The Local Wildlife

Welcome, barely domesticated reader, as today I want to introduce you to the kind of urban wildlife which is living with us here in Palo Alto.

California is quite a different biome to our windy, rainy island just off the mainland of Europe. The mild climate and lack of rain mean that we have different species of bird, mammal and who knows what else here. Urban wildlife is perhaps a bit less of a thing than back in the UK, but nonetheless there's some interesting creatures sharing the place with us. But enough about the neighbours (joking!).

One of the delightful sights here are hummingbirds. These small, nimble creatures seem almost fantastical the first time you see them: they hover with incredible stillness, starting and stopping with a Scalectrix-like abruptness. They're more common the warmer it gets, so you tend to see more of them further South from us, but they're still reasonably frequent visitors to Palo Alto.

In fact they're much more frequent visitors to our neck of the woods these days, as we invested in a hummingbird feeder and some concentrated nectar solution to feed them with. We dutifully erected the feeder close to our back door, and for the first week it seemed like the local hummingbird population wasn't that bothered about this new addition. But then, we started seeing very frequent visitors:

Now, we have a fairly constant stream of these folks coming in for a quick drink. If you're sitting on our back porch, you can watch as a hummingbird flies down, hovers for a while, then stops to feed, before being chased off by another hummingbird, and then the cycle repeats. They're quite territorial and competitive over access to the feeder, and it's hard to know how many we're feeding, but this shot was relatively easy to get.

Our other daily local visitors are the squirrels. Now, everyone in the UK knows that grey squirrels over there are brash American immigrants displacing our more delicate native British reds, but here our squirrels are often jet black. There's a lot of them about too - perhaps not surprising given the density of street trees in Palo Alto.

We're also seeing daily visits from elegantly-circling hawks in the skies above Palo Alto now. This has definitely got a lot more common during the pandemic, although I'm not sure why. We have a burgeoning local crow population, and often the crows will unsuccessfully try to chase off the hawks.

Finally, Palo Alto is also home to a small, but noisy, flock of parrots that seem to have escaped from somewhere. Local info seems to indicate these have been around for years, and are well known. It's odd but comforting to hear their noisy screeching as they look for somewhere to roost. It seems like they're unable to fly without shouting about it!

We're yet to see anything more exotic than this. It's possible that we could run into coyotes, mountain lions, and of course gophers, although these are all relatively rare visitors downtown. We thought we saw a skunk in the drains once though!