The color saturation’s pretty good too. Some days it’s better to be lucky than good.
FYI, things seem to be heating up a bit so far as the schedule is concerned, so you might be seeing more of these “one picture, one caption” posts for a while.
We’ll see.
Filed under Flowers, Photography
On Sunday I told the story of a pair of red-tail hawks that I saw just after I got home with groceries. The first was the literal embodiment of “death from above,” while the second perched on the telephone pole across the street and gave me time to take some pictures.
Thank you for staying there while I grabbed the camera from inside the house!
What are you looking at? Okay, I know that I outweigh this dude (dudette? I don’t know) by about a factor of 100 or so, but I would still give him at least even odds if he really, REALLY decided to take his chances with me.
Now looking for lunch, having apparently decided that I’m not it. Probably too tough and stringy to eat.
Anything downhill? That’s where his mate went with her mourning dove entrée.
What’s that, a lizard? Or maybe one of the bunnies in the bushes?
After taking pictures for over five minutes and praying that he wouldn’t take off, I was now wanting to catch some photos of him flying off (and I needed to rescue those groceries from the car…). Finally he starts to stretch.
And he’s off! Look at those claws! Okay, so forget my 50/50 comment, the betting’s now 60/40 on the hawk.
You can see why their called “red-tailed” hawks! Out over the canyon and gone…
Time to go grab the groceries out of the car.
Filed under Birds
Big clouds. Broken. Puffy. Probably VFR conditions breaking through that deck, but I don’t know if I would push my luck and go through on a check ride.
More clouds to the north but a different pattern. Can you see the tiny hummingbird?
Now can you find the tiny hummingbird? How about the mid-sized jet? A Southwest 747 to be exact, going straight in to Burbank Runway 8. Small compared to the clouds, huge compared to the hummingbird, mid-sized compared to a 747.
It’s all perspective.
Filed under Birds, Flying, Photography, Weather
I’m only semi-functional tonight – it’s been a lot of days of work in a row, and there’s another big thing kicking off this week, so there are few neurons to spare.
But one thing that’s a great diversion for a few minutes here or there when I need a break is watching all of the videos from the volcanic eruption in southwest Iceland.
It started on March 19th, with a mid-sized eruption. Lots of lava, but no huge ash clouds like the eruption a few years back in northern Iceland that shut down air traffic to and from Europe for weeks. No toxic gas emissions that could kill whole towns or groups of nearby spectators and scientists, so the scientists and spectators came in droves.
Then, after a few weeks, a series of smaller fissures started opening up along a line to the northeast. Most of these petered out, but one cinder cone started growing and growing and has now become the main vent. For a while there were spectacular fountains of lava, but these have died down a little bit and been replaced with little surges of lava ever ten minutes or so. Every ten minutes or so 24/7 for weeks, and the valley that all of these vents are in has finally filled.
A couple weeks ago the valley overflowed down into a canyon and started filling up a small valley below, and some time in the last couple of days a second spot overflowed in a HUGE push and now that lower valley is threatening to overflow. Once that happens it’s only a half-mile or so down the hill to the ocean, cutting the Southern Ring Road in the process.
There are six or seven or so cameras set up, all streaming online 24/7. My favorite site is a combination of four screens, one with a map that’s updated every day, the other three cycling through five or six different cameras:
(Image: Tokolosh YouTube Channel)
There are lots of videos on YouTube showing time lapses and other great events through the whole twelve week event so far, with no end in sight.
Like the drones that keep flying over and suffering the consequences of density altitude:
THE FLOOR IS LAVA!
No, really… Be careful out there.
Two experiences today where I was either without a camera (and it happened really fast) or I had a camera and something happened too fast to move, focus, and shoot.
Experience The First – Death From Above
I had done my usual Sunday morning COVID-based grocery run and pick up of breakfast. As I pulled into the driveway and got out, I saw a pair of red-tail hawks circling a quarter-mile or so down to the south, maybe 500′ above us. I locked the car and walked around to the trunk, popped it open, and for whatever reason I looked south for the hawks and couldn’t see them. As I looked, I heard the cry of a hawk directly overhead (exactly like the sound effect used in every Western since the first talkie hit the flicks), looked up, and saw one of them with wings tucked, in a full dive. “Death From Above” indeed!
