Wednesday, January 1, 2025

New Year's Party

 

Looking Forward To A Great New Year

Lucky for me, I decided not to hike Mt. Tam in shorts on Monday. Cold! I'd hiked from Rock Spring half-way to Upper Cataract Falls before I finally started to warm up. 

It's been so long since I took a hike up there that I felt a mix of familiarity and surprise. It looked a little different due to continued tree-thinning, as well as storm-related changes such as toppled trees and flood-scoured stream edges. Even the airplane engine that's been in the creek for decades seemed to have become re-buried beneath fallen trees. Near that same spot, a log that had spanned the creek and once sported a beautiful fruiting of lion's mane (photographed in this post) had been smashed by a falling tree and/or washed out.

The fetid adder's tongues (featured in the current issue of Bay Nature Magazine) were not yet showing any sprouts near the wooden bridge that links the Cataract Trail with the little Ray Murphy Trail. The "meadow" where they like to come up has also become a lot more cluttered with forest debris. One odd bit of trail maintenance near the bridge was the addition of three large sections of a cut-up Douglas fir that had been rested against the pull of gravity on fairly small rocks. I would not want to be downhill of one of those logs if it broke loose.

The only camera I brought on the hike was the Lumix FZ80D. I'd been looking forward to shooting along Cataract Creek to see if I could get hand-held exposures long enough to soften the look of the moving water. Again, the camera surprised me in a good way. After hiking to the falls I doubled back to pick up the Mickey O'Brien Trail to Barth's Retreat, then looped back via the Simmons Trail. 

Although it was a pleasure to be carrying just one little camera and no tripod, I admit to feeling a little bit of guilt for trading the convenience of a point-and-shoot over the quality of a full-frame camera. 

The pix in this post are from Tuesday morning. There was a flock of sanderlings feeding between two groups of fishers. I glanced up and down the coast and, seeing no dog-walkers closing in, walked down to photograph the birds. I was able to sit and observe them for several minutes, and at one point a long-billed curlew dropped in. The curlew never got comfortable with me though and soon flew south. A minute or two later, a few dog-walkers showed up and let their dogs chase off the wildlife.
























The Cliff House yellow-rumper is still there (but I haven't seen the Say's phoebe at Balboa Natural Area in a while).



Sanderlings at Ocean Beach


Mt. Shasta Sunrise on New Year's Eve


New Year's Day Sunrise from Golden Gate Heights

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Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Let Nature Blow Your Mind

 

Cataract Creek, Mt. Tamalpais


I lived next to my neighbor, Jake, for a couple of decades before I found out he's been writing Nature News all this time. Sometimes we relate as superficially to people as we do to a photograph, even though it's possible to have a deeper experience of either one. What I allude to in my Photographer's Statement is that an image can be a link to the deeper experience of being in the presence of nature itself. But only if you let it. And only if you have previously had a deeper experience to relate it to. 

An article about "plant blindness" that Jake mentioned in a recent newsletter put me on a tangent regarding other things we are blind to. The most important of these in my own life was being thrust out of the blindness of taking things for granted, of accepting superficial, received knowledge as being a true and adequate guide to the unfathomable intricacies of life. Sometimes all it takes to blow our minds is a little scratch beneath the surface of what we think we know. 

Over the years I've found that Nature is always ready to blow my mind. By directing my attention to the unfathomable intricacy of the natural world, and of life itself, in this present moment, the illusion of a hum-drum world of ordinariness vanishes and is replaced by an experience that some call ultimate reality and others call God. 

It's probably the best antidepressant of all. Check out this article from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, called Experiences of "Ultimate Reality" or "God" Confer Lasting Benefits to Mental Health: "About 75 percent of respondents in both the non-drug and psychedelics groups rated their 'God encounter' experience as among the most meaningful and spiritually significant in their lifetime, and both groups attributed to it positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose and meaning."

