Layer Cake

 

Mt. Tamalpais from Grandview Park

Toasty Temps on Mt. Tamalpais

Stepping out onto our back stoop this morning, I was surprised by a clear and sunny view, and air so fresh and cool that it pulled me out of the house. I grabbed the FZ80 and took a quick nature-stroll over to Grandview Park. 

A red-tailed hawk perched from its lookout on a chert outcrop (there was almost no wind for soaring), and along with the usual juncos and sparrows calling back and forth at the top of the park, a woodpecker whistled sharply from one of the cypress trees. The sandy trail below the trees was wet in places where fog-drip still fell from the saturated branches despite the fog itself having pulled all the way back to beach. Coast buckwheat was taking center stage among the summer wildflowers, hosting numerous honeybees and bumblebees.

A little later in the morning my wife and I walked past the park again and spotted our first ground squirrel there. It actually moved so fast we couldn't be certain what it was before it disappeared into a burrow. I'm not sure I could set up a trail cam there without it being stolen, but I'll check it out. I have never seen a ground squirrel in San Francisco before.

Passing the park, we continued down the Hidden Garden Steps to Irving Street and almost to the beach where we checked out Black Bird Bookstore and had lunch at Beach'N SF, both of which were excellent. I especially liked the large photographic prints on the wall at Black Bird, and both the chicken sandwich and mac 'n cheese (and chocolate chip cookie) at Beach'N SF.

Red Trumpet Vine, Ortega Street

Layer Cake

Bees & Buckwheat

* * *

The Hot & The Not

Foggy Forest, Golden Gate Heights Park

I was a little shocked when I checked the Yosemite Valley forecast and saw that it was going to be over 100 degrees this week. According to the National Weather Service, it was 94 there around noon and could hit a high of 107; meanwhile it's 63 here in the Sunset District, and we're expecting a high of 66 -- a 40-degree difference in the highs!

Something completely different gave me a shock this morning when I read that a guy my age and his artist wife were robbed at gunpoint near the bison paddock, and the thieves were after the guy's Nikon camera. A trial attorney quoted in the story said a lot of folks get robbed in Golden Gate Park, and that this was not an extraordinary case! Welcome to San Francisco.

Looming Pines in Forest Hill

Yowza!

Dewy Rose Petals

The Unfurling

A few ochre sea stars cling to a mussel bed at the base of Seal Rocks during low tide.

A tight formation of pelicans.

What do you know? A "seal" (actually a sea lion) at Seal Rocks. It looks like a youngster hanging out with the usual gulls and cormorants.

Western Gull at Cliff House

Find Waldo's Lime Scooter

Our friend the young red-tailed hawk was hunting in the same area I've seen it on other recent occasions.

* * *

A Bee, Or Not A Bee

 

Yellowjacket Nest, Golden Gate Park

On today's morning walk, which took me down Ortega Street to the beach, I passed a yellow pick-up truck with a "BMAN" license plate and a small honeybee sticker on its side. I should have taken a snapshot of it [UPDATE: see below], because Bs were a little bit of a theme today, since I also picked up B&B (bagels and bananas) at the Safeway on Noriega Street on my return trip....

And then as I was biking through Golden Gate Park I thought I'd spotted a bee's nest, only to stand corrected: a wasp is not a bee, and yellowjackets are wasps. Their papery nests are admirable constructions, like this one maybe twenty feet off the ground in some tree branches (poss. Norfolk Island Pine, Araucaria heterophylla) along MLK Jr. Drive. Unlike bees, yellowjackets can sting more than once, as I learned long ago when as a kid I got stung in the lip, twice, when I stuck my head in some bushes to get a better look at one of their nests. 

The other side of the nest, with workers putting on some finishing touches.

Perils of the Park
(The sprinkler was going when I rode by today, 7/9, and was coming very close to wiping out the wasp nest.)

View With Entrance Hole
(Here's the post-sprinkler nest on 7/10, with some bees going in and out at the nearly dead-center entrance hole.)

Vine Branches on Retaining Wall, Ortega Street

Monkey Flower and Chert Outcrop, 14th Avenue

The Bee Man's Truck

* * *

Up In Smoke

 

Primrose Entrance

We'd been looking forward to taking another art and photography trip next week, this time among the giant sequoias, but wildfires in the area are threatening to put the kibosh on our plans. We'd already been a little worried about recent triple-digit heat, but it looks like smoky atmospheric conditions are more likely to hold us back. 

Meanwhile, we've been spared much of California's scorching temperatures here on the coast, where last night's fog horns cut through the incessant fireworks to let us know nature's air conditioner was turned on. Today the fog was dense right at the coast but the city was in full sun otherwise, cooled by a mild sea breeze.

Flower Patch at Garden for the Environment

Rock Purslane on Parnassus Heights
(The Golden Gate Bridge towers can be seen in the distance.)

Rock Purslane Motherlode, Strybing Arboretum (7/6/24)

This sunflower is what became of the bud I photographed on June 21st.

Same Sunflower on 7/12/2024

Sunflower on 7/19/2024

Sunflower on 7/26/2024

Sunflower on 8/2/2024
(I wonder if there will be any seed production. There are no other nearby sunflowers. This is on the edge of the Fuchsia Garden, on a narrow dirt trail just off Conservatory Drive East.)

