A pair of acorn woodpeckers performs maintenance on their pantry holes.
The destination for my ride was Mt. Tam, where I wanted to check up on a third trail camera I set up last week on a somewhat rickety foundation. Although my mind was making a beeline to the cam, my body reminded me to enjoy the journey.
In the Presidio I rode past a bunch of fallen eucalyptus leaves floating in a puddle of fog-drip created by their own trees. Ordinarily I'd have kept on going, but I figured "what's the rush," and went back to snap a picture.
Because I make the trip fairly often I don't always feel like stopping along the way to record my sightings in pictures, but it feels good to open that door once in a while. I stopped next to watch a handful of brown pelicans dive into Richardson Bay, but they were too far away to photograph. Nearby, a group of shorebirds was foraging on a little bump of marshland that juts into the bay, a flock of maybe twenty greater yellowlegs.
Later I stopped to watch some black-necked stilts in their usual pools along Coyote Creek, then pedaled up the fog-drippy Shoreline Highway and into the thick of the fog billowing over the ridge along Panoramic Highway. There was sun and fog near Pantoll Campground, but the conditions weren't producing crepuscular rays the way they did last week.
By the time I reached Mountain Home Inn I was surprised to see that I still had four of five bars left on my e-bike battery. I've been riding in "battery off" mode on flat sections and downhills, plus I'd just inflated my tires before leaving home, but I was still surprised. By the time I'd gone all the way up to Rock Spring and part of the way out West Ridgecrest, though, I was down to two bars. Clearly, each bar does not represent twenty percent of the battery's juice. Anyway, I carry a spare battery for the ride home.
I was glad to find that the trail camera I'd lashed to a somewhat rickety branch was still standing. I'd prepared myself to find it in a heap on the ground, perhaps even blown over by a strong wind. What I didn't find out until I got the memory card home was that it even survived having a gray squirrel pounce on it.
Almost all the best captures came from that cam, which I set up in a ravine where my other cams had previously caught a descending bobcat. Naturally, the bobcat this time ascended the ravine, so we never see its face. Better luck next week.
Eucalyptus leaves lying in a pool of their own fog-drip.
A greater yellowlegs forages amidst the pickleweed along Richardson Bay.
A black-necked stilt forages along the Coyote Creek marsh.
Siesta with black-necked stilt and snowy egret.
I managed to find a fogbow along a steep flank of Mt. Tam, but the conditions never gelled enough to create a brocken specter.
It's been a long time since I enjoyed making fire sticks, and as I was recently clearing out some old stuff I don't use anymore I decided to place a few of my hearths and spindles in secret spots within the Rock Spring picnic area, hopefully to be found by someone who takes an interest in them.
Both the hearth and spindles are made from buckeye wood I collected not too far away (but many years ago). These can be used to make a bow-drill fire, but you'd still need a couple other items to get there. I guess it should come as no surprise that you can actually buy a bow-drill kit on Amazon, but to make your own kit and actually get fire with it is a wonderful experience. I learned this and many other interesting ways to appreciate nature at Tom Brown's Tracker School and Headwaters Outdoor School.
The woodpeckers appeared to be pecking at existing holes in the acorn granary, or pantry, possibly allowing them to more easily accommodate the big acorns maturing on nearby oaks and tanoaks.
A western fence lizard takes in the sun with a wall of fog behind him.
View toward Stinson Beach along West Ridgecrest Road.
The tide was high as I headed home, and the black-necked stilts of the Coyote Creek marsh had gathered together for siesta.
Meanwhile, the snowy egret was still hunting, swishing its front foot in the mud in the hope of spooking prey into showing themselves.
When I spotted the Lycoperdon in the garden late yesterday afternoon I was too tired to photograph it (but not to pour a little water on it), and I almost had the same issue today. I'm so used to being most active in the morning that I need to find a second wind to do anything more strenuous than reading a book in the afternoon.
The puffballs had sprouted in the midst of some yerba buena I recently got from Bay Natives, so I included a sprig of the deliciously scented leaves along with the sandy, loamy soil from which the fungi are growing. I replaced the fungi along with the lump of soil back where it came from when I was done shooting it, and I hope the puffballs keep growing long enough to sporulate.
The original lump of soil included a tiny sprout of Oxalis, my ubiquitous nemesis.
I like these little spurred purple guys, but I've forgotten what they're called. I'm glad I planted them in a pot because they are prolific spreaders.
Besides having very little working space to set up a tripod for shooting in the garden itself, if Coco wakes up from her bed of leaves and sees me, I will have no chance to work without her furry, purry interruptions.
