Thanksgiving on the Watershed: Wild Turkeys—Pardoned by Circumstance

Wild turkeys flourish here and there throughout the Peninsula Watershed. Our watershed keepers are particularly used to a flock of 20 or so that routinely pass by their office, a mile or so in from the staff entrance near I-280. 

The approximately 36-square-mile space provides an ideal diversity of habitat for the opportunistic foragers, which roam a couple of miles a day to feast on grasses or scratch in the woodland leaf litter for insects, seeds, acorns, blackberries and other plant or animal fodder. 

Since the long-protected watershed is also designated as a State Fish and Game Refuge, the turkeys that dwell here are safe from one of THEIR potential predators, the human hunter. 

Happy Thanksgiving to them and  all of you, from all of us.    

Life on the Watershed: The Most Social of Them All

They are the most social of birds. 
Acorn woodpeckers live in tight clans and share stored acorns for food—as well as mates and the raising of the young in one common nest inside a tree cavity.

They’re year-round residents of the Peninsula Watershed, where the mixed oak/conifer forests provide abundant acorns as well as large trees with soft bark and dead trunks or limbs for storing them. Each acorn nut is stored in its own hole, When an acorn dries out and shrinks, the woodpecker moves it to a smaller hole—so that simply maintaining the granary is a constant activity.

Their abandoned nesting and roosting holes become homes for other native breeders: such as tree swallows (at left), along with chickadees, bluebirds and other “secondary cavity nesters." Woodpecker holes are also adopted by chipmunks, Western fence lizards, Gopher snakes, and some amphibians, 

Good places to see and hear Acorn woodpeckers are open slopes with scattered oaks and dead trunks or other bare limbs.