Sporadic dispatches from the hinterlands.
We’ve been staying indoors due to heavy smoke from a nearby wildfire, but this weekend the air cleared up a little. We can’t head up the coast due to the fires (which are still burning), so we went down to Moss Landing to look for shorebirds. The weather was gray and dark, but we managed to get a few pictures.
Every year we have to re-learn some of these birds, but we’re always happy to see them when they show up to spend the winter in our area.
I recently came upon this odd creature while I was out paddling. It’a a salp — a pelagic tunicate. It’s in the phylum Chordata, along with all of us vertebrates, but it does not have a backbone. Like all tunicates, it feeds by filtering particles from the water. Most tunicates are benthic (attached to the bottom), but salps are among the few who swim in the wide open seas (in other words, they’re pelagic). It has a gut and reproductive organs, but not a lot of other complex structures. They represent an example of a group of organisms evolving to become simpler. This one is about the size of my hand.
We’ve been having southwesterly winds, warm water, and red tides in Monterey Bay. I don’t usually see salps locally, but this summer they are abundant.
I happened to have my phone with me (I usually don’t), so I snapped a picture.
On Joy’s tomato cage in the front yard.
The UCSC arboretum was closed for a while, but now it’s open and they offer occasional early morning openings for members (like us!). We got up at five this morning to take our binoculars, camera, and coffee up there to greet the morning.
I’ve been using the Sony A7RIV with 200-600 mm lens, but for today I added a new 1.4x converter, which seems to help. It was a gloomy marine-layer morning, but the sun burned through just enough to allow a few photos with the new setup.
