Date/time: Saturday 2022-02-19, 08:00-09:30Location: Natural Bridges State ParkWeather: Chilly (8.3C), as sun hadn’t yet risen above the roofs of the houses nearby; very light breeze For Day 2 of the 2022 Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) I went to Natural Bridges, not suspecting that I would be able to ID and count so many species…
Great Backyard Bird Count 2022
This weekend, 18-21 February 2022, are the four days of the Great Background Bird Count. This is a global community science project in which people go out and document bird life. The beauty of a project like this is that is available to anyone who has a window to the outside. Of course, anybody can…
The ripple effect
At ~05:00h UTC on 15 January 2022, the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano erupted. The eruption was probably followed by a massive undersea landslide, which set tsunami waves out across the Pacific Ocean. This time translates to ~21:00h PST on Friday 14 January, and for the rest of this entry all times and dates…
Glow
On this winter solstice, as we anticipate the return of light, I thought I’d write about a different kind of light. Merriam-Webster defines fluorescence as “luminescence that is caused by the absorption of radiation at one wavelength followed by nearly immediate reradiation usually at a different wavelength and that ceases almost at once when the…
Hungry? Then just keep swimming
Yesterday I had some time to kill before getting a COVID test, and, as usual, wandered down to the ocean. This time I was at Seacliff State Beach. It was pretty crowded, so I walked onto the pier to see if the fishermen were having any luck. They weren’t, really. One man kept catching jack…
Butterflies
I go to Natural Bridges quite often, to play in and study the rocky intertidal. But at this time of year, before the low tides really get useful, there is another reason to visit Natural Bridges—to see the monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus). Natural Bridges State Park is a butterfly sanctuary, providing a safe overwintering spot…
A promising start
Over the weekend the atmospheric river slammed into Northern California and settled over us for a few days. Our weather station at home, roughly at sea level, measured 4.5 inches of rain. On Sunday afternoon it was extremely windy, and I think the rain wasn’t falling vertically enough to be captured by the rain gauge,…
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…
Hoppenings at the beach
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve rented two super telephoto lenses, to see what all the hype was about. I mean, do I really need 500 or 600mm of reach? I had read up on the specs of such lenses, and one major drawback is the weight—1900 grams or more. Would I be willing…
Anniversary
One year ago today a lightning storm settled over the Santa Cruz Mountains and dry lightning ignited a bunch of wildfires. Given the drier-than-normal conditions at the time the fires took off like crazy and eventually merged into one megablaze that CalFire dubbed the CZU Lightning Complex fire. The CZU Lightning Complex fire burned over…