Sporadic dispatches from the hinterlands.
Last weekend we went to Neary Lagoon in Santa Cruz to see if we could find some Wood Ducks. We did find a few, along with some other birds.
Neary Lagoon is an easy photo spot for us, but it was very dark and grey that morning, so we had to choose our camera settings with care: fast enough shutter speed to reduce blur, but low enough ISO to reduce noise. Luckily, the birds gave us several chances.
I completed my second Jay Race last weekend. It's a 12-mile paddling race from Capitola to the Santa Cruz wharf, out around the Mile Buoy, and back to Capitola beach. I did it last year on my stand-up paddleboard, and it was a struggle. This year I paddled my OC1 (1-person outrigger canoe). It was no less painful, but I did go considerably faster.
I hadn't been planning to compete again, but when they opened an OC1 division a few weeks before the race, I decided to do it. I wish I had trained more; maybe next year! This race took a lot out of me, and I don't know if I'd do it again without more preparation.
Joy doubled as support crew and action photographer. Thanks, Joy!
We've been spending a lot of time at the UCSC Arboretum lately. We'd heard that a rare white hummingbird was sighted there, so we went to look for it.
We didn't see the white hummingbird on our first few visits, but we kept going back, a couple of times a day, until it eventually appeared. We think it's an Anna's Hummingbird, which is one of the most common species in our area. It is leucistic, which simply means that it has very little pigment in its feathers; unlike an albino, it does have normal pigment in the irises of its eyes. Leucism can be caused by mutations in any of several genes.
While we were there, we took a few shots of the more usual denizens of the arboretum.
This morning the full moon set over the Pacific, just after sunrise. At least that's what I read on The Photographer's Ephemeris. Aaron and I went up to Pigeon Point hoping to catch dramatic light on a striking landscape, but we mostly saw a lot of clouds. The moon popped out for less than a minute, while we scrambled to get our cameras ready. Soon it was gone behind the clouds, and the rising sun was equally incognito. We wandered around the tidepools, snapped a few photos, and called it a morning. Maybe next time we'll find that dramatic light.
