Adios, March

Anise Swallowtail on Checkerbloom

As we say "Adios" to the most surreal March of our lives, I thought I'd post some favorite bird and butterfly images -- the lighter side of nature -- from the month of March in years past.

Townsend's Warbler

Green Hairstreak

Fox Sparrow

Pipevine Swallowtail

Yellow-Rumped Warbler

White-Crowned Sparrow

Allen's Hummingbird

Red-Winged Blackbird

Scrub Jay

Long-Billed Curlew

Although my wife and I are both working from home, there is enough down time even during the workday that it's good to have a book to pick up. On my wife's recommendation I started sheltering in place with Frank Herbert's Dune. I finally finished it on Saturday, and we streamed the movie that night after a dinner of rice with baked tofu and broccoli, generously spiced.

On Sunday I picked The Forest Unseen, A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell, which I'm re-reading. I was going to photograph it on the ground in our garden, but it was too wet. The bird bath, with antler and quartz crystal from Mt. Tamalpais and Buddha from a friend, seemed appropriate because the book starts off with a description of a Tibetan sand mandala and segues into the circle of life that the author will study for a year. 

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Agony & Ecstasy

Black Mountain from White House Pool, Pt. Reyes

If you've ever felt the ecstasy of being one with nature, one with the universe, you may also have felt the agony of being unique, separate and alone.

Drifting Thoughts

Two sides of the same coin, as the saying goes. We each carry these polarities, if only as potentials that graze our conscious selves like tangents on a circle. 

Would we trade the bliss of ignorance for the torture of clarity? Or, better yet, marry them together?

Horseshoe Bend, Drake's Beach

I like to think we're drawn to frontiers, to edges where the land meets the sea, because they tune these polarities within us, bring us into harmony.

Textured Wave, Drake's Beach

We're all one, all born of elements formed in exploding stars, born of a virgin that science calls a singularity. From that unique mother of the universe comes a family of forces and elements, of life and consciousness.

Iris Bluffs, Pt. Reyes

Spring is a great reminder of the mystery of life.

Spring Greenery, Kehoe Beach

And I don't just mean mystery in a religious, poetic, or mystical sense, but an actual mystery that has scientists completely flummoxed.

Sun Breakthrough, Pt Reyes Ranchlands

All the insights we've made into physics and biology remain fragmentary knowledge, as yet unsynthesized into a coherent story of the mystery of life.

Silhouettes in Morning Mist

This all came together for me as I was reading an interview in Quanta Magazine with the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and was struck by the following passage:

“It’s in that sense that I think our view of evolution as a process needs to be expanded — by thinking about dynamical systems, and how it is possible that systems capable of evolving and reproducing can exist at all. If you think about the physical world, it is not at all obvious why you don’t just make more dead stuff. Why does a planet have the capability to sustain life? Why does life even occur? The dynamics of evolution should be able to address that question. Remarkably, we don’t have an idea even in principle of how to address that question — which, given that life started as something physical and not biological, is fundamentally a physics question.”

Cliff Dweller, Pt. Reyes

I like to believe that humanity will someday be able to address that question, to tell that story. And maybe in doing so, become able to address the ability of a virus that's just following the laws of nature to jam up our life systems, not just individually but extending to the entire tribe of human beings throughout the world.

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Hooves & Feathers

Anyone else remember the break of, I don't recall how many years, when dairy cows were gone and tule elk had the D Ranch pastures  at Pt. Reyes for themselves? That was good times for wildlife viewing. My heart sank a little when I went back out there some years ago and saw that cattle ranching was back.

March is a good month to spot baby blue egret eggs in a pine tree full of feathers.

Alert and frisky in the fields of spring.

Willets foraging in the pickleweed.

One bull still hangs onto his antlers while three others have already shed theirs and begun sporting velvet nubbins.

A black turnstone walks the tide line.

Deer take an early morning break at Chimney Rock.

A raven pontificates in clatters and clicks.

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