On Tuesday 8 July 2025 I had a total joint replacement of my right knee. Over the past year and a half or so the osteoarthritis had gotten really bad, to the point that I couldn’t walk without pain. Much less actually do anything active, like hiking or tidepooling or even carrying a camera around…
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Afternoon mystery
For the past week and a half or so, every afternoon between about 14:00 and 14:30 there has been an outbreak of coyote noise in the canyon behind my house. It starts up, goes furiously for about 5 minutes, and then abruptly stops. I’m rehabbing a new knee joint and am not really mobile now,…
Collateral damage
My home town of Santa Cruz made national news the other day, 23 December 2024, when a series of massive swells caused part of the Municipal Wharf to collapse into the ocean. People in the restaurants and other businesses had to evacuate immediately, and three people were dropped into the water of Monterey Bay (they…
Happy New Year!
Año Nuevo Island is a small island just off Point Año Nuevo along the San Mateo County coast. These place names come from the fact that the first European to see this bit of California, the Spaniard Sebastián Vizcaíno, first saw it on 3 January 1603. Of course, the native people of this area, the…
Take a class with me!
This coming semester, Fall 2023, I am teaching marine biology (BIO 11B) at Cabrillo College. I’ve done this for years, but what makes this semester different is that I’m teaching it asynchronously online. We’ve been teaching in-person for a few semesters now, but due to an unusual crunch for lab space the marine bio class…
You never see just one
For the past several weeks now, the by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella) have been washing up on local beaches. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one floating on the surface of the sea, which is Velella‘s actual habitat. And when you see one Velella on the beach, all you have to do is take a…
Practice, practice, practice
Over the weekend we had dinner with some family members down in Monterey, and my niece gave me a leaf. She had collected it somewhere and carried it around for a while, and I never did get a clear answer about where it came from. To me it looks like a magnolia leaf. When I…
Upcoming talk
In this strange pandemic school year with classes online and student clubs not able to meet in person, the Natural History Club has been meeting virtually twice a week. We can’t go out as a group on any field trips, so the students have been sharing their nature journals online. Yesterday we played Jeopardy! I…
False nightfall
California has been burning for almost a month now. Wildfires rage up and down the state, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. I haven’t bothered looking up the latest stats on acreage destroyed because, frankly, it would be too depressing. All across social media today people posted photos of orange skies…
Fire Breaks
Today’s report was written by a guest blogger, Alex Johnson, who also happens to be my husband. 26 August 2020 In the late afternoon last Saturday, the wind shifted and we got our first breaths of fresh air all week. We even saw actual clouds and blue sky for the first time in 5 days!…