It's been fun creating composite trail camera images from these locations, but I've had the cams out in the same area for several months now and I felt like it was time to change things up, so I moved all three to new locations.
Dropping down from home into my neighborhood yesterday morning I parked my bike outside Posh Bagels and strapped on my face mask to wait in line and score some breakfast before traversing the city along Arguello Street, crossing the windy and foggy Golden Gate Bridge, and finally stopping in a relatively windless spot in Sausalito to finally eat. A gull and a crow dropped by to keep me company, and I felt stingy for resisting the urge to share, but duty-bound to do so.
There were a couple of points along the ride where the fog was dripping out of the trees like a cold shower of rain, but I finally made it to the sun/fog barrier. I'd hoped to get into position to photograph a glory, but the sun was too high. I couldn't get an angle on even the steepest hillside to place my shadow in the center of the circle whose partial circumference you see here.
There were god beams in the woods just behind me, though, which provided a different kind of glory. Nice to have such great lighting effects on the day before Summer Solstice.
With perfect crepuscular rays filtering through the oaks I didn't want to leave. So I stayed awhile.
Then I posed with my intrepid ebike, now with over 3,000 miles on it, in my unbrushed morning helmet hair.
The bucks are branching out nicely as you can see in this composite image (I added the fox to a shot of the two bucks), and foxes were all over the place. In fact foxes appeared on all three cams.
Including this one, which I'd set out near the rattlesnake den. Although this trap netted 699 frames, they were nearly all blanks. It didn't even look like wind was the culprit, so maybe it was darting lizards or flitting birds and butterflies. A handful were wood rats.
I do wish these cams had a faster trigger. It's almost inconceivable to me that the fox didn't trigger the camera before it got to this point.
Ditto for this one, but at least it caught the whole fox.
Daylight composites can work out okay if the light is diffuse.
The cute fawn and its mom are still around. Also of note, but not on the cams, the western azaleas have faded, but the yellow mariposa lilies continue, and spotted leopard lilies (Lilium pardalinum) have come into bloom, as well as California pinks (Silene californica).
Back in the woods where the trail cams were, the air was warm and still beneath a cloudless sky. I wasn't looking forward to dropping back down into the cold wind and fog. The wind, especially, was kind of fierce along the Panoramic Highway ridge between Mountain Home Inn and Highway 1. I thought if it was bad there, it was going to be even worse on the Golden Gate Bridge, but the bridge winds turned out to be strong but unremarkable.
The god beams I photographed in the morning were in that group of oaks on the knoll in the frame above.
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