Potential

I moved the cams back to an area I've used during the dry season before. Right now there's still a fair amount of water everywhere, but soon pools like this will be rare patches of Eden for the local wildlife. I like this spot for its potential. I can just imagine a nice wildcat coming here to drink, and in my dreams maybe even a puma.

A second cam is pointing down the length of the log that you see in the background of the top image. I'd love to see a weasel go across it, but I'm not sure weasels come up this high on the mountain. Way back in the '90s I found a dead weasel just lying on a log across Redwood Creek. I took it over to the rangers at Muir Woods because I didn't know what kind of animal it was. I left it with them in case they wanted to preserve it for an exhibit, but I've never remembered to check back to see if they did.

Which reminds me, I passed a road-killed squirrel on the way up to Rock Spring Saturday morning, then went back to move it off the road so scavengers can make use of it without getting run over themselves, or having the carcass too flattened to hold much promise of gustatory delight.

Just the usual suspects so far: deer, raccoons, robins, juncos, a flycatcher, and several band-tailed pigeons.

Here's a deer's-eye view of the cam.

It was a beautiful day for a ride up the mountain. When all I want to do is check the cams and just experience the mountain for an hour or so I'm grateful to be able to bike up instead of having to drive. The round-trip distance of 44 miles is pretty close to the limit of what I'd want to do on a weekly basis in hilly terrain, though, even with an e-bike.

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Fun in the Fog

It's been fun creating composite trail camera images from these locations, but I've had the cams out in the same area for several months now and I felt like it was time to change things up, so I moved all three to new locations.

Dropping down from home into my neighborhood yesterday morning I parked my bike outside Posh Bagels and strapped on my face mask to wait in line and score some breakfast before traversing the city along Arguello Street, crossing the windy and foggy Golden Gate Bridge, and finally stopping in a relatively windless spot in Sausalito to finally eat. A gull and a crow dropped by to keep me company, and I felt stingy for resisting the urge to share, but duty-bound to do so.

There were a couple of points along the ride where the fog was dripping out of the trees like a cold shower of rain, but I finally made it to the sun/fog barrier. I'd hoped to get into position to photograph a glory, but the sun was too high. I couldn't get an angle on even the steepest hillside to place my shadow in the center of the circle whose partial circumference you see here.

There were god beams in the woods just behind me, though, which provided a different kind of glory. Nice to have such great lighting effects on the day before Summer Solstice.

With perfect crepuscular rays filtering through the oaks I didn't want to leave. So I stayed awhile.

Then I posed with my intrepid ebike, now with over 3,000 miles on it, in my unbrushed morning helmet hair.

The bucks are branching out nicely as you can see in this composite image (I added the fox to a shot of the two bucks), and foxes were all over the place. In fact foxes appeared on all three cams.

Including this one, which I'd set out near the rattlesnake den. Although this trap netted 699 frames, they were nearly all blanks. It didn't even look like wind was the culprit, so maybe it was darting lizards or flitting birds and butterflies. A handful were wood rats.

I do wish these cams had a faster trigger. It's almost inconceivable to me that the fox didn't trigger the camera before it got to this point.

Ditto for this one, but at least it caught the whole fox.

Daylight composites can work out okay if the light is diffuse.

The cute fawn and its mom are still around. Also of note, but not on the cams, the western azaleas have faded, but the yellow mariposa lilies continue, and spotted leopard lilies (Lilium pardalinum) have come into bloom, as well as California pinks (Silene californica).

Back in the woods where the trail cams were, the air was warm and still beneath a cloudless sky. I wasn't looking forward to dropping back down into the cold wind and fog. The wind, especially, was kind of fierce along the Panoramic Highway ridge between Mountain Home Inn and Highway 1. I thought if it was bad there, it was going to be even worse on the Golden Gate Bridge, but the bridge winds turned out to be strong but unremarkable.

The god beams I photographed in the morning were in that group of oaks on the knoll in the frame above.

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Foxes to Fawns

The foxes have been very present the last couple of weeks, showing up on all three cams, but mostly on this one, although this particular frame is a composite image.

Only once did the fox get caught before the cam's night vision went into effect.

Another cam caught a fox in a nice pose, with perhaps part of the tail of a second fox on the lower left, and a strange flying insect in the upper right.

Since I was just going up to do a camera check, I rode my bike, leaving home with 4 out of 5 bars on my battery. That would have been enough if the headwinds hadn't been so strong. I'd never ridden the battery all the way to empty before (the gauge is at the bottom of the display) and was interested to find out what would happen. I learned that the last bar drains much more quickly than the first bar, and that the battery seemed to die all at once, rather than tapering off.

This is where the first battery died. Long live the second battery.

Despite the windy conditions, it was a delectable, crystalline morning on the mountain.

I had moved the chaparral cam into the woods to this new location, where a Robin struck a pose.

A Hermit Thrush too.

And Mr. Gray Squirrel.

