Yardsters

 

Show-offs

I'm getting about 18 gallons of gray water per load of wash, and running two loads a week has been keeping the garden alive all summer. I was worried the gray water would actually harm the plants at first, but all is well after my second year of using it. 

Incidentally, I just read an article that says it's a myth that coffee grounds are good for your garden. The author, James Wong (writing in the Autumn 2023 issue of New Scientist), points out that, "Coffee grounds, even after brewing, are still a rich source of caffeine" -- which is a kind of natural herbicide. Oops.

I'd forgotten what one of my plants was called, but Pl@nt ID came up with the name. I'd mentioned our gopher problem to a guy working at Sloat Garden Center about three years ago, and he recommend the plant, called society garlic, as a gopher-inhibitor. I planted some and it didn't flower until the second year we had it. I was surprised to find it flowering this time of year. (I think our problem gopher was eaten by a cat; I found its gut pile and skull out back.) I still plant small leftover garlic cloves here and there in case gophers (or vampires) come back.

Society Garlic
(Tulbaghia violacea)

Fuchsia Sage
(Salvia buchananii)

Bush Monkey Flower
(Diplacus aurantiacus)

Garden Pals

The Usual Suspects

I heard the Blue Angels getting started just after I posted, so I went to the back room with the FZ80 on the off chance I might photograph them going over one of the Twin Peaks....

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Buffalo Days

 

American Bison, Golden Gate Park

If buffalo wings are hot, then so are buffalo days. 

I was surprised to see the bison all hanging out in the sunshine today. It was around 11:30 a.m., so not quite the hottest part of the day. But those dark, heavy coats! I sought the shade just to stop and watch them for a few minutes, and I was in shorts and t-shirt, riding my bike. I felt like I'd time-traveled back to Santa Barbara when I got to the beach. Such a beautiful day.

It's 88 degrees in the shade just outside the door of my flat at about 1:30 p.m. About 76 degrees inside, although I expect it to exceed 80 degrees later on, as it did yesterday. It's a good afternoon for ice-cold lemonade and relaxing with an engaging book, like Arctic Dreams.... 

The Nickel Pose

Ocean Beach, San Francisco (not San Diego!)

Lots of brown pelicans chilling on Seal Rocks.

Enjoying the beach out by Noriega Street.

Picture-perfect beach weather.

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Baby Snakes

 

Baby Gopher Snake

It didn't take long after I brought my trail cams home that I realized I wanted to take one more crack at photographing the bobcat and fox going either up or down the ravine. I actually bought a new GardePro camera to replace the old Foxelli cams I've been using for years, but which seem to be getting toward the end of their life cycle. Also, I like the GardePro's "no glow" night vision, the working microphone, and the better clock. The Foxelli mic was poorly designed and didn't work, and the clock always ran fast, but despite the degrading video quality it's still useful enough to keep at home for backyard critters.

Anyway, I took the two GardePro cams back up today and set them up in the ravine in a way to catch critters approaching from either high or low, and also crossing the ravine. I biked up today to catch the cooler weather, since by Thursday it's supposed to get hot. 

On the way up toward Rock Spring I found a road-killed baby gopher snake. That's the one posted above. On the way back down I saw a second road-killed baby gopher snake and posed that one on a nearby lichen-crusted rock.

After I set the cams I ate the sandwich and apple I'd brought along and watched the acorn woodpeckers doing their thing. The tide was pretty high by the time I rode back down to sea level. I saw some shorebirds foraging in the pickleweed and figured they were the same greater yellowlegs I've stopped to photograph before, only to second-guess myself, then turn around and go back to check in case they were something else. So much of the ground had been inundated by the tide that the birds were in taller grass and pickleweed than last time, and I could barely see their long yellow legs.

The second baby gopher snake.

The waning gibbous moon sets behind the West Point Inn.

Acorn Season!

Greater yellowlegs on the prowl.

As this bird was keeping an eye on the sky, it looked through the lens of the FZ80 as though it had some kind of mohawk on its head, but it's just some pickleweed in the background.

