Solstice Hike

 

Heading down Mt. Tamalpais' Old Mine Trail, with Mt. Diablo on the horizon.

We woke up to a mostly clear sky with a fogbank looming above Twin Peaks to the east, but as the sun rose above Sutro Forest it seemed to suck the fog in from the ocean. By the time we left home for Mt. Tam the fog had pretty much covered the whole city, although the Golden Gate Bridge was still clear and beautifully lit by the morning sun. 

We began our hike a little after 8 a.m. under ideal conditions, sunny and cool. The loop was Rock Spring to Old Mine Trail, to Matt Davis Trail, to Coastal Trail, to Willow Camp Fire Road up and over West Ridgecrest Road to pick up the Cataract Trail back to the car.

The longest day of the year begins with the sun rising above San Francisco's Sutro Forest.

View from the mountain to the sea.

A rider on an electric mountain bike heads out the Old Mine Trail.

Acorn woodpecker.

A painted lady butterfly feeds on a cobwebby thistle, with an earwig also burrowing into the purple perianth.

Mt. Diablo view over Richardson Bay.

View of East Peak from Old Mine Trail.

Forest-floor fruiting of fog-drip fungus.

Resting fly.

Dappled light on the Matt Davis Trail.

One of several squirrels we saw along the Matt Davis Trail.

A common wood-nymph butterfly rests on a stalk of grass.

The grass was quite tall along parts of the trail. I picked up my second tick of the season somewhere along here, not noticing it until it began to burrow into the back of my thigh. 

Hike to the Sky

The wreck of the old 1941 Pontiac along the Coastal Trail.

Foxgloves in a meadow along the Cataract Trail.

A chipmunk appeared to be gathering seeds in the sedge along the side of the trail.

Bright-red canyon larkspur and yellow madia stand out on a sun-dappled, summer-green hillside along Cataract Creek.

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Red Shouldered Hawk Nest

 

After bringing a dead mouse to its young, one of the red-shouldered hawk parents prepares to fly off for more.

I was visiting Strybing Arboretum back on May 13 when I saw a red-shouldered hawk bringing a small branch to its nest in a eucalyptus tree back near the Children's Garden (a photo is at the bottom of the linked post). 

Back at home I looked up the length of their incubation periods and, based on my calculations, returned last week wondering if the eggs had hatched. I was a little perplexed when my wife and I got there and saw that the adult hawk spent most of its time standing next to the nest rather than sitting in the middle of it. The day was chilly and windy, and it didn't seem like the best time to leave incubating eggs in the open.

Then I wondered whether the "adult" I was looking at was actually a fledgling. But how could it have hatched and become so large already? 

What I didn't see until I put the pictures up on my computer screen back at home was that the little fluffballs of recently hatched hawk chicks were actually within the nest. One of each would pop its head up from time to time to be in the picture, but we hadn't noticed them from far below, especially with a skinny, leafy branch continually whipping up and down in front of the nest.

In any event, my wife and I went back for another look yesterday morning, and now the nest was empty! How could those little fluffballs have grown up and fledged already?! Does Nature really move that fast? 

As a matter of fact, the two fledglings had indeed left the nest, but they were perched nearby on a different eucalyptus tree. Almost as soon as we arrived, one of the parents flew in with a dead mouse. The two youngsters fought over it, but only one got the prize.

After waiting fruitlessly for a repeat performance, we eventually gave up and walked through the California Garden to exit the arboretum, stopping to enjoy the sight and scent of the big buckeye in bloom. 

Buckeyes are one of my favorite California native plants. The tree itself has a gnarly trunk with an intricate crown of branches and looks as beautiful when it's adorned with its large dangling seeds in the fall as it is when it's full of flowers in the spring. The white corollas with their long arcs of orange-tipped stamens are positively musical, and the huge and shiny mahogany seeds are delicious to look at (though poisonous to eat unless leached of their toxins). And if all that weren't enough, the wood is also excellent for making bow-drill fires. 

What I hadn't known until recently is that buckeye nectar and/or pollen is toxic to European honeybees. If there's a lot of buckeye and not much else near the bee hives, whole colonies can succumb to the toxins.

Red-Shouldered Hawk & Nestling (June 11, 2023). A second nestling shows up in other frames nearer to the adult bird.

Only one of the siblings came away with the mousy meal (June 16, 2023).

Hard to believe these young hawks were nestlings just a week ago. 

"Love to eat them mousies,
Mousies what I love to eat,
Bite they little heads off...
Nibble on they tiny feet."
--B. Kliban

Strybing Arboretum Buckeye & Honeybee

* * *

Fawn Season

 

After riding through the fog-drip that started just below Pantoll I had to pedal up past Rock Spring toward East Peak to finally reach the sunshine. Stonecrop and monkey flower were growing from crevices on this lichen-crusted boulder, and the gray-green oak in the foreground was in full flower.

Iconic summer weather, with fog still high on the mountain even in the late morning.

A couple of fawns hang out at the new trail camera location. It's too bad GardePro's information strip is overlayed on the image instead of placed below it.

I approached the new trail camera location prepared to find zero animal activations. They've only been up there a week, so even if it had been zero I'd have left them there another week. As it happened, the cams captured a few deer, a single gray fox, a couple of squirrels and steller's jays -- and a hiker. I don't know why I'm still surprised that hikers show up on off-trail cams. People roam all over Mt. Tamalpais. 

