Amanita muscaria

 

Amanita muscaria, December 5

There's a narrow garden between someone's house and the sidewalk that I often walk past. Back in September I photographed a bunch of princess flower petals lying on the ground there. This time the attraction has been arguably the most iconic of all fungi, the Fly Agaric (my last walkabout fungus was of Latticed Stinkhorn). 

Besides being used as poison to kill flies, this gorgeous mushroom also produces an hallucinogenic compound called muscimol. Check out mycologist Tom Volk's Fungus of the Month for December 1999 to read all about its effects and how the Vikings used it to become berserkers!

Blooming Mushrooms, Blooming Flowers
(click image to view larger)

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All I Want For Christmas

 

All I want for Christmas is another bobcat encounter. I spotted this sleepy-head snoozing in a field across the road from the Abbotts Lagoon parking lot. I stopped and got my camera out just in time to see him rise and stretch. He didn't see that I was onto him until he came toward the edge of the road, and then he turned back and walked down the field a ways, stopping once to look back at me. I lost sight of him until he emerged once again to cross the road and lose himself in the coastal scrub around the lagoon.

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Revisiting the Past

 

Bluffs Along Tomales Point Trail

You can't go home again, as the saying goes, but you can go back to blog posts from the past, and a wild and wooly morning like today's seemed like a good time to do so. I enjoyed looking back and reading my posts from December 2019, several of which could have been descriptions of this year. All the photos in today's post are from Point Reyes in Decembers past. I've included two landscapes showing the range of drama to serenity to be found out there, and the rest of the shots are of our antlered friends, the elk and deer.

Hog Island

Top O' The World Elk

Three Amigos

King of the Road

Remembering Axis Deer

Elk at Sunrise Near Drake's Beach

Blacktail Bucks Near Chimney Rock

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Grandview Moonrise

 

Moonrise from Grandview Park

By the time I got back from my ride to Mt. Tam and had showered and downloaded pictures, it was about 3 o'clock, so I only had about an hour to relax before walking over to Grandview Park to catch the moonrise. I had an idea of where it would come up, but as the minutes passed beyond 4:28 p.m. I wondered if I would be able to see the moon through all the haze. Plus there was this one lone cloud over the distant horizon.

While I waited for the moon I snapped a couple of other shots, including the SkyStar Wheel in Golden Gate Park, and a panorama of Mt. Tam (click to view larger). People walked by and took phone snaps of the city skyline, but they were there for the sunset, which was happening on the other side of the hill. As it set, the sun reflected quite obnoxiously off the Salesforce Tower with a glare that would have dominated the scene, leaving the moon in second place. I was relieved when the reflection finally sank into the shadows.

The moon finally made its appearance--from behind the cloud, naturally--and I was excited by its beauty as the first contours of its shape became apparent. 

I had only brought a 300mm lens, so I made most of my shots by rotating the lens to vertical format and shooting a horizontal series to convert into a panorama. A single horizonal frame put the Transamerica Building and the Salesforce Tower very close to the left and right edges of the frame, leaving no room for the image to breathe. 

As I left the park I passed a small crowd of people on the other side of the hill who had been absorbed in watching the sunset. I don't think they even realized what was happening behind them.

SkyStar Wheel in Golden Gate Park

Panorama with Mount Tamalpais

Moon Above Salesforce Tower

Moon Rising Above Sutro Forest

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Racing the Tide

 

Resting Buck

A year ago this month I ran into a high tide that flooded the Mill Valley-Sausalito Pathway, cutting off my bike route to Mt. Tam. A large group of cyclists soon showed up and decided to take the freeway, so I joined them, figuring we had a reasonable amount of safety in numbers. It all worked out fine, and we had a nice little adventure.

Back then I had arrived at the flooded path about a half hour after a 6.74-foot high tide. I had planned to do the ride again yesterday and was concerned about the 6.3-foot high tide, but I had no idea if that would be high enough to close off the route. I decided it was worth a try, even if I ended up having to turn back. I'm glad to report that I did not have to turn back. I passed through before high tide, and the path was still dry when I returned afterward, so I know the flooding happens somewhere north of 6.3 feet. 

Later this month we'll have king tides (get your cameras), starting with a 6.4 high tide on the 20th, followed by 6.7, 7.0, and two 7.1 highs on subsequent days, dropping to a 6.9-footer on Christmas Day.

On the way up the mountain I saw that the crazy azaleas (crazaleas?) were still blooming along that little straightaway just before Bootjack. Right in among them were bundles of juicy red toyon berries which are more typical for this time of year. 

