Glass Beach Tidepools

 

Clown Nudibranch (Triopha catalinae)

The nudibranch was upside-down, clowning around, when I first spotted it. The poor thing was probably trying to keep its gills wet in an extremely shallow pool of water. I diverted more water to its pool, but it was still in a sandy food desert, so I picked it up in a mussel shell and moved it to a more diverse tidepool to wait out the very low tide of minus 1.7 feet at Glass Beach in Fort Bragg.

The tidepools at Glass Beach were impressive at such a low tide, and I wished I'd dressed appropriately for exploring them in more detail. As it was, I had to keep my shoes and pants dry which limited how far out I was willing to go. We stayed until the sun set and the full moon rose, a dramatic closing to an excellent afternoon.

This guy (possibly a white-spotted rose anemone, Urticina lofotensis) was snuggled in a deep recess of a huge rock, preventing me from getting any other visual angle on it.

A very well-camouflaged mossy chiton (Mopalia muscosa), slightly curled up among pebbles, sand, and tiny bits of sea glass.

This purple shore crab (Hemigrapsus nudus) was also very well-camouflaged.

This tiny six-rayed sea star (Leptasterias sp.) was showing off its even tinier tube feet.

The clown nudibranch in its new pool.

This encrusting red sponge was a little one, but there were larger encrustations farther out.

All the sea stars I saw looked to be in pretty good shape, showing no sign of wasting disease.

Mussels and gooseneck barnacles share the bed.

This ochre sea star seemed to have lost some of its grip after becoming exposed above the water line.

This other tiny six-rayed star was showing off its underside.

My wife asked me to photograph this hermit crab, attracted by its nacreous shell colors.

I just took it as a challenge to try to photograph this little tidepool sculpin.

2025: A Beach Odyssey

I was interested in the split between the dark aggregating anemones and the lighter ones that apparently lost their symbiotic algae.

A conclave of crabs watches the sun go down.

Farther out than I could reach in my street clothes, I had to let my Lumix superzoom do the walking. It has been years, I think, since I last saw bat stars and leather stars in the wild, and those are some pretty big purple sea urchins out in the open near an even bigger red urchin.

The sea palms were pretty beat up, having peaked in spring and early summer.

Drifting boat at sunset.

Moonrise from Glass Beach

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Myth & Empiricism

 

Decomposing Tree Leaves, Mendocino Coast

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade describes the ways in which human culture has sought through its rituals to bring people back from a superficial, profane experience of the world, to return to a deeper, sacred experience of the world. The sense of return is a coming home to an original state of being that is uncluttered by the demands of ordinary life. We human beings can have a literal, empirical experience of the immanence of the sacred, which we then describe through metaphor. The metaphor becomes the myth. The empirical experience remains a potential to be unlocked.

Last night we experienced the last full moon before the winter solstice, the time of year when we enter the depths of darkness only to be reborn into a new dawn. There's a literal sense of crossing that threshold that is superficial and ordinary, but there is also a metaphorical sense of crossing that threshold of death and rebirth that is deep and sacred. 

Anyway, I was thinking about this in the literal sense as I woke up this morning, since I've been reading about two ways that life itself cycles through death and rebirth -- via chromosomes and viruses. The individual chromosomes in each of our bodies will die in their trillions when we ourselves die, but they will have at least tried to be reborn into a new human being before that happens. Even the lowly virus, which can't reproduce on its own and which sometimes even kills its host organism, conspires to be reborn in a new host.

Chromosomes and viruses, eternally dying and being reborn, are the seeds of life's innate drive for immortality.

I created the files to merge into an HDR image of this sunset on the Mendocino Headlands with my full-frame camera, but I hadn't thought to download my dedicated HDR software onto my laptop while I was home, so I used Photoshop for the job. I'm not crazy about the result, and I look forward to running the files through Aurora HDR for comparison when I get home. 

Same raw files, but using Aurora HDR.

As we faced the sunset from the headlands, a nearly full moon was rising over the town of Mendocino behind us.

This was actually a sundog with prismatic colors, but I don't seem to have captured its delicacy here.

Sundown at the Headlands

The back yard where we're staying has a tree with countless sapsucker holes in its trunk, and its falling leaves are all over the deck. As with the HDR software, I also don't have Helicon Focus loaded on the laptop and had to use Lightroom and Photoshop to create focus stacks. I was surprised the little laptop was able to handle the files from my Nikon D800E.

