When you come around one certain spot in the White Rock Lake trail you pass a band of trees that line the water’s edge. There are a number of very large birds (I know nothing of what they are) that are always hanging out in these certain trees. I don’t know if it is the location or the species of trees that attracts these birds – but they are always there and I don’t see them anywhere else.
The amount of bird shit is distressing. The caustic guano kills everything. I even think there is so much nitrogen that it is killing the trees themselves. I know bird shit is a fertilizer and should help the plants…. but everything is a remedy and a poison – it all depends on the dose.
The birds must live off of fresh water fish that they catch by diving from their lofty perch. In addition to the usual acrid smell of shit – there is an overpowering fishy odor.
Bill Chance 
Birds are anhingas. May also be some cormorants . Colony nesters will reuse a spot until it is dead and then move.
Thanks, I’ll have to look those up.
A little creepy.
Thanks. Good, that’s the look I was going for in the photo. In real life, it’s more gross than anything.
Love this pic, the barren tree, the birds n the somewhat cloudy sky, very nice, very Alfred Hitchcock. Thanks for sharing.
Glad I wasn’t there to enjoy the smell.
Bill, they are all Double-Crested Cormorants. They feed by diving from the surface of the water, not from the treetops, for fish, and are visible on the water in large flocks, usually with Pelicans and gulls, trolling for schools of fish. Occasionally, you will see one pop to the surface with a fish in its bill. They are here, only in the winter season, and migrate north soon, where they will roost in trees and poop on the sidewalks, much to the annoyance of Yankees. – Ron
Thanks for the information, Ron. It’s funny – you see the Cormorants all over the lake but they look different, more ominous somehow, when they are up in the tree.
I’ve never noticed that they are gone in the summer – you don’t usually see what isn’t there.