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| View of Mt. Diablo from Mt. Tamalpais |
When I checked the Mt. Tam web cams yesterday morning, the view east showed a beautiful orange sunrise glow on the tops of an endless layer of clouds. No mountains, no city in the distance. Even the usual foreground near East Peak was gone. There's a similar scene this morning, with the difference that now I can see beneath the clouds, and what I see is a ship in what appears to be the ocean (but might be the bay). Strange that a fire camera would be trained on sea and fog, but maybe it was accidentally bumped out of its usual position.
I hadn't really planned to ride up there since I just checked the trail cams a week ago, but I wanted to add a third camera and didn't feel like waiting the usual two or three weeks before getting it in place. This was my first ride up since tourist season unofficially closed on Labor Day. Pedestrian traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge was much less crowded than a week ago, but automobile traffic and its attendant stink of exhaust fumes was about the same.
A couple of brown pelicans were diving for fish in Richardson Bay, and black-necked stilts were back in the marshy area around Coyote Creek. I finally reached the sun/fog interface between the Bootjack and Pantoll parking lots. When I got into the woods, the fog had made the leaves less crunchy than they were just a week ago. The nagging horse flies seem to have disappeared, and the sun was nice and warm without being too hot. The autumnal equinox is just two weeks away.
The other day I noticed a flock of parrots (cherry-headed conures) in my neighbor's oak tree. All of the parrots appeared to be resting, preening, and socializing, except for one of them that was busily hunting for acorns, which it appeared to be eating. I've mentioned this before to my neighbor, and he believes they are just playing with the nuts, not actually ingesting them. Although I am prepared to entertain that possibility, it sure looks like they are eating the nuts (video below).
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| Screenshot from this morning's web cam. |
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| Here's the PM view.... |
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| Sun/Fog Interface |
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| View Along West Ridgecrest Road |
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| The bobcat must have been moving fast. The camera was set to capture three still frames, then a 10-second video, but the bobcat was already gone by the time the second still shot fired. |
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| Big buck heading home at closing time. |
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| A cherry-headed conure, one of "The Wild Parrots of San Francisco", uses its strong beak and agile tongue to munch an acorn. |
Here's a short video clip of the parrot (shot through a double-pane window). Is it eating the acorn, or just playing with it?
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