* * *

Huckleberry Rat

 

Hot Lips
(Salvia microphylla)

What a great surprise to put the flower photo above into Pl@nt ID and get the result of "Hot Lips." I'd seen this one growing in the neighborhood as my wife and I walked home from the bus stop yesterday. We were just coming home from seeing the "Open 2023" exhibit at the De Young Museum (which was outstanding, and I'm not just saying that because my wife has a painting in the show). 

I knew I wanted to photograph the neighbor's flower, so this morning I skulked outside for a dawn patrol flower-snip. Was I caught on someone's doorbell cam? Is there at this very moment a video of my snag being vilified on NextDoor? 

I can only hope so.

While I was out, I also snipped an actual native wildflower -- one of my favorites. I think it's one of my favorites because it blooms in the late summer and fall, a scarlet contrarian. Hummingbirds love it too.

Since I have my trail cams at home, I put them out back to see if I could catch the culprit who's been scratching in my garden. I had a feeling who it was, but there's nothing like getting the video evidence. 

The main surprise was seeing an animal finally go after the remaining huckleberries still stuck to the branches of our back yard Vaccinium. I had to prune it quite a bit a while back when several of the thin branches got so top-heavy with berries that they bent over and snapped.

California Fuchsia
(Epilobium canum)

Formerly known as Zauschneria californica.

Was this the naughty scratcher?

Huckleberry Rat & The Scratcher

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September Trail Cams

 

Deer in Forest Fog

It feels like it's time to find a new camera trap location, but I'm still mulling over the possibilities. When I biked up on Thursday to check on them I ended up taking them home. Now that the cams are gone, I'm sure the bobcats, foxes, coyotes, bucks, and turkeys will frolic like elves, and I will miss it. 

In the meantime I've been wondering who's been digging in my own back yard, so I've got a cam out there to hopefully find out. The usual suspects passed by last night -- cat, rat, hermit thrush, raccoons. A couple critters sniffed around the dig area, but no one actually dug, at least not on camera. I did find the area disturbed this morning, but the disturbance happened (of course) after the video timed out.

Once again, the bobcat only went up the canyon instead of down.... (The camera's info strip went haywire at some point and made the dates wrong.) 

Gray Fox

Coyote passes through the dappled sunlight.

The bucks are starting to get frisky.

* * *

Hazelnut

 

First Hazelnut

After so many years with nothing, the native hazel (Corylus cornuta) we planted in our yard finally produced a nut! I actually found it on the ground this morning. I'd thought the lack of nuts all these years was because there are no other hazels nearby to pollinate the flowers (of which there are many females and males each year), so this is a surprise. This year I'm planning to go find some wild hazelnuts so I can collect pollen to bring home. 

In addition to the above nut, I also found a collection of very small nuts in another kind of plant structure. There's a picture of the two nuts on a hazel leaf below.

In addition to finding the nut on the ground, I also found the inflorescence of one of our succulents (possibly Echeveria cante, which I might previously have misidentified as a Dudleya) had been knocked off -- whether by cat, 'coon, squirrel, rat, or bird, I have no idea. I couldn't let it go to waste, so I photographed it.

On my neighborhood walk today I picked a mallow-family blossom to photograph back at home, and I also took some phone snaps of a few flowers I encountered on my walk.

Hazelnuts on Hazel Leaf

Anisodontea capensis, I believe.

Facing the other way.

Echeveria conte (?)

Zinnia in the 7th Avenue Garden

I believe this is called flowering maple (Callianthe striata).

Natal Lilies (Crinum moorei) at the pond across Stanyan Street from the Haight (where an apartment complex is being built on the old McDonald's property next to Amoeba Records).

* * *

Orange, Rose, Crimson

 

Orange Puffer Fish
(aka Goldfish Plant, Columnea nematanthus)

Although I use Google Maps all the time nowadays, there's still nothing quite as good at inspiring wanderlust as a well-made paper map, which is why I recently picked up a California Road & Recreation Atlas. I look forward to making good use of it, and have already been checking out some of the far corners of the state, from the South Warner Mountains in the north to the Old Woman Mountains in the south, and oh so many intriguing places in between.