When I saw that the cam had fired off nearly 800 frames (where the other two cams had less than 300 each), I figured I'd have a lot of blank frames caused by branches blowing in the wind. Nope. The trail I'd set up on was less a game trail and more of a Wood Rat playground.

Almost all of the close-up frames were blurs.

The cams picked up surprisingly few deer in the last couple of weeks.

But in addition to lots of fox captures, there also were numerous jackrabbits. Some were caught posing....

Others bounding.

Note the fawn's mom back in the upper left.

Say cheese!

I decided to move the wood rat cam to a new location, where I've seen rattlesnakes in years past. I'd scouted this spot on the way in without seeing any snakes, but on the way out, at 10 a.m., Mr. Buzz was sunning himself about where I expected to find him. I set up the cam very nearby in the hope of capturing a hunter in the chaparral (whether fox, bobcat, coyote, or snake), but it's quite possible I won't capture anything at all.

Not only are the rattlesnakes out, but the side creeks are nearly dried up. The one that I've been refilling my water bottle at the last couple of times was dry, with just a couple of small, stagnant pools well below the spot where I'd been filling up. I thought I'd refill at the Pantoll Ranger Station but I forgot by the time I got down there, and I also figured I could eat a couple more plums at a tree I'd stopped at on the way up. It was a cool day, though, and I made it home with water to spare.

I didn't stop to take any pictures between home and Mt. Tam, at least not until I came back through Golden Gate Park just in time to catch a Black Lives Matter march as it passed in front of the Conservatory of Flowers, headed toward the beach.

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Mountain Critters

Composite Critter-Cam

Although this is a composite of three image captures, the fox, jackrabbit, and coyote are depicted where they appeared in each frame.

Mt. Tam, May 22, 2020

On May 1, as the scrub jay gathers nesting material, you can see some of the sickle-leaved onions coming up, but there are no flowers yet.

Just a couple of weeks later, the onions' pink flowers are everywhere. This is another composite frame of course. One thing I forgot to do when I re-set this cam on my previous trip was to make sure there wasn't anything in front of the lens that would move in the wind and create false triggers. That blade of grass in front of the chipmunk led to thousands of useless frames. I got the card home and downloaded a record 6,901 files, which used up 29.4 GB of the 32 GB card.

Buck in the Rain

Lizard Cam

This used to be a popular (unauthorized) route for mountain bikers, and the authorities tried to decommission it by blocking it with dead wood. This was the only time since the cam has been in place at this spot that it caught any humans passing through. Pretty much the only people up high on the mountain during the lockdown are park and watershed employees doing various maintenance tasks, and bike riders.

Lucky for the mouse, unlucky for the fox: two captures made hours apart.

When I headed into the woods to check my trail cams, I was surprised, and yet not surprised, when I encountered a guy enjoying the morning who'd obviously spent the night. I was surprised because I never expect to run into anyone off-trail, but I was not surprised since I know I'm not the only one who likes to roam around. As I walked through "camp" I saw that he'd leaned his bike against an oak tree that I've previously placed my camera in. His hammock was also slung very near another spot I've set the cams at.

Passing Bucks

A casual hiker going through this area would have been unlikely to spot this cam, and even though this location hasn't picked up any humans, I wondered if the camping guy would wander up this way after seeing me enter the woods without coming back out the way I went in. After swapping cards and batteries, I moved this cam to the base of the big Doug fir, even though it makes the cam much more visible to anyone who might pass by. Fingers crossed that it's still there next time I go back.

Mama & Fawn

Billy the Wonder Squirrel

You can't do as nice a composite with sunny-day frames because the shadows move through the day.

Squirrel & Bunny Composite

I was probably as surprised to find the bike-camper as I was to find a pair of fresh grisette mushrooms (Amanita pachycolea). According to California Mushrooms grisettes typically fruit from late fall through mid-winter, yet this guy had just recently burst forth from the earth and was still fresh and pretty on May 22.

This was the first time I rode all the way from home. My ebike has a 500 watt-hour battery, and I do believe I could probably just make it to Mt. Tam and back, about 45 miles round-trip, if I used "battery off" mode whenever I could (on flats and downhills). But I decided to banish "range anxiety" once and for all by purchasing a second battery.

The battery weighs about five pounds and fits nicely in the top Topeak bag I have on the rack. When I locked my bike to a tree so I could hike out to the critter cams, I removed the frame-mounted battery and hid it, along with the bike bag and my helmet, to help ensure it would all still be there when it was time to go home.

Northside Vista Point

A park ranger who'd just let a car head up toward Rock Spring was re-locking the gate across from the Pantoll parking lot when I arrived Friday morning. Employees have work to do up there, but the public is still being kept out, unless you get there on foot or bicycle. It appears the closure will continue through the holiday, which is quite disappointing, especially to my wife who doesn't ride.

View on YouTube

I could hear a chainsaw in the distance at one point, but the woods were alive with birdsong. Here's a minute's worth I recorded on my smartphone.

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