Fade to Blue

A.M. - just enough fog to outlines the hills.

 Goodbye spring.

Hanging Out with California Natives

Blue oaks (Quercus douglasii) have large gaps in their canopy through which you can see the stars. Growing only here, blue oaks are California natives.

I'm working on this idea that it takes a long time to know a place. So if you want to know California better, you better hang out with California natives, not just the native plants and animals but also the people who were raised in this state.

Driveway Moment

On a full-moon night,  the moon rises at the same time the sun sets.

Half our world is sky. At least when you are in the country and have a 360-degree view and there are clouds to remind you of that huge volume of space above your head. Or stars, sunsets, moon rises, and sometimes comets. The driveway to the Dipper ranch house is a road that shows up on a US Geological Survey topographic map from the late 1800's whereas none of the other modern day country roads existed then. Other people must have walked, ridden or driven down this road and gazed upwards. Some of them must have come through the gate, around the corner and gasped to see the full moon rise just as I did the other night.

Spring has arrived and it brings the changing of the herpetofauna guard.  The lizards are coming out and bowing to the sun and the amphibians are finishing their aquatic breeding and returning to the dark, damp earth.

De-Lovely Moon

Total lunar eclipse, December 10, 2011.  The green ghosting is probably some type of light bouncing in the lens. Those little white dots are not specks on your monitor but stars showing up as the moon's glow is dimmed.
f/4, 4 seconds, ISO 400, 120 mm, Nikon D60, photo cropped

I spend most of my time puzzling over things on the earth's surface. I largely ignore the sky, just too much of it there. And then like a fortune cookie, the Lion Hunter called last week to say we were going to photograph the total eclipse of the moon at the Dipper Ranch. We agreed to meet early the next morning.  I have been missing eclipses and sleeping through meteorite showers since 1986, so I was determined to try harder this time. Over the next 12 hours, curiosity and photography once again brought me face-to-face with intimate details of nature, even extraterrestrial nature.

Denning

Wet, cold and dark induce dreamy illusions as a storm envelopes Long Ridge.

Denning - a personal definition - reluctance to leave the lair; the time of year when wet, dark and cold conditions cause a shift towards low metabolic activities:  reading, writing, searching for thermal underwear and down comforter, mending, walnut-cracking while watching movies, sleeping, thinking about but not actually waterproofing boots, dreaming of a functional woodstove, baking, and more reading this time with a cat sitting in lap.


The season of glorious clouds has been superseded by the wet season with increasing periods of cold and darkness.  Morningside, I argue with myself in the hot shower, "See you are waterproof.  Get going!"  Instead, I find lion faces in the fake marble patterns of the cheap shower walls and the daylight just gets shorter.

Seasonal Attention Disorder

Sunset 11-05-10
One day too early for the walnut harvest party

The clouds are back.  I say that every year, don't I?  After the summer dry season, the tinted, shape-shifting clouds highlight the huge space looming above us, and then by association, the curved earth we scratch upon.

Pretty sunrises start the day and spectacular sunsets inspire evening thoughts.

Mr. Accipiter

This small hawk was sitting on a fence post as I motored up the drive this morning. Birds often ignore the car, even if it is moving, however, they flush as soon as I get out of the car. When I saw the hawk, I eased the car near the post, set the hand-brake and crawled back through the seats of my station wagon to get my camera. Good thing I took that yoga class on Friday.

Even when I unrolled the window, he didn't budge. Mostly, he was scanning the pasture below the drive with an occasional slight head rotation and dark eye cast at my car. I guess a small black car with mud on it probably looks like one of the cows. It's an Angus car.

We've had two days of blustery rain (yeah, keep it up until May!) with sunny breaks. This morning, loose white clouds were drifting under a dense dark mid-altitude band of clouds, and perhaps the little birds and their predators were getting a few bites to eat between storms. Or they could have been blown in by the storm front.

Accipiters are small hawks that make quick dashing flights among brush and branches to capture smaller birds - aerial pursuit. We get both sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper's hawks and I can't tell the difference. I was feeling frustrated until I read 3 pages in Hawks in Flight on how to tell the two apart, including "Arguments about identification of accipiters may well account for more broken friendships and more failed marriages between hawk watchers than all other causes combined." There's a lot of trouble packed into those little raptor bodies.

My guess is that Mr. Accipiter is a sharp-shinned hawk since he seemed ridiculously small for a savage raptor and his folded tail had a notch in the end. He also did not have the extremely long tail of a Cooper's hawk that often makes me think, "Is that a raptor or a military drone that just flew by?" My reference to "Mr." for this bird is only creative license. I make absolutely no claim to being able to distinguish whether this is a male or female bird. Although they look nearly identical, there is enough size difference between sexes within each accipiter species (males are about 1/3 smaller), that female sharpies are almost as large as male Cooper's. As a lone birder this morning, I can make these claims without offending anyone. You are welcomed to share your assessment in the comments, but no complaining about my hawk photography or our friendship might just teeter under the weight of this "Artful Dodger" (Dunne).
See also:
Hawks in Flight, Pete Dunne, David Sibley & Clay Sutton, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.

The Beautiful Colors of Thirst

I took some friends for a walk on the Dipper Ranch on the day after Christmas. As we headed back to the ranch house for a spaghetti dinner, the sunset colored the sky. We were in awe. The photo above was taken at 5:17 pm and the photo below was taken 3 minutes later. We rarely get such colors for either sunrise or sunset in this part of California. Mostly it is either blank blue sky or fog.

On December 28, the sunset clouds were back but with hanging bases (photo below). This was probably virga - raindrops or ice falling from a cloud but evaporating before they reach the ground. It indicates a layer of dry air beneath the cloud. Sometimes the evaporation associated with virga increases the water vapor in the dry layer until there is enough humidity that rainfall can make it all the way to the ground. Not this day. Just beautiful colors, no rainfall.


Coastal California has a Mediterranean climate. Summers are dry and winters are wet with relatively mild temperatures year round. In our area, there is virtually no rain from June through September; most annual rainfall occurs from November through April.

But not this water year. Weeks later, it's still warm and dry and no rain or fog in sight. We could be entering our third year of drought. So far in January 2009, San Francisco has received 0.24 inches of rain. The last time it was so low in January was 0.26 inches in 1920.

My lips and fingers are cracking and the start of the pollen season has us sneezing. Meanwhile, the winter animals are trying to find water. My bathroom window looks out at a cattle trough. These days all kinds of animals are visiting it and a trip to the bathroom is like looking out a blind on an African safari. A flock of over one hundred band-tailed pigeons visits the trough every morning. Even Cole the grey ranch cat makes a morning pilgrimage.



















This last one I call the Buzzard Bar.