Up on the mountain I spotted a big buck deer relaxing in the warm sunshine well above the tule fog that rose almost all the way to the Mountain Home Inn. By and by he stood up and commenced to groom himself before ambling over to the edge of the woods where he began to thrash the tree branches with his antlers. It's long past velvet-shedding time, so I wondered if he was knocking acorns down. I didn't see him eat anything though, so maybe he was trying to shed his antlers or just make a game of sparring with branches.

Speaking of acorns, I'd been wondering why I hadn't seen or heard any wild turkeys in a long time since the ground is covered with ripe nuts, and I finally saw a gaggle of them on my ride down from Rock Spring to Pantoll. They were feeding together, but doing so very quietly, and with no tail-feather flourishing.

December crazaleas on Panoramic Highway

View of Mt. Diablo Over Tule Fog
(inland fog that doesn't come from the ocean)

The Buck Rises

Caught in the Act
(of sparring with branches)

Hiker on the Benstein Trail

Frost on Beetle-Grazed Bark

Shed Antler With A View

Wary Turkey

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Neighborhood Nature

 

Beach Rainbow

It was a surprisingly beautiful day at the beach, with small, clean surf, a dramatic sky, plenty of solitude, and a gentle, short-lived rain shower that delivered a somewhat shy rainbow. 

Coyotes in Golden Gate Heights

When I saw the first coyote, I was pretty far away and only about fifty percent sure it was even an animal. It finally moved, so I walked closer to see what it was. When I saw that it was a coyote I regretted that I only had my smartphone camera. The coyote lay down to rest when a second coyote ambled into the scene from the left side of the frame and stopped to nuzzle greetings for a few seconds before moving along.

Sidewalk Surprise

Amanita muscaria in a sidewalk garden. Note additional button in the background.

Dragonfly Steps

My walk takes me up the nature-themed 16th Avenue steps, and today I finally decided to count how many there are. I got 150 on the nose, but the official web site claims there are 163. [I counted two more times, each time getting 148 steps, with a step only counting if it was a step up.]

View toward cloud-hidden Mt. Tamalpais from bottom of Grandview Park.

Cloud Train 2

* * *

Cloud Train

 

I went to the bedroom to get my shoes so I could go for a walk around the neighborhood and noticed an interesting train of clouds chugging by out the back window, so I set a timelapse to run until I got back from my walk.

Cloud Train Timelapse

* * *

Cold & Dry

 

A Bobcat emerges from the chain ferns surrounding a mostly dry creek bed.

My habit has been to ride up to Mt. Tam every other Thursday to check on my trail cameras, but with rain in the forecast I figured I'd go up earlier this week. Monday was still too windy, and Tuesday was almost too cold. I had to do a bit of self-cajoling to actually roll out the door, but as usual I was glad to be outdoors on such a beautiful day. 

The ride was fairly uneventful: uncrowded bridge crossing, greater yellowlegs and black-necked stilts probing the mud at low tide, light vehicle traffic, still-blooming weird azaleas, the squirrel carcass was gone, a couple of awesome road-bikers passed me on my e-bike while going uphill (a remarkable feat that has happened only twice before), still-blooming California fuchsia, and dry brown hillsides.

I moved the trail cameras back to the pool, which was covered with powder down left behind by bathing band-tailed pigeons. I'm hoping to capture something interesting before and after the coming rain. Hopefully we'll get enough rain to finally get the creeks going.

Second frame of bobcat capture (video below)

Crop of the previous frame.

Gray Fox

Buck with skinny antlers.

Dual-frame overlay of passing coyote.

The new GardePro camera has a "no glow" flash for night photography, and the animals (including this coyote) really don't react to it. The Foxelli "low glow" camera sometimes mesmerizes animals to the point where a 10-second video shows nothing but the animal staring at the lights. The downside to "no glow" is the flat light.

Tam Cam Video Clips

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Point Reyes in November Past

 

Sunrise at Point Reyes

I've been too lazy to go out and get any new shots, so this is Point Reyes in November of years past.

Bluffs at Chimney Rock

Pacific Edge at Dawn

Lagunitas Creek

Surf Fishing at North Beach

Marbled Godwit at Drake's Beach

Roadside Cleaning Crew

Dewy Morning in Bear Valley

Handsome Coyote #1

Handsome Coyote #2

Remembering Fallow Deer

Remembering the Wittenberg Trail

Galerina in the Moss

Pelicans in the Dunes

Mt. Vision View

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