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| Brown pelican, trying to beat the frame. |
"Beating the frame" is something the characters do in some of the detective novels I like to read. I recently got started reading Tana French, whose style of detective novel is so novel that I keep forgetting the main plot while luxuriating in her many beautiful digressions into the kinds of details that are the ecstatic moments of everyday life -- or they could be, if only we noticed them.
Anyway, I was interested to notice today that the pelicans are still numerous on Seal Rocks, but that the great mass of them had moved to the one that's farthest from shore.
Whenever I think of pelicans, I think of a line that I've long thought must have come from a cartoon I learned as a kid: "my beak can hold more than my belly can." It turns out to be part of a limerick written by the poet, humorist, and newspaper editor, Dixon Lanier Merritt, and reads as follows:
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican!
My morning walk today took me past the alleged stinging nettles I recently posted about finding at Golden Gate Heights Park. The plants have matured since then and look even more nettlesome, since they are not the kind I'm familiar with from Mt. Tamalpais (Urtica dioica). Thanks to Plant ID, a phone snap of the plant shows it very likely to be dwarf nettle (Urtica urens).
I was prepared to record temperatures again today, but our heat wave (on the west side of San Francisco, that is) turned out to be a nothingburger. It was 71 degrees at my computer desk at 6:30 this morning, 73 when I left for my walk at 8:30, and thanks to a sea breeze, back to 71 by noon.
Meanwhile, today's high is going to be over 120 degrees in Death Valley, where the Badwater 135 ultramarathon is only a couple of weeks away....
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| A disorderly squadron of pelicans flies past the old Cliff House. |
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| Pelican In Suspense |
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| A Cocktail Party of Heermann's Gulls on Ocean Beach |
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| Dwarf Nettle |
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