Marty planned this trip back to Lake Pillsbury to look for migrating birds in the fall. We figured this would be the last camping trip of the summer season. My brother and some other friends who have canoes were invited, but everyone else couldn't go or got sick that weekend and we ended up camping alone.
Marty checked on the WEB and found out that deer season was over, and bear season had started. Bear hunting doesn't seem to have the mass appeal that dear hunting does, so we figured there wouldn't be a lot of them out. Also, bear hunters don't have the reputation of shooting everything that moves and isn't day-glow orange. So we figured we would have the lake all to ourselves. This did not turn out to be correct: It was still duck hunting season, and as we were getting ready to go canoeing Saturday morning before sunrise, we were greeted by the crack of dawn. And the boom of dawn, and the crack and boom echoing back and forth across the lake. Apparently the lake was ringed by duck hunters. As we paddled out into the safety of the center of the lake, we passed by several guys sitting on the shore, dressed in cammo, with their hunting dogs at their side. The lake was covered with a few feet of mist, and we heard a roaring noise of thousands of birds panicking back and forth on the water. These turned out to be Coots, which nobody hunts as far as we know.
We went down the west shore of the lake, to catch the early morning sun to warm up in. The water was two meters lower than the last trip here for the family reunion. There were two meters of sloping gravel visible below the vertical banks we went past on that trip. We tried landing on this gravel in a few places, and discovered that our legs would sink up to the middle of the calf in the silty mud.
Past the Scotts Valley Dam, were we turned back last time we were here, we explored a valley branch of the lake. This was apparently the "Rice Fork" branch of the lake. We passed a street sign on a rock that said "Rice Fork Branch" in one direction, and "Flamingo Rock Blvd." in the other direction, where a short side branch split off. There was a pink lawn flamingo mounted on the top of the street sign. We also passed a "houseboat" going the other way that said "Rice Fork Navy" on the side. Not too far down Rice Fork, we saw a largw bird nest on the top of a tree leaning out over the water. Marty didn't think it was big enough, but I think it is an eagles nest.
Just before the end of this fork of the lake, I was a small critter swimming towards us along a steep rocky section of shore. It looked like an otter, but it was too small. The head looked angular and the body, which I could only see where it sinuated out of the water, looked very thin. For a second, I thought it was a snake, but then the head turned and made me think mammal again. I hissed at Marty to look at it, but she looked in the wrong place and missed it. It turned and went between two rocks on shore and we drifted closer to the place it disappeared. As we cam abreast of where I last saw it, I saw a red body turn in the water and head down. Marty missed it again. The red color and small size made me think of a weasel, but I don't think weasels do a lot of swimming. Marty says that mink come in a variety of colors, and they do a lot of swimming, so it might have been a mink. We waited around, but never saw it again, so we may never know what it was that we saw.
When we got to the end of the water in Rice Fork, we saw a long valley with a muddy creek in it. We could see way down into the valley, and it is apparent that an extra meter or two of water would add several kilometers of lake for us to paddle down. We considered going for a walk here, but when I tried to ram the shore and slide up to drier ground, the canoe just slid back off and back into the water. This seemed to indicate that we didn't want to go for a walk in this slippery muddy valley anyway, so we turned back.
Marty identified three kinds of grebes on this trip, one of which had bright red eyes. One evening recently, Marty and I saw the last 5 minutes of a bad horror movie on the TV. Peter Cushing and the rest of the passengers of a train were cowering in the caboose, trying desperately to disconnect it from the rest of the train. A man with glowing red eyes was stoking the fires and running the engine, eventually off a cliff. Marty asked "What does red eyes mean?", and I answered "He's obviously possessed by the Devil!". So when Marty saw some of these little grebes with bright red eyes, I immediately said "They must be possessed by the Devil!". Then Marty looked them up in the bird book and found that they were called "Horned Grebes". Red eyes, AND horns? Devil Birds found in Lake Pillsbury! Look for it on checkout counters everywhere.
It was afternoon before we started back up the east shore of the lake, and a strong wind had come up. Marty helped paddle, but the wind kicked up waves that splashed over the prow of the canoe when we were going at speed. Eventually, we made it to a little marina with picnic facilities and stopped for a rest. In the shallows near a boat ramp, there were a bunch of what looked like little ducks with their heads invisible under the water and their tails sticking up. Since they were not moving, I assumed that they were duck lures. Marty (always assuming the worst) was almost convinced that they were dead ducks from the hunters. We investigated with binoculars, and sure enough, there were a dozen dead ducks floating in the water. Apparently, there isn't much meat on a wild duck, and hunters would cut off the largest piece and throw most of the rest back in the water. How discussing. I though the age of the great white hunter was long over. The trip west across the top of the lake and back to camp was much easier. There wasn't enough lake north of us to create any waves. We paddled a little northwest for a while, and let the wind blow us south around a marshy point. Then northwest again to where we got in the water.
When we got back to camp, Marty saw a Harriers Hawk (Marsh Hawk) flying over the dry marsh between our tent and the lake. We watched as it dove down into the marsh grass several times, but we never saw it come back up with anything in its claws.
Sunday morning, there were fewer hunters around the lake. We still heard a few guns go off at dawn, but then we didn't have to paddle past the gauntlet of hunters to get out into open water. When we got into the center of the lake, Marty saw a Peregrine Falcon whack a coot! I saw the action out of the corner of my eye, and would have just assumed that I had seen a coot make a bad landing while another took off. But Marty had seen the Peregrine, and was about to point it out to me, when it dove down on a flock of coots on the water. It hit one of them so hard that the poor thing tumbled end over end on the surface. Peregrines normally hunt over land: They dive onto another bird and whack them with their balled up feet (they don't use their claws to kill). The stunned bird falls to the ground where the peregrine lands to eat it's prey. If a peregrine stuns a bird on the water, it cannot land on the water and retrieve it. Marty thinks it may have done this stunt to try to panic the birds into taking off and flying over the land where they would be easier prey.
On this day trip, we went half way down the lake, and turned left to explore the east fork. Just a few hundred meters in, a bald eagle flew over us and landed in a tree. We went back to get a good look at him, and let the breeze blow us back past him. Then we landed on the next point for a morning snack, and to watch and see if he would fly back out over the water again. Eventually, we did see him flying away from us, on his way to the west side of the lake. But as we got back in our canoe and headed east again, a second eagle flew past us.
The east fork was not as long as the Rice Fork was, and we soon found the end, and then the end of every nook and cranny we could explore. We came back to the start of the east fork and started north. This was the same place where we had a head wind the previous afternoon. The same wind was blowing us back again, but it was not as strong and did not create any waves to bother us with. Part way up this part of the shore, a peregrine falcon flew over. We watched it land on a tree behind us, so we drifted back until we could watch it though the binoculars for a while. But soon it flew off and disappeared over the trees, and we continued back to camp.
We tried to break camp early so we could head home before it got too late. Just as we got everything in the car and started to drive away, another Bald Eagle landed in a tree just a few hundred meters from the camp. We had to get out and watch him for a while before we could actually leave. This bird was facing away from us, and we never actually saw its head before it flew off. So we're really not quite sure if it was an eagle, or an osprey that we saw from behind and below.
