I wasn't sure I'd be able to bike up to Tam on Thursday after having some bike trouble on Tuesday. I was coming home from my daily ride and a stop at the grocery store, just about to head home up the 3/4-mile-long hill, when my derailleur went insane and dropped me into ninth gear!
I was SOL even with the e-bike in turbo mode and had to push about 60 pounds of bike and food up the hill. I'm glad this didn't happen way out around Mt. Tam! I got it home, put it on a bike rack, and drove it to Barbary Coast Cyclery where they fixed it (my shifting cable had broken) by the end of the day Wednesday.
So yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day for a bike ride up to Mt. Tam. Goldilocks temperatures and almost no headwinds. The trail cams had not been disturbed, and the ravine was merely damp after the brief rain we had. Since there's still no real rain in the forecast I decided to leave the cams in place, but I will have to move them before the ravine turns back into a creek.
As nice a day as it was on the mountain, I was just about to head back home without taking any pictures when a lone buckeye butterfly landed near me, then proceeded to fly away when I got close to enough for a shot. Just as I got back to my bike to pack up and leave, I realized a nearby coyote brush was a-flutter with maybe a dozen buckeyes. Several of them appeared to be getting harassed by others of their own kind. I couldn't tell if it was a mating thing, a territorial thing, or something else. In one instance, the nagging butterfly was about half the size of the "victim," and it reminded me of a baby bird trying to get its mama to feed it.
This tiny madrone growing out of a crevice in the rock was full of ripening berries. This is at the hang-glider launching area on West Ridgecrest. A guy showed up at one point and put up some decorative wind socks on the other side of the road, but he didn't have a hang-glider on his car, and the wind was blowing offshore. He disappeared somewhere before I left, so I wasn't able to find out what it was all about.
More cavorting buckeyes.
Gray Hairstreak
Acmon Blue
Hedgerow Hairstreak
Various bees and flies also were feeding on the flowering coyote brush.
It was such a clear day I couldn't resist stopping at the north parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph the city skyline which looked good even in the mid-day (1 p.m.) light.
No bobcats went up or down the ravine (though a fox did), and the critters that crossed the ravine were in and out of the frame in a snap. This is a frame-capture from a video clip.
Pretty sparse animal activity (except for squirrels), but the first clip shows a fox appearing to rub its neck in some old scent before depositing some new scent.
This is a short series of still frames from the back yard last night. Just yesterday my wife had been watching one of her paranormal-type shows (something to have on while knitting) where their trail camera picked up a "mysterious object" that the show made much of, but was pretty obviously a bug or something, and not a UFO or supernatural object. But when I checked my own backyard cam this morning I was surprised to see some unusual lights show up behind a rat. Was it an extraterrestrial or a ghost?! You decide. :)
As I was out on my walk this morning and mulling over the possibility of heading out to the Eastern Sierra for fall color next week, I took a moment to appreciate the color closer to home. The bougainvillea was climbing over a neighbor's fence, so I took some home to get a closer look at it.
The pink bracts enclose three flowers; the photo above shows them in different stages of opening. I was interested to learn that bougainvillea is in the four o'clock family, Nyctaginaceae, and that its sap can cause a poison-oak-like skin rash. The petals of our own desert four o'clock (Mirabilis multiflora) sport a similarly showy color.
Bougainvillea is a native of South America and was discovered (by Europeans, that is) during a circumnavigation of the Earth undertaken by the French Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1766. One of the botanists on the trip was Jeanne Baret, who disguised herself as a man in order to join the voyage, and became the first woman to circumnavigate the planet.
Other fall color I noticed on my walk included princess flower (Pleroma urvilleanum). According to Google definitions, pleroma is a Gnostic term for "the spiritual universe as the abode of God and of the totality of the divine powers and emanations." Someone must have really liked this flower! One of my favorite things about this plant, which is among the first horticultural plants I learned when I moved to Santa Barbara in the early '80s, is the fallen petals that cover the ground below them.
Finally, since I'm already stretching the idea of "fall color," I'm posting more video clips of the cherry-headed parrots going after the acorns on my neighbor's coast live oak. The footage was shot through a double-paned window with the FZ80, and I substituted the obnoxious sounds the camera made with some royalty-free background music.
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....
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....
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
