Twice now in the past six months I’ve gone to Las Vegas for a concert. Trust me, I’m just about the last person you’d expect to spend any time in Vegas—I have zero interest in gambling or shopping, and the nonstop lights and noise of the Strip really get on my nerves. So since we had some time to kill before the shows, we ventured out of the city to explore the desert.
One of the places we visited both times was Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada’s first state park, established in 1935. Located to the northeast of Vegas, Valley of Fire is about as un-Vegas as you can get. It’s only about an hour out of the city, and is a welcome change from the sensory overstimulation of the Strip. It would be brutally hot there in the summer, but in the fall and late winter was lovely. Even though it will never be one of my favorite habitats, I find the desert fascinating. The limited color palette has my photographer’s eye looking for nuances in color value and texture in the landscape. And some of the blue skies are amazing.
On the way to Valley of Fire this time we drove through the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. One of the interesting places we passed was Rogers Spring, which is a naturally occurring oasis. It runs continually throughout the year, although the National Park Service website says that the ultimate source of the water is uncertain.
The sign that is mostly obscured by foliage tells people that they can protect the ecology of this rare desert oasis by not releasing their pet fish/reptiles/amphibians into the spring. Clearly the warning comes too late, as I saw many “liberated” pet fish—guppies, gouramis, and goldfish—swimming in the spring. Perhaps other springs are farther from the road and not as easily accessible as this one, and perhaps those are less affected by human stupidity.
The Valley of Fire takes its name from the iron-rich rocks that dominate the landscape. The geology of the place is amazing! We didn’t have time to go fossil-hunting or do much hiking, but even from the road the vistas were spectacular.
But the one thing I really wanted to see was one of the petroglyph formations in the park. The oldest petroglyphs in Valley of Fire date back to about 2000 BCE. There are two easily accessible petroglyph formations, and we visited the one nearest the visitor center in an area called Mouse’s Tank Trail.
These particular petroglyphs are right along the trail, which is why I don’t think I’m drawing unwanted attention to them. Anybody can walk right up them, and some people have unfortunately decided to leave their mark. Obviously, that smiley face on the far left isn’t a petroglyph. I was actually surprised that the petroglyphs were as un-messed-with as they appeared to be. I’m neither an anthropologist nor an historian, but I do wonder what these early artists were trying to communicate. Some of the images are clearly people, and with some imagination I can see animals in others. An anthropologist named Eric Pacl wrote a thesis about the Valley of Fire petroglyphs for their M.A. degree in Archeology from UNLV in 2012. I defer to their expertise and interpretation of the petroglyphs.
So if you find yourself in Vegas and don’t want to the whole Vegas thing, head out of town and check out Valley of Fire State Park. You won’t regret it!
This afternoon I was hanging some laundry to dry on the back deck, when something reddish caught my eye. I grabbed the binoculars, peered down into the bushes, and saw a pair of ears emerging from behind a bush. Soon a very handsome coyote came out to bask in the sun. Just in case it did anything interesting I fetched the camera, which was fortunately already wearing the 400mm lens, and settled down to watch for a while.
After a few more moments enjoying the sun, the coyote got up and went on alert. It had clearly heard something. A late lunch, maybe?
But in the manner of a cat, the coyote dropped the rodent and played with it for a while.
Once the rodent (which I think was a rat of some kind) was captured, it took more chomping than I had anticipated for the coyote to actually eat it. I kept thinking, “Okay, it must be done now,” and the coyote would turn its head to show me the rodent sticking out of the side of its mouth.
The entire event, from when the coyote first heard the rustling of the rodent to when it stood up and walked away, lasted about five minutes. Shortly after finishing its meal the coyote stood up, threw a glance down the hill, and disappeared into the bushes.
We often hear coyotes yipping at night, which inevitably riles up all the neighborhood dogs, and occasionally we capture one on the critter cam. It’s not unusual to see coyotes in the daylight, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to see one hunting and making a kill. This coyote looked very healthy. And this is why we keep the cats indoors!
Earlier this week I collected a plankton sample and settled down for a day of microscopy. For a variety of reasons it was my first foray into actual biology for the month of June, and I just wanted to feel like a marine biologist for a while.
As far as plankton samples go, there wasn’t a lot to write home about. The large centric diatoms that we had seen in the spring were much less abundant, although there was quite a bit of the pennate diatom Pseudonitzschia. Part of the reason I did the plankton tow was to have something to look at under the microscope and to practice taking photos. There are all sorts of gadgets that allow one to use a phone to take photos through the microscope, but I’ve found those to be either specific to one phone model or too fiddly and frustrating to get properly lined up. Besides, when I bought my microscope several years ago now I had the foresight to splurge for the trinocular head, which allows me to mount a real camera and leaves both eyepieces available to look through. Might as well take advantage of it!