As I was about to ride back down into the fog at Rock Spring I saw this pale swallowtail butterfly (with still-pristine wings) fluttering around the chaparral pea and yerba santa flowers across the road. I kept hoping it would land and feed on the nectar of one of them, but it eventually sailed high into this oak to spread its wings and gather warmth.

A little later I saw it (or another one) fluttering around the chaparral pea again. It kept appearing to land but then it would flutter away before I could get a clean photo. It was only when I got home and viewed this image on a large screen that I noticed it appears to be ovi-positing on the pea's leaves. 

Riding back down toward Rock Spring I had just passed the Mountain Theater entrance when my bike spooked a pair of fawns that I hadn't even noticed, and then their mother. 

I was tempted to enter the woods to try to get a better view of them but realized it would be hopeless, even with the benefit of damp leaves that wouldn't crackle and crunch under my feet.

Fog still lingered over the meadow at Rock Spring when I arrived. I checked the area where I'd seen the hen turkey appearing to make a nest last week. The depression was still there, all the leaves and other detritus cleared down to bare dirt, but the turkey was long gone, there were no eggs, and a deer had unceremoniously deposited a generous ball of pellets at its edge. As I prepared to lock my bike to a tree before hiking to the trail cams, I realized the key to the lock had fallen off the keyring and was nowhere to be found. I left the bike unlocked and under the protection of the mountain gods and people's better natures.

There were many more yellow mariposa lilies in bloom this week, and insects were already taking advantage. I'm a little bit in awe of the fact that insects and flowers have their appointed times in each others' life cycles. The flower holds fast through its non-flowering season by bulb or seed, and I guess insects can be dormant as eggs (or the insects harvest from different sources throughout the year). But what about crab spiders, aka flower spiders, who can't fly? How do they spring into action and find their way to the mariposa lilies where their color gives them perfect camouflage?

The obvious answer to how they find their way seems to be that the females lay their eggs on or near the flowers, which are likely to grow again in the same place the following year. Apparently the spiders can alter their color somewhat when they molt, depending on the color of their host flower.

If you look closely at this photo (click to view larger) you'll see there's a carnivore also taking advantage of this mariposa lily. The skipper stopped by to sip sweet nectar, but was soon spooked away by a flower spider laying in wait.

I walked by this colorful patch of checker bloom once without taking a picture but succumbed to the temptation when I passed it again on my way back to my bike (which thankfully was still there). You can see some dogtail grass in there as well, and I noticed that a large patch of it that I'd photographed before in that general area has been overtaken by other grasses this year. 

* * *

Kehoe Beach

 

Blue-Beaked Amigos

As I hiked around a bend toward Kehoe Beach this morning, spooking brush rabbits and sparrows back into the dewy jungle of mustard, radish, and poison hemlock that hugged the narrow trail, my eyes lit up when a small chocolate-brown bobcat executed a rapid, low scuttle away from me for maybe ten yards before ducking off the trail. It happened so fast that I couldn't get a shot despite the fact that I had already mounted my long lens to the tripod in anticipation of just such a lucky encounter.

I would get one more chance to photograph a bobcat as I was leaving for home. Although the cat ducked into the roadside vegetation when he saw me, I stopped my car, turned off the motor, and waited to see if he'd come back out. The park roads provide very few places to pull off the road to appreciate views or look for wildlife, but since it was still early Tuesday morning, I was able to just stop in the road with no other cars passing by. 

After a few minutes of keeping my eyes and ears open I heard a twig snap behind me. I looked over my shoulder but didn't immediately see that the cat had re-emerged onto the road, and by the time I finally saw it padding away I was only able to fire off two frames before he sped up and moved out of range.

My initial purpose for driving out to Kehoe was the hope of finding another group of juvenile peregrine falcons like the ones I photographed in 2018 (a year when I didn't blog). This time I saw only one juvenile, and with no boisterous siblings urging it on, it simply clung to a cliff ledge near its nest the whole time I was there, never coming down to the beach. 

Not only did I see no beach falcons during my walk, but the only birds I did see were a handful of widely scattered gulls. It was a bit of bum luck to go along with the foggy, drizzly morning until my spirits rose at the sharp whistle of a black oystercatcher. On my way back down the beach I was able to hang out with a few of them as they relaxed on a seaweed-draped rock.

A little farther down the beach I watched a great blue heron hunting at the water's edge, plucking little mole crabs out of their sandy, salty lair. The heron appeared to make a jab at a fish when it ventured into slightly deeper water at one point but came up empty.

In addition to the usual wildflower suspects such as yellow bush lupine, seaside daisy, lizard tail, paintbrush, and yarrow, I discovered a species I'd never really appreciated before, with its twirling inflorescence reminiscent of a Christmas tree, called silver beachweed. I've probably picked its burrs out of my socks without knowing where they'd come from.

Ready for Lift-Off

Falcon Shenanigans

This morning's lone and forlorn juvie peregrine.

Kehoe Beach has several interesting cliff faces of different types of rock.

Rock Layers and Wildflowers

Seaside Daisies at End-of-the-Beach

Hillside Wildflowers

Black Oystercatchers

Orange Beaks, Orange Eyes

Time to Skedaddle

A great blue heron makes a nearby juvenile gull jealous by catching one mole crab after another.

Elegance and Grace

Ruffled Feathers, Ruffled Wave

Seaside Heron

Silver Beachweed
(Ambrosia chamissonis)

Also known, less colorfully, as beach burr.

Dewy-Furred Bobcat

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