I wasn't sure I'd be able to bike up to Tam on Thursday after having some bike trouble on Tuesday. I was coming home from my daily ride and a stop at the grocery store, just about to head home up the 3/4-mile-long hill, when my derailleur went insane and dropped me into ninth gear!
I was SOL even with the e-bike in turbo mode and had to push about 60 pounds of bike and food up the hill. I'm glad this didn't happen way out around Mt. Tam! I got it home, put it on a bike rack, and drove it to Barbary Coast Cyclery where they fixed it (my shifting cable had broken) by the end of the day Wednesday.
So yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day for a bike ride up to Mt. Tam. Goldilocks temperatures and almost no headwinds. The trail cams had not been disturbed, and the ravine was merely damp after the brief rain we had. Since there's still no real rain in the forecast I decided to leave the cams in place, but I will have to move them before the ravine turns back into a creek.
As nice a day as it was on the mountain, I was just about to head back home without taking any pictures when a lone buckeye butterfly landed near me, then proceeded to fly away when I got close to enough for a shot. Just as I got back to my bike to pack up and leave, I realized a nearby coyote brush was a-flutter with maybe a dozen buckeyes. Several of them appeared to be getting harassed by others of their own kind. I couldn't tell if it was a mating thing, a territorial thing, or something else. In one instance, the nagging butterfly was about half the size of the "victim," and it reminded me of a baby bird trying to get its mama to feed it.
This tiny madrone growing out of a crevice in the rock was full of ripening berries. This is at the hang-glider launching area on West Ridgecrest. A guy showed up at one point and put up some decorative wind socks on the other side of the road, but he didn't have a hang-glider on his car, and the wind was blowing offshore. He disappeared somewhere before I left, so I wasn't able to find out what it was all about.
More cavorting buckeyes.
Gray Hairstreak
Acmon Blue
Hedgerow Hairstreak
Various bees and flies also were feeding on the flowering coyote brush.
It was such a clear day I couldn't resist stopping at the north parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph the city skyline which looked good even in the mid-day (1 p.m.) light.
No bobcats went up or down the ravine (though a fox did), and the critters that crossed the ravine were in and out of the frame in a snap. This is a frame-capture from a video clip.
Pretty sparse animal activity (except for squirrels), but the first clip shows a fox appearing to rub its neck in some old scent before depositing some new scent.
This is a short series of still frames from the back yard last night. Just yesterday my wife had been watching one of her paranormal-type shows (something to have on while knitting) where their trail camera picked up a "mysterious object" that the show made much of, but was pretty obviously a bug or something, and not a UFO or supernatural object. But when I checked my own backyard cam this morning I was surprised to see some unusual lights show up behind a rat. Was it an extraterrestrial or a ghost?! You decide. :)
