Deer Cam

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In the wee hours of Sunday, a trio of deer walked past the camera, which I'd set up near the bathtub area I used in Set 1. Note the times -- three deer in three minutes, starting with li'l sister...

...then li'l brother...

...then big daddy.

And the next day, another (different) big daddy passed by.

Dang, I might have missed a bobcat here, but I can't tell for sure.

Except for the lone mystery "cat," it was all about deer on this set, and all the deer passed by during the nighttime hours. Not a single daytime capture.

I was going to put the cam at the Lily Pond next, but I couldn't find a spot that seemed likely to catch critters without catching people, nor a location that wouldn't be easily spotted. I doubt a lot of people use that area in any given week, though, so I might go for it one of these days. I kind of wanted to bring the camera home, anyway, to see if I can catch whatever critters pass through our "back 40" at night.

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Sunrise & Acorns

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Leaving San Francisco I encountered light fog outside my door -- the heavier stuff was below our 700-foot elevation. Looking up, I could even see a few stars. The fog wasn't too bad across the Golden Gate Bridge and over Waldo Grade, but it became a thick soup near the top of Highway 1 where it does the hairpin turn up to Panoramic. 

Suddenly I could see only a couple of car lengths ahead. I'd pulled over earlier to let a faster car pass, and they were already long gone; no tail lights to follow. (A traffic sign down near Tam Junction had warned people that both Muir Woods and Stinson Beach were closed, by the way.) 

I broke out of the fog somewhere above Muir Woods, and the view out the driver's side window looked so fine (see above) I decided to stop and await dawn's early light.

I could hear someone sneezing in one of the nearby homes across the street as I waited, watching the fog slowly move up the canyon, then back down, making it seem like the canyon itself was breathing. The sneezing reminded me of Pam, who was at home nursing a cold.

I was dressed warm in jeans and a fleece jacket. I had my coffee and a safe shoulder to wait on. But whoever lives in that sneezing house had an even better spot: their living room. Can you imagine having this view outside your living room window?!

The color started to get good right around sunrise, but the shift to dawn sent the fog right up the hill until it surrounded me. My perfect location was soon completely useless, obscured by fog.

I drove up the road a ways until I was above the fog once again and fired off a few frames with the 300mm. If you use a little imagination, you can just make out a faint orange tint across part of the fog bank.

Here's a scene I've seen countless times, but I still can't resist photographing it. Galen Rowell mistakenly calls the interesting, layered tree a Monterey pine in his excellent, must-have book Bay Area Wild, but it is a Douglas fir.

A bunch of little swallows were zooming overhead while I took in the gorgeous view. This is a composite photo showing several frames of the same bird as it flew by.

Continuing last week's acorn round-up, I wanted to photograph tanoak (named for its use in tanning animal skins)...

...and canyon live oak, or maul oak (named for its dense wood which was used to fashion mauls).

There were acorns galore, and them that eats acorns, like this Steller's jay. 

I spent quite a bit of time just standing in the woods waiting for a bird to land near me, since chance favors the prepared photographer. Every now and then I'd hear a loud metallic thud as an acorn dropped onto the cars parked in the shade of the oak trees.  

I could hear the red-breasted nuthatches calling from high in trees both near and far, but chance finally favored me when one of them flitted down to a nearby snag to work on ... a nest hole!

What the heck? In October? The bird was actively digging out the hole, pulling crumbs out with its beak.

Hard to imagine it's actually going to start raising young nuthatches, but time will tell.

I photographed this acorn woodpecker from nearly the same spot from which I'd watched the nuthatch. You gotta love that well-stocked larder. I saw a pair of ravens near the top of a different acorn-storage tree, and they appeared to be trying to prise acorns out of the holes. Leave it to a raven to try to steal what it could easily gather right off the ground.

I got out my Sibley and National Geographic bird guides to try to figure out which sparrow this is, and my guess is it's a youthful white-crowned sparrow. If so, they have a very sweet song that's quite different from the one we hear in my neighborhood and in Golden Gate Park.

Golden-crowned sparrow foraging in the moss.

When I bought my Nikon D800E (the one without an anti-aliasing filter), I wondered if I would run into moire problems photographing birds when I was close enough to capture feather detail. The image below is a crop from the (full-frame) image above.

Here's the close crop.

(Nikon 300mm f/4 w/ 1.7X teleconverter; 1/125th sec. @ f/6.7, ISO 1600)

Another golden-crowned sparrow perched on a lichen-crusted bay laurel.

I was originally attracted to the shadows of this fern on the rock in the background, as it made the rock look like a fossil.

Sunlight moves through the forest, briefly shining a spotlight on the same patch of deer ferns.

The "fossil" fern....

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TamCam (Set 2)

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I finally picked a productive spot after two consecutive weeks of duds.

It must have been just dark enough here in the woods to make the camera fire in infrared mode. I wonder if this is the same coyote caught in the previous frame. It's the same day, Sunday, about two hours later.

I got nothing but a squirrel's tail in Set 1, so it was nice to get the whole critter this time. We take gray squirrels for granted, but they are not acclimated to people on Mt. Tam and are not easy to see, much less photograph.

Trail cams are built for hunters, not photographers. All a hunter wants to know is whether game is plentiful and at what time of day it passed by. Even the most basic point-n-shoot can take a better picture, though.

Sorta think this is the same coyote again.

Definitely a different buck, though.

