we followed the Poison Oak Alley trail up the river a bit going through these big green ferns.
Buzzard rock
We were headed up to Buzzard rock which is this rock above the river.
Another Turkey vulture nest?
As I approached the top of the rock and looked over, this turkey vulture flew out of some rocks and landed in this spot below the rock. The bird stayed at this spot the whole time we were there. I think it has a nest down there. This would be the second nest in this area if it has one.
Wild turkeys
John climbed up on buzzard rock and was looking around when we heard some turkeys gobble. They were a ways away over by the big green trees to the right and are in the picture, but hard to see at this distance.
These are the turkeys we saw by the big trees. They seemed to be feeding and stayed close to this spot for a long time while we hiked.
Headed to the Indian Rock
We continued on up the hill from Buzzard rock and were headed to the Old Indian Ladies Face rock which you can see in this picture. John spied a deer to the left of the rock looking at us. It’s in the picture, but I doubt you can find it as they blend in well.
Here’s the deer. It watched us for a bit, then turned and walked off not to be seen again.
We headed over to the Indian rock through this grassy area which had a bunch of little wild flowers growing here and there.
I spotted another one of these pink flowers like I saw yesterday, this one a little larger size.
We made it to the top of the Indian Rock and this was our view down to the river.
Gobbling turkeys
Every once in awhile the turkeys across the way would gobble and this was what we could see from the rock. The upper Tom is displaying.
We stayed on the rock for awhile resting, before starting down the trail just below the rock. As we started we could hear some turkeys crossing below us in the trees, but we couldn’t see anything as we were now in the thick trees.
They must of heard us going down the trail as they became quiet and we didn’t hear them again as we continued down the hill.
About half way down we heard some more turkeys across the river. John says there’s two females down there.
When I got to a spot I could see out, I could see the two female turkeys down there across the river from us. Once we were back in the brush we didn’t see them again.
Turkey Tom in the skyline
We made it down to our boats and got back in the water. We were taking our time paddling down the river when we heard a loud gobble back up the hill somewhere were we had just been, so we were looking up there to see if we could find the source of the gobble when John says, there he is, right up on the ridge line.This is what we saw as the turkey gobbled away.
It was about 4:30 PM so John took off to the boat ramp while I continued down the river at my leisurely pace. I passed by this pair of mallards sitting on the shoreline.
There was some fog moving in so it was getting darker, so I headed on in for the day and went on home where I hit the couch.
Another nice day on the river.
