Morning Sky

Here in the Sunset District we don't take it for granted that we'll be able to see the sky on any given morning, so it's always a pleasant surprise to have a clear view when we open the curtains after shutting off the alarm clock. This morning the waning crescent moon had just risen above Twin Peaks, and the appearance of Venus and Jupiter were icing on the cake.

Today is my first official day back in the office since the pandemic, so I'm going to take the morning sky as a good omen. I skipped my usual routine to grab my camera and a couple of lenses and step outside into the cool, but not very quiet, pre-dawn neighborhood. With a garbage truck noisily working its way up the hill I snapped a couple of frames and headed back indoors.

Mars and Saturn were supposedly out there above and to the right of Venus, but I couldn't see them. Jupiter will get closer to Venus over the next couple of days until they actually appear to touch.

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Grandview Park

Ordinarily I'd have included this park on my morning walk, which today would have been about a half-hour before sunrise. But as I began my walk I thought I heard some little birds or varmints scurrying in the red trumpet vines next to the sidewalk. Only when I had passed the vines did I realize the sound was drizzling rain. 

It was very light, though, so I continued my walk. Naturally, the rain started to fall harder instead of stopping, so I took refuge beneath an overhang in someone's driveway. I waited and waited, then finally started walking back home since I needed to stay on schedule. Back at home, Pam had changed out of her walking-to-work clothes so she could catch the bus. Naturally, the rain soon stopped. No morning walks for us!

But hey, at least it's Friday. I took another spin up to the park for my 10 a.m. walk and brought my camera along to capture the three-in-one: cloudscape, cityscape, and landscape.

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Bug Bites

 

I just dug up one of my wife's aphid-infested plants, recently brought home from the nursery, and unceremoniously dumped it in the compost bin for tomorrow morning's pick-up.

Along with the winged adult captured above, you can see hints of much more infestation on the bottom of this sage leaf. The top surface was littered with what appeared to be countless tiny, spherical white eggs. Several of the leaves had white splotches of powdery mildew, which drew our eyes at first. The aphids showed up on closer examination. The sage was in a window box planter between a lavender and a rosemary, both of which appear to be unscathed by either the aphids or the fungus.

I was a little disappointed with the clarity of the 1:1 images I shot with a Nikon 105mm/Micro despite using a flash and bracing myself. Next I tried running a focus stack with my camera on a tripod, but I didn't lock up the mirror since I was using flash, and those images were even worse. The mirror-slap vibrations at that magnification were all too evident. I didn't have time to keep testing, so I'll have to experiment with capturing such tiny creatures a bit more on another day.

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Native of Mexico

A bee's-eye view.

(Click images for larger view.)

The neighbors across the street have created a living privacy fence with this densely leaved Red Trumpet Vine (Distictis buccinatoria), which recently began blooming like crazy. It looks like something that might be pollinated by hummingbirds, but I confess that I haven't noticed any when I've walked past it. Distictis is in the Bignoniaceae family, like one of my favorite trees, the jacaranda, whose blossoms turned a street near a friend's house in Santa Barbara into purple tunnels.

My neighborhood walks take me past the vine three times a day, and on yesterday's early walk, while it was still dark outside, I spotted a coyote trotting toward me just a second before he spotted me and turned around. 

This was the second morning in a row that I encountered a coyote on my early walk. I told my wife about it when I got back home just as she was going out the door to walk to work. No sooner had she closed the gate when she came back to tell me the coyote was out front. He trotted up the street ahead of my wife, turning often to see if she was still coming, and paying little heed to the mob of raucous ravens cawing at him from rooftops, trees and telephone poles.

The two-lobed stigma (in the back, looking like an ostrich head) opens to receive pollen, then closes when it gets enough to fertilize its ovules.

A fresher corolla tube.

Now that I've finally taken a close look at these flowers after living near them for many years, I'll have to spend some time watching for visiting hummingbirds. The nectaries are a long way down that tube, so it might be a pretty good show. Once I determined that this plant is non-toxic I touched the tip of my tongue to the base of the stamens and tasted the sweet nectar. [After the sun came out I checked and saw no hummingbirds visiting, but plenty of honeybees, who mostly gathered pollen but occasionally went deep into the tube for nectar, and bumblebees, who made straight for the nectar, but became so dusted with pollen on the way in and out that pollen cascaded from their backs when they emerged.]