Across the street, perched on a telephone wire, was a mourning dove. The hawk at the last second in an eyeblink extended his wings, hit the brakes, extended his claws, and that mourning dove EXPLODED into a cloud of feathers. Out of this fluttering mass of feathers emerged the hawk with its lunch, struggling a bit with the weight of its prey, but as the hill drops of pretty swiftly it made it off with no problem into the trees a couple of houses down.
As I was picking up my jaw from seeing that, the other red-tail hawk swooped in low from behind our house, crossed to where the kill had been, and perched on the power line transformer on top of the pole. I have to wonder if it went there since it was very close to where the kill had just happened, the hawk logic being that where there was one fat, slow bird, there might be others. This time I did grab my camera (as I took the cold food and hot breakfast into the house) and spent several minutes taking pictures as the second hawk scanned the neighborhood for its lunch. It finally flew off to look elsewhere, just as the memory card on my camera filled up. (RAW files will do that…)
Pictures will follow this week (probably) as I get time to process them.
Experience The Second – Buzzed By Fighters
After replacing the memory card with a new one, I was out taking pictures of the hummingbirds. There’s a whole drama thing going on with them (again, pictures to follow one of these days) but at one point the very territorial male Anna’s Hummingbird was chasing a Rufous Hummingbird away from one of the feeders.
I had been taking pictures of the Anna’s and through the lens saw the Rufous zoom through the field of view toward the feeder. The Anna’s took off like a Spitfire scrambling to take on fleet of German bombers during the Battle of Britain. The Rufous did a hard right and headed right toward my face with the Anna’s, neon red neck feathers on full display, right behind them. They went past my left ear just slightly under Mach One, just like a biological Top Gun dogfight.
It was awesome!
I don’t know if a newer, faster, better camera would have caught it (it might have – they’re pretty good these days, especially at the high end, while my two are like fifteen years old) but my didn’t even try, so no pictures for you, sorry!
“Pics Or It Didn’t Happen!”
Don’t even start with me…
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
It’s getting crowded under the Volvo…
Last weekend I saw two lizards soaking up photons from the hot driveway, one of which is (I believe) the legendary Doctor Lizardo, and the other a darker, almost jet black lizard with a missing tail, who I was thinking of calling “Stumpy.” Then earlier this week I saw a third lizard out there, a smaller, light tan colored youngster, along with “Stumpy.”
Today was again a busy day for lizardkind on the hot, hot driveway.
I was going out to get the trash cans when I spotted this guy.
I was quite surprised that he didn’t bolt immediately as I retrieved the rolling trash barrels. My path from the street to the back yard gate goes within a couple of feet of him, and when they’re empty and being dragged across the bumps in the lawn and up onto the driveway, they make a LOT of noise.
Be he was cool – then he sat right there while I went back into the house and got my camera. Perhaps he’s been chatting with Doctor Lizardo who is also not an instant bolter.
His tan color is definitely lighter and more brown than almost all of the other lizards in the yard.
His look reminds me of a soldier in a desert camouflage uniform, so I might call him “Khaki.”
On closer examination of the pictures, I can see some bluish stripes of scales along his back. He also has a black patch behind each of his front legs.
Just before sunset, I was confused by this guy. He was out away from the car, not moving, not running away. My first thought was that he was dead, but then I saw the head moving.
I again went back into the house, got the camera, and found him still there when I came back out. Very odd. And he looked…awkward.
In looking back at the pictures from earlier in the week, it all became clear. He’s not just missing part of his tail – he’s missing his feet and part of his legs on his left side. I didn’t see it earlier, but in the pictures from last weekend, so is the second lizard there.
This is “Stumpy.”
His coloration appears much lighter and more brown in this lighting, where in the sun he appeared quite dark and more black. (Do these lizards have the ability to make short-term changes to their coloration? I didn’t think so, but now I wonder.)
He’s not missing just his tail, but also much of his left-side limbs. That’s got to be a serious survival disadvantage.
Yet, if it’s the same lizard I think it is, he’s the guy that’s been out several times over the winter and dashing to hiding through a crack under the garage door when I get too close. I noticed the tail problem but never the missing feet, so I can’t say if the foot issue is recent or I just never noticed it.
