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| Canada Geese in Coyote Creek |
I've been thinking about making the long drive up to the Klamath Basin to immerse myself in millions of geese who fill the air with incessant honking and countless fluttering wings rising up like a thunderous applause, but for now I'll settle for eleven geese silently floating past Mt. Tamalpais.
It was amazingly sunny and warm today and felt more like summer than fall, although I was pleasantly surprised to find a few little fruitings of fungi. They were pretty dried out, but were a tantalizing taste of what the rains will bring.
The new trail cam location was a dud, so I moved the cams once again. When I returned to Rock Spring there was a group of CalFire and other folks at the picnic table near my bike. They'd been doing more prescribed burns. We noticed a lot of dark smoke out over the ocean that didn't seem to make sense. Where was it coming from? One guy said there's another burn going on at China Camp State Park, but it still didn't make sense until I got down the mountain a ways and could see that, sure enough, the smoke was blowing down from there and then getting whooshed out through the Golden Gate.
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| Just another gorgeous day for a bike ride on Mt. Tam. |
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| The California fuchsia are still going strong. |
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| When this guy fluttered past me the tops of its wings seemed more intricately patterned than a cabbage white, but it never spread its wings after it landed, so I'm not sure what this is. |
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| Just a few steps farther along, a more indulgent painted lady soaked up the sun on the Cataract Trail. |
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| This thing has gotten a little bigger (since 10/26), but I'm still not sure if it's going to turn into anything recognizeable. It's still quite spongy, so I assume it's still growing into ... something. |
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| A few dried russulas thought it was time to hop to it, only to have Mother Nature deliver a bit of a fake-out. |
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| This cute littel amanita has barely cleared its universal veil. Maybe some rain will come this weekend and get things going again. |
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| I would have thought this tipped-over madrone with the dead crown was all done with life, but the brand new leaves say otherwise. I assume this new growth is sprouting from the original tree's burl, and not from a berry that fell down in there and sprouted. |
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| First I found the band-tailed pigeon feather, then I saw a couple of nearby madrone berries that the birds didn't get at feeding time. |
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| California giant salamander hanging out on a rock in a relatively deep and quiet pool. |
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| Another of those white butterflies fluttered past me and drew me out into a meadow where I found a lot of pushed-down grass and some relatively fresh deer bones. |
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| Smoke from a prescribed burn blows out to sea. |
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| Black-necked stilt along Coyote Creek. |
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| Looking very stilty! |
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| This large and odd-looking ship is the vehicle carrier Shanghai Highway, most recently from Incheon, Korea, and before that -- where else but Shanghai, China. |
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| The container ship YM Travel was close behind, heading for Oakland. VesselFinder doesn't show its other recent port calls. |
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| Just down the way from the large No Dancing sign on Golden Gate Park's JFK Promenade, some cool new sculptures were being set up as I passed through on my way home. |
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| Some kids nearby were hoping the Gillie and Marc sculptures were made of chocolate. |
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