So, I just took a bunch of photos.
First up was a chain diatom in the genus Chaetoceros. Phase contrast lighting might not have been the best option here, but oh well. Chaetoceros cells are box-shaped, with a spine protruding from each corner of the box. Aside: ‘chaeto’ means ‘hair’ or ‘bristle’ in Greek. The spines of adjacent cells sort of interlock and hold the cells together, forming the chain. Spines also provide some defense against predation.
Many species of Chaetoceros form straight chains like this.
Earlier in the spring there were a lot of Coscinodiscus diatoms in the local plankton. Those are the big button-like diatoms with the sculpted frustule. They aren’t nearly as common now, but I did see a few. And managed to get a nice shot of one:
The star of the show was Thalassiothrix, another diatom in which the ends of cells cells remain connected after dividing. Instead of forming chains as Chaetoceros does, Thalassiothrix makes colonies that are either zig-zag or star-shaped. It just so happens that this organism looks especially brilliant under darkfield lighting, so I was very happy.
Isn’t that a spectacular organism? I had a lot of fun developing and processing that image, and am happy at how well it turned out. Darkfield lighting is fun to play with!
One of my favorite seabirds is the pigeon guillemot (Cepphus columba). According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithololgy, pigeon guillemots should be present along the California coast year-round, but I seem to see them only during the summer breeding season, when they forage close to shore. Having first to incubate eggs, and then to feed hungry chicks, the adults cannot venture too far from land. At this time they are central place foragers, which just means that they make short flights to find food, then always return to the same site (where the nest is). During the nonbreeding season the pigeon guillemots are still around, but forage farther out to sea. Once their young have fledged and are feeding on their own, there is no need for the adults to spend much time on land at all, and they certainly are no longer tied to any particular location.
This morning I was at the marine lab looking for the black oystercatcher chicks that hatched recently. I didn’t seem them today. However, patience was rewarded and I saw a pair of pigeon guillemots land on one of the cliffs near where I was sitting. For a while they just rested, then they rose up onto their feet and started circling around each other. That sure looked like courtship behavior, so I brought up the camera and snapped away.
Given how conspicuous those red feet are, it’s no surprise that they are indeed used in courtship displays. The birds walk around each other to show off their feet, and touch their bills together. The inner surface of the mouth is a matching crimson color. Presumably the redness indicates vitality that would be desirable in a mate.
I’ve seen pigeon guillemots nesting in cliffs up at Pigeon Point. I’m not sure where the birds at the marine lab have made their nests, though. Must investigate further!
For years now we’ve known that the world just beyond our back deck was owned by a variety of wildlife. We’ve seen coyotes and bobcats often enough to think “Good to know you guys are still there!” and of course we hear coyotes a lot more often than we see them. We’ve also known the arroyo behind our house to be in the territory of a mountain lion—a collared female had been tracked there. She, however, has proven to be much more elusive, hiding from people just like the cat she is.
In late November I bought a critter camera for my husband’s birthday, and it arrived on the slow boat from China about two weeks later. We joked that it would be really cool if we caught a mountain lion some time, ha ha ha. But we honestly had no great expectations. I mean, once you set up the camera you have to hope that it’s pointing in the right direction and that something interesting walks in front of it. Alex set up the critter camera in the afternoon of Sunday 10 December, and then we forgot about it until the next day. . .
. . . when we saw that the camera had captured both photos and videos of something, and it was a big something! It was a big cat!
Funny how even a mountain lion (Felis concolor) is still a cat. The posture and behavior is not at all different from the feline tasty morsels that live inside the house with us. We thought that someone we know should buy a new refrigerator, so we can give the big kitty a box.
Look at the size of these paws!
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-10
Note the time stamps on the photos and video. This cat was prowling around after dinner time. Of course, being mid-December-ish it was already full dark, but this is hardly the middle of the night. So the camera caught its first big animal just a few hours after it went live. Call it beginner’s luck.
A week later we caught another mountain lion! Or maybe it was the same mountain lion. This one was also uncollared and, from what we can see of the footage, has about the same build. Given that mountain lions tend to be territorial, I think this is the same cat, and this path above our beehives is a regular thoroughfare for it and other wildlife.
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-17
In a related coincidental matter, the first mountain lion was filmed using the new wildlife crossing that goes underneath Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains!
