This morning I went on a solo trip to one of my favorite intertidal sites up the coast a bit. I’ve been busy with stuff at the marine lab and my house is a construction zone this summer so it was really nice being alone in nature for a couple…
Category: General natural history
Crystals in the sky
Early this afternoon the clouds at the marine lab were very interesting, so I took some photos: These thin wisps are a subset of cirrus cloud called cirrus uncini clouds, commonly referred to as mares’ tails and characterized by the hooked formation (‘uncinus’ is Latin for ‘hook’). They occur high in the…
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And we have fledged!
Yesterday afternoon when I got home I checked out the red-tailed hawk nest across the canyon and didn’t see anybody home. Then I started scanning the trees on both sides of the canyon to see if the parents were around. While I was looking the dad flew in with prey…
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Almost branchers
Our red-tailed hawk chicks are sooo close to fledging now! I’ve been told that the tree-nesting raptors usually first leave the nest to hop around on branches; hence they’re called “branchers.” This afternoon I watched the chicks and was able to catch some of the maneuvering, which included hopping around…
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A naturalist goes in the field
This morning I took a small group of Seymour Center volunteers on a tidepooling trip to Point Piños (see red arrow in the photo below). Point Piños is a very interesting site. It marks the boundary between Monterey Bay to the right (east) of the point and the mighty Pacific Ocean…
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Timing is everything
This morning I went here (see arrow): See how it’s covered in water? I took this picture at about 13:00, probably right at high tide. And of course when I was out there this morning at 06:00, it was low tide. It wasn’t the greatest of low tides but it…
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Pre-flight calisthenics
Our red-tailed hawk chicks are growing bigger every day, and trading fluff for feathers as well. Their bodies are almost completely feathered by now, which makes their heads look small and strange, as though the heads are developing more slowly than the rest of the body. Given that the head…
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Old skills
When I was in graduate school I found myself drawn to the “old-fashioned” skills of classical zoology: observation of and experiments with living animals. I had, and still have, very little interest in the new-fangled high-tech methods of studying animals, and part of me strongly resents having to homogenize an…
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Sea and sky
As a native Californian, I’ve been living with drought my entire life. Well, maybe not so much during the El Niño of 1997-98, but even then the thought “We have water now but might not later…” was always in the back of my mind. This season we had a great…