I was sad to learn today that a blogger I've followed for years recently passed away. John was traveling around the country in his RV with his cat Sinbad when I first started reading his blog, then another cat named Beans after Sinbad died. I always appreciated the experience of vicarious wanderlust during the years leading up to my own recent retirement. Unfortunately, John's wife took down the blog after a spate of nasty trolling in the comment section following his death. It looks like his free e-books still survive, at least for now.
When I checked the Mt. Tam web cams yesterday morning, the view east showed a beautiful orange sunrise glow on the tops of an endless layer of clouds. No mountains, no city in the distance. Even the usual foreground near East Peak was gone. There's a similar scene this morning, with the difference that now I can see beneath the clouds, and what I see is a ship in what appears to be the ocean (but might be the bay). Strange that a fire camera would be trained on sea and fog, but maybe it was accidentally bumped out of its usual position.
I hadn't really planned to ride up there since I just checked the trail cams a week ago, but I wanted to add a third camera and didn't feel like waiting the usual two or three weeks before getting it in place. This was my first ride up since tourist season unofficially closed on Labor Day. Pedestrian traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge was much less crowded than a week ago, but automobile traffic and its attendant stink of exhaust fumes was about the same.
A couple of brown pelicans were diving for fish in Richardson Bay, and black-necked stilts were back in the marshy area around Coyote Creek. I finally reached the sun/fog interface between the Bootjack and Pantoll parking lots. When I got into the woods, the fog had made the leaves less crunchy than they were just a week ago. The nagging horse flies seem to have disappeared, and the sun was nice and warm without being too hot. The autumnal equinox is just two weeks away.
The other day I noticed a flock of parrots (cherry-headed conures) in my neighbor's oak tree. All of the parrots appeared to be resting, preening, and socializing, except for one of them that was busily hunting for acorns, which it appeared to be eating. I've mentioned this before to my neighbor, and he believes they are just playing with the nuts, not actually ingesting them. Although I am prepared to entertain that possibility, it sure looks like they are eating the nuts (video below).
Screenshot from this morning's web cam.
Here's the PM view....
Sun/Fog Interface
View Along West Ridgecrest Road
The bobcat must have been moving fast. The camera was set to capture three still frames, then a 10-second video, but the bobcat was already gone by the time the second still shot fired.
Big buck heading home at closing time.
A cherry-headed conure, one of "The Wild Parrots of San Francisco", uses its strong beak and agile tongue to munch an acorn.
Here's a short video clip of the parrot (shot through a double-pane window). Is it eating the acorn, or just playing with it?
Fuchsia photographed at 1:1 (full frame). (Click to view larger.)
It was a dank and foggy morning in my neighborhood yesterday and I was feeling too lazy to go for my customary long walk, so I decided to test an old 200mm Micro-Nikkor AI-S lens that I've kept stowed away for many years. I'd originally paired this lens with a Nikon F3 but stopped using it when I bought a D800 (could it really be almost 10 years ago?!) because I thought it wasn't sharp enough.
That idea was based on a close-up photo I'd made of some goldfields on Mt. Tamalpais. I kind of liked the soft-focus look for that subject, but I felt such a soft lens wouldn't do once I had a 36 megapixel camera.
At first I thought I'd do the test out back, where the fuchsia flowers are, but I decided to bring one of the blossoms indoors to do it right, using a tripod. I compared the 200mm with a 105mm AF Micro Nikkor that I use all the time. The 200mm only goes to 1:2, so I set the 105mm likewise, and shot a single frame at f/16, using a flash.
The result was a great reminder that the fault for a soft image is probably technique, not equipment. Maybe those goldfields jiggled in a slight breeze that I didn't detect. Maybe I didn't set the focus point in just the right place for the aperture I used. In any case, the 200mm image looked sharp. The lens was not the problem.
Since I had the fuchsia indoors anyway, I took a few shots of it with the 105mm at 1:1. I set the camera on a focusing rail so I could make focus stacks. This is old school stuff, where I have to manually turn a knob to adjust the camera position.
My first two tries on the fuchsia were sharp, but not throughout the whole subject area I wanted. Despite shooting at f/16, I couldn't get what I wanted until I barely turned the knob at all between each frame. It was as if the depth of field covered no more than half the diameter of the little white pollen sacs. The bonus was having the gnat on the stigma remain motionless during the time it took me to adjust the focusing rail through 17 frames, letting the flash recycle after each one.