In this crop of the previous image you can see hairs on the outside of the corolla tube, maybe making it more reflective to keep it from overheating and endangering the nascent seeds within. Even the style (the stalk of the stigma) had hairs on it.

When I opened Helicon Focus to create these focus-stacked images I was surprised to learn that the company is based in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Their web site lists several ways to donate money to the war effort.

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Fast Times

Watch on YouTube

Looking out the back window late this morning, my impression was that the clouds were not moving at all. Only when I looked more carefully and used Sutro Tower as a reference point was it apparent that the clouds were lazily sweeping north to south. I set up the DSLR to capture the movement in a timelapse with frames firing every two seconds. 

Normally I have little patience to hang around during a long timelapse, but this time I was able to set it up in the bedroom, then close the door and return to the living room where I could work at my computer without having to listen to the noisy mirror-slap of each frame. 

Maybe there's a mirrorless camera in my future. 

I do enjoy watching clouds in timelapse mode. All that churning and roiling of fluid, chaotic, and evanescent shapes is mesmerizing. I also like to watch other slow things in nature that have been sped up, like plants and mushrooms growing. On the other hand, it's also interesting to see fast things slowed down, like a ladybird beetle taking flight.

Whenever I want a quick fix of timelapsed clouds I run the latest hour captured by various fire lookouts around the state, like these in the Tahoe region or these in the North Bay.

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Bioscapes

(Click images to view larger.)

I like to admire and photograph landscapes as much as the next guy, but I've always been especially drawn to "bioscapes" -- the intimate details of nature. I want to see indigo anthers that haven't fully opened up yet, and others that have exploded with orange pollen grains. I only wish I could render even greater detail, and one of these days I'm going to buy a stereo microscope so I can do just that.

When you start with a landscape, you might pick out individual trees, a river, a wildflower meadow, a section of cliff face, or the peak of a mountain. The bioscape is where you get to the level that isn't available to your unaided eyes. It's like peering into a realm of fantasy, except it's even better because it's real. Somehow -- and no one knows how -- this universe that got its start billions of years ago contained within its initial conditions the ability of atomic elements to organize themselves into living creatures. The intricacy of life is literally mind-boggling, and when I'm doing close-up photography I'm giving my imagination free rein to roam in those intricate worlds.

Come to think of it, it was staring at anthers and trichomes and other botanical fare through dissection microscopes in a botany class in college that first sparked my interest in close-up photography. One day I was out doing nature photography and was awed by the beauty of a species of monkey flower with wildly colorful nectar guides. To better appreciate them I dissected a flower, then set a sheet of glass over the parts to make them lie flat enough to be photographed (this was long before the days of digital photography and focus stacking).

Mimulus cardinalis

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Looking for Compromise

Lying in the dark during the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning I contemplated driving up to Mt. Tam to find a patch of lupines to photograph with the sunrise. I'd just been up there last week, though, and I couldn't recall seeing a patch that would give me a good vantage point. That meant I'd have to try to find one on the fly, hurrying along after the 7 a.m. gate opening, looking for something that may well not exist. I concluded that such a quest would be futile and require an unnecessary trip in the car, and soon fell back to sleep.

When I finally woke up for good I decided to ride my e-bike up to Mt. Tam. I wanted to update my recent "Then & Now" post with another photo that required the use of my DSLR and 16-35mm lens, so I also had an opportunity to try out something else I've been thinking about. 

I've been wondering if I could continue to pursue my interest in nature photography within an area bounded by the limit of my e-bike range. My carbon footprint would be reduced compared with driving my car, and I'd get some great exercise. I'd compromise speed and range for physical and environmental health.

The result of my little test with the DSLR on Sunday was that it's possible, but I'm not quite prepared equipment-wise. I could easily add a 105mm Micro to my bike kit, but I would still really miss having a tripod. My current tripod is too long and heavy for the bike, so I'd have to find something smaller. 

On the way home I was excited to find this gas station with prices exceeding the $6.00 mark. The last time I bought gas it was $4.65/gal., which I thought was outrageous. We don't drive much, so we've missed the big run-up since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Judging by the traffic I see in the city, especially along 19th Avenue, it doesn't appear that high prices are making much of a dent in people's need or desire to drive. 

