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| Black-crowned Night Heron, Blue Heron Lake |
Birds are excellent, but bugs are nature too, and the variety, even here in the city, turns out to be more interesting than I expected. I look forward to doing bug safaris at various locations to see what there is to find.
There was a black-crowned night heron chilling just offshore from where I started this morning's outing. Good thing, probably. Otherwise there'd be a crazy-looking spider at the top of the page.
On another subject, I was going over my finances yesterday and got to reminiscing about San Francisco before A.I., before Bitcoin, before smartphones, before cell phones, and even before the internet. I know. Hard to believe anyone alive could go back that far.
The first time I lived in San Francisco was 1987. I'd just graduated from college and was living in the Haight with my best friend from the Navy and his obliging roommates, where I slept in a hallway for a few months. Walking around the old hippie neighborhood (back when you could catch live music at the I-Beam) I thought, "Wow, it's been twenty years since the Summer of Love. I'm walking through ancient history!"
I got a temp job doing customer service at Charles Schwab, where I took phone calls from people who wanted to check up on their accounts. If they were feeling frisky and wanted make a stock trade, I would hand them off to a licensed broker.
That was a great gig, working with an interesting, fun, and beautiful group of fellow temps, but it ended after a couple of months and I took another temp job at Goldman Sachs where I was one of two wire operators. A client would call to make a trade through the OTC desk. I would write down the information and hand the piece of paper to a broker, who would use his direct line to the stock exchange trading floor where another guy would execute the trade.
By today's standards it was all kind of a human Rube Goldberg machine.
Now, anybody can trade stocks from an app on their smartphone, people are paying $80,000 to own a Bitcoin, and it's been sixty years (!) since the Summer of Love. Ain't San Francisco beautiful!
And now, the bugs.
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Blow Fly or Greenbottle Fly (Lucilla sp.)
(I'll add IDs as I get them from the knowledgeable folks at Bug Guide and iNaturalist.) |
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| Sweat Bee (Lasioglossum sp.) |
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| Root-maggot Fly |
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| Bumblebee on Blackberry Flower |
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| Resting Cabbage White |
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| Honeybee on Wild Radish |
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| Wolf Spider (Pardosa sp.) Carrying Egg Sac |
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| Flower Fly (Syrphus torvus) on Poison Hemlock Flowers |
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| Meadow Fly (Chrysotoxum sp.) |
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| Lady Bug (Coccinella septempunctata) on Blackberry Leaf |
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| Fuzzy-faced Spider |
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| Woodlouse Fly (Melanophora roralis) |
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| Blow Fly (Compsomyiops callipes) |
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| Ichneumonid Wasp |
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| The defunct building across from Amoeba Music (which used to be a bowling alley until it closed in '96) used to be the I-Beam. |
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