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| Raccoon In Blackberry Thicket, North Lake |
After listening to a show on the radio this morning I wondered if the cure for a lot of life's dissatisfactions could be as simple as cultivating an authentic sense of gratitude for one's life as it is. If you're bored with climbing the ladder solely in pusuit of more money and whatever self-respect you hope to buy with that money, try climbing the ladder toward greater gratitude. Or simply be kinder to yourself and the people close to you. Learn a new language or how to play a musical instrument. Take up nature photography!
I don't know. More and more I come back to gratitude being a superpower, and a superpower that anybody can cultivate. It slays boredom, self-pity, anxiety -- you name it.
I wasn't sure I was going to have any photos to post today. During my walk I was drawn to patterns of tree bark. Birds are a great doorway into nature, but even something as simple as patterns can slow us down enough to look more closely, or from a different perspective. Nevertheless, looking for patterns to photograph can be hit-or-miss, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the patterns once I got home and opened them up in Photoshop.
But then, as I was tooling around North Lake on my bike, I spotted a raccoon in a tree that was tangled with blackberry vines. I gingerly got off my bike and got out my camera, and the raccoon stayed put! Eventually it even resumed hunting for berries. So I ended up having a post afterall, thanks to something a little cuter, if less cerebral, than tree bark.
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| The cells that make wood are dead at maturity. They literally grow up to die, to support the rest of the plant. This pocked specimen is from a weathered stump near the south entrance to the Oak Woodlands in Golden Gate Park. |
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| Oak Bark |
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| Eucalyptus Bark |
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| Song Sparrow Walks On Water |
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| I wondered if this was the same great blue heron I saw in a tree at Lily Lake last week. A cormorant was having some success hunting underwater, but I didn't see the heron make a single strike. |
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| A few of the water lilies are still blooming, but if you're looking specifically for water lilies, you might also try the lily pond in the San Francisco Botanical Garden. |
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| The heron didn't seem to move a muscle for several minutes. I wondered if it would be content to catch a mere minnow, or if it was waiting for something bigger to swim by. |
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| Leaf Patterns at the National AIDS Memorial Grove |
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| Bark Patterns, Whiskey Hill |
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| A daddy longlegs photobombs my bark pattern. |
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| Cute! |
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| I was a little surprised the raccoon was all by itself. |
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| I've snagged a few blackberries myself the last couple of weeks, especially at Grandview Park. I still remember a great berry patch in my neighborhood that unfortunately got dug up to make room for a new house. (Surprisingly, there still are a couple of empty lots around.) |
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| As the raccoon wandered into deep cover, I heard a cooper's hawk calling nearby and went to investigate. |
Raccoon & Cooper's Hawk
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| Another chilly, windy day on the west side of the city again today. This is the gull's nest that used to be near the black oystercatcher nest, before the oystercatchers abandoned it. I did wonder why I saw two oystercatchers for a few days, then only one for a few more days, and then none. A solo bird is never going to be able to hatch and raise chicks out in the open like that, with all those gulls about. Maybe the first one left because the foraging wasn't good enough. |
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| There was very little bird activity on Seal Rocks this morning. The lack of birds and the chilly gray day gave no cause to linger. I'm going to miss it anyway. |
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