11 antsy pelicans

  

I did my usual walk around the lake on my lunch break yesterday and spotted eleven pelicans, a great egret, eight turtles and a single cat. The cat was sitting on the back of an easy chair looking out the picture window of a house close to the Pavilion. I sometimes spot this cat lying on its cat tree in an adjacent window.

The pelicans were antsy and moving around a lot, both swimming and flying in short bursts. They would sometimes clump together and then separate after a while. Two pelicans were bullying a diving cormorant. They rushed the cormorant together several times by ascending about six feet and then swooping at it. The cormorant eventually left.

The pelicans were challenging to count with all the moving around they were doing but by the time I was getting close to the Pavilion all eleven were relatively close together. I had an opportunity to photograph them in one shot, but missed it by using the wrong lens. I did manage to photograph ten of them together:

 

There are two logs where turtles hang out when it's sunny but not too hot. The smaller one which is about a quarter of the way along was vacant like it's been for a while. The bigger log at the halfway point had eight turtles and they were mostly clustered towards to the end close to the island.

There's an island of California bulrushes a little further along where Kate and I spotted two great blue herons. We saw a single blue heron in the same spot on a subsequent. On yesterday's walk there was a great egret in the exact same spot. We wondered of the blue herons were building a nest but it doesn't seem likely.