Oranges

Spotted Dorid Nudibranch
(click images to view larger)

Stepping out onto the reef at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve early this morning I quickly spotted a tiny bright orange critter that I assumed was another of the tiny sea cucumbers I photographed at the bottom of this recent post. It was only when I viewed the magnified image in Photoshop that I was able to get a better look at the tentacles coming out of its head. But wait, what is that among the tentacles? Isn't that a rhinophore? D'oh!

Apparently this was a juvenile spotted dorid, Triopha maculata, and at no time on that reef did I ever realize it was a nudibranch. Yes, there is more than one kind of tiny orange slug-like critter with weird appendages.

For a couple of days before heading out to Fitzgerald I whet my appetite with a perusal of the hefty Intertidal Invertebrates of California by Morris, Abbott, and Haderlie, published in 1980. Morris was the sole photographer for the color plates in the back of the book, and he has a nice shot of a 40mm-long Triopha maculata (much larger than the ones in this post) from Pacific Grove. Morris shot all the pictures using Kodacolor film in a second-hand Exakta 35mm camera with 50mm and 100mm lenses fitted with bellows, extension tubes, and/or close-up lenses. He used trays, flood lights, and fresh bottled sea water to make many of the images, sometimes from the confines of a motel room. I can imagine the struggle of trying to do it all himself, and I appreciated his quip that, "The equipment seemed to function more effectively when it was supplemented by ample amounts of sweating and cursing."

It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find non-commercial search results with Google, and I couldn't figure out if Morris is still around. But if he is, I'll bet he'd appreciate how easy it is nowadays to photograph tidepools. I saw people getting amazingly good results with their smartphones, as well as compact cameras that can go underwater. Anyway, I thank Morris for his efforts and for showing me the incredible variety of intertidal animals it's possible to see in California, including some that look more like slime molds than anything we'd normally associate with the word "animal."

Spotted Dorid Preparing To Be Left High & Dry

Spotted Dorid Showing Its Foot

Another Orange Animal (A Sponge, I Believe)

A Turban Snail Encrusted With Coralline Algae

San Diego Dorid Nudibranch

Close Crop of One of Its Rhinophores

The Setting Moon With Remnants of Fog

A Tube Worm in Its Case

A Not-Very-Yellow Sea Lemon Nudibranch

A Beautiful Lined Chiton

A Smaller Lined Chiton In A Delicious Bowl of Coralline Algae

A Six-Rayed Sea Star
(About the Size of a Quarter)

An Even Smaller Sea Star On Iridescent Kelp

A Green-Tinged Limpet Surrounded By Barnacles

The Always Irresistible Sunburst Anemone

Reef Rug

An Even Tinier Six-Rayed Sea Star

A Keyhole Limpet on the Move

A Young Red Crab (Deceased)

Another of the Morning's Several Juvenile Spotted Dorids
Scoots Past a Periwinkle Shell

Camouflaged Sculpin

Sun Rays on the Bluffs

A Raven Snags A Morsel In The Wrack

First at the Tidepools,
Last at the Tidepools:
A Flock of Gulls

* * *

Sonora Pass II

 

Pass Panorama
(click to view larger)

I've been driving my Mazda 3 for eight years now and still have less than 45,000 miles on it, and yet I've thought about replacing it for a vehicle with higher ground clearance and 4WD. I figured places I would want to go would be off-limits to me otherwise, places like the St. Mary's Pass trailhead parking area. But with a little recon I was able to chart a route from the paved highway through the rutted, rocky entrance. I was proud to park my little Mazda next to higher-clearance pick-up trucks and SUVs, and even a brand new Jeep Wrangler that still had its temporary license plate. I even watched a guy in a Lexus SUV with plenty of clearance start to pull into the parking area, only to turn back and park across the street.

It reminded me of how I'd been sure I couldn't drive the Mazda up to the Patriarch Grove at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest because I remembered how rocky the last section of it was. But by picking my routes and driving slowly, I was able to make it. 

After all the trucks and SUVs left, my car was alone in the parking area for the night. The next morning we heard car doors being shut and went to investigate. A guy driving a Honda Fit had made it through.

I know there are places I went with my Jeep Cherokee and Ford Ranger that I wouldn't try with the Mazda, but they are not necessarily places I need to re-visit, especially given all the excellent places I can reach in a regular car. 

The one fairly new purchase I made to make camping more appealing to my old bones was a very large tent, a North Face Wawona 6. I don't use this when I camp by myself, mind you, but it's amazing to have when my wife is with me. It's actually bigger than some campsites we've stayed at, so we do have to keep that in mind. The vestibule alone is as big as many 2-person tents. But inside the main tent we have a queen-sized air mattress, with lots of room left over along the sides and in the front, and at six feet tall, I can stand up in it.

All too soon, our stay to Sonora Pass was over; we packed up the tent, crawled the Mazda out through the rocks and ruts, and were soon enjoying a beautiful drive home through the mountains, with the only concerning view being all the dead trees. They dotted the forest here and there, and we could only wonder if eventually there will be vast swathes of them. We were delayed a little due to road work on CA-108, but it was well worth a minor inconvenience to be able to enjoy all the excellent road work that had already been done.

