Cold Winds

 

Snowy Egret, South Lake

The hazy morning fog and wind have made for chilly walks the last couple of days, and I wouldn't be surprised if the wind chill on my bike rides has been around 40-45 degrees. Had it been warmer, I'd have stuck around Elk Glen Lake a while longer to try to photograph a common yellowthroat that came out to forage for insects. I had to quit to continue walking so I could get warmed up again.

I thought I had a nice shot of it here, only to see that the focus point landed on the cattails just behind the bird....

The focus was better on this one, but the bird was farther away and facing away from the camera. Better luck next time.

Several yellow-rumped warblers were also foraging in the cattails.

There's lots of green in the Bison Paddock, and the animals looked cozy and contented as they snoozed in the sun.

This group of female hooded mergansers was on a mission, swiftly paddling across South Lake and making intermittent dives for prey. There were a couple of males around as well.

The snowy egret flew low over the surface of the lake and surprised me by landing on a partly submerged branch that I hadn't noticed. The water level was maybe six inches lower than usual.

The belted kingfisher was hunting from her island perch again when I passed by.

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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

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *