18 Minutes

Fall color along the east side of Tioga Pass, 6:03 a.m., Oct. 7, 2008.

Eighteen minutes later.

Too smoky to drive all the way out there this year. 

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Over the Pass

 

They say we're heading into a La Niña year, which supposedly could spell d-r-o-u-g-h-t. Shhh. Maybe if we're quiet, the beast won't awaken.

I made these photos crossing Tioga Pass in October 2008, during the "strong" La Niña season of 2007-08, when Sierra snowpack was well below average. Interestingly, we had another "strong" La Niña season in 2010-11, when snowpack was well above average. With any luck we'll get some fresh snow in the mountains this weekend.

 

Interestingly, snowpack was way below average during the "weak" El Niño year of 2014-15, and in 2015 the snowpack was basically nil at 5 percent of normal, a 500-year record low.

Like pikas living in the scree along the Nunatak Nature Trail, we'll just have to harvest what we can and hope we get through the winter okay.

You find treefrogs in the strangest places, such as here in High Country pika territory. I've also seen them in the desert. As long as there's a wet spot nearby, they are right at home.

If I remember right, this is Ellery Lake. The rabbitbrush is pretty much done at this altitude, but monarch butterflies are sipping nectar from their flowers down the hill.

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Fresh Air

 

View on YouTube

Phone snaps from our Sunday hike. I'll take fog over smoke any day.

Funny how it was so hot up there--baking hot and dry--and yet soon after we got back into the fog at home we had to turn the heat on to warm up the flat.

Sunday morning at Rock Spring, and not a single car.

View of East Peak on the way back down the hill.

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Coyote Stories

I've got a lot of video clips from the month of September, but not enough time yet to put them into a single video montage. The coyote only wandered through the camera traps once all month, pausing to lap up some creek water from the little (and still shrinking) pool.

I like to remind myself that coyotes, and all other wild animals, live without agriculture. They find what they need as they travel about, roaming the Earth like Jules in Pulp Fiction wanted to do. 

The gate to Rock Spring was closed all weekend, but you could still park and hike in. Pam and I were surprised and a little pissed off to encounter about a dozen mountain bike riders illegally descending the very narrow Old Mine Trail. Farther up the hill you could see where bikers have been abetting the erosion of a hillside by carving their own routes. Even on the trail, they managed to knock out a couple of wooden water bars, abetting erosion there as well.

It was smoky when I drove up on Saturday, but the air was supremely clear when we hiked up on Sunday. Despite the lack of smoke, the fire danger remained. 

Speaking of fire danger, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry last night when I watched a 60 Minutes segment where a scientist put in layman's terms to the President of the United States a very clear and rational explanation of how global heating works and the dangers it presents to our way of life, and the President's response was that the Earth will cool off soon. Does he mean because winter is coming?! Is he telling us some kind of inscrutable coyote story? To see the President of the United States engaging in magical thinking to guide national policy on the defining threat of our time was just mind-blowing. 

Anyway, I'm glad I was able to spend a little time in nature this weekend. This new camera location turned out to be pretty good. I'd already seen that deer had been browsing on the plants, but I couldn't tell until I saw all the camera footage that they were continuing to do so. The most obvious sign had been some Indian hemp whose leaves have been gnawed down to its tough stem, but the deer have also been eating the sedges, the ferns, and even the thorny blackberry plants.

I had to take this kestrel frame off the video footage since I didn't get a still shot. The kestrel somehow triggered the camera to shoot three still frames without getting caught, but when the video kicked in, there it was.

Before I left the area last week I placed a couple of windfall bay nuts on the log. This video clip shows who got one of them. I'd placed the other one in a nook, and it was still there. Maybe it'll sprout next spring. This time I placed several acorns on the log. 

The water hole has shrunk quite a bit. I hope it lasts until the rains come. The pool was so small that I moved the camera to a new spot, thinking this viewpoint wasn't going to work much longer.

It was nice to catch the gray fox with the new camera location. If you look behind the fox you'll see some branches that I placed across an opening in the hope of steering the critters between the two rocks in the center of the frame, but the critters often wriggled through the branches instead, probably preferring their usual route. 

I don't know why this honeysuckle decided to hog the camera on the final day of the month, but I wish it would have waited until after the bobcat came by to drink from the pool.

And the owl too. I've been catching this owl for a while, but the old camera location was too far away to see it very well. Unfortunately, I don't know owls well enough to do more than hazard a guess as to what this guy is: screech owl? saw-whet? spotted? I doubt I'll ever get a daytime image of it, but hopefully I'll get another chance without a honeysuckle vine obscuring the view.

