Mornings at the park

I take my pug Chloe to the nearby dog park (at Harry Griffen park in La Mesa) almost every morning. Sometimes we walk around the park for a while before going into the dog park area. There are often very interesting things to see. There are a couple of Blue Herons that hang around the park, even though there is no water there - we think they probably live at Lake Murray. Why do they hang out there? They hunt the gophers! It gives you a whole different perspective on the herons when you realize that they hunt mammals, not just things like fish and frogs! Just a few days ago, one of the herons realized that the view from on top of the cars is perfect for scouting out areas with active gophers. We were all quite startled to see the heron that close to people! He stayed there for about 10 minutes and then flew down to an area in the grass where there were some fresh gopher mounds and began stalking. I haven't yet seen the exact moment of the kill, but I have watched a heron fussing with a dead gopher until it was positioned just right to be swallowed.

One day during the hot summer, the morning was extremely foggy. I was walking Chloe through the area at the park that is kind of a native plant/wilderness area (I use the term "wilderness" very loosely). Everything was covered heavily with dew and there were an amazing number of spider webs that were quite visible from all the dew clinging to them.
These 2 webs were huge, between two bushes that were about 4 feet apart.


This web is hard to see, but the spider has been going around the web collecting the drops of dew. You can see there are a few thin vertical strands of web to the left of the spider with no dewdrops. I watched this guy going around the web to get rid of the dewdrops. I don't know what happened to the drops. I know they are quite small, but he collected so many I would have thought he would drown.

The one thing I couldn't get a picture of was the hummingbirds that were drinking the dew off of the webs. One was very close and I could see the dew disappearing as it flitted around the web. That was really fascinating to see!