Early Morning Light

When I left my driveway at 6:30 a.m., I entered dense fog.  At least I thought it was fog.  Had a flashback to a silly line of poetry I wrote over 40 years ago while teaching a high school class the elements of poetry.  "Desperately daring to distinguish fog from smog boggles my goggles." Sounds very silly now, but at the time it appropriately referred to the steady increase in the smog-to-fog ratio in the Central Valley that ultimately prompted my escape to the Sierra.  I'm pretty sure what I drove into this morning was not entirely fog.  It was quite dense in the direction of the 'industrial zone' of town and, as you can see in the above photo, the sky was clear toward the West.  That's Spanish Peak glowing in the early morning sunlight before it reached the valley floor.  Just bringing this up caused another flashback: a memory of studying Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People."  The theme: if bringing money to a community involves producing pollution, people don't want to know about it; and if they don't like the message, they'll shoot the messenger.  I'd better go hide.

The bed of Ponderosa Pine needles on the ground below me brought back memories of playing pick-up-sticks.  I wonder if cold weather causes these flashbacks.  What I did for a good 15 minutes was shiver and process old memories.  Hmmmm.

The frost did some beautiful things in the area, too.  As I said to a friend in an early email, I didn't need to go to a coffee shop to get wired.

A 'field' of frost on top of a fence post.  I wish I could hang around and watch it sublimate.  The air seems dry enough that the frost should disappear without melting.  That always fascinates me.

A frosty knot got my attention before I had to get back into the car to get warm.

To complete the story, here's the view East where the stuff in the sky is ambiguous.  Fog?  Smog?  Either way, it makes the sunrise more dramatic.

Some Winter Greenery

 Despite its being a gray and windy day with a storm looming to the North, these scenes made me feel warm.  Only a short distance from yesterday's goose and fungus photos, I walked through the woods and found vegetation that proved to me plants can be beautiful in mid-winter.  The persistent manzanita berries were almost black, but will probably hang on until the spring buds push them off.  These clusters made me wish I'd had the time to draw and paint.  Also, the longer you stay in a spot, the more likely something exciting will happen. 

 Growing up in Massachusetts, I used to see drawings and paintings of trees like this in my cowboy and Indian books, especially ones by Holling C. Holling.  I didn't think trees like this existed, but now I live among them.

 A scatologist is rather like an archaeologist.  There's a story in this poop.  I didn't think to place a pen or a comb on the ground for scale.  This gathering of bear scat is around a foot from end to end.  Evidence of the bear's diet was easy to read.

                                         Prickly Ponderosa it is. 

 The male cones of California Incense Cedar provide a nice color contrast with the foliage.

 This is the sort of view you often see of Coastal Redwoods on post cards.  Here we have Douglas-fir.  When I get in a spot like this, I feel like a little kid again.  I could stare straight up until my neck cramps, then do it again and again.

Before the Storm

 I took a short drive with my camera yesterday afternoon and came across a nice scene, a bend in Spanish Creek, where three Canada Geese were hanging out on a small peninsula in the distance. 

 As I slowly approached their spot, they seemed to be uneasy, not so much with my presence and something in the air.  Maybe I was imagining it, but they seemed to be wary of an impending storm.  I know, easy to say since today the storm arrived.  At least six inches of snow all around American Valley.  I wonder where the geese are today. 
   Anyway, two of the three crossed the creek and scrambled up the steep bank.  I zoomed in to photograph the one furthest behind.  The scene reminded me of the one on Main Street last week when I came across three Ravens feeding.  A bold one stayed behind until the last possible safe second while the two skittish ones took off as soon as they saw me coming.  I wonder which are the most successful.

 A few miles away, I wandered through the woods by the side of Highway 70 and spotted some interesting Fungi.

 This rather large "shelf" fungus was growing on a Ponderosa Pine stump.  I've seen this species (I think) grow to 18" across on large pines in the Bucks Lake Wilderness.  Making more soil.

On a larger stump, Dougas-fir I believe, I saw this nice gathering of a Turkey Tail Fungus or a close facsimile.  Even though I only have a still camera, to a Naturalist with imagination, there is a lot of activity in these photos.  I hope you can feel it.  Sometimes I'm tempted to try video, then I resist, thinking my imagination might get lazy.  Some would say that by using any kind of camera I risk having my memory get lazy. 

