Tree Houseleek

Dressed in rain gear and pressing down on my ballcap to keep it from blowing away on this blustery Leap Day, I almost walked right past these blooming yellow plants without noticing something different about them.... Besides the September shot above, they're also in a picture from early December, and they weren't blooming then, either.

Apparently these natives of the Canary Islands are in the genus Aeonium (Greek for "ageless"), and these are probably A. arboreum or A. canariense. On Wikipedia they are given the oh-so-common name of tree houseleeks: the Anglo-Saxon word leac means plant, so they are basically called Tree Houseplants.  They're in the Crassulaceae, same as our stonecrops.

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Spring Bling

 

Shooting Stars

Spring is still almost three weeks away, and I guess we're going to get some heavy winter snows in the Sierra this weekend, but a few of my favorite early-season Mt. Tam wildflowers make it seem like spring is already here. I felt a little guilty to actually drive all the way up there just to snap a few photos with the DSLR, but it won't happen again (at least, not until next time). 

I also swapped out the two trail camera memory cards and gathered a few more male hazel flowers in the hope of dusting some of their pollen on the female flowers of our backyard hazel. After I clipped a few of the open catkins I shook the branches and sent a beautiful golden cloud of pollen drifting on a very light breeze. If only I could get a cloud like that to drift past my homegrown plant. 

When I hiked the short distance out to one of my favorite spots for finding calypso orchids, shooting stars, and Indian warrior (or warrior's plume, Pedicularis densiflora), I found a very changed landscape. There's been so much forest thinning going on (as a precaution against fire) that I found mostly fallen trees and slash piles along the forest edges where I'd expected to find wildflowers. Thankfully I still managed to find the few special species I was looking for. 

I'm curious to see what's going to happen with all the girdled trees. Will they die and become the well-used pantries of acorn woodpeckers? Homes to beetle larvae for pileated woodpeckers to dig out? A source of nesting holes for red-breasted nuthatches? I hope so.

Petals, Wavy & Flat

Like Indian paintbrush, Indian warrior is a hemiparasite, meaning it likes to parasitize the roots of other plants, but can live without doing so.

Calscape says it likes to parasitize members of the heath family, such as madrone.

Like a jubilant opera star, the fairy slipper (Calypso bulbosa) appears to sing its heart out.

Tiny sprouts of turkey pea (Sanicula tuberosa) were coming up among serpentine gravels.

Small Falls

The water flows have gone down quite a bit, and the forest floor has been drying out and getting crunchy again. Just in time for another deluge of rain. Bring it!

Pacific Trillium

Bobcat Composite

The bobcat must have been brushing up against the trail camera when it first set it off. A fox and a coyote also made an appearance this week, in addition to numerous turkeys and deer.

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Metson Lake Heron

 

Great Blue Heron at Attention

The great blue heron was in its usual spot within a scramble of branches when I biked past Metson Lake yesterday, so I took a little break to watch from a park bench on the edge of the lake. I first noticed the fallen tree on 2/3/23, and only recently began to see the occasional heron in there. It appeared to be resting and preening for the most part, although it did briefly show interest in something that swam by near its feet. I also saw a heron back (after a long absence in the wake of the Feb. 4 wind storm) in one of the nesting trees at Blue Heron Lake on the way home.

Preening the Wing

Stretching a Leg

I heard the clip-clopping of horses behind me as I was about to pack up and leave.

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Beached

 

Scooting Sanderlings

A sanderling steps up to the (dinner) plate.

Preparing to nab an unsuspecting mole crab.

Probing Reflections

A few surf scoters suddenly appeared close to shore and gave me a chance to fire off a few frames before they headed back out to deeper water.

It sorta looks like the scoter caught something, but it might just be a beakful of sand.

The sea foam was more colorful out of focus.

River of Clouds

This little rowboat looks like something you'd rent at Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park. But hopefully you'd get one in better shape.

Good ole Mt. Tamalpais
(It took a while for the clouds to lift off its peak.)

