Mom and Dad are furiously working to keep them fed, but they still thought the camera might be bringing them some food. It's kind of hard to take pictures where the nest is located, so I apologize for the not-so-sharp pics.
This American Robin began building a nest about three feet outside our front door on Saturday, June 6th. By the next day, the mud/trash portion of the nest was complete, and on Monday, she lined it with dry grass. She lay her first egg on Wednesday:
sycamore flower
raccoon tracks
western pond turtle
red-eared slider
henbit, close and...
closer
great egret in full breeding plumage
Bonaparte's gull
Pied-billed grebes are excellent swimmers and divers. They often swim around with just their head and neck above the water and look like a snake or small Loch Ness Monster swimming through the creek. Pretty cute, right?
With their stripey heads and their fuzziness, they inspired me to create the new recurring (hopefully) segment of Field Notes. When they are even smaller than this, they will ride on the mother's back if trouble comes calling. So I guess, to answer my own question, that could be cuter.
I also got a neat photo of these two snowy egrets having a standoff over a very productive fishing hole.
Our drawdown was slowed down quite a bit by some late spring rains, but here is the same area of the upper cell as it looked today (the small patch of tules in the center is the same in each photo):
You can see we're getting some nice growth of our seasonal wetland foodplants. In this unit, we primarily try to grow watergrass and annual smartweed, which are both excellent waterfowl feed. Even as the upper cell is greening up, the lower wetland cell is still completing drawdown. Normally I like to have the water off by now, but an extra week won't hurt anything too much. These birds seemed to like it.
white-faced ibis (ibii???) 
I realize when most people think of minnows, they typically picture a small, silvery fish ranging in size from pizza topping to bait. Minnows in California, however, tend to be especially large, with many species greater than two feet in length. This dead fish, a common carp (not native to California), was a tad over 24 inches. It is in the minnow family.
As one of the most successful fish families in California, minnows here have evolved to fill all sorts of niches that we don't ordinarily expect them to occupy. For example, the Sacramento pikeminnow is a large, predatory species that feeds almost exclusively on fish and grows to three feet in length. The Sacramento blackfish, which can be found at Kokopelli Wildlife Area, is like the whale shark of California's fresh water, cruising through still backwaters and filtering tiny particles of food from the water.
One interesting thing about minnows is that they don't have any teeth in their jaws. So all you swimmers who got out of the water when I wrote about the pikeminnow can get back in. They do have teeth, but they are located back in their throat and they are called pharyngeal teeth. And, like other animals, you can usually get a pretty good idea of what they eat by looking at their teeth. The pikeminnow has sharp, knifelike teeth for gripping and shredding live fish. This is what the teeth of the dead carp looked like (this picture is taken from the bottom side of the fish looking just behind the gills):
I'll post some pictures of the grinding surfaces of these teeth another time, but you can see they look sort of like molars. Carp use these to grind plant materials against the bony plate above. I hope to clean this specimen up and create a clean skeleton from lips to the back of the throat to show kids how minnows eat.
For more information about California fish, I highly recommend Peter Moyle's landmark text: Inland Fishes of California. It's really, really, really, really........great.
We also concentrate larger prey items such as fish and crayfish to help feed other species like these:
This next bird is a fairly uncommon visitor to Kokopelli WA and it reminds me of fishing from a boat on Lake Sabrina with my father and brother. I used to have a lot of fun watching them dive and then trying to predict where they would pop back up.
We also have a large heron, egret and cormorant rookery. Right now they are trying to feed their young and the steady supply of easy pickings during drawdown helps them out quite a bit.
Order: Charadriiformes
Additionally, their eggs are spotted and streaked in order to blend in with the surrounding rocks. The killdeer places these eggs in a carefully scraped out nest. On gravel roads, they are often lined with small, white pieces of quartz.
While sitting at the nest, or when protecting young, the parent exhibits a distraction technique to lure predators away from the nest when disturbed. They put on a very believable (and noisy) broken wing distraction dispaly worthy of an award from the Academy.
After the young hatch, they are on their feet immediately, running around almost as well as their parents, although the do trip and fall from time to time--something which causes my children to giggle hysterically whenever they see it. They can't fly until they get older and their downy feathers are replaced with genuine flight feathers.
References:
Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter
Birders Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds
savannah sparrow
yellow-billed magpie--only in California
mourning dove
jackrabbit attacking disc
cottontail
California quail
box elder bugs
American pipit