Crop showing the area I wanted sharp.
A little tighter crop.
The set-up with 105mm and a hazel leaf for the background (I held the flash at a higher angle for the shots).
After shooting the fuchsia I tossed the hazel leaves into the back yard. When I went down there hours later and saw how the mist had settled on one of the leaves I couldn't resist making another macro. I've always been fascinated by nature's intricate beauty, from the atomic to the galactic.
Last time I was up there I relocated one of the two cams to what turned out to be a pretty good spot (the scene above). The other cam did okay too, but it tends to capture animals farther away than I like, so yesterday I moved it, too. Being able to review the captures on my phone by way of a card-reader dongle is a handy way to make placement decisions while I'm on the scene instead of back at home.
We were amazed to part the curtains and see a fog-free view this morning. It smelled a little bit smoky, apparently due to the wildfires up north, but a regular sunny day seems almost like some kind of natural wonder after many days of fog.
I found a surprise in the back yard yesterday, a couple of broken branches on the huckleberry plant, and wondered at first if it had anything to do with the family of five raccoons who've been rooting around back there lately. But I think it's more likely that the branches simply broke due to the weight of ripening berries which were mostly congregated at the ends of the branches.
In the 15 or so years I've had it back there I've never gotten such a big harvest. I collected what berries I could, although many fell to the ground. Surprisingly, none of the local raccoons, squirrels, rats, or birds seem interested in them. I put a heap of them in my oatmeal this morning, and they were excellent.
Selfheal is another one of those plants, like the orchids, that came into our garden on its own. I confess a fondness for it because it reminds me of the couple of years I lived in Arcata, where I first saw it, a common but pretty yard weed.
Until I took these pictures at a 1:1 magnification ratio, I hadn't realized they were so hairy. We have lots of selfheal in a rectangular patch in our yard (I have to hold the line on its spread into unwanted areas), but this was the only one currently flowering. I was reluctant to cut it when I leaned down with my scissors and saw a hoverfly probing the blossoms. But one thing's for sure about hardy Prunella, there will be plenty more flowers.
I wanted someplace to post random phone snaps from neighborhood walks and that kind of thing, so I created an account on Instagram for them. Check 'em out at https://www.instagram.com/jwallphoto.sf/. [UPDATE: It's now 4/20/2024, and I almost never post anything on Instagram.]
The orchids above and below are actually "weeds" from our little garden. I didn't know what they were when I first saw them growing a couple of years ago. We certainly didn't plant them, at least not on purpose, so I cut them down even though I suspected they might be related to the Epipactis helleborine orchids I've seen on Mt. Tamalpais this time of year. I'm told it's the only naturalized orchid in California. All the other ones we find in the wild are natives. Anyway, this year I decided to let them flower.
Since my computer is still so new I can't help waxing a little enthusiastic about how fast it is. The specs don't seem that different from my old one, but all of a sudden Lightroom and Photoshop open right away, and Helicon Focus blazes through a 17-image focus stack of raw NEF files. I'm impressed.
An immature acorn woodpecker (given away by its begging) crowds an adult as the adult removes a saved morsel from an acorn pantry on Mt. Tamalpais.
I recently replaced my seven-year-old computer because it would no longer connect to the internet. It seemed like a bit of a shame to get a whole new box since I could still use apps like Photoshop, but now that I've gotten everything set up (always a bit of a headache), I'm impressed by how fast the new machine is. It boots up in about a minute, versus the old one's 10-15 minutes! I used to turn on my computer, then go make breakfast and coffee while it booted up.
It seems like I just got back from reveling in the mountain air among the bristlecone pines, but I'm already yearning to make another trip. The tropical storm that just passed through makes the prospect even more enticing, as does next week's blue moon (the second full moon in August).
In the meantime I biked up to Mt. Tam to check on the trail cams. They didn't get as much action as I'd hoped for during the last two weeks. I probably wouldn't even have posted anything on the blog, but the video had a nice surprise in it, with a buck deer shape-shifting into a coyote.
Also, in homage to the tropical storm, I've posted some old rain-in-the-city file photos.
The adult prepares to launch, taking its acorn to a quieter location.
This animal trail is much steeper than it looks, and the coyotes, deer, and foxes, all negotiated it much more gracefully than I did.
Shape-shifting deer, and foggy fox.
The Cliff House in better times.
Land's End
Rainy but colorful day at the fishing pier.
Commuters (remember those?) in San Francisco's Financial District.
Life in the weather, downtown San Francisco, 2001.
