Oak-Loving Fungi

After the first rains of November,  outlandish growths suddenly appeared on this old oak.

Tentative identification: Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus gilbertsonii)

I pass this tree every day and the yellow fungus sprouted overnight.

After several weeks it browned and withered.

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Fast forward to late December, at the base of the same tree...

Tentative identification: some kind of Chanterelle

Chanterelle favors soil around (or in the nooks and crannies of) oak.

People actually collect and sell this beauty.

Red-Breasted Sapsucker

A new bird, a Christmas gift.

Across the field, high in a tree, a dim silhouette at dusk with a unrecognized call: "Cheer"

Forget the binoculars!
A pocket digital camera with mega-zoom is a birder's best friend.

If I'd had presence of mind, I would have switched to video and captured its song.

December Clouds

Killdeer

Western Meadowlark

Certain birds pass through in the Spring and then again in the Fall.

Coyote Bush

A non-descript shrub I despaired of identifying: unruly, evergreen, common.

Finally, beginning in late September, it began "blooming", tight white hairy tufts.

Small mystery solved.

Acorns

Mid-November, the birds (and squirrels) are stocking their larder with acorns.


This Scrub Jay is about to bury his acorn in the ground.

The Acorn Woodpecker uses and reuses holes pecked into trees and poles.

Come December this is what all the telephone poles will look like.

There are thieves. Squirrels pry the nuts from telephone poles, and flickers uncover acorns which they did not bury.

Question: what kind of acorns do the different animals favor?  Live, Blue, Black, Valley?

A magic sight the other day: a towering Valley Oak and scores of peckers and jays streaming into the dense boughs and leaving with an acorn.  It was a river of birds both ways.  Then the obvious dawned on me -- they pluck the acorns straight from the branches, and not off the ground.  Duh.