He never moved a muscle except to swing his head around to watch me, even though I was starting to get pretty close. In fact, I got so close that I couldn’t focus the telephoto lens. I was down on my knees about three feet away and stumbled when I tried to scoot back a foot or so. The he turned and took off under the car and down the driveway that I lost sight of him immediately.
I hadn’t at that time noticed his feet, but his almost completely motionless state made me think that he was hurt, right up until he took off like a bat out of Hell. Then when I saw the pictures, I was even more amazed that he could move like that with that physical issue.
I won’t call him “Stumpy.” I’ll call him “Warrior,” because he is!
Filed under Critters, Photography
Is everything going to fast?
Are we falling?
Or do I just have clumsy, fat thumbs?
Filed under Paul, Photography
As Adam Savage is fond of saying, “Well THERE‘s your problem!”
The Long-Suffering Wife was minding her own business, out on errands, when her Apple Watch spontaneously disassembled itself.
She has the screen, grabbed it as it was falling off. But see all of those really, REALLY tiny wires?
I suspect they’re important. I can solder and run a test meter and do some fundamental electronics work – but THAT’s way above my pay grade.
Um…yeah. That’s not going to just snap back together.
I’m not upset. It’s not like it was new and we need to go to the Apple Store and demand to “talk to the manager.” It was a Series 2, and its replacement will be a Series 6, so in “computer years” it was probably living on borrowed time for at least the last year or longer.
The additional benefit is that it makes it brain-dead simple to figure out what to get her for her birthday later in the month. And thanks to the internet and FedEx, she’ll get it tomorrow!
Filed under Photography, Ronnie
There had been some minor confusion about the lizards that have been sunning on the driveway underneath the cars. Last year we had seen Doctor Lizardo, who had then lost his tail. Then this year, after they came out of hibernation, there was another, darker lizard there who was missing his tail but really didn’t look like Doctor Lizardo. Then there was a lizard with a re-grown tail that I thought might be Doctor Lizardo.
It was very confusing. It would be so much easier if they would wear the little name tags I made for them.
But this weekend there were two of them out there at the same time, which hasn’t ever happened that I’ve seen, so that’s brought some clarity for me.
This guy was out on the grass instead of on the concrete and brick, which was a trait of Doctor Lizardo. (I’m guessing, but I think it’s for temperature regulation – if it starts to get too hot then they’ll move onto the grass where they’ll rest on top of the blades, getting some air circulation underneath them?)
This guy is darker, almost black, and has no tail, so let’s call him Stumpy. (I say it with admiration, not a belittling attitude. If my tail got chewed off by a cat or bird, I doubt it would grow back any time soon.)
This guy has a full tail…
…where this guy is just starting to grow his back.
One step closer and this guy’s got an eye on me, but he’s holding fast (another trait of Doctor Lizardo)…
…while this guy has had enough of that shit. He didn’t run into the garage (I’ve seen him retreat under the garage door in the past) but he’s not going to stay out in the open. (I was probably still eight or nine feet away at this point, taking pictures with a 300 mm telephoto lens.)
Doctor Lizard lets me get another step closer…
…and another. Now you can see that the tail is regrown since there’s a break in the scale pattern where the new tail grew.
He’ll even let me crouch down to get a close-up. This is probably no more than four feet away. You can see some of the beautiful patterns to his scaling, but none of the brilliant green markings that showed up later last year. I suspect there are some color changes from time to time with the scales, depending on where we are in the mating cycle. Again – guessing.
This dude has moved away from the tire to give us a great view of that tail and his scales, but he’s not going to let me get anywhere even near to closer.
Standing up from a crouch (and potentially falling over and landing on top of him I guess) was a bridge too far. We’ll retreat to under the car and pray that the shocks and suspension are enough so that he won’t get crushed when I fall onto the car. (They will be. I’m not that out of shape post-COVID!)
So, evidence of Doctor Lizardo with a regrown tail, dark brown, beautiful scale patterns, co-existing with Stumpy, much darker, in the process of re-growing his tail. A little bit of clarity.
Of course, today I went out to get the mail, Doctor Lizardo wasn’t there, Stumpy was, and there was a third lizard, a light tan color, about half of Doctor Lizardo’s size. And none of that takes into account the five or six or seven different lizards in the back yard, or the two or three that live on the big tree…
Lots o’ lizards!
Filed under Critters, Photography
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