Sunflower on 8/9/2024
(Those brown bumps in the lower right are ripened seeds. I plucked one out, and yep, it looked like a sunflower seed.)

Sunflower on 8/15/2024

Sunflower on 8/23/2024

Seal Rocks in the Fog
(It was so foggy out at the farthest rock, which is outside the frame to the north, that I couldn't tell if it was still harboring a lot of pelicans. Hopefully the two pelican carcasses I saw on the beach weren't indicative of poor fishing conditions.)

* * *

Nettlesome Weather

Brown pelican, trying to beat the frame.

"Beating the frame" is something the characters do in some of the detective novels I like to read. I recently got started reading Tana French, whose style of detective novel is so novel that I keep forgetting the main plot while luxuriating in her many beautiful digressions into the kinds of details that are the ecstatic moments of everyday life -- or they could be, if only we noticed them. 

Anyway, I was interested to notice today that the pelicans are still numerous on Seal Rocks, but that the great mass of them had moved to the one that's farthest from shore. 

Whenever I think of pelicans, I think of a line that I've long thought must have come from a cartoon I learned as a kid: "my beak can hold more than my belly can." It turns out to be part of a limerick written by the poet, humorist, and newspaper editor, Dixon Lanier Merritt, and reads as follows:

     A wonderful bird is the pelican,
     His bill will hold more than his belican,
     He can take in his beak
     Enough food for a week,
     But I'm damned if I see how the helican!

My morning walk today took me past the alleged stinging nettles I recently posted about finding at Golden Gate Heights Park. The plants have matured since then and look even more nettlesome, since they are not the kind I'm familiar with from Mt. Tamalpais (Urtica dioica). Thanks to Plant ID, a phone snap of the plant shows it very likely to be dwarf nettle (Urtica urens). 

I was prepared to record temperatures again today, but our heat wave (on the west side of San Francisco, that is) turned out to be a nothingburger. It was 71 degrees at my computer desk at 6:30 this morning, 73 when I left for my walk at 8:30, and thanks to a sea breeze, back to 71 by noon. 

Meanwhile, today's high is going to be over 120 degrees in Death Valley, where the Badwater 135 ultramarathon is only a couple of weeks away....

A disorderly squadron of pelicans flies past the old Cliff House.

Pelican In Suspense

A Cocktail Party of Heermann's Gulls on Ocean Beach

Dwarf Nettle

* * *

Day in the Sun

 

Flying Into The Sun

The main action at the bison paddock today was a group of red-tailed hawks that was using the large meadow as a hunting ground. I spotted a pair of first-years hanging out on a tree stump on the other side of the field when suddenly a commotion broke out as a third hawk swooped in with something in its talons, a meal for the stump hawks.

I circled around the paddock to see if I could get a better angle on the stump hawks, but shooting through the chain-link fence didn't work out very well. On the plus side, a third first-year was perched in a eucalyptus right above my head. I stuck around awhile and watched finches flutter and alight on branches very near the hawk without the hawk paying them any mind. I even went away and came back, which is when I snapped the grab-shot above during another commotion involving the stump hawks. Surprisingly, the eucalyptus hawk remained unmoved throughout the screeching melee.

My next stop was the beach, where there were many more pelicans, cormorants, and even gulls than I saw on Seal Rocks just yesterday. Black oystercatchers chattered out there as well, minuscule black dots too small for me to photograph. 

With a heat wave supposed to begin today, I kept track of temperatures during my morning walk, starting from my apartment where it was 66.8 degrees indoors at 8:15 a.m., just a little warmer than the usual 64-65 degrees. By the time I got to the beach it was 9 a.m., and my thermometer read 75.1 degrees. There was no breeze. On the way home, though, I was surprised to get readings of 71.6 at Sunset Boulevard and 72.9 at 19th Avenue. I wondered if the beach measurement had been corrupted somehow, or if it truly was cooler inland.

By the time I got close to home at about 9:45, it was 75.5 degrees at 14th & Ortega, and I was sweating profusely after the hill climb. I had to spend a little more time than usual to cool down before getting on the bike and heading down to Seal Rocks, where the thermometer read 76.1 degrees at about 11 a.m. There was a nice breeze that made it feel considerably cooler than the 75.1 degrees I'd noted at the beach earlier.

It's 70.2 indoors now at about 12:30 p.m., a beautiful sunny day. Here's hoping the next few days won't bring too much of a good thing....

A couple of first-year red-tailed hawks await their next meal at the Golden Gate Park Bison Paddock.

Perhaps this first-year wanted nothing to with the rowdy stump hawks and waited patiently in a eucalyptus tree a safe distance away.

Pelican Gathering At Seal Rocks

Pelicans take the high ground while cormorants rest below.

A group of visitors safely emerges from the tunnel of doom at Sutro Baths.

This is some sort of in-flight fracas, probably the result of junior insisting on being fed by the red-tail who's old enough to actually have a red tail.

The younger red-tail with its feathers splayed out to catch some lift.

* * *