The pleasing part of the drive usually takes a pause right around Sonora as traffic becomes an issue again, and once we've refueled in Oakdale we usually hunker down to cross the valley as quickly as possible. But this time, since we were recently in Wisconsin and had gotten some excellent farm-fresh corn on the cob, we stopped at a farm stand to get some of our own California golden nuggets. We passed a couple of stands along CA-120 before we saw one that advertised corn, called Baba Bazaar, where we loaded up. In addition to the fresh fruit, nuts and veggies we got, they also had numerous flavors of corn nuts which I used to love, plus freaky "garlic chips" which are whole cloves of garlic with a brilliant soft crunch and a surprisingly mild flavor. As we packed our loot in the cooler my wife asked me if I had seen the pies. Fortunately, I had not. But next time....

The Other Side of the Pass

Loco Fruit

Minty Fresh Landscape

Lupines Catching the Light

Painting in the Open

Bouquet of Faded Skyrocket

Fireweed on Edge of Onion Meadow

Rein Orchid in the Onion Meadow

The Orange Beast

Roadside Attractions

* * *

Sonora Pass

 

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2022)

It seems overly romantic now that I'm back in the city--that almost religious sense of release I felt in the High Sierra. The word "moksha" came to mind as I took in the rocky landscape with its sparse meadows, steep ochre cliffs, and river of wind-blown clouds crossing a deep blue sky. I had been making photographs here and there while my wife painted a landscape over the course of a couple of hours. The passing clouds, which occasionally spilled a dash of rain, constantly changed the landscape from bright to dark and every shade in between, first over here, then over there. I can't imagine trying to paint a landscape that refuses to sit still. 

Sometimes we are the ones who have to sit still while the landscape moves into position. Such was the case for me after I hiked north up the St. Mary's Pass Trail to photograph the mountains on the south side of the valley. I'd shot a panorama from up there on August 11, 2010 (a 36x48 print hangs on our bathroom wall), and wanted to capture the scene  again these dozen years later. Since I was just recently in the area of Sonora Pass, I wasn't surprised to see so little snow compared with back then, but what is interesting is that less than half the amount of snow fell in the 2009-2010 snow year as it did this last year. More snow fell this year, but it melted faster.

When I reached my destination, the whole mountain range that I'd planned to photograph was in deep shade. That would definitely not do for a comparison since my 2010 shot was made under a virtually cloudless sky. It wouldn't even even do as a shot worth hiking up there for. The short but steep hike to get into position only took about an hour, but I had to wait another hour for the mountains to come out of the shade. I'd hiked up in shorts and t-shirt and was glad I'd brought a windbreaker.

I didn't mind the wait at all. A friend took me up St. Mary's Pass for the first time in the late 1980s, and I first went back with my camera in '91. The landscape holds good memories of both those early trips. At first I didn't see any of my favorite plants from up there, Astragalus whitneyi, a locoweed whose fruits, when I first saw them, were a joy and marvel to behold. When I finally spotted a couple of the plants it was like running into an old friend.

One thing I noticed from my panoramic vantage point was a bright yellow meadow near the base of the mountains. The next day I hiked over to check it out and discovered that the source of the color wasn't the wildflowers I'd expected, but a mass of corn lilies and other plants that had already dried out. Upon closer look I was happy to see that the central part of the meadow was still blooming with ball-shaped inflorescences of purple and magenta onion flowers which were being visited by numerous honey bees and by one strikingly odd white moth-like insect about half the size of a crane fly (which iNaturalist shows to be a plume moth).

As I moved around in the meadow I came across a trail of footprints that were much too big to have been made by deer, and too incongruous to have been made by a human. It looked  like I'd stumbled onto a bear trail, and the trail led into a nearby willow thicket. A nice little chill of fear raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I hoped the bear trail was old. I imagined what I'd do if a bear appeared either in the nearby willows or farther away on the edge of the meadow. I would have no chance of finding safety by running since there was nowhere to go. I figured I'd have to stand my ground and hope that I could talk my way safely out of the meadow, with sincere apologies for the intrusion. Happily, I didn't have to do that. In fact, despite being in the middle of a meadow, I was bothered, and only briefly, by just one little mosquito!

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2010)

View Along St. Mary's Pass Trail

Wide Angle View from the Pass

Whitney's Locoweed

Arnica, Sonora Peak, and Small Snow Patch (August 2022)

Snow Patch Panorama (August 2010)

Patch of Fleabane

Onion Meadow in the Sun

Onion Meadow in the Shade

Plume Moth Nectaring in the Onions

View from the Onion Meadow

* * *

Checking the Trap

 

Prowling Bobcat
(Video Frame Capture)

I hadn't checked my camera trap in a while, so the day after I got back from visiting family in Chicago I packed up my saddlebags and biked across Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through Sausalito, then climbed up Panoramic Highway until I finally emerged from the fog and reached clear skies a short ways before the Bootjack Campground. As always, it was a beautiful day to be on the mountain.

