Mountain Critters

Composite Critter-Cam

Although this is a composite of three image captures, the fox, jackrabbit, and coyote are depicted where they appeared in each frame.

Mt. Tam, May 22, 2020

On May 1, as the scrub jay gathers nesting material, you can see some of the sickle-leaved onions coming up, but there are no flowers yet.

Just a couple of weeks later, the onions' pink flowers are everywhere. This is another composite frame of course. One thing I forgot to do when I re-set this cam on my previous trip was to make sure there wasn't anything in front of the lens that would move in the wind and create false triggers. That blade of grass in front of the chipmunk led to thousands of useless frames. I got the card home and downloaded a record 6,901 files, which used up 29.4 GB of the 32 GB card.

Buck in the Rain

Lizard Cam

This used to be a popular (unauthorized) route for mountain bikers, and the authorities tried to decommission it by blocking it with dead wood. This was the only time since the cam has been in place at this spot that it caught any humans passing through. Pretty much the only people up high on the mountain during the lockdown are park and watershed employees doing various maintenance tasks, and bike riders.

Lucky for the mouse, unlucky for the fox: two captures made hours apart.

When I headed into the woods to check my trail cams, I was surprised, and yet not surprised, when I encountered a guy enjoying the morning who'd obviously spent the night. I was surprised because I never expect to run into anyone off-trail, but I was not surprised since I know I'm not the only one who likes to roam around. As I walked through "camp" I saw that he'd leaned his bike against an oak tree that I've previously placed my camera in. His hammock was also slung very near another spot I've set the cams at.

Passing Bucks

A casual hiker going through this area would have been unlikely to spot this cam, and even though this location hasn't picked up any humans, I wondered if the camping guy would wander up this way after seeing me enter the woods without coming back out the way I went in. After swapping cards and batteries, I moved this cam to the base of the big Doug fir, even though it makes the cam much more visible to anyone who might pass by. Fingers crossed that it's still there next time I go back.

Mama & Fawn

Billy the Wonder Squirrel

The hare and the bobcat: You can't do as nice a composite with sunny-day frames because the shadows move through the day.

Squirrel & Jackie Composite

I was probably as surprised to find the bike-camper as I was to find a pair of fresh grisette mushrooms (Amanita pachycolea). According to California Mushrooms grisettes typically fruit from late fall through mid-winter, yet this guy had just recently burst forth from the earth and was still fresh and pretty on May 22.

This was the first time I rode all the way from home. My ebike has a 500 watt-hour battery, and I do believe I could probably just make it to Mt. Tam and back, about 45 miles round-trip, if I used "battery off" mode whenever I could (on flats and downhills). But I decided to banish "range anxiety" once and for all by purchasing a second battery.

The battery weighs about five pounds and fits nicely in the top Topeak bag I have on the rack. When I locked my bike to a tree so I could hike out to the critter cams, I removed the frame-mounted battery and hid it, along with the bike bag and my helmet, to help ensure it would all still be there when it was time to go home.

Northside Vista Point

A park ranger who'd just let a car head up toward Rock Spring was re-locking the gate across from the Pantoll parking lot when I arrived Friday morning. Employees have work to do up there, but the public is still being kept out, unless you get there on foot or bicycle. It appears the closure will continue through the holiday, which is quite disappointing, especially to my wife who doesn't ride.

View on YouTube

I could hear a chainsaw in the distance at one point, but the woods were alive with birdsong. Here's a minute's worth I recorded on my smartphone.

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Coast Reverie

Somewhere out there...

(Salt Point State Park)

Coast Lily

Sea Pink

Rhododendron

Goldfields & Friends

Pacific Coral Root

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Vista Point

California Quail, Tennessee Valley

I need to adopt the stoicism of a California quail. The wind ruffles his feathers? So what. It's just the laws of physics, so how could it lower your spirits. On my morning walk I noticed the wind was coming up already, which means I'm going to have to plow into it on my mid-day bike ride. It's not even a big deal, though, and in fact it's just a slight diminution of the pure excellence of riding with little or no wind. Since the psychological laws of nature are every bit as real as the physical laws, there's some truth to the saying that it's all in how you look at it.

Quail Calling

I was listening to a report on the marvel of the Mt. Diablo viewshed this morning on KQED radio when the reporter expressed her joy that, looking through binoculars, she could see the Golden Gate Bridge, sixty miles away. As it happens, I had recently measured the distance between Mt. Tam and Mt. Diablo, so I had a pretty good idea how the reporter mistakenly doubled the actual distance.

Anyone who uses Google Maps knows you can plot a route from, say, Mt. Diablo to the Golden Gate Bridge, and get not just the directions but also the distance to be traveled. But that's road distance. Obviously, when you look through binoculars, your vision does not follow that same route! (I was thanked by KQED for pointing out the error in time for them to fix it before the next airing.)

Of course you can also use Google Maps to plot a straight-line distance. Simply right-click on your departure point, then choose "Measure distance" from the pop-up menu. Then right-click on your destination point and choose "Distance to here" on the pop-up menu. Now you can read the distance on the ruler.

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