I was surprised to see the subject brought up in a recent article in, of all places, the staid New York Times, where David Brooks writes: "At least for me, these experiences didn't answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding."

Continuing, he writes, "In his book My Bright Abyss, the poet Christian Wiman writes, 'Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterward.'"

If religion is a framework for developing the means of making these moments part of my life, then I guess I'm religious. As I prepare for 2025 and beyond I will religiously cultivate a deeper and more resilient sense of gratitude for the power and the intricacy, the beauty and the mystery, of being immersed in this awesome world.


Upper Cataract Falls


Sulfur Tufts


Flows Over The Serpentine


Deer Mushrooms


Swirl & Splash


Banana Sluggo


Cataract Canyon


Water & Stone


Mossy Boulders


Polypody


Base of Upper Cataract Falls


Toyon Berries


Christmasberry Tree


Lichen on Manzanita Branch


Pileated Woodpecker


Pileated Woodpecker Looking Sneaky, With Bay Leaves


Mistletoe & Berries On Sargent Cypress


Wrentit in the Chaparral


Witch's Butter & Stereum Fungus


I was pleasantly surprised to actually find this slime mold fruiting. I returned to an area of the mountain where I photographed it a year ago, and sure enough it was here again.


Ascomycete Fungus (Peziza repanda)


Bolinas Ridge



Brief clip of the pileated woodpecker.

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Sunday, December 29, 2024

Friday, December 27, 2024

Red-breasted Sapsucker

 

Red-breasted Sapsucker, Golden Gate Park

I was walking up a narrow dirt path on the edge of the Oak Woodland and had almost reached the Horseshoe Pit when I flushed a pair of Northern Flickers. I chided myself for walking so fast and being so oblivious of my surroundings. They were no more than ten feet away when they flushed, so I'd probably have gotten a great view if I'd seen them without frightening them away.

The flickers flew up into a nearby pine where they were soon joined by a second pair. While I waited in vain for them to fly back down to the ground, I was consoled by the sapsucker and, shortly afterward, by a Varied Thrush who called out from another tree above and behind me. 

The flickers stayed up in their pine, preening and keeping an eye out, before finally flying away toward the Fuchsia Dell. Although my walk took me through the dell, I heard the flickers' calls but never got another glimpse of them.


Pecking for Treasure


I doubted my ears when I first heard the call of this varied thrush. I don't think I've ever seen one in the city before.


While these northern flickers were preening high on the pine branch, at least one  of them would constantly have its bill dug into its feathers. Then, just briefly, they both stopped at the same time.


A little bit of sunshine started to come out to enliven the morning. This flicker didn't have an obvious partner, but there were probably half a dozen of them in the same general area.


Something about the filtered morning light, and maybe the pair of Adirondack chairs, got me to finally snap a photo of the giant "LOVE" blocks in front of the Conservatory of Flowers.


More ginkgo leaves, but this time with beaded raindrops.


This is the same spot where last week I photographed a lone plum leaf with the  horde of ginkgo leaves (the plum tree is behind me here). Many more leaves have fallen since then.


I always like to see the new year's crop of miner's lettuce getting started.


Mushroom Army


The great egret was hunting from this floating platform of aquatic plants. It appeared to be catching something from time to time, but whatever it was must have been very small. Although park staff have cleared up many of the fallen trees that went down in the December 14th storm (the one where we got a tornado warning), the big tree that toppled into South Lake was not one of them.


Just for the heck of it I also checked out Middle Lake and found a pair of ruby-crowned kinglets foraging and hawking. The one above, without a ruby crown, was the bolder of the two, while the crowned one kept his distance.


It might be that he was staying close to the bathing hole. In these shots, he'd just been chased out of the bath by a Townsend's warbler. (The bath itself was hidden from view.)


Post-bath preening.


The Townie stuck around a little bit to splash in the bathing hole a couple of times. Mostly it would fly into this oak for its post-bath preening.


Townsend's Warbler



This is a couple of super-short video clips of the speedily preening warbler.

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