After locking my bike to an oak tree I set out toward the trap at a very relaxed pace in the hope of finding interesting insects or reptiles to photograph. A fence lizard drew my attention with its brilliant colors, as if it had recently shed its old dull skin, and up around a bend in the trail I encountered a small meadow with countless stalks of yampah swaying in the breeze. Their tiny white flowers were being visited by many buzzing insects, the most prominent of which, to my eyes, were the black-footed drone flies (identified thanks to the brilliance of iNaturalist).

On the far side of the yampah meadow I stopped to try to spot the white-breasted nuthatches that I could hear foraging among the cones up high in the Douglas fir trees. Once they became used to my presence, a couple of goldfinches fluttered onto some nearby thistles to gather seeds, perturbing an Anna's hummingbird that was gathering nectar from the remaining blossoms. A Wilson's warbler made a brief appearance, and a pacific slope flycatcher emerged from the woods to gaze out over the edge of the meadow. I suspect the little flycatcher (I thought it was a ruby-crowned kinglet at first) couldn't concentrate on hunting with a pesky human so close by, and it soon disappeared back into the woods. 

Fir Forest in the Fog

Magic on the Mountain

Showing Off Its Colors

Black-Footed Drone Fly on Yampah Blossoms

Eristalis hirta Feeding on Perideridia kelloggii

Goldfinch With Seed Halo

Goldfinches Gathering Thistle Seeds

Wilson's Warbler

Pacific Slope Flycatcher

Empidonax difficilis

Bobcat Passing Through

Gray Fox at the Water Hole

* * *

Head in the Clouds

 

Above the Sierra Nevada

One of the things I enjoy about flying is staring out the window to watch the clouds go by, and I always try to get a window seat. When I look around to see if anyone else is entranced by the view out the window, it seems the only other cloud-appreciators are small children. I do confess a childlike sense of awe at being privileged to fly above the clouds, a place people once considered the exclusive domain of the gods. 

The clouds in the image above were boiling up over the Sierra Nevada when I returned to San Francisco the other day. Below, Mt. Diablo stands in relief on a hazy, corduroy landscape.

Diablo Landscape

* * *

Backyard Pipevine

 

Backyard Dutchman's Pipe
(Aristolochia californica)

A couple of years ago I walked down to Strybing Arboretum and found someone who could sell me a pipevine plant. The clerk at the little store near the entrance sent me to the nursery greenhouses down by the California garden. I snooped around until I found a gardener who offered to see if they had one they could sell me, and she soon came back out with a fragile little sprig. For the price of sixteen bucks, quite a bit more than the typical potted plants I get at Sloat Garden Center, I had another California native to plant out back. It joined a hazelnut and a huckleberry that I planted more than ten years ago.

The little sprig looked so fragile that I didn't let myself get too attached to it. But it was still alive the following season, and I kept coddling it, giving it a little extra water and pulling out any nearby weeds or other competition. 

One day I happened to look down from the stoop above the garden and saw the cat sleeping right next to it, oblivious. I placed a ring of thin sticks around the base of the plant to make sure she didn't accidentally crush it. It has so far survived the cat, as well as visiting skunks, squirrels, raccoons, rats, slugs, and gophers. It's a winter-deciduous plant, and after its first growing season it soon looked even more pitiful than when I first planted it, so I was relieved to see new growth on it after its first winter.

At the end of January this year it flowered for the first time. Just one flower. Our yard gets very little direct sunlight (even when it's not foggy), so growth is unsurprisingly slow. Because it had already bloomed earlier this year, I was cheerfully surprised this week to see that it had bloomed yet again, and again with just one flower. 

And such a cool flower it is. According to the California Native Plant Society, "[t]he flowers have an unpleasant odor which is attractive to tiny carrion-feeding insects. The insects crawl into the convoluted flowers and often become stuck and disoriented for some time, picking up pollen as they wander. Most eventually escape; the plant is not insectivorous as was once thought."

I can't detect any odor at all from the lone flower I have, and looking down into the pipe reveals no fungus gnats or other critters, carrion-feeding or otherwise. When I trained my macro lens on the flower I did see a spider tiny enough to hide behind a grain of rice scuttle up the flower stalk. Maybe it is a hunter of other tiny visitors.

My neighbor, a former gardener at Golden Gate Park who at the age of 95 still does vigorous gardening by volunteering with the Recreation and Parks Department, has much more mature pipevine plants in his back yard. Much of his pipevine climbs the oak tree he planted from an acorn back around the time my wife was born, and his plants have hosted numerous pipevine swallowtail caterpillars (which I believe he got from the arboretum, if I recall right). I hope one day my plant becomes robust enough to be a host as well, and perhaps to provide a little genetic diversity should any pollinators visit the flowers in both our yards.

Hanging by a Thread

Phone Snap, Jan. 30, 2022

[UPDATE]

Phone Snap, Jan. 19, 2023

* * *