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| Ocean Beach on Jan. 31, 2023 |
Monday was an excellent day to watch the surfers enjoying a rare clean swell at Ocean Beach, but the waves got even bigger on Tuesday, and I couldn't resist bringing the camera down to the beach again. Three other photographers were already there, shooting from a high vantage point on the dunes with big-lens 35mm gear (as opposed to my point-and-shoot FZ80).
The surf was great, and so was the turf. On Wednesday I stopped to check my trail cams on the way to Rock Spring where my wife and I took a hike down to Cataract Falls. I had put the trail cams in the area where I recently saw a lot of buck deer and turkeys, and sure enough the cams recorded numerous deer and turkeys, as well as a passing fox, a coyote, and a herd of band-tailed pigeons. I say "herd" because there were dozens of them roaming all over the ground like cattle, feeding on whatever it is they find in leaf litter.
Despite the recent deluge of rain, the forest on Mt. Tam already seemed to be drying out. We saw very few fungi, and Cataract Creek was quite placid, as were the falls. Fetid adder's tongue was already blooming in its usual places, although some of those places had been reduced in size due to forest debris blown down by the storms. Down by the falls below Laurel Dell, chestnut-brown buckeye nuts were sending their cream-colored roots into the earth, and several very young buckeyes, most of them little more than foot-high unbranched sticks, were just leafing out. Here's hoping they'll get a nice lift with more rain soon.
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| Poetry in Motion |
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| Leader of the Pack (see video) |
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| Flying Buck |
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| Bucks in the Wee Hours (the light is from a second cam) |
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| Traveling Stone |
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