I’ve been monitoring the fish happenings at our local beach — the official “Fish Count” of returning salmon. I knew this park years ago when my family lived close by. It was a figment then of what it’s now become, restored to encourage Coho and Chum salmon to return up creek and spawn. The habitat…
A Budding Amphipodologist
Chris Anderson said it back in 2004: The Internet has a long tail . . . so long, in fact, that a person can leap from being a writer one day, to a budding amphipodologist the next. This may not be the anecdote Anderson had in mind when he wrote about the long tail….
Beach Fleas . . . Again
My late dad and I share a gene that — due to a missed deadline with the Humane Genome Project — hasn’t been mapped for posterity. He dreamed (and I dream) in preposterous anachronisms and juxtapositions. One of Dad’s recurring dreams was about a horse in a penthouse apartment who would fling himself off the…
A Short Visit With Lines Written in Early Spring
I have Frank of EcoSnake to thank for today’s post. He included Wordsworth’s poem in the comment section below one of his photos on Flickr. I can relate to the melancholy of this poem, having many times “sat reclined” in my own grove, contemplating what “man has done to man.” People like Frank are a…
Mudbath
I’m keen to see eyes peering out of mudflats . . . the creatures from the bog, the foraging carp, the bullfrog in camo, a Pacific chorus frog in a dewdrop. I shot this photo at Blake Garden, just north of Berkeley in the Kensington Hills. My vision is tuned to anomalies and, sure enough,…
Ahimsa at the Tidepools
I swear, if I have to ask one more kid to stop throwing rocks at animals . . . It was an imperfect plan to begin with: super-low tide on a Sunday at the gorgeous but hardly-secret Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. I’ve been waiting for a daylight minus (-) tide for a few months. I’d even…
The Mock Snail
This title, The Mock Snail caused the tiniest bit of confusion on Flickr. He’s a real snail. It’s just that the psychedelic tone rendered by my Raynox 150 lens inspired a Lewis Carroll reference.
Life Beneath a Water Lily
A water lily leaf in its imperfection . . . its asymmetry . . . its blemishes . . . the leaf detritus and pebbles collected at its core. In the family Nymphaeaceae, this — one of many species of water lilies — lives in the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. Its underwater stems provide cover…
An American Bullfrog in Berkeley
I don’t usually ignore visual anomalies. They bring me to interesting things. On this Berkeley day, something seemed out of place — that nagging oddity in my periphery. I turned and looked closer in the mud. Sure enough, there was an unusual outline in the creek bed. As quickly as I noticed the frog, it…
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…