Ocean Beach on a Sunny Sunday Afternoon (2/25/24)

Once a month my wife comes down to the beach to do an hour of clean-up of mostly little bits of plastic and short lengths of rope. It adds up to a surprisingly heavy load.

This old man and the sea
is probably younger than me.

Official Coast Guard Fly-by

Nature's Coast Guard Fly-by

Raven Shadow

The crude oil tanker Sapphira heads out to sea, with Mt. Tam in the distance. I only noticed later that a pair of boogie-boarders was having a kiss before paddling out.

Sanderlings on the Move

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Full Metal Moon

 

Full Moon Rising Behind Sutro Tower (2/23/24)

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Mountain Run

 

Milk Maids

Today I drove up to Mt. Tam once again to gather hazel pollen from some trees I had in mind, but I couldn't reach them due to Fairfax-Bolinas Road being closed. Even as I drove up there I was looking forward to bicycling again, and as it happened I found a great hazel area right along Panoramic Highway that I could easily have collected pollen from during a bike ride. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. (I just watched a documentary about Vonnegut, Unstuck in Time, last night.)

Since I had the car, I brought along my DSLR gear, but I hardly used it despite seeing blooms of Indian warrior, calypso orchid, and trillium. All three can be highly photogenic, but the Indian warrior was in too difficult and unsafe a spot to photograph, the calypsos were all brooding, half-open and bent downward, and the trillium were also nodding as though half-asleep.

Before I found the hazel on Panoramic Highway I'd planned to have a look down along Redwood Creek in Frank Valley (where Muir Woods is). I used to hike into the hills from down there quite a lot back in the day, when it was still sleepy down there, with few cars or hikers, and you could walk into Muir Woods without a reservation. Now, most of the parking areas west of Muir Woods are gone or signed "No Parking - $99 Fine." The old main trail through Frank Valley appears to have been decommissioned. Even the beautifully funky, lichen-crusted old bridge that crossed the creek has been removed. [UPDATE: It looks like they're going to replace the bridge as part of general road work slated for Frank Valley.]

The bridge was near a couple of old California buckeye trees next to the road. Years go I collected a few seeds from those trees and tossed them into a vacant lot near my home, and now there is a small, lone buckeye growing there. It leafs out every year, but I've never seen it produce seeds. Anyway, I was surprised to see that someone had screwed a metal plate into one of the buckeyes, reading "Beckett Briggs" and dated 2022. I googled the name, figuring it was a botanist, to no avail. So now I wonder if it's just some kind of graffiti, akin to carving initials into a tree.

Mossy Madrone

Moss Fingerlings

Science Project or Graffiti?

One of the old buckeyes along Frank Valley Road. I haven't noticed leaves sprouting on the wild buckeyes yet, but the big one in Strybing Arboretum is already leafing out.

Just when I thought this log on the way to the trail cams was done sprouting new growths of bear's head fungus, this is what I find today.

Lots of deer and turkeys on the two cams over the last week...

...but not a single coyote, fox, or bobcat.

Then & Now

I like these little wooden chairs set in a cul-de-sac along one of my urban hikes. That's almost all miner's lettuce packed up around them.

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Twenty Percent Chance

 

Sun and Clouds at Seal Rocks

I completed most of my morning walk before I needed the rain jacket. I'd circled through Forest Hill and West Portal and was up near Golden Gate Heights Park when it began to drizzle, and the clouds had already passed by the time I reached the Cascade Walk stairs. As the sun came out, a trace of rainbow lit up out toward Mt. Tam, and I took a snapshot with my phone camera, then dropped it and cracked the screen in two places. It still works, but this might be the excuse I've been waiting for to get a new phone with a top-notch camera.

Today's forecast called for a 20 percent chance of rain, so I figured the early morning sprinkle might have been it, and I headed out on my bike soon after I got home. I dropped down Golden Gate Park via JFK Drive until I reached the Great Highway, where I usually turn south. But when I looked to the north, the contrast of bright sun and dark clouds lured me toward it like singing Sirens.

