I’m not a big fan of Descartes. In spite of his genius and complexity, he held some mechanisticviews toward nature and non-human animals. But I’ll give him some love for this explanation of rainbowsI recently read at the UCAR website. He simplified the study of a rainbow to one rain droplet — and how light refracts…
Attack of the Giant Fish People
I saw these gigantic creatures slithering through the shallows — whipping up mud with each slap of the tail. They looked like radioactive versions of pond koi, ranging from about two to four feet long. And where I was, it was just me and and wind and the sound of their slither, evoking the Creature…
The Art in Bull Kelp
I never appreciated kelp until, 1) I first saw this particular monster of a kelp, and 2) I saw close-ups of kelp shot by better nature photographers than I — capturing the golden palette of this gargantuan plant.
Encounters With [the Elusive] California Beach Hopper
California Beach Hopper or Megalorchestia californiana As fleas go, they’re giants. Not giants in the sense of Bikini-Atoll-nuclear-mutant-gone-bad giants. But by flea standards, they’re positively huge — about 1 inch long. That’s probably because they’re not parasitic dog or cat fleas, but rather, amphipods — shrimp-like creatures who dine on organic matter at the outer…
Marine Mammal Viewing — From a Distance
Hugh and I had another wildlife harassment incident this past week with a family on the Mendocino coast. We hiked over an unpopulated bluff and saw a mom and kids chasing a young sea lion across the rocks for a photo op. Their actions were forcing the young animal away from her resting spot, as…
Wasp Art
Wasp Nest – ©ingridtaylar I didn’t see it this way through the viewfinder — the aquarelle tone and texture of this wasp nest, clutching the painted boards. (Just as I didn’t see the pixie faceof a blue damselfly I’d been shooting over a pond — until I offloaded those giant orbs-for-eyes onto my Mac.) I…
Splendor in the Low Tide
An homage to Warren and Natalie — in title alone. There’s photographic magic in the sun rising over a super-low tide. At the point where dawn meets a -2.0, the strange, the stunning, the predictable and the chaotic all converge on that plane of tide pools, mudflats, and beach hopper burrows. One of my favorite…
R.I.P. “Hi” – San Francisco’s Young Peregrine Falcon
This video compresses days 20 to 32 in the lives of three Peregrine Falcon eyasses (chicks) nesting in the PG&E building in downtown San Francisco. See photos and visual logs of the young San Francisco Peregrines in local photographer Glenn Nevill’s Raptor Galleries. And learn more about the Peregrine Falcon research at the website of…
More Alameda Terns: Caspian, Forster’s, Least Terns
Take a look at this image of terns — not because it’s anything spectacular. In fact, those terns were but specks on my visual horizon, so this is a dramatic crop to show just one thing: the size differential between the Caspian Terns and the Forster’s Terns I wrote about in a previous post. The…
There is a Season … Terns (Alameda Terns)
Lame Byrds pun aside . . . Tern Nation in Alameda Their gravelly call precedes them, these terns with their fuzzy black berets and orange feet. They sound like aerial barflys with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. When it’s a row of more than 50 terns — alternately calling to each other…