Last weekend the fabled Western Flyer came home to Monterey for a brief visit. For anyone who doesn’t recognize the name, the WesternFlyer is the boat that Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck took to the Sea of Cortez in 1940. At the time of the trip she was just another purse seiner in Monterey, and after the collapse of the sardine fishery she passed through several owners’ hands and was outfitted first as a deep water trawler and then as a crab boat. Several decades passed, and in 2012 the boat, now named the Gemini, sank near Anacortes, WA. She was refloated and sank again in early 2013. This time she was left on the bottom for several months. In June 2013 she was refloated again and taken to dry dock in Port Townsend, WA, where she sat for a couple of years until she was purchased and the long journey towards restoration began. The Western Flyer Foundation has more about the acquisition, restoration, and new purpose of this boat.
Fast forward to 2023, and it was time for the Western Flyer (somewhere along the way she was rechristened to her original name) to return to California. The majority of the work to restore her (woodwork, mechanical engine stuff, etc.) was done up in Washington, which was fitting because she was originally built in Tacoma. She had to come down to California, however, to be kitted out to do science. And she will live here and work out of Monterey.
On Saturday 4 November 2023, the public was invited to welcome the Western Flyer to Monterey. It was a big event, with a boat parade, a decorated boat contest, and much speechifying. The plan was for boats to gather outside the Monterey harbor and wait until the Flyer arrived from Moss Landing with her escort, wait until she was berthed in her temporary spot in the marina, and then parade past her and wherever the judges were. I never did quite figure out where that was. We trailered our friend Murray’s boat, Scherzo, down to Monterey to see the Flyer and tootle along in the boat parade. Scherzo has her own stories to tell, as she was built in Murray’s backyard over a period of several years. Murray was unable to join us, so it was just Alex and me in the boat parade aboard Scherzo.
It was hard to count the boats out on the bay waiting for the Flyer, but there were about 40. We were in the middle of the pack. Most of the boats were sailboats but there were a few motorboats and one research vessel along for the ride. Scherzo was definitely the only little boat!
Given our position in the middle of the boat scrum, we didn’t get a very good view of the Flyer when she arrived. But once she got into the harbor, the fireboat escort made it easier to see where she was.
We were instructed to wait outside the harbor until the Flyer was docked, and then position ourselves into single queue. Being quite ignorant about how these things are done, I imagined that getting ~40 vessels of various sizes and propulsion systems, all bobbing around in Monterey Bay, into a single-file line would be like herding cats, but it was very well organized. Clearly these boat captains know what they’re doing.
And how was I doing with my infamous seasickness, you ask? I was hopped up on Dramamine, the only drug that works for me. And I was fine while on the water. After that, though, the sleepiness took hold and I had to take a nap on a park bench.
The Flyer was docked at about noon, and the speechifying began. Tours of the boat would start at 13:00 and end at 16:00. We left to get some lunch, hoping to beat the crowd, and came back at around 14:00 to find that there were still hordes of people waiting to go aboard. So we took Scherzo out for another tootle, first cruising around the harbor to get some nice shots of the Flyer.
Western Flyer, docked in MontereyWestern Flyer, docked in Monterey
We still had time to kill, so we left the harbor and went down the coast as far as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, stopping to look at sea otters and murres. Then we looked at the time and saw that it was about 15:30, so we turned around and high-tailed it back to the harbor. We got Scherzo out of the water and ran over to the Flyer. By my watch it was 15:58, so I convinced the volunteer to let us get in line.
Even at the end of the public access period, it took about 45 minutes for us to get onto the boat. Once aboard, we could wander around and take pictures of pretty much everything. My eye, as usual, was drawn to the less obvious things.
This gentleman wearing the colors of the Italian flag, was explaining how purse seiners work. This display was on the rear deck, directly above what was originally the fish hold.
We were not allowed to go below decks into the fish hold, because that’s the part of the boat that isn’t finished yet. The aft section of the hold will be the science lab and will eventually be kitted out with microscopes and a small library. I imagine there will be computers, too.
One of my favorite bits of the boat was this wooden turtle inlaid on the aft deck. It wasn’t until we got home that I remembered this passage from Sea of Cortez:
They hung the turtle to a stay where it waved its flippers helplessly and stretched its old wrinkled neck and gnashed its parrot beak. The small dark eyes had a quizzical pained look and a quantity of blood emerged from the pierced shell. . . . And now a strange and terrible bit of knowledge came to Tiny; turtles are very hard to kill. Cutting off the head seems to have little immediate effect. This turtle was as lively as it had been, and a large quantity of very red blood poured from the trunk of the neck. The flippers waived frantically and there was none of the constricting motion of a decapitated animal.
