Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
It’s drought resistant, “desert landscaping,” so you see a lot of it around, including in our back yard.
The rabbits love it, they’re always shredding the ends and chewing it down. It’s unusual to see it this long, especially given the number of bunnies seen every night in the yard.
The birds were flitting about as I was stretching my legs, but instead of flying away, a bunch of them stuck around in the tree right above me.
Out in the sun is one of the male house wrens, resplendent in the bright morning rays. Can you spot the hummingbird in the shadows?
Yeah, he’s shiny and bright and bold and he knows it.
Little Bastard can be absolutely iridescent in the sun, but he knows that the hawks are out, so he’ll stay well hidden in the shadows and let the wren sit out in the sun at the top of the tree in the open.
But the clouds were very nice for about two hours. It looked like there might be a touch of virga around, but we never saw any rain and it was clear and a million by afternoon.
Nothing in the forecast for precipitation, and the temps will be rising. It won’t be “Texas hot,” but the days in the 70’s might be behind us for a while.
Enjoy the upcoming week! Stay flexible and strong, be prepared to pivot when required. Rigid is brittle – bend, don’t break.
It started with the distinctive cry of a Cooper’s Hawk in the back yard, along with the squawking of several ravens. The hawk was close, somewhere in those big pine trees on the hill behind the house. I quickly pulled up the Cornell Labs Merlin app (you need this app too!) and started an audio recording with the app identifying the birds as it hears them.
You can hear the Cooper’s Hawk at the very beginning, over the sound of the screen door closing, and again (much more clearly) at the 01:06 mark.
I had set the phone down and grabbed my camera, looking for the Cooper’s Hawk, when from behind me (at the 00:57 mark) I heard a Red-tailed Hawk, then a second one. This pair is familiar! They were close and getting closer, flying right over my head into the trees where the ongoing fight was happening.
As a helicopter goes over you can hear chirping and calls from all three hawks, as well as the ravens still harassing them. The ravens finally forced them out of the trees, the Cooper’s Hawk going down into the canyon behind us where its nest is and the Red-tailed Hawks climbing back into the thermals over Valley Circle Boulevard.
Notice the missing feathers on this hawk’s right wing. I would have thought they would have grown back by now, but it’s become an identifying mark on this particular magnificent bird, one that’s easily seen even when it’s several hundred feet in the air and a half mile or more away.
Sunset. Clear skies. A white dagger moving slowly toward the horizon.
Not a comet. A jet headed out to sea over Ventura County. High and fast.
Destination Hawaii was my first guess. Going to Asia, Tokyo or Shanghai or Seoul, they would be heading north or northwest, up the coast toward Alaska on a great circle route. Headed out to sea in this direction there’s a LOT of nothing except Hawaii unless you’re going to Singapore or Australia.
The dot is another jet, this one headed south down the coast from Asia into LAX. There’s a whole stream of them, 24/7/365.
It’s been a really, REALLY wet winter, which was fantastic! Everything’s green and growing! Until it gets hot, and dry, and “everything” turns brown and highly flammable.
We aren’t quite there yet with all of the May Gray and June Gloom that I’ve been complaining about as the marine layer stays over us all day long for weeks on end. But we haven’t had a good, soaking rain in a couple of months, so we’re getting there.
As a side note, there’s a new app that I like a lot called “Watch Duty.” It goes off and sends you notifications if any brush fires pop up within the range you have set. I have mine set to all of LA County and it’s gone off a half dozen times this spring and early summer. Imagine my surprise when it beeped and vibrated this afternoon and said there was a new fire in West Hills, at an intersection that’s maybe a mile away as the crow flies…
(Image: Watch Duty)
And about two seconds later I heard ALL of the fire trucks firing up their sirens and two air dropping helicopters going over at about 500 feet.
Huh! Something’s going on, me thinks! Let’s go look!
