Bird Bath

Here's a little bird action showing some of the diversity of species that have been visiting the little water pool. I was surprised no wild turkeys showed up on the cam. When I went down to the pool recently to collect the SD card and swap in some fresh batteries, I spooked up several turkeys who immediately but casually mosied out of the area. Probably the most frequently captured bird has been the screech-owl. The owl visits often and tends to stick around awhile. In contrast, the band-tailed pigeons, who are also frequent visitors, are usually in-and-out during the span of a 12-second video clip. 

Acorn Woodpecker

Black-headed Grosbeaks

Band-tailed Pigeon

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Hairy Woodpecker and Western Tanager

Flicker

Flycatcher (?) (It didn't land.)

Great-horned Owl

Pacific Wren

Pacific Slope Flycatcher

Robins

Screech-Owl

Spotted Towhee

Steller's Jay

Townsend's Warbler

Varied Thrush

Western Tanager

Wilson's Warbler

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Saturday Snaps

Took a few phone snaps while I was on Mt. Tam to check my camera traps on Saturday. I climbed a nearby hill where the sun was trying to break through the clouds in what promised to be a stunning display of backlighting, crepuscular rays, glories, and brocken specter, but the fog rose too high and the sun was blotted out. A raven joined me, glad for a little company. In recent weeks the bay laurels have been bustling with ravens feeding on peppernuts, but the frenzy seemed to have died down.

There was lovely fall color in patches of poison oak, and in just the past week, all the dry, stony creekbeds with their shrinking pools had filled with the rush of singing water. I hadn't really expected to find fungi just yet, but a large dyer's polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) surprised me, and some young oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) promised edibles to come.

Happy Halloween Tree

Fall Color in the Poison Oak

The Twin Snag at Rock Spring

Climbing Poison Oak Vines & Creek Dogwood

Dyer's Polypore

More Spooky Stuff

Oyster Babies on Mossy Log

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Building Blocks

 

Sand Tufa at Mono Lake

They thought physics was dead more than a hundred years ago. Before Max Planck postulated the quantum. Before Einstein explained the photoelectric effect. Long before dark energy and dark matter. And way, way before double-charm tetraquarks!

From Quanta Magazine: “The unexpected discovery of the double-charm tetraquark highlights an uncomfortable truth. While physicists know the exact equation that defines the strong force … they can rarely solve this strange, endlessly iterative equation, so they struggle to predict the strong force’s effects.”

I love it that physicists are stuck with an equation they can rarely solve, that physics is not dead, and that nature is still bending minds, thank you very much. The writer goes on to explain that the tetraquark they discovered was surprisingly stable—because it lasted 12 sextillionths of a second!

And here I am thinking a flash sync of 1/250^th of a second is blink-of-an-eye fast. Of course in the context of atomic physics it would be ridiculous to even call a blinking eye “fast.” Anything that took as long as an eye-blink to happen would probably put a particle physicist to sleep!

A tempting internal hyperlink in the above article took me to a page about protons, which reminded me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode that I recently watched on Amazon Prime (“When the Bough Breaks”). When this kid who’s maybe 12 years old was scolded by his dad for ditching his calculus homework, I hoped that they would eventually show the kid why calculus is useful. Alas, they missed their chance. Maybe the writers themselves didn’t know either.

Not only did we not learn calculus when I was in 7^th grade (the year after Apollo 11 landed on the moon), we didn’t learn about quarks either, much less tetraquarks. An atom was a neutron, plus protons and electrons, and that was that. So I thought it was funny when the linked article started out saying, “We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks—two ‘up’ quarks and a ‘down’ quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and -1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far stranger, as-yet-unresolved story.”

I love that the proton story I learned about has become passé, but you’ll have to read the article to see how mind-blowing the “as-yet-unresolved story” is. How intricate and mysterious this beautiful world is.

October Sunrise, Mono Lake

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Town & Country

I've been getting lots of raccoon activity out back recently. I believe this is a family group, and that it is the same group whose younger, smaller members I saw trooping around maybe a month or so ago. I keep a bowl of water out for the local wildlife, birdlife and neighborhood cats, and I can always tell in the morning when the raccoons have been around the night before because the bowl will be empty of water and full of sand (from putting their paws in the water).

 

Town Raccoons

Country Raccoon

Town Skunk

Country Skunk

It's not unusual at certain times of the year to see a hermit thrush poking around out back, and they frequently show up on the Tam Cams also.

Town Hermit Thrush

Country Hermit Thrush

Okay, it's not exactly comparing apples to apples since the town and country rats are different species. In fact, the Old World and New World rats are even in different families. I had to go way back to February to find a rat picture, partly because I don't retain all the rat captures, but also, I suspect, because my next-door neighbor recently hired a rat-exterminator.

Town (Norway) Rat

Country (Wood) Rat

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Phrase Shift

Monarch on Toyon

Maybe Doris Day popped into my head this morning, although I can no longer trace the line of thought that would have led to such a thing. But the French phrase, “Que sera, sera” (“Whatever will be, will be”) popped into my head, followed directly by the American phrase, “It is what it is.” I asked myself what those two phrases might say about the respective national characters that produced them.

The French phrase seems to put the emphasis on the future, and the American phrase seems to put the emphasis on the present. In fact, though, the French phrase is actually suggesting that we enjoy the present and shrug our shoulders about the future. The American phrase suggests that we accept the present (because we’re too taciturn to “enjoy” it) and shrug our shoulders about the past.

I guess that’s the “national character” difference in a nutshell. The French remind themselves to enjoy the present, and the Americans simply accept that they’re stuck with all the bad decisions they’ve made. The French ideal is to drink champagne in the face of, for example, a changing climate and its portents of catastrophe, while the American ideal is to say, in the aftermath of the latest flood, drought, heat-wave, or wildfire, “No use crying over spilt milk; deal with it.”

The future will take care of itself, and the past is past. Nothing to do about the former, and nothing to learn from the latter.

Or, as Annie Hall would say, “La-dee-da, la-dee-da.”

And that, my friends, is why we call ourselves Homo sapiens, “the wise people.”

Pipevine Swallowtail

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