[Paddlewise] birds on boats

Years ago (1975-80) I lived on the shore of Lake Elsinore (a low desert
town about 40 miles south of Riverside, CA).  I had a HobieCat 14
sailboat to play on the water that was kept beached about 6 feet from
the shoreline when not in use (lots of wind but no tide!).
This lake was a good spot for bird watching.  One winter the mast of the
Hobie was shared by a Belted Kingfisher in the mornings and an American
Kestrel in the afternoons.  A lot of birds eat stuff that they can't
digest, and what they don't poop they "pellet" by coughing up a tight
little wad of compacted debris.  Owl seekers can look around the base of
trees for these things to know if an owl is in the tree and even what
kind, as the pellets are quite distinctive for each species.
In the morning, the kingfisher would show up and take position on the
mast top.  Every now and then it would make a dive and come up with
something to take back to its mast top perch.  She liked to let it
wriggle in her beak for a while and then toss it back and look for more
until about 9am when she would vacate the mast and the kestrel (a small
indigenous falcon some people used to call a Chicken Hawk) would take
over.  Her program was the same only her food was next to the shore, not
in the water, and she would daintily hold the catch in one talon while
ripping off bits to swallow with her short hooked beak.
In the evening, I would go down and brush the pellets off the boat's
trampoline.  The kingfisher's were all little white fish bones and tiny
shiny scales.  The falcon's were mostly grasshopper and beetle wings,
legs, and exoskeletal armor pieces.
My little beach was also frequented by Great Blue Herons who would walk
the shoreline fishing for minnows.  Sometimes they would grab a fish so
big it would take a minute or more for that fish to slooowly go down the
long length of the bird's neck, all the while looking like a snake that
swallowed something impossibly large.
                      >///:>Chris Hardenbrook<:\\\<
                       Drizzly Southern California

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