And here's a different coyote, a bit younger than the other one. This is close enough to my first set that this could be the same young coyote I caught over there by the bathtub. This coyote and one doe deer (which I'm not bothering to post) were the only two animals that used the main trail. Several pairs of human hikers passed through, all of whom used the main trail. I believe that white stick of plant material in the foreground set off quite a few empty frames when the wind blew. I've got to be more careful about noticing such things when I set up the camera.

This is a shot of me being captured by the camera this morning. Although this is not a regular, maintained trail, it is obviously a people trail; however, I was still surprised to see that so many people used it. I had hikers on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday! Thankfully I placed the camera next to the animal trail, so none of the passing hikers noticed it. A much better spot was available nearby, but it would have been spotted by hikers for sure. I'd also considered putting it where a tree had fallen across the trail, but it would have been right out in the open. I doubt an animal jumping over the log would have been caught by the camera anyway.

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Tam's Toes

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If you go to Muir Woods really early -- I mean really early -- you can always beat the crowds, even on a weekend. But government shutdowns? Those you can't beat. 

Purely out of historical interest I headed down to Muir Woods to photograph the closure sign, which reads, "Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is closed." Nothing snarky, though the temptation must have been fierce. Just the sad fact, black ink on white paper. Later on I would see a tour bus at Rock Spring for the first time ever. French-speaking people milled around outside the bus: "Ou sont les frickin' redwoods?" Some of them visited the portable toilets. Somewhere in the distance, a cabal of Republicans were high-fiving each other for screwing a busload of French people out of a trip to Muir Woods.

I'd been thinking about getting over to the coastal feet of Mt. Tam since I hadn't been out that way in a long time. The wind was still blowing pretty hard from the east, and I had to use the Jeep as a windbreak to make this 30-second exposure along the Shoreline Highway north of the Muir Beach Overlook.

I didn't have anyplace in mind to shoot from, so I stopped at a few different pull-outs and decided this one would do.

This is another view from the same pull-out. That spit of land in the distance is Bolinas. When the sun finally rose, it touched the very tip of that spit and worked its way inland.

I have never stayed at the Steep Ravine Environmental Campground. It looked pretty quiet down there, but I see that they are closed this month for maintenance. I've heard it's not easy to get reservations on the spur of the moment, but one of these days I'm going to have to make a plan and spend a couple of days there.

When the original Forty-Niners saw this stretch of coast, there wasn't a pampas grass in sight. It was introduced in Santa Barbara in 1848 and has since spread throughout the state. 

Dawn at Stinson Beach.

I swung a right just before Stinson Beach and drove up toward Pantoll, reacquainting myself with this stretch of road. Along the way I spotted this fern-filled canyon and had to stop to check it out. I guess I made some noise clambering up the hill; I could hear a deer loudly chuffing in indignation from farther up the canyon.

Heading up to Rock Spring I was passed by several Ferraris whenever I stopped at a pull-out. They appeared to be gathering for a group photo. I had moved on by the time they left, but you couldn't miss hearing them go, as they all revved their engines for maybe half a minute before they went.

On my way to check out the trail camera I stopped to photograph some ripe peppernuts (bay laurel).

The coast live oak acorns were still green.

I haven't had much luck with the trail camera since that first week. I had one week with no animals at all -- but lots of pictures of wind-blown trees -- and a second week with just a single deer. It's amazing to realize that a game trail can go completely unused for a whole week. I moved the camera to a pretty good trail for the coming week, but I'm thinking about moving it back over to the west side of Bolinas Ridge next time. There's lots of coyote and bobcat scat along the trails, but it's all old. Maybe the animals don't use that area much this time of year.

I spotted some wild turkeys and American goldfinches on my way back from setting up the camera.

They need a dexterous beak to separate the kernel from the fluff.

The meadowlarks are back!

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Nature's Chaos

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"The images . . . are mostly details of nature which emphasize how nature's apparent disorder can be reduced to aesthetically stimulating fragments."

--Eliot Porter, Nature's Chaos, 1990

California Buckeye Along Redwood Creek

I finally found an Eliot Porter book that at least comes close to doing justice to his photographs (the public library had a first edition). It's called Nature's Chaos (NY Times review) and features Porter's photography accompanied by the writing of James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). Porter had been fascinated by Gleick's book and was inspired to spend the last days of his life (he died in 1990) on one last photography project.

I can see how Porter, who had a scientific bent (he began his career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard University), took such an interest in Gleick's book. I remember being excited about the book myself when it came out. 

Chaos seems like such an unlikely subject for a photographer. We tend to look for something simple and graphic, something with a clear subject that grabs our attention and stands apart from its background. Indeed, that's the key to our usual aesthetic in nature photography. What I loved about Nature's Chaos was Porter's genius for creating beautiful compositions from a chaotic scene. Much of his success for me is due the details so clearly visible in the images captured with his large format camera. With the details rendered so clearly, my eyes comfortably roam over the larger compositional elements -- the lines and shapes -- and gradually transition into the finest surrounding textural details.

Porter didn't make new photographs to illustrate the book. He pulled the images from his collection after being inspired by the "new science." As I was looking through the Mt. Tam images in my "October" folder I came across the photo above of the California buckeye with dozens of large nuts dangling from a now-leafless tree. Although I shot that image in October 2004, I still remember being charmed by the scene and thinking it was going to be impossible to photograph. I shot a frame anyway.

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