So this one isn’t going to win any awards, but I was honestly soooo lucky to even get this very heavily cropped shot. It’s a harbour porpoise deep in the central San Francisco Bay! I’ve never, ever seen one from shore before this deep into the bay - they didn’t even occur here all that many years ago. They disappeared from the bay in the 1940’s and didn’t start to recolonize until the mid-2000’s. The first sighting wasn’t until ~2008, they weren’t officially documented until 2011 and then mostly near the mouth below the Golden Gate Bridge where they established a breeding and birthing site. They seem to have done quite well since then and have spread out into the central bay and beyond, even venturing up the delta.
Just to even out the mammal, a female white-breasted nuthatch I spent twenty minutes stalking. They’re having an irruptive year here in the lowlands - it’s pretty uncommon to see them this near the bay, but suddenly they’re being sighted all over the place.
I went out to Lemon lake to try to get the Milky Way reflected in the lake.
It was too breezy to get a good reflection, and I was getting cold (and a little freaked out being out there in Bear and Mountain Lion country by myself), so I left before it got really dark. Another hour would have been better, but I’ll plan on doing this agin in early summer next year (with some company).
Still pretty nice IMO . I do admire your astral shots. Makes me want to give it a try some day, but the disincentives of the inconvenience/discomfort so far has won out. Also I just don’t enjoy camping much anymore (can’t really sleep comfortably), so it is a little harder to dodge light pollution.
One of these days - maybe a spring desert trip.
Yeah, I don’t usually see all that many out my way and then usually red-bellied. So this one near eye-level was a happy find. I was actually following a Nuttall’s woodpecker - it disappeared around one side of a tree trunk and then much too my surprise instead of the woodpecker I was expecting this is what popped up around the other side.
I didn’t see this directly myself, but one of my aunts has some old disco balls hanging from a tree in her yard, and she caught a video of a passing bear pausing to play with them.
I like playing with long exposures - it’s always a surprise. In this case, about halfway through, some guys fly fishing in a raft paddled into the frame. They were there at least 5 minutes, but I can’t find a trace of them.
Simple enough. Someone had left a piece of bread lying on the ground in a parking lot (in an aire on the autoroute just north of Dijon in France), and these little guys were all over it. I guess it’s a common occurrence because they basically ignored me - the photo was taken from about a metre away from the ruck. I was genuinely scared that I was going to step on one of them.
Sparrows, BTW. Not sure if they are an introduced species in the US.
Though few people bother, locally it’s perfectly legal to kill them without a permit as non-native pests (unlike virtually every native bird in the US, where you could conceivably be heavily fined) and most wildlife rehabbers automatically euthanize any fallen chicks that are brought to them. But they’re doing just fine for all of that.
. I do admire your astral shots. Makes me want to give it a try some day, but the disincentives of the inconvenience/discomfort so far has won out. Also I just don’t enjoy camping much anymore (can’t really sleep comfortably), so it is a little harder to dodge light pollution.
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