The Mighty Bay

Here is a photo I took on a rare pause as I biked across the Golden Gate Bridge a few weeks ago. It's two frames, stitched together digitally and then cropped to look square. The stitch job is pretty bad, but if you blur your eyes it doesn't matter much.

As I shot this, I thought to myself the caption: "The Morning Commute."

Morning commute, June 2013, San Francisco (stitch of two images).

Of all the photographs shot from the Golden Gate Bridge, how many can capture the glorious might of the Bay? Lately I've been thinking about the Gate itself: not as a deep ocean channel, but rather as a fantastically monstrous river. The mouth of many rivers that gushes out to the ocean, and gushes back in, bringing life in and out with it.

That's not actually the case; it's an estuary, a complex system mixed with both salt and freshwater. I have visited two estuaries where the salinity and purity is just right to permit the survival of a marine microorganism that produces "bioluminescense", or naturally produced light (it's completely unbelievable). I've read that this was once the case for San Francisco Bay -- early explorers documented it.

40% of California's surface area (and a bit of Oregon's) drains into the Bay. Take a minute to appreciate this:

I appreciate the Golden Gate Bridge -- it enables an astounding bike commute for me. But because of the Bridge, the Golden Gate itself is too often overlooked. 

I'm OK with that, though. Sometimes I'm just getting across the bridge myself without appreciating the environs. Sometimes I'm getting blasted by wind and less than fully appreciative of that. But sometimes I stop and peer over to see the porpoises, terns, and cormorants swimming below me. They are some of the benefactors of the tremendous supply of sustenance that gushes on the current under the bridge, mostly unseen to the human eye.

Blossom Petals

Petals from blossoms that littered the back porch in March have now turned to pears that fall when the wind gusts. I tasted one today that had fallen two days ago, and it was marvelous.

Pear blossom petals on the back porch, Spring 2013.

The neighborhood is full of plum trees given away by stains on the pavement below them. (I learned from the purple finches that the blossoms were tasty, mildly sweet.) Some trees have mounds of rotting brown/red plums that give off a boozy smell as you approach. If you look carefully through them, you can find ones that have just fallen and are perfect to eat, only a little bruised after having been released by the tree. But I only eat one or two on my walks now, having eaten up to a dozen on each walk for the last month.

One tree in the neighborhood is a cherry. The only way to harvest them is by shaking, listening and watching for the few that fall, and chasing them before they disappear into dirt or poison oak leaves. After giving the tree a gentle shake, I hold out my open hand in vain, but one day I will have the luck to have one land upon it.

Blackberries are ripe. Days are longer. It is easier to meet our neighbors now.

The Ordinary Extraordinary Junco

A fairly recent series of videos released from a multi-partner project team dedicated to studying and educating the world on the dark-eyed junco recently caught my attention. 

The series of eight videos is 88 minutes long, and can be watched piecemeal. 

http://juncoproject.org/

The subject of the project is a bird that you may be familiar with, and if not, I bet you'll notice in your surroundings after watching the videos. 

These videos provide insight into modern-day field ornithology about one particular species. As you'll see, with as much as people know about birds, each discovery in nature spawns a new series of questions. 

Below is a photo I recently took of an Oregon Junco in the Presidio. Plain, yet beautiful...ordinary, yet extraordinary. 

I have my own personal connection to the junco because I shot one for no reason when I was about 10 years old. It was winter in Wisconsin. The bird, hopping innocently on the ground, was fully entrusted to the safety of the environs of our backyard feeder. I hid around the house corner with my BB gun and fired. My aim was good, and it instantly died. I walked to pick it up, and I studied it. That one action taught me so much about the fragility of life, the consequences of a senseless action, the weight of a bird, the softness of feathers.

I don't think I talked to anyone about that act that day. In fact, I don't think I talked to anyone about it until about a year ago. I have been too ashamed. Yet, I might be learning that that one action was probably one of the formative moments that led me to a lifetime of working to help nature while teaching people what I can along the way.

Dark-eyed (Oregon) junco, Presidio, June 2012.

Fiddleneck

Trad by Barry Phillips

Note: this page has background music --  from the Barry Phillips (no relation) album Trad. To stop the loop, click the pause button (upper left) on the player above, or simply mute your speakers...

Fiddleneck. A satisfyingly fitting name for a relatively unmistakable plant with a flower cluster shaped like the scroll of a violin.

Fiddleneck, East Bay Regional Parks, April 2012.

 Although I took these photos last year near Oakland, this plant is currently in bloom in the Presidio.

Fiddleneck closeup, East Bay Regional Parks, April 2012.

But getting back to this shape. An interesting spiral array of flowers, arranged to accommodate many visiting bees at once.

The plant is named after the scroll of a violin, or cello -- but why is the neck of a fiddle shaped this way? I wondered, is there a chance that the fiddle's neck was designed after the shape of this flower?

This may be more interesting to me because I once played violin. (I probably would have gotten better had I spent more time practicing and less time studying the shape of the thing...) But anyway, I found an interesting blog post that gets into scroll design of the viols (violin, viola, cello, and string bass). Is it a tribute to the written word? Is it homage to the Fibonacci sequence? If you're up for a 4-minute video, pause the Barry Phillips and click here -- warning: you may need to watch it 2 or 3 times: Nature by Numbers.

OK. Did that change the way you see the natural world?

Getting back to the necks of fiddles, you may have read in the Fein Violins blog post above that animal heads were often carved into the necks of viols (as in the cello on the Trad album cover). You can find many examples of animal head (often renditions of lions with long tongues and slicked-back hair) scrolls online, maybe even in the string section of your local symphony. And here's something really cool: a cello with a woman's head for a scroll. Now I wonder -- do any plants resemble this?