I have a small obsession with finding and photographing burrowing owls. Burrowing owls are a highly threatened species that lives year-round in some parts of California, and winters here in others. Burrowing owls are a photographer’s dream because they are not only extremely cute, but they hang out on the ground instead of high up in trees, and they are active during the day. Unfortunately, their numbers are dwindling so fast that it’s not easy to find them. Cesar Chavez Park in the Berkeley Marina is the winter home to a couple of burrowing owls. It’s an interesting choice on the owls’ part because the place is essentially a large dog park. To protect the owls, the park erects fencing around the area they nest in during the winter months to keep off-leash dogs (and curious humans) away from them. I’ve been meaning to head over there to see if I could find them and I finally found the time to do so a couple of weekends ago. Unfortunately, despite doing several laps around the park, I never did see the owls. Had I been successful in my owl quest the title of this post would have included the words “burrowing owls” and lots of exclamation points.
Cesar Chavez isn’t my normal type of park, as it’s very small and as I said mostly a dog park: one doesn’t really go there to hike. It does, however, have some spectacular views of the bay. There are points where you can see three of the bridges at the same time (the Bay bridge, the Golden Gate, and the San Rafael).
There is some solar calendar thing that I didn’t pay much attention to because there were other people hanging about it and I was anxious to find the owls.
I prefer natural surfaces to hike on, but with all the rain we’ve had, the paved perimeter trail was a welcome respite from all the mud I’ve been sloshing through lately.
San Fran view from the park:
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