The clouds and ocean provided beautiful drama, but since I wasn't getting any rainbow action, I rode up to Land's End where I arrived just in time to view a faint bow over the water with the Marin Headlands in the background. Unfortunately, as faint as it looked through my polarized eyeglasses, it was even fainter in the phone snap and soon disappeared as a huge rain cloud moved in and blotted out the sun. The cloud was impressively dark, but the rain was forgivingly light, and I managed to stay fairly dry under the branched awning of a cypress tree.

When there was a brief let-up in the rain, I coasted back down to the old Cliff House to find a more secure refuge to wait out the next line of squalls. Another faint rainbow appeared in the rain's wake, but it was 11:30 by then and the bow was very low in the sky.

On the way home I wished I'd brought my FZ80 to photograph a great blue heron  on the fallen tree at Metson Lake, where I last saw one on December 21st. I've looked for the heron every time I've passed by since, and today was the first time I've seen it again. Incidentally, I haven't seen the great blue herons I recently saw in their nests at their eponymous lake (formerly Stow Lake) since the big wind storm.

And finally, apropos of nothing, I learned that Alabama's Supreme Court has ruled that frozen human embryos are children. The striking thing to me was the Court's reasoning. I thought I heard a reporter on the radio state that the Court reasoned that destroying embryos would incur the wrath of God. 

Really?! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and our highest courts are invoking the wrath of Zeus (or whatever name one chooses for God)!

I downloaded the Court's decision to make sure I heard right, and indeed it says on page 37, "In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: ... and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself." 

Variations of the word "God" appear 41 times in this Court's decision, and the Court relies, at least in part (I haven't read the whole decision, and even though I worked as a litigation assistant for many years, I do not have the expertise of a lawyer), on the U.S. Constitution's declarations about God for authority. 

People are entitled to believe whatever they want, but a state supreme court that bases its legal ruling on relgious beliefs and metaphysics should be an affront to so-called sober judges everywhere. A lot of people in this country have already abandoned reason and science, but now even a court of law has woven its own logic out of mythological cloth. This seems like a misunderstanding of what it means to be rational.

("Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology." --Joseph Campbell.) 

One more apropos of nothing item: Last night I watched an excellent documenary, Radical Wolfe, about the writer Tom Wolfe. As a teenager I never took to reading  beyond our set of Encyclopedia Brittanica until a kid four years younger than I was turned me on to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I've been, if not voracious, at least hungry for books ever since. Thanks, kid!

Love is Blue

If you squint and put on your x-ray goggles, you can just make out the faint bow arching below the line of six white birds in the distance.

The view back toward the squall that just moved off to the north.

Rear Window Timelapse of Clouds

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Cloudplay

 

Afternoon Partial Bow
(Screenshot)

Try as I might, I couldn't resist running some timelapse video of the clouds racing through the sky out the back window yesterday. I hadn't even been thinking about it until I went back there to get my e-reader and noticed a rainbow blinking in and out of existence. But even with the timelapse set to fire every two seconds, the shimmering evanescence was over in a couple of finger-snaps.

Rear Window Timelapse, 2/19/24

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Bow Shift

 

Storm Blowing Through San Francisco

Hanging out at Grandview Park this morning was the best show in town. The wind was often blowing at 15-25 mph, with occasional forays into the 30s. The most powerful gust I recorded on the wind speed unit was 38.5 mph. Despite all the wind, it really didn't rain very much. Ditto for last night. The wettest parts of the storm must have passed to our north and south.

At the foot of a rainbow, Golden Gate Park's Murphy Windmill was catching the southern wind while large waves broke with dramatically billowing spindrift along Ocean Beach.

I spent so much time at the park that I got to watch the rainbow shifting across the horizon. In this shot at 10 a.m., the top of the bow is over the Richmond District.

By noon, when this was shot, the top of the bow is over Blue Heron Lake (Strawberry Hill is the high point just to the left of center). The bow has shifted east, but it's also lower in the sky (since the sun is higher).

A quick clip from Grandview Park just before I left.

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