Continuity

 My friend Spencer Dykstra (at Spencer Dykstra Photography) enthusiastically reports that early blooming is underway at Table Mountain.  He posted a photo of poppies.  I was aching with envy.  I could feel his enthusiastic paragraph urging the seasons along.  I thought I'd try a little of the same.
There won't be any wildflowers blooming around Quincy for a while longer.  Still too cold.  Some people urge the process along by planting Crocuses and other early-blooming cultivated flowers.  See my previous post.  The Crocuses were planted in front of Patti's Thunder Cafe, formerly Morning Thunder.  Call it cheating if you will, but I've decided to help spring along by posting one of last year's poppies.

I encountered more concrete evidence of seasonal change when I took an early morning walk downtown yesterday.  There was a sudden increase in bird activity over previous days. Robins are a harbinger of spring of course, and there were lots feeding on the courthouse lawn and in many people's front yards.  I also saw and heard many Stellar's Jays and they were sitting side by side with Mourning Doves on the the power lines.  There were also Ravens and Brewer's Blackbirds, and maybe a few Starlings.  More birds than I've seen in my neighborhood since last November.  It's hard for me to capture birds with a camera, and I didn't have my camera with me which makes it even harder.  So, again in the spirit of urging the season along, I'm posting last year's hummingbird.  They will come back, won't they?
10:10 a.m.  I published the above around 6:30 this morning when I wasn't fully awake.  I just now realized that I made no sense of the title.  It was inspired by Spencer's recent post in which his words, stirred by early blooms, reminisced on past trips to Table Mountain in all seasons and projected ahead to exciting trips to come.  The poppies were just markers in a continuum, and anyone who visits a place like Table Mountain often enough (your own back yard probably qualifies) will develop a sense of being part of a cycle, a continuum, which has its own special features in every season and time of day.  I've always been curious about life cycles in the tropics.  We temperate zone people tend to think we have a corner on seasons, but even in lands with much less temperature variation than ours, there are undoubtedly seasons for individual species of plants and animals that are noticeable and provide the same feeling of continuity.  Thanks to Thomas Edison's light bulb, more and more people at all latitudes are staying inside most of the time.  Do they know what they're missing?

Finally!

 I was determined to photograph flowers today, even if I had to visit a nursery, or the Safeway flower department.  But I came across freshly bloomed Crocuses in the garden in front of Morning Thunder.  Thanks Patti for helping spring along.

A cruised around town a bit longer to see if I could find any native wildflowers blooming.  No luck, but I did find new leaves of Cinquefoil emerging along North Mill Creek Road.  New I have a few places to watch.  More sunny weather ahead, and I should see some action.

A Little Botanical Confusion

One of my favorite images from yesterday's walk around FRC is of the Watercress.  This was in a 50-foot long strip of lush greenery along the south-facing side of one of the hatchery buildings.  The creek that flows by has been confined to a cement channel, and I suspect the building absorbs a lot of solar energy creating a kind of windowless greenhouse.  Watercress is in the mustard family, Brassicaceae, along with cabbage, broccoli, and other edibles.  The scientific name is Nasturtium officinale. There are several other species of Nasturtium in the USA, but the garden nasturtium with its bright yellow and orange flowers is not one of them.  In fact, that nasturtium isn't even in the same family.  It's Tropaeolum majus.  More warm (relatively) weather ahead, so maybe we'll be seeing some crocuses and other early birds among the spring wildflowers soon.

Wandering Under the Sun

 Feather River College is in the northwest corner of American Valley, so it receives a great deal more sun each day than my house on the south side.  I'm at the base of Claremont Mountain and shaded by tall Douglas-firs and Ponderosa Pines.  On my wanderings around FRC I found large areas with no snow on the ground and the soil was actually warm compared to my front yard which is still ice and snow around a foot deep.  Along Golden Eagle Drive leading into the college the willows in the wet areas are budding beautifully (above) and there are many kinds of green starting to show on the ground and in the water.

 The filamentous algae in the flowing water are colorful, and I couldn't resist picking up a couple of blobs with a stick.  I wish I had a microscope because these green hairs are habitat for a wide variety of microscopic organisms - ciliates, flagellates, and flatworms, etc.  This coming spring I'm going to find a way to borrow a microscope and start photographing the wonders found in creek and pond water, especially the unclear kind.

 No polarizing filter, but if you click on this photo you can probably make out the large trout in the hatchery ponds.  Covered with ice only a couple of weeks ago, the ponds are now an exciting scene with fish jumping and ospreys planning robberies.

 Healthy clumps of moss adorn some of the sidewalk cracks.

 This young plant will produce a five-petaled, pink flower, only a quarter inch in diameter.  These grow in my dirt driveway and I haven't been able to identify them.  Probably non-native.  Will try again this spring when they bloom.

The Lupines have made their first appearance.  This clump is about 4 inches across.  Exciting signs of spring.  I now it's only February, but I'm ready for April!