Photoshop did much better with the focus-stacking than it did with the HDR treatment, up to a point (see next image). This one, a 19-image stack, was done with Helicon Focus.

This is a 28-image stack, and Photoshop couldn't handle it at all (at least, not on the old MacBook Pro), but Helicon Focus ran it in a couple of seconds.

The property owner where we're staying warned us about bears at the garbage cans, so I brought my trail cameras along. I was stoked that a large black bear showed up on our first night. This is a frame-capture from a video recording.

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Red-Tail

 

Red-tailed Hawk, Sunset Parkway

We're heading up to Mendocino for a few days and today's red-tailed hawk sighting reminded me of something: What ever happened to Red Tail Ale? 

Looks like Mendocino Brewing Company went bankrupt several years ago, but Red Tail Ale has apparently been brought back with the original recipe by Fogbelt Brewing in Santa Rosa.

On a windy branch, looking for prey.

Making a scary face.

Tree-climbing.

Mallard Lake Reflections

Hooded Merganser at Mallard Lake
(ISO 1000 with no denoise.)

Same frame with denoise.

Tree Dahlia (Dahlia imperialis)

A white-crowned sparrow enjoys the sun's warming rays from its perch on a coffeeberry branch.

A nearly full moon was about to cross the center line of Sutro Tower just before sunset today, and a fog bank came in before it could get there.

Just a narrow band of sunset showed between the fog and the horizon.

* * *

Kingfisher

 

Female Belted Kingfisher, South Lake

It was another chilly day, even with the sun shining. The highlight of the day's nature sightings was a female belted kingfisher who happened to perch on a couple of branches that were close enough to photograph. I often hear its chittering call when I ride past South Lake, but I rarely see the bird. And when I do see it, the sighting is usually over before I even try to get my camera out.

* * *

Bound to Wander in Wonder

 

Anna's Hummingbird, Elk Glen Lake

A hummingbird rests on the tip of a lichen-crusted twig, thanks to the binding energy of the gluons that hold quarks together. In a world of objects that possess a quality we call "mass," it's interesting to note how difficult it is to conceptualize why anything has mass, and what mass actually is. And yet, anything that has mass is what we call "matter," a substance that accounts for a mere five percent of the universe, and which, despite its mysterious qualities, is perhaps nowhere near as mysterious as the other ninety-five percent.

Despite the lowly status of ordinary matter in our universe, one of its key properties is that it can turn into hummingbirds.  

While I was wandering down online rabbit holes related to quantum vacuum fluctuations (one of which might have jump-started our universe) I came across a 2008 article in New Scientist that stated, "...[M]ost of our mass comes from virtual quarks and gluons fizzing away in the quantum vacuum.... The Higgs field creates mass out of the quantum vacuum too, in the form of virtual Higgs bosons. So if the [Large Hadron Collider] confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is virtual."

Five years later, Higgs' existence was confirmed.

Saw my first Northern shovelers of the season today at Mallard Lake.

They both spent most of their time with their heads underwater, but the female was especially voracious and I wasn't sure I'd ever get a photo of her pretty face.

This little orange-crowned warbler (also my first of the season) scampered down through blackberry vines, ivy, and other plant cover to reach a popular roadside bathing pool created by a garden sprinkler at Blue Heron Lake.

A Townsend's warbler was surprisingly tentative about bathing in my presence, even though I was sitting on the curb on the other side of the road.

Unfortunately, the diffuse light of a hazy morning meant slow shutter speeds and lots of focus-hunting, so this was my best shot of a bathing ruby-crowned kinglet whose crown actually showed.

A demure yellow-rumped warbler was even more tentative than the Townie and refused to come down to bathe at all.

It was the numerous pygmy nuthatches at the bathing hole that first caught my attention.

Cars, bicyclists, and joggers often passed by and temporarily caused the birds to flee. I cringed as I watched one of the nuthatches try to race across the path of a passing car. I hoped to see it emerge on the other side, but unfortunately it didn't make it. I was relieved to see that it was at least killed outright instead of just being injured, and I moved its body off the road (next picture).

Another ruby-crowned kinglet caught bathing.

A nasturtium leaf provides bathing decor.

Elsewhere on the lake, a couple of old coots were hanging out like bumps on a log.

A few ring-necked ducks paddled around with the coots and more numerous mallards, all of whom appeared to expect treats to be tossed by any dawdling humans.

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