Steinbeck, John, and Edward Flanders Ricketts. Sea of Cortez, The Viking Press, New York, 1941.
I didn’t think at the time to ask, but I bet this inlaid turtle marks the spot where the hawksbill turtle came to its unfortunate end.
Inside the cabin we could see just how crowded things were, for a total of seven people on a 6-week expedition. There were three pairs of narrow bunks for scientists and crew, and a separate room for the captain behind the wheelhouse. There would be no privacy.
The galley, on the other hand, felt rather spacious. The modern Western Flyer has a nifty modern fridge unit and seems well arranged to maximize usable space. The coolest part was the stove, which is the same model (although not the same exact unit) as in the original Flyer. It runs on diesel fuel and would have done a great job of heating the cabin area.
The Western Flyer was in Monterey for another day (Sunday), so visitors could come and take pictures of her, but no additional tours were allowed. Then on Monday she went back up to Moss Landing. She will be there for about six months, for the installation of the science lab. After that, the Western Flyer goes back to school. She will take students on cruises, to study oceanography and marine biology, combined with the arts and humanities, with the goal of fostering curiosity about the natural world. The Western Flyer Foundation offers these educational programs free of charge. If you would like to contribute to this endeavor, please consider donating to the Western Flyer Foundation.
Like many (most?) Californians, I was swept up in the 2023 wildflower superbloom, which followed on the record-setting rain and snowfall we saw in the previous winter. The rain caused disruptions in many areas of California; in my area, I had multiple students whose homes were flooded when the levee along the Pajaro River failed. I didn’t have to deal with anything nearly that serious, although I did have to make a lot of schedule adjustments for the field classes that I taught.
In my rather desultory way, I noticed that the flowers seem to be blooming later than usual. In previous years (2017 and 2019) we went flower hunting during my spring break at the end of March, and in some places the peak of the bloom had already finished. This year (2023) we went in mid-April, and the many of the flowers had yet to reach peak bloom. Another thing we did differently this year was to bypass most of the sites at lower elevations such as Carrizo Plain, which were way too crowded to be thoroughly enjoyable, and visit the hills where the roads were less tourist-friendly and thus less traveled. In general, flowers at the higher elevations are always a little behind those at lower elevations.
I took a ton of photos, of course, and the one that most accurately encapsulates the splendiferousness of the views is this one:
This was the typical color palette in these hills. At first I thought all the yellow was due to goldfields, which we had seen at lower elevations, but it turned out to be something entirely different. And note that there are two distinct shades of purple. Who are these? Here’s a key to the different floral colors in this landscape.
Flower A: Common hillside daisy (Monolopia lanceolata)
I remember seeing Castilleja exserta on previous trips, in dry, sandy areas. But I’d never seen dense patches of them, so that was new and fun. They are the flowers that make up the violet purple color. It is a low growing flower and seems to occur in open places among grasses.
The bluer shade of purple is due to Phacelia. I’m not sure which species, and my observation on iNaturalist hasn’t yet been identified. I think it’s P. ciliata, as it looks right and has been found in this area.
Flower D: California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Last, but certainly not least, was our state flower, the California poppy. We did see some dense patches of poppies in the hills but there were more prevalent in the flatlands—Carrizo Plain, Antelope Valley, and the Shell Creek Road area were chock full of poppies.
What the photos don’t depict is the dynamic aspect of these landscapes. At these elevations there was almost always a soft breeze, and the flowers sway with the wind. It’s really very soothing to watch. I had to zoom way in to record this video, but it’s totally worth it.
Just for funsies, I want to show off what might be my favorite photo of the weekend, taken at the end of the day. I encountered these handsome fellows along the Wildflower Loop at Windwolves Preserve. They both stared at me for so long that I had to take their picture. I never thought a bovine portrait would wind up in my portfolio, but there you have it.
With so much emphasis on the wildflower superbloom, one can easily overlook the torrential and destructive rains that were at least partly responsible for it. Ongoing climate change may mean that California oscillates between severe drought and flooding rains for the foreseeable future. It’s more than a little unsettling, but at least the rains bring flowers for us to enjoy.
Yesterday I had the great fortune to visit a new intertidal site. It can be accessed only by crossing private property. The property owner is my next-door neighbor, and he said I can visit any time. As I said, lucky me! The site is a little north of Pigeon Point, and at first glance the terrain is not very different from Pigeon. But I could tell that it a site that is rarely, if ever, visited by humans. It just had that look of being mostly undisturbed. Yesterday’s marine layer was low, making for dark skies and pretty lousy light for picture-taking, so I had to try something new.
