Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea) I first encountered hummingbird sage in Santa Barbara. As a wildflower, its natural range does not include the Bay Area. However, it's also a popular horticultural plant that happens to do pretty well in people's gardens here. The plant I photographed here appears to have escaped the confines of its nearby garden, but I suspect the gardener (a neighbor) actually seeded the soil beneath a couple of street trees.  I have yet to catch a hummingbird feeding on them as I walk by, but it seems like just the kind of thing they would like ..read more

  California Poppy I've been thinking about these poppies (Eschscholzia californica) for a few days. They're growing in a yard across the street, in front of an unoccupied house that has been undergoing a lot of refurbishment since the nice old lady who lived there moved in with her family. Even with no one living there, I felt just a tiny bit guilty when I walked over this afternoon and picked out a pair to photograph in my living room. Even though I've been thinking about doing it for a few days, I finally had the time and inclination today, maybe enhanced by having watched, j ..read more

  Prowling Night Heron I'd thought about going to Mt. Tam this morning before continuing on to Duxbury Reef, but I'm glad I changed my mind before trying to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which was closed for hours by protesters. Instead I took my usual walk to the beach, followed by a bike ride through the park, where I was surprised to see a black-crowned night heron hunting from the broken-down tree branches on Metson Lake. Cattails at Metson Lake Plantain Border at Metson Lake Cattails and Calla Lilies The heron eventually moved to a ne ..read more

  Goldfields in Serpentine Soil, Mt. Tamalpais I took a ride up to Mt. Tam yesterday to check on my trail cams for the first time in a month (and picked up my first tick of the year). I'd meant to check them a week after putting them in a new location but never got around to it. There were hundreds of captures on the SD cards, and the rechargeable batteries were almost dead.  A mass of earwigs had taken up residence behind one of the cams, nestling between the back of the cam and the bark of the Douglas fir tree it was strapped to. Perhaps they enjoyed not just the protecti ..read more

  Magic Pinhole Eclipse :) A neighbor asked me to move his morning newspaper into his porch vestibule for a few days while he is visiting a relative -- in Cincinnati, Ohio. What a totality lucky guy! As you can see from the photo above, I'd been looking for a suitable pinhole to view our measly partial eclipse and got a mushroom instead. (My wife created the image by poking pinholes in a sheet of thick paper.) I took a bike ride down to the Giant Camera at the Cliff House, hoping they would have a great pinhole view of whatever eclipse could be seen here, but it was closed. I tr ..read more

  Carrizo Plain near the southern end of Soda Lake Road, with owl's clover, fiddleneck, and daisies galore. The Temblor Range is in the distance. (Click images to view larger.) I don't have much to add to what I've already said in the previous recent posts about my very brief Carrizo Plain visit. Carrizo still remains a kind of wildflower Shangri-La in my mind, ever since learning about it in a botany class at Santa Barbara City College back in the '80s. I've seen it looking very sparse in April in dry years, and I've been there in the winter when all is brown. I love it all. Th ..read more

  Desert lilies with verbena and creosote bush along Desert Center-Rice Road, just south of the Desert Lily Sanctuary. As I mentioned in a previous post, I couldn't find any lilies in the sanctuary despite arriving with a lucky rainbow in the distance, and I wondered if the ground has become more gravelly over the nearly 70 years since Tasker and Beula Edmiston first saw them here, making the land less conducive to growing lilies. As I left the sanctuary and accelerated to driving speed I suddenly spotted numerous desert lilies growing just a little distance into the desert near ..read more

  Ocotillo in creosote bush scrub, Hell Hole Canyon The last day of March (Easter Sunday) began when I woke up at 2:30 a.m. and hit the road an hour later, arriving in rainy Anza-Borrego Desert State Park around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I remembered squeezing in my last trip there on a long weekend when I was working four days a week, and being amazed that I could so quickly drive to a place so utterly foreign to, say, Mt. Tamalpais or Pt. Reyes -- a place where the average annual rainfall is just 5 or 6 inches -- and still be back at work on Monday.  The shots below are ..read more

  Wildflowers in a sandy wash, Anza-Borrego Desert (3/31/2024). The moon and stars aligned serendipitously to send me on an April Fool's errand -- not of a thousand-mile round-trip to the desert, but more like 1,714.9 miles (to put a little bit of a fine point on it). Just when I thought I wasn't going to go this year, I learned about the Sunday storm heading for Southern California and started champing at the bit all over again. Thankfully my wife was free to keep an eye on Coco and understanding of my need for speed. And it was a speedy trip indeed, beginning at 3:30 a.m. Sund ..read more

  Potted Mushroom At the bottom of this post back in early January I mentioned the Poison Pie mushrooms [UPDATE: spore print below] that were growing in my potted coast live oaks. Today I saw that they were back, just a few days before the rainy season officially comes to a close at the end of this month (according to the New York Times).  My plans for a thousand-mile round-trip drive down to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park seem to have evaporated like desert dew, hampered by commitments at home and windy conditions in Borrego Springs.  It's kind of far to go down there ..read more