Meanwhile, with gas having climbed to $5.89 and still showing no sign of retreat, I'm content to explore the hidden intricacies of the macro world of flowers close enough to gather on foot. 

If you click on the above picture to view it at full size, it's 175-times bigger than the actual flower, which I photographed at 1:1 on a full-frame camera (with no cropping). The vertical images are smaller -- only 78-times life size. I'm always seeing stuff in the pictures that I didn't see IRL, like all the silky spider strands on the orange puffer fish. 

In case you're wondering, orange puffer fish is my own name for the plant since I don't know what its proper name is. I tried to find it on Pl@ntNet to no avail. [UPDATE: I have since learned I had the wrong fish; it's called goldfish plant. And if you accidentally search for "goldfish pants," you'll get plenty of results!]

The plant ID came up with Fuchsia microphylla for these little ones. Despite their tiny size, I often seen bumblebees and even hummingbirds feeding on their nectar.

This is from a large fuchsia vine that I started from a cutting given to me by the neighbor whose oak tree has been sporting parrots lately.

Phone snap showing the relative size of the two fuchsia flowers.

* * *

Macro Madness

 

Rock Purslane (Cistanthe grandiflora)
(click to view larger)

What's worth doing in nature photography? 

I googled the question just for the heck of it and did not get the kind of responses I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is a project I can take on within my limited travel budget, with my current camera gear and 2WD passenger car, that would be fun and interesting. Bonus points for creating something of lasting value beyond my own self-interest.

When I first got hooked on nature photography in the early 1980s, in part by discovering the Santa Ynez Mountains and the San Rafael Wilderness Area near my home in Santa Barbara, I thought it would be cool to photograph all of California's wilderness areas. Back then, there were about thirty (ditto for the number of California condors left in the wild). The Dick Smith Wilderness, for example, which is adjacent to the San Rafael Wilderness, hadn't been designated yet.

Fast-forward about 40 years, and I'm finally retired and have the time to take on a big project like that. Except for one little problem. There are now five-times as many wilderness areas! (And in other good news, there are now about 560 California condors, of which 347 are living in the wild.)

Since there's probably no way I'm going to be able to photograph all those wilderness areas, I'll bundle them into groups based on their proximity to each other, then pick one to represent the whole group. I'm not sure if this will have value beyond my own self-interest, but maybe an organization like the California Wilderness Coalition would be interested in a windfall of such imagery: "Here's what this place looked like, and what I found living there, in the year 2024." And beyond, of course. The plan would be to carry on as long as I can.

The book I put together on Mt. Tamalpais (now available in PDF for the low, low price of just $15!) is composed of pictures I shot over about 20 years. With luck I'll have another 20 years to get to explore at least the periphery of many of California's wilderness areas.

For the pictures in this post I snagged a couple of flowers that have intrigued me on recent walks around the neighborhood, including a flowering Heteromeles arbutifolia on the edge of Golden Gate Heights Park. I decided to try a light background for a change. And apropos of nothing, I saw an osprey gliding south over Ocean Beach this morning -- the first time I've ever seen an osprey out there.

Toyon
(Heteromeles arbutifolia)

Veronica sp.

Veronica sp.

* * *

Yard Flowers

 

Lone Violet

We'd planned to go for a hike on Mt. Tam for the first day of autumn (Friday), but the smoke was kind of a drag, and it was forecast to be clear again by tomorrow (Sunday) so instead we drove over to Sloat Garden Center and bought a bunch of plants and a couple big bags of soil. We'd been meaning to get around to doing some work in our back yard for weeks, but thanks to the smoke, we finally got it done. We went mostly for perennials that will draw bees and hummingbirds, and hopefully they will be able to survive our yard, which gets direct sun for only a couple of hours a day (assuming it's even sunny at all).

It didn't take long to do all that so, still needing some indoor sport, I set up a few more macro compositions using violets, Clivia, Dudleya, and red trumpet vine, with leaves of hazel and redwood sorrel providing some greenery.

Red Trumpet Vine, Deconstructed

Clivia

Dudleya

Violet

The Set-up.

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