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Dear President Obama,
Did you know there's a lichen (Caloplaca obamae) named after you?
I don't have a picture of the lichen since it grows on an island off the coast of California, and I don't have a boat.
I have a hard time identifying lichens, and I couldn't tell you what the scientists call the one in these photos. I call it Medusa Lichen because its round reproductive structures look like heads. It's quite pretty to my eye, and it grows in abundance on some willow branches in a very small national park called Tennessee Valley.
Anyway, you're pretty lucky to have a lichen named after you. Something nice to think about when recessions and wars are all anyone wants to talk about.
Fruticosely yours,
A Lichen Watcher
A long time ago, in a land far away, I used to consult the Chinese oracle known as the I Ching. This involves throwing three coins heads-or-tails simultaneously and reading the resulting hexagram. I did this for a couple of years or so and even took a somewhat systematic approach by throwing twice a day and recording the hexagrams, then looking for patterns to emerge. It was an interesting way to become acquainted with Taoist principles.
Fast-forward a decade or two. My tattered copy of the I Ching is a dusty volume in a bookcase. The three pennies I used remain in their plastic film cannister, long unused. Still, after all this time, the Taoist principle of wu wei came into my head where it has no doubt been lingering in some dusty corner of my brain. I'd been feeling a little depressed after cranking out my latest self-publishing book projects. The main one was the result of years of photography and travel throughout the state. I had a nagging sense that I was done now. Done with photography. The project is over, so what is there left to do?
The answer that dawned on me was "nothing." Wu wei. Just let it go for a while, and maybe the creative energy (tao) will cycle out of its resting mode and back into an active mode.
While I've been resting I plucked an old paperback from my bookcase, A Testament to the Wilderness, Ten Essays on an Address by C. A. Meier. Meier was a colleague of Carl Jung and one of the deans of the school of analytical psychology. His address was to the World Wilderness Congress in Inverness, Scotland in 1983. There's a bit of jargon, and the tone seems dated in places, but some of the essays, especially the ones by Laurens van der Post, are excellent and as revitalizing, in their way, as getting out into wild nature.
I was thumbing through my 2010 Sierra Club planning calendar and came across a picture of a familiar face -- the weathered redwood log seen above. It wasn't my shot, but I found a very similar take at the photographer's stock photo agency. The picture used in the calendar was a vertical format that looks a lot nicer. Anyway, the calendar shot appears in the first week of December 2010. I don't know when Ed Callaert's shot was taken, but my shot, which shows a lot more water in the creek, was made in December 2002. I'm tempted to guess that Ed's was done in a later year since his log appears to have moved downstream a bit.
I can't remember when I last looked for that log, but I do remember finding it, and I'm sure it's still out there. Maybe I'll have to go look for it again sometime soon. It's in the upper part of the Cataract Creek falls, somewhere below Laurel Dell but above the falls that most people visit by parking at Alpine Lake. I searched through 400 or so images of "Cataract Creek" on Flickr and found only one other shot of this log.
Anyway, it was pretty cool to run across that calendar shot of Ed's, and it also gets me thinking about rain and how we haven't gotten much yet this year. The weather-guessers say the storm door will open next week, and I can only hope they are right. Bring it on!
I came across a group of wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in about the same place on Mt. Tam a week ago. Although I passed them up that time I decided to park and watch a while this morning. There were quite a few ambling along the side of the road, alternately strutting their stuff and pecking the ground in search of food. I didn't realize the rustling sound I kept hearing wasn't the wind, but feathers being shaken as part of their courtship display. Two of the males faced off at one point, chest to chest, but basically did a kind of turkey tango around eachother before continuing to stroll and feed.
I had a couple more ya-ya's to get out and wanted to try out Blurb's 11x13 format, so I put together a book of photos shot along the California coast. It's pretty darned expensive, so I hope I love the result and have it to enjoy for the rest of my life. No more Christmas presents to myself, I swear!
I know it's turkey day and all, and I agree wild turkeys are fine-looking birds, but word went out this week that a Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) had graced our very own Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. I was one of several people who went out this morning to have a look at this unusual visitor to the city.
Range maps show that wood ducks can be found in many parts of the state, though they aren't common anywhere. They weren't such an unusual find before we chopped down most of their habitat. The wood duck is one the few North American ducks that nests in tree cavities. I was surprised to read that it's second only to Mallards in the number taken by hunters every year. I wasn't surprised because it's so pretty, but because it's so small. The mallards it was paddling around with were about twice its size.
So far there's just the lone male at Stow Lake, but with any luck an attractive female will drop by in time for spring breeding season. Whether its family could get enough nutritious food to eat there, I don't know, but plenty of Mallards seem to do okay. In addition to tree cavities, they'll use nest boxes, and I imagine if a female did show up, local birders would have nest boxes put up in no time.
Still under the weather today, but I was close enough to being finished with this other book project that I decided to hack away at the computer to put on the final touches and upload it to Blurb.
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