Woodland Plants near Blue Hole, Virginia

Two months ago, Catey and I were just finishing up a trip to Vermont, Virginia, and North Carolina, making stops along the way to visit special people and places. One of our adventures near Charlottesville was a hike with Rose to Blue Hole. Although we put our feet in the Moormans River, we did not swim at this well-known swimming spot. As Rose told us, there had been a renowned rope swing there until Summer 2012, when someone with a chainsaw, presumably worried about liability, took it upon themselves to cut the tree on which it hung. That story is here.

Those guys walked ahead and I stopped to find some old friends in the undergrowth -- woodland plants that I recognized from doing plant surveys in Illinois when I lived there.

I stopped to photo the heart-shaped, almost glisteny leaf of the wild ginger. I believe it has fine hairs on its surface to give it the texture it has. , which was lighted nicely, by the time I found it, by the tall forest above it.

The dappled appearance of a woodland floor in the summer can have a soothing effect on us. However, plants need light -- so leaves of woodland plants have to be ready to capture the few bursts of sunlight that filter through, even in the long days of summer. I don't know whether ginger or hepatica actually follow the sun as it moves throughout the sky, but they may. Plants do this, and it's called phototropism -- here's a link to a video showing it.

Asarum canadense (wild ginger), Shenandoah National Forest, August 2013.

Hepatica nobilis var. obtusa (liver leaf), Shenandoah National Forest, August 2013.

Orb in woods (I'll call it a Virginia Fly Trap), Shenandoah National Forest, August 2013.

Despite Shutdown, the Presidio Remains Open

I'm not usually news-y in my posts. I'm mainly just posting this for you, my friends and family who will probably hear it from me here before we have a chance to talk or text. 

Ugh...the Federal Government has shut down! Citizens are locked out of National Parks. As the article linked mentions, this is really bad news for tourism-related businesses near Yosemite already hugely affected by the finally contained Rim Fire.

GGNRA gate daisy chain, Marin, 2012.

The Presidio of San Francisco, where I work as a biotech, is largely unaffected by the shutdown: we are financially self-sustaining as of the current fiscal year. As such, the Presidio remains open despite the shutdown. 

However, the Volunteer Agreement under which our volunteers work is a National Park Service agreement -- when volunteers donate their services, they actually do the opposite of "waiving" their rights; they become protected under NPS' workers compensation insurance.

I'm selfishly hoping that as a result, I will have the opportunity to lead a few extra bird walks during our regularly scheduled program times for volunteers who still want to come enjoy the Presidio. Maybe my fellow biotechs will want to do plant walks too. My NPS colleagues will have to stay home...without pay, at least until the government kicks in again and they receive back-pay.

How Birds Make a Living on the Coast

I took a picture of the poster below a few years back, when I had biked with my buddy Diony up to Point Reyes National Seashore. A generous acquaintance named Dale, whom I'd met at a large sustainability festival that November, offered us a floor to sleep on, which was something we greatly appreciated. We rode the 35 (or so) miles in the rain. 

Marin County weather - phone screenshot, December 19, 2010.

The next morning, we would meet up with another group of fellow birders to participate in the Christmas Bird Count, patrolling the uplands and shorelines near our assigned portion of the count circle: Abbott's Lagoon. That would also be fairly physically taxing, but rewarding, of course. The round trip by bike and dawn-to-dusk birding we did that weekend is another story.


The poster hangs in the researcher housing near the Bear Valley Visitor Center at Point Reyes. In some ways, I like places like this better than visitor centers. I lived in housing like this for a short spell at Santa Ana NWR when I served my first AmeriCorps term in 1997. (Dale was also serving an AmeriCorps term.) There were so many similarities: ordinary, non-matching furniture in simple arrangements; miniblinds; wall-to-wall carpeting; discarded reading material about local natural history, and wall decorations like maps and this poster. And this one had an outdated, but still apparently used, Nintendo video game system plugged into an old crappy TV. This adds another layer of interest: a researcher's brainless escape from long days of physically and mentally challenging field research.

How Birds Make a Living on the Coast poster. Categories/strategies:  Scavengers; Predators; Seed-Eaters; Insect-Eaters; Fish-Eaters; Dabbling Ducks; Diving Ducks; Food-Strainers; Invertebrate-Eaters.

I thought of this poster a few days ago. I was birding at Crissy Lagoon in the Presidio, leading my monthly bird walk for volunteers in our community-based volunteer habitat restoration program. We saw a rare bird, a northern waterthrush, so I returned later with our office camera, wanting to capture the rarity. While waiting for the waterthrush to reappear (which, eventually he did, and luckily has for other photographers who can do a much better job of capturing it), I had good chances to look at and photograph some marsh birds. Shorebird migration has brought curlews, willets, sandpipers, and plovers to the marsh. This creates a golden opportunity to teach the concepts described in the poster...which I did to two passersby during our bird walk. I had them look through the spotting scope that we were using. The long-billed curlew's bill is simply too long not to talk about. (By the way, the curlew is about chicken-sized, at least.)

Willet and long-billed curlew, Crissy Lagoon, August 30, 2013.

Getting back to the poster, if I could find one I'd buy a few copies. I have looked. It contains so much information in such a great format.

A few details (some blurry and poor-quality -- my bad!) from the poster are below.

Poster details (clockwise from upper left): bills designed to probe to different mud depths; belted kingfisher's fish swallowing technique; heron's fish swallowing technique; black skimmer's dining method and longer lower mandible.

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.