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Reflections

 

Does a Great Egret ponder its reflection or reflect on its ponderings? I wonder how long it takes a young egret to learn how to compensate for refraction when hunting.

I was having a brain-freeze and tried to google "who pondered his reflection," only to be disappointed by the results. None of them answered my question. It only worked when I added the contextual word "mythology." Of course, if I had queried "who fell in love with his reflection," I'd have gotten right to it, but I couldn't even remember that Narcissus didn't ponder so much as swoon.

A Brown Pelican swoops over its reflection, having too much sense to swoon over it.

A sleepy looking Mew Gull also appears to be in a reflective mood.

It's been so long since I went out to photograph shorebirds that it took me a minute to remember that this is a Willet. All of these photos were shot at Crissy Lagoon one October day in 2007, eight years after the marsh was connected to San Francisco bay to expose it to the tides.

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Beach Life

 

Sometimes there's just no better place to be than the beach on a September morning.

Marbled Godwits have dropped by for the winter.

They are right at home among the teeming Sanderlings.

Which is not to say that sanderlings are team players.

And plucking isopods out of the sand isn't the only lip-smackin' fun going on.

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Foxy

 

It was more foxy than usual around the pool the last couple of weeks.

One difference, though, is that the fox was always alone. Another is that it's showing up in the daytime.

Sometimes I can't figure out how an animal that appears to be heading directly for an area covered by another camera manages to escape without being camera-trapped. This fox is leaping toward the pool, but it didn't trigger the pool cam.

Often, an animal will light up one cam...

...then trigger a second cam.

This is where the fox ended up when she jumped off the log. In the past, this cam often didn't get triggered at times like this. The pool is to her left, but she has never stopped there to drink. As I was biking up the mountain I was surprised to hear a fair amount of running water in one of the roadside drainages, so I imagine there are still plenty of watering holes for a fox on the move.

The pool keeps getting smaller, but the raccoon continues to check it out. It's not coming to drink, but to hunt.

This guy chattered at me from high in a nearby tree almost the whole time I was hanging around the camera trap area. I recorded some video on my phone to capture all the sounds -- the scolding squirrel, the laughing acorn woodpeckers, the drumbeat of the woodpeckers making acorn holes, the loud calls of a nearby pileated woodpecker, and numerous small songbirds companion-calling.

This big buck made his first appearance.

Stepped in for a close-up.

Here, a different cam had caught him ten hours earlier.

And here he is trailing a doe.

I've always liked the general view of this cam, but it seemed to be missing a lot of shots (for example, when the bobcat was on the log, this cam did not fire), so I moved it to another tree slightly closer to the log. When I got the memory cards home, though, I could see that the cam had suddenly been doing much better. Why, I don't know. Hopefully I won't be sorry I moved it. It sometimes seems like whack-a-mole to get the position just right. I also brought my yard-cam up, so there are now four cams in this one little area.

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For the Birds

 

September is a good time to go out and find birds fattening up for the winter. Back in September 2009 at El Polin Spring I watched this Western Tanager stalk a nice fat meal hanging on a willow leaf.

I haven't been able to identify the caterpillar, unfortunately. It seems close to some kind of sphinx moth, but I can't find an exact match. Despite the tanager's powerful beak, he was unable to yank the caterpillar off its leaf.

Berries are much easier to catch. Figuring out this is likely a female  or immature Western Tanager was not so easy. I looked her up in Sibley with no luck, but National Geographic led me to understand that the top-pictured bird is a male (yellow on its top wing bar), so it followed that this was a female. 

I also tried to google it at one point. How do you google a bird? Even the images didn't cut it. Those birds looked so much more yellow than mine. I woke up in the middle of the night, still thinking about that, and fell into a silly reverie about impossible google searches. Imagine getting a million people, all at once, to search for things that don't exist. Now trending: chewable barbed wire; milk of titanium; carbon trioxide; water pianos; and sunspot remover. Yes, I do get even more goofy than usual at 2 a.m. 

It almost looks like this Townsend's Warbler is interested in the little urn-shaped flowers, but there's probably some little insect up there that I just can't see.

This Pygmy Nuthatch seems to have a nutritious little prize.

And this Steller's Jay was going to town on a seed, hammering off the pulp to get at the nut inside.

I recently read an alarming news story about hundreds of thousands of migrating birds that dropped dead in New Mexico. Biologists thought the mass die-off could have been the result of wildfire smoke, drought, and an unusual cold front that swept through. The Fish and Wildlife Service's Forensics Lab (home of the Feather Atlas) is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.

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