Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron, Point Reyes National Seashore

This is a photo of a great blue heron in Drakes Beach Lagoon wading through thick algae as it looks for minnows.

I was out at Point Reyes National Seashore last week and photographed this great blue heron.  It was fishing in what is a new lagoon next to the parking lot at Drakes Beach.  I understand it was developed a couple of years ago as mitigation for the widening of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard through East Schooner Creek, which is one of the few anadromous streams in the Seashore.  A lagoon may have existed here long ago.  It sits at the bottom of a drainage with a dairy farm, C Ranch, at the top of the drainage.   The constituents of cow manure include nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which cause algal blooms when they get into watercourses.  The water might also contain E coli.  Unless something is done about the manure in the upper drainage, the whole lagoon will probably be filled with algae in another year or two.   This heron looked like it was having trouble just wading around in the lagoon.   This ranching shouldn’t be happening on Park Service-owned land in a national park.

black-faced monkey, Vervet Monkey

Vervet Monkey, Amboseli National Park, Kenya

 

Photo of a vervet monkey.

Vervet monkeys, aka black-faced monkeys, live around some safari tent camps in East Africa.   They are very cute and entertaining until they go into your tent which they will try to do in the daytime (only) when you aren’t there.   They are good at finding any weakness in your tent’s security.

In June of 2022 I was staying at Gamewatchers’s Porini Mara Camp (which I highly recommend) and when I returned after my first game drive  I found one or more vervets had gotten into my tent despite my carefully zipping it closed.  It (or they) found that the velcro that holds the vertical front wall of the tent to the ground portion of the tent had a weakness, a worn out section of velcro about a 12-18 inches wide just to the right of where the vertical door zipper intersects with the left and right lower side zippers.  That resulted in them being able to easily pull the upper and lower sections of the tent wall apart enough to get into my tent.  When I got back to camp for lunch I found the plastic bag holding my malaria pills and a few other pills was gone.  I told the camp manager and he started a little search party.  Fortunately, the staff found my malaria pill bottle which had one of those little thumb tabs the vervet or vervets couldn’t open, so it (or they) dumped it on the creek bank after chewing on it.  The other pills were never found.

What did I learn from that?  Well, not enough.  After the next game drive I opened the tent to find the wrapper from an energy bar I had forgotten to take with me was on the bedspread.  That wasn’t all.  Like pack rats that take things that attract them and sometimes leave something in return, also on the bedspread was a vervet dropping.  I didn’t know how to take that.  Was the vervet laughing at me or was it just saying “thanks” in vervet?  Fortunately, it was dry and easy to deal with.  I reported it to Gamewatchers along with a suggestion to drill some holes in the spot where the velcro was no longer sticking together and run some small bolts through the two layers of canvas/velcro and then attach the nuts on the other side.

When I returned this past June I saw that Gamewatchers had fixed the problem nicely by creating a number of paired holes in the two overlapping layers of canvas/velcro  and running zip ties in and out of the paired holes and tightening the zip ties.  The zip ties were a better solution.  I stayed in the same tent in June 2023 and there were no vervet entries.