Bay Island Nature

Like mycelium quietly expanding underground, my blog life will be meeting up with a couple of public blogging opportunities soon!  In this wonderful winter season with inspiration from camellias to wintering song birds, to mushrooms and beach walks after a storm, I get to write a blog for KQED QUEST and also an occasional blog for Alameda Patch.  I'll have to take my writing up a notch for KQED after reading some of their posted blogs.  It should be fun, though, to write for a larger readership (though I appreciate those of you following this little blog - yes, I know all four of you - which I can't even find when I try searching for it!).  I've been lately inspired by all of the mushrooms popping up like winter wildflowers after the latest rains.  There are so many different species - one report claimed many hundreds compared to just 35 kinds of oaks.  I've been researching mushroom lifestyles - lifestyles of the dirt-poor, spore-fungi and they are fascinating!  I wish

Though Christmas has come and gone, there are still many winter gifts to enjoy.  Around the East Bay two of my favorites are thriving in this dry, La Nina season.  The camellia trees are painting yards around town with showy flowers that attract some of my favorite birds.  Among the camellia's shiny, large green leaves, Audubon's warblers, also called yellow-rumped warblers or sometimes just "butter butts," are hopping from flower to flower catching insects.  It's almost like watching a circus show on these clear, crisp mornings with flashes of yellow, white, and black as the small birds work through the  red flowers and bright green foliage.  The birds have an unusual adaptation to being able to digest waxy berries such as wax myrtles and bayberries allowing it to winter further north than other warbler species.  On the East Coast, they winter as far north as Newfoundland where the waxy berries persist into winter.  They're in the Bay Area mostly