Warm Cockles

 

The fact that it was 81 degrees in our living room even before sunrise this morning does not warm the cockles of my heart. And if you've ever wondered where that saying comes from, it appears that a "cockle" is the chamber of a kiln. Our hearts have four chambers--four cockles--to be warmed. 

I believe this is the shell of a Nuttall's Cockle (Clinocardium nuttallii), found on the sand near the mouth of Drake's Estero. It's surprisingly more colorful up close than it appeared at first glance, and I can only wonder what gave the shell its light blue coloration.

In the book The Nature of Nature which I mentioned in a recent post, Enric Sala writes about testing the water for bacterial pollutants in a string of islands, some of which people lived on, while others were uninhabited. On the uninhabited islands, giant clams which, like cockles, are filter-feeders, lived in peace, while on the populated islands they were eaten, and their numbers were greatly reduced. The predictable result was that the water around the clammy islands was pristine, while the water around the people-y islands was filthy with bacteria.

And if you thought, as I did, that cockles just sit there waiting to be eaten, check out this short video of a cockle escaping predation by a sunstar.

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Habitats for Humanity

 

Woodland, marsh, and dune. I've always liked the variety of habitats at Pt. Reyes. Each hosts its own specialized bird life, but some generalists cross the boundaries like shoppers moving down the different aisles in a grocery store.

We had a lot of smoke in my neighborhood last night. It came in around 11 p.m. and we had to close all the windows. The Purple Air numbers were over 200 all around us in Golden Gate Heights, and over 300 around Twin Peaks.

This morning our neighborhood is showing numbers among the lowest in the city. There is no breeze, so maybe the smoke settled near the bottom of the hill, as it did yesterday. It was interesting to check the North Bay Fire Cams this morning and play the timelapse of the Pt. Reyes fires from Barnabe Peak. I started the timelapse before the sun came up, which gave a more clear idea of where the actual flames are. 

I found this coyote (?) skull while I was poking around the marshy area above.

I brought it home and cleaned it up, then put it in my back yard as a decoration. It didn't even last one night before a raccoon chewed it to pieces.

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Spiders of September

 

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As I was sitting out back just now I noticed this orb-weaver spider in her web spanning part of the width of a basement door that rarely gets opened. I went upstairs to get my camera and brought along a water mister to spray on her web, but the mist didn't really stick. Maybe the strands of the web are just too thin to hold decent sized droplets.

I also remembered to look up the reason why it seems like I see more spider webs in the garden in the late summer and early fall, and the answer was that the females that hatched in spring have finally gotten big enough to notice. The smaller males are roaming the earth in search of females, who will lay their eggs before winter sets in.

And since I already had my camera out, I decided to clean the sensor since I've been putting it off for some time. I put it off because no one has invented a tiny vacuum cleaner or some other easy and effective method of doing the job. It always takes several iterations of snapping a picture of the sky with my 50mm lens stopped down to f/16, then importing the image into Lightroom so I can see where the spots are. Sometimes I'll do the cleaning, only to check the sensor and find it even more spotty than before I cleaned it, which never makes me happy. What does make me happy is when I somehow finally get the thing in good shape.

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