Sunday Ramble

Sunday Morning Fog

Some days go so perfectly you feel in tune with the universe. Other days you figure it must be time for a tune-up.

I always get a tune-up when I visit Mt. Tam, even when some things go perfectly south, like yesterday when I locked my ebike to a tree and realized I didn’t have the key to unlock my battery so I could swap in the fresh one. With less than two bars left on the first battery, there was no way I was going to make it home. I’d probably go to zero on the hill out of Sausalito, or maybe in the cold, howling wind and fog part-way across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Luckily I had my phone, and once I was back in cellphone range I was able to call my wife to come get me. We still had some grocery shopping to do, so we met up at The Good Earth down in Tam Junction, which we’ve been curious to check out anyway, and where I was able to get some sprouted wheat bagels and tempeh, neither of which our local Andronico’s carries.

When I got home and downloaded the three trail cams’ memory cards, I knew perfection had been lost again when I saw that one of them had more than 4,000 images on it. This was from the third cam that I set up last week, and I figured I must have missed seeing some errant blade of grass that caused a lot of wind-triggers. I downloaded the images figuring it would still be worth it to weed out hundreds or thousands of “empty” frames in order to get the one classic bobcat shot.

But when I pulled the images into Lightroom I was struck by the fact that almost every frame looked the same, and that nothing in the images indicated what could have caused the false triggers. Also, every one of the 4,000-plus images was shot on the same day I set out the cam, and only covered a couple hours of that day before it shut down.

After mulling over this strange turn of events for some time, it finally dawned on me that I had set that camera to shoot a time lapse while we were camping at Sonora Pass recently.

This morning I drove back up to Mt. Tam, arriving just as the ranger opened the gate at 6:58 a.m., and the trail cam was indeed still set to shoot a frame every few seconds. Now I know, if you set time lapse on the trail cam, you have to unset it to make it stop. I swapped out the drained batteries, reformatted the memory card, set the correct shooting mode, and drove back home so I could get to the farmer’s market before the strawberries sold out.

By the way, I like the idea of using a trail cam to shoot a long time lapse. For one thing, it runs silently since there is no mirror-slap like there is on my Nikon D800E. The unfortunate thing is, the trail camera doesn’t compile all the images into a single time lapse video file like the Nikon does. I had to pull the thousands of images into Adobe Premiere Elements to create the time lapse, and despite following somewhat complicated directions I didn’t get the smooth-running playback that I’d hoped for. I was surprised a dedicated video program couldn’t make it easy to create a decent time lapse, especially since the Nikon does it in-camera.

Inquisitive Fox

Mom & Two Fawns Spot a Fox

Friday Fogbeams

Bolinas Ridge Trail

'41 Pontiac

Sausalito Pit Stop

Looking for Brocken Specter

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Fog Break

I was about to settle down to some reading last night when I made a shocking discovery: when I looked out the back window, I could see! 

For the first time in weeks, the gray wall of fog was gone. I got the crazy notion that I should go over to Grandview Park and see if Comet Neowise was going to be visible. 

Even though it's not that far away, I drove my car and sat awhile to watch a gloriously bright orange sun sink below the horizon. I watched in vain for the green flash. Once the sun was below the horizon, park visitors began to exit. By the time I decided to head up the stairs there were only three other people up there enduring a strong, steady and cold wind.

I craned my neck to look for stars emerging from the night sky, but a nearly full moon was rising and keeping the stars from showing off. I passed the time by shooting a couple of panoramas, one of Mt. Tamalpais and the other looking over the Inner Sunset toward downtown.

A little after 9 p.m. it was actually getting dark, but still there were precious few stars, and no sign of the Big Dipper, which would give me a clue as to where the comet could be found. I'd hoped to have a shot of the comet over Mt. Tam, but no such luck. If the comet's still around in another couple of weeks during the new moon--and we get another fog break--I might try again.

I made the images above 1200 pixels wide, and you can click on an image to see it full-sized (although for some reason it doesn't work with the Mt. Tam pic, maybe something to do with Blogger's redesign).

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Tam Cam July

In my post earlier in the month I said I thought this trail cam location had potential, and I sorta cursed when I later got this image of a bobcat apparently bolting through so quickly it's head was cut off before the cam could jump into action. I have the cam set to fire off three frames when it's triggered. This was frame number one, and it seemed impossible to me that the bobcat wouldn't have triggered the camera sooner. I didn't figure out how it could have happened, aside from an insanely slow camera trigger, until I returned to the scene yesterday, July 31.

I had two cams set up, with one on the log and the other on this pool. For part of the month I had both photo and video working on this pool, but I ended up with so many useless frames that I turned off the video. It's a lot more time-consuming to review video in Lightroom than to review still images, and video also eats up the trail cam batteries more quickly.

What kind of owl is this? Check out the video below to see what happens next.

Yesterday I brought a third trail camera along, even though I wasn't sure where I wanted to place it. Biking up toward Rock Spring I returned to the scene of my recent fox encounter to look for anything obvious about the location that would be of enough interest to foxes that I could expect to catch them again. Seeing nothing more than a faint animal trail on the very steep slope, I didn't think it was worth setting up a cam there. 

The log cam has been catching foxes fairly often anyway. The video shows a nice little interaction between two foxes who meet in apparent joy.

All the other usual suspects also showed up, including mice and band-tailed pigeons, which are briefly included in the video.

When I swapped out the memory cards and batteries yesterday, I also re-synchronized the timestamp on each of the cams. Unfortunately, each cam gains time at a different speed. This image of the fox heading downstream past the pool and toward the log was stamped at 9:51 p.m.

And this one of the fox crossing the log was stamped at 10:04 p.m. I doubt the fox actually dawdled at the pool for 13 minutes, but who knows. I wish the timestamps were more accurate.

 

All three bobcat captures (July 9, 23 & 26) occurred in daytime. I suspect the bobcat in this image leaped up to the log from the downstream (left) side. More of this cat appears in the video.

What I also found yesterday is a nearby upstream ledge which probably explains how the bobcat's head was already cut off in the first frame at the top of this post. Unlike the foxes, the bobcat doesn't traverse the log from end to end, but leaps onto it.

The foxes always seem to get on the log from one of the ends, but they sometimes exit by jumping off. This one appears to be checking out something of interest at the pool.

Here it is almost noon when the bobcat comes down for a drink. Unfortunately I had turned off the video on this cam, but the third shot in the series clearly shows the cat dipping its head to drink. 

Having found nowhere better to put the third cam, I decided to set it up to overlook the pool and the log. I set its video to run for six seconds instead of the twelve that runs on the log cam, and already I regret doing that. I'm thinking about going back up tomorrow to set all the videos for 20 seconds. 

Even though it will be a pain to go through them all, and I'll have to swap batteries more often, it's probably worth the trouble to get the one-in-a-hundred (or several hundred) captures that would make the enterprise more fun and interesting.

Mt. Tam was gorgeous yesterday, with warm sunshine (which we haven't experienced in my fog-bound Sunset District neighborhood in recent memory) and best of all, hardly any bugs. On my last trip to swap out memory cards and batteries, I rushed through the task, swatting at various gnats and flies that swarmed around my face and tried to bite my legs. This time I sat rapturously next to the creek with a breeze singing in the trees and numerous birds flying about, in no hurry to leave.

View on YouTube

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