The news media and the president focus their hand-wringing on the high prices, but I never hear them suggest that people try to drive less. I suspect to most people the idea of not using their car every day just boggles the mind, like going vegetarian. It makes me think of Dr. Strangelove: how I stopped worrying and learned to love climate change.

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Backyard Beauties

 

The Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) out back has the advantage over its wild kin of having been watered more than nature provided this season.

The basal rosette of this plant, like the many neighbors in its patch, was about as big around as the palm of my hand.

Although it's a very good edible plant, this one ended up in a small vase on the window ledge over our kitchen sink.

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Then & Now

 

West Ridgecrest Road on March 27, 2016

West Ridgecrest Road on March 26, 2022

I went back up on April 3 to see if the little bit of rain we had during the week had made any difference, and I wouldn't say that it did, except that maybe the grass is a little taller, and the poppies bloomed. Another difference between 2016 and 2022 is that the embankment itself seems to be less steep. Even with the 2016 picture in my hand, I was unable to reproduce the same vantage point.

The little bit of rain we've had seems to have pushed the spring season along a little bit, though certainly nothing like we had in 2016. Nevertheless, the hillsides were a more cheerful green than the greenish-yellow we found on our last visit, and there were nice patches of sky lupine here and there. 

Although it was still very dry in the woods, there was lots of birdsong. We heard the easily identified birds such as flicker, acorn woodpecker, robin, red-breasted nuthatch, steller's jay, junco, quail, turkey, chickadee, and western bluebird. And if my Merlin app is to be believed, we also heard warbling vireo, black-throated gray warbler, townsend's warbler, purple finch, violet-green swallow, hermit warbler, and brown creeper.

Beautiful day from the Coastal Trail along Bolinas Ridge, looking out over Stinson Beach and Bolinas. This hike starts at Rock Spring, goes up and over the Old Mine Trail and down to the Matt Davis Trail, then takes the fork up onto the Coastal Trail as far as the Willow Camp Fire Road. From there it goes up and over West Ridgecrest and descends Laurel Dell Road to pick up the Cataract Trail where it swings upstream to close the loop.

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Time of March

There's a saying about "the march of time," and I can see how some people might like their time to be cadenced, orderly, and on the move. But in my own experience it feels like time flows through me like wind through the trees. I shot the photo above in March of 2012, and it's amazing to me that ten years have passed since then. 

Records for San Francisco indicate that rainfall was 70 percent of normal in 2012, directly on the heels of a 66 percent year in 2011. This shot of Lower Cataract Falls was made almost twenty years ago, in March of 2003, a year that saw rainfall at 107 percent of normal.

The 2020 and 2021 rainfall years were both below 50 percent of normal.

And I suspect this year will be similar.

I was browsing through my Mt. Tam images to find out what I've seen and photographed in March in other years. Even though I could probably find images like these again this year, my heart isn't in it.

And come to think of it, I haven't even seen a calypso orchid yet this year. Not that I think there aren't any, but they certainly aren't jumping out at me.

When I biked up to the mountain to check my trail cams I was dismayed by how dry it seemed. It felt like summer, and it was even starting to get a little buggy.

Walking the animal trail through the woods was as noisy as walking on corn flakes. Birds called from the woods. Holding my phone, I waited slightly impatiently for a couple of hikers to pass. "Do you see a hawk?" one of them asked. No, I said, I'm trying to get a recording of that birdsong so my Merlin app can identify it. 

Yellow-rumped warbler. Farther along I thought the app was getting it wrong. Could that really be a dark-eyed junco? But the app was insistent. Still farther along, ruby-crowned kinglet, western bluebird. All birds I can identify by sight, and even by some of their sounds, but nesting season breeds rare songs.

The bobcats and coyotes might be hanging out lower on the mountain. None have passed by the cams in a good while.

I tried another chaparral set-up that I had high hopes for, with this nice little view up an arroyo.

But there was surprisingly little activity there. A fox and a jackrabbit crossed the arroyo, and a few deer browsed their way down through the middle of the frame. One of the deer had a very big, round belly and was probably expecting her fawn very soon.

It was so dry that I decided to pull up stakes and move both cameras.

I'm down to two cams now. One was stolen, another washed away in a flood, and a third one stopped working. 

I haven't decided where to put the cams next, so for the time being I put one of them in our tiny back yard. In the meantime, here's hoping we get some decent rain the rest of the month.

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