About two acres of light brush, reported to have started at Knapp Ranch Park. The bad news is that Knapp Ranch isn’t at the top of the hill, but just a block or so up from Valley Circle Boulevard, so there are three or four streets crossing the hill north to south above it. Streets with houses on both sides. Which the fire was rapidly approaching.
LAPD and LA County Fire hit this one hard. We had at least three, maybe more, water dropping helicopters overhead in less than ten minutes. It looked like they were going to refill up in Chatsworth Reservoir, which is directly behind us compared to the fire, so we had our own little airshow going on.
We also of course had a whole fleet of fire trucks and crews converging on the area. Which blocked Valley Circle Boulevard and had a whole stream of folks cutting across to Platt and Sherman Way via Highlander, making a mess of our local side streets.
Meh, could have been a lot worse. The winds were light and while today was warmer and clear, the recent history of cloudy, cool days helped. It didn’t spread fast. It took them less than an hour to declare it contained and I never heard any reports of any houses being damaged. Although I do bet there were some homeowners immediately uphill of the fire needing a change of underwear.
No sunrise pictures from Stonehenge for me this year. First of all, there’s that whole “sunrise” and how damn early it is that I’m opposed to. On the other hand, if I were able to make it all the way to Stonhenge for the solstice, I suspect I’d find a way to scrape my sorry ass out of bed early enough to be there.
However, we did have a very pretty conjunction after sunset, starting with the three-day old crescent Moon and the very bright Venus.
A short exposure shows the crescent nicely and Venus is a pinpoint. If I had the telescope out, Venus would show the same crescent as the Moon. (It’s geometry.)
Crank up the exposure and Venus is overexposed but the Moon much more so. There are craters and plains and some details silhouetted at the terminator (the line between sunlight and darkness) but you see the dark portion of the moon dimly illuminated by “earthshine,” light reflected from the Sun off of the bright Earth.
Pull back a little and try to capture some details in the illuminated part of the moon, but I always forget just how stinking bright it is. Even though I had reset for a 1/250 second exposure, it’s still a bit overexposed. I should have gone down at least to 1/1000 second.
Pull back the zoom a little more and try again? Same mistake.
Pull all the way back on the zoom, overexpose for earthshine, and what else shows up? That thing just to the right of the palm trees that looks like a bright red planet? That’s a bright red planet, i.e., Mars.
As always, if you didn’t see this tonight, go look for it tomorrow night or Friday or Saturday. The Moon will be further up and to the left each night (for example, closer to Mars tomorrow) but you’ll still be able to see all of this if you have a clear western sky about an hour to two hours after sunset. Our forecast is for the June gloom to return with the coastal marine layer and fog moving back in, but we’ll see. Maybe the gods will cut us a break.
What does that Magic Eight Ball say? “Outlook not so good!”
I do wish that the sound quality on YouTube videos was better. On my phone you can hear all kinds of bird songs, the drone of other hummers buzzing me, dogs barking, planes goin overhead…
On this video, it’s all dulled down and dampened, like listening through it with soggy sponges stuck into your ears.
At the little restaurant where we get Sunday breakfast, there are a couple dozen eucalyptus trees in the parking lot.
Yesterday I found the entire parking lot littered with thin strips and patches of eucalyptus bark as the whole grove had decided to shed together almost overnight.
Eucalyptus are non-native to SoCal, but they grow well here and they’re everywhere. As invasive species go, they’re not terrible.
The fact that they anually shed their bark is a bit of a nuisance since the stuff gets everywhere and is a mess to clean up.
The bigger problem is that, either on the ground like this or still clinging to the trunk of the tree, this thin, paper-like bark is highly flammable. When a brush fire starts, these things go up like Roman candles.
What I was REALLY looking for as I got back to the car was the red tailed hawk that was making quite the racket somewhere in the treetops thirty feet above me. I never saw him, but the food chain is obvious. There’s a grocery store here, several restaurants, large trash bins spilling over with food, and all of that attracts seagulls. Fat, slow, well fed seagulls keep red tailed hawks well fed.
The laws of unintended consequences, urban shopping mall version!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 