This site has a lot of lovely pools and channels to explore, and at this time of year the water is very clear, which does make for good picture-taking. Halosaccion glandiforme, one of the charismatic red algae, is more abundant here than at other sites, and in the pools it grows quite a bit taller than it does on the rocks.
Here’s what it looks like on the tops of the rocks. This is a cluster of young thalli. The tallest of these “bladders” is about 4 cm tall. Note that they are about 2/3 full of water, with a large air space at the top.
This was a super fun morning. I’m looking forward to visiting this site again, when the light is better. When the daylight low tides return in a few months they will be in the afternoon. I anticipate some fantastic light shows in these pools and channels. I’ll be teaching most afternoons by then, but will get out as often as I can.
Dedication: For Krinkle, because I think he’d appreciate the juxtaposition
This is one of my favorite quotations from literature:
And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and back to the tide pool again.
—J. Steinbeck and E.F. Ricketts, Log from the Sea of Cortez
These words are never far from my thoughts when I contemplate the nature of life on planet Earth. And with this week’s release of the first images from the James Webb telescope, they rocketed back into my brain with full force.
To my eye, the most striking of these first images from James Webb is this one, of the Carina Nebula. It is just breathtaking.
Carina Nebula, photographed by the James Webb space telescope 2022-07-12 Public domain by NASA
When I started poking around NASA’s website I kept finding images that reminded me of my tide pool photos. So I want to share a few comparisons.
Stephan’s Quintet
NASA also released this photo of Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies found in the constellation Pegasus. Only four of the five galaxies are visible in this image.
Stephan’s Quintet, photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope 2022-07-12 Public domain by NASA
Those swirling white masses are vast sweeps of dust and gas. But to my mind they resemble spawning male marine invertebrates, of which I have seen more than any normal person. See what I mean?
Given all the justified hype over the images taken by James Webb, it’s sort of easy to forget about the Hubble Space Telescope. But Hubble has been taking spectacular images for years, giving humanity some of our first and best images of the universe far from home.
Abell 370
In the archived data from the Hubble Space Telescope, I found several eye-catching photos. This one, of Abell 370, reminded me of plankton. Abell 370 is another cluster of galaxies. It contains hundreds of galaxies held in a group by their mutual gravitational pulls. I love all the shapes of these galaxies, which do indeed look like plankters!
Abell 370, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2017 Public domain by NASA
In 2021 the Hubble Space Telescope took a photograph of the Prawn Nebula. As with most of images of amorphous things in space, I can’t explain why the Prawn Nebula has that name. Most of the light it emits is in wavelengths that we cannot see, so the Prawn Nebula is essentially invisible to the naked eye. This image from Hubble was taken in infrared light, and is beautifully colorful.
The Prawn Nebula, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2021 Public domain by NASA
The colors in this nursery for baby stars reminds me of the ones I see in some of our iridescent algae in the intertidal here on Earth.
In 2016, NASA’s Juno mission arrived at its target, the largest planet in our solar system. The vehicle carries a camera called the JunoCam, which sends data back to Earth. NASA collects the raw images and makes them available to the public for free, to be processed and edited. The public is thus making an ongoing contribution to science. The JunoCam is still operational. NASA also invites amateur astronomers to add their own photos of Jupiter, taken from personal telescopes, to the database of images.
Anyway, here’s a photo of Jupiter, taken by JunoCam and processed by Brian Swift:
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/BrianSwift
All of these lovely swirls brought to mind the patterns I sometimes see on the surface of a tide pool.
And now, having spent several hours marveling at the beauty of the stars as captured by the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, I take Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’ advice and return to my tide pool image library, where I see other swirling patterns that I did not find in any of the space photos. But I hope that they will be found out there, some day.
By all means, look up at the stars and marvel at the vastness of the universe. But don’t forget to also look down at where your feet are and marvel at the intricacy and exquisite beauty of what we can experience with our human senses.
Last night, 15 May 2022, there was a total lunar eclipse, which turned the full moon dark red. By the time the moon rose above the trees to the east the red phase was in full swing. I learned that it’s extremely difficult to photograph what is essentially the new moon against the night sky.
I had better success once the moon started moving out of Earth’s shadow and re-learned how to create photo montages. Some day I will remember how to do that and not have to learn it all over again. But the result is pretty nice!
