Glitch

For whatever reason, subscription e-mails seem not to have gone out this morning, and my WordPress notifications don’t include the usual confirmation that this morning’s post got published (which it did). To see whether the glitch has been fixed, I’m following up with this post that includes another picture from the Grand Canyon on October 19th.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

A subspecies

Behold Homo turisticus ssp. congestissimus, a subspecies* that was impossible not to notice and hard to avoid when we visited the Grand Canyon on October 19th. That was a Wednesday, so imagine the horror of a weekend visitor running a gauntlet of ten thousand phones and selfie-sticks.

But this is a nature photography blog, so let me show a personless picture from that visit.

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* Last year I found that the same subspecies has spread to New Zealand.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Also at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery near San Simeon

We arrived at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery near San Simeon, California, so late in the afternoon on November 4th that we soon got to enjoy a scenic sunset.

While the distant rocks in the photograph that appeared here three days ago hosted seals, the rock at the left in today’s photograph attracted birds. Click the excerpt below if you’d like to zoom in on that silhouetted rock and its avian fringe.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Elephant seals

A couple of posts back you caught a tiny glimpse of seals on the rocks at Point Lobos, California, on November 3. Late the next afternoon, having worked our way down scenic Highway 1, we pulled in at the parking area overlooking the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery near San Simeon. It was a popular place, both for the elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) on the beach and the onlookers lining the fence to watch them. Note that while most of the seals were drowsily minding their own business, two of them were going at it nose to nose.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Monterey cypress with an unusually long horizontal branch

Click for better quality and larger size.

At Point Lobos, California, on November 3rd, I noticed that one of the Monterey cypresses, Cupressus macrocarpa, had an extraordinarily long horizontal branch.

If you’ve ever seen one branch of a tree so much longer than all the others, raise your hand. Of course you’ll have to tell us if you raised your hand.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

My camera on Point Lobos

I’ve borrowed the title from Edward Weston but the November 3rd view from Point Lobos is my own. This trip was the first time since New Zealand, 21 months earlier, that I got to see the Pacific Ocean.

You can’t tell at this scale, but the rocks in the upper left played host to a colony of seals. We could hear them barking even if we didn’t see them at first.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Not just reddish-orange

The reddish-orange sandstone so common at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada serves as an excellent substrate for lichens of contrasting colors, as you see in these two photographs from our October 24th visit. You can click either picture to get greater size and more details.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

A great place you probably never heard of

Not until researching our impending trip to the Southwest did I learn about Valley of Fire State Park, which is an hour’s drive northeast of Las Vegas in Nevada. The “Fire” in the name refers to the orange sandstone that characterizes large parts of the area, rather than to the high temperatures in the desert for much of the year. We experienced the color but not the heat: when we spent an afternoon there on October 24th the temperature was pleasant, in part because of overcast skies that led to occasional drizzle and for a while downright rain.

Have you ever seen such orange sand?

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

One advantage of traveling in higher latitudes and altitudes in the second half of October

One advantage of traveling in higher latitudes and altitudes in the second half of October is the chance to see some colorful fall foliage. The first time we stopped for that was on October 20th as we drove south into Oak Creek Canyon in northern Arizona and pulled over at the entrance to the Cave Springs Campground. Most prominent initially were Lombardy poplars, but the name tells you that those trees aren’t native to the United States. I hope that this nearby tree with bright red leaves, apparently a maple, is native.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Frost, but not from frostweed

The weather forecast for the early morning of November 20th in Austin predicted a temperature of around 37°, which has occasionally been cold enough to cause frostweed to do its ice trick. Living up to the nature photographer’s creed, I dressed warmly that Sunday morning, put on my rubber boots, and wended my way the half-mile downhill to check out the stand of frostweed I rely on in Great Hills Park. No luck.

While I didn’t find frostweed ice, I did find some frost, most noticeably on a colony of straggler daisies, Calyptocarpus vialis. Straggling, which is to say being low and little, works to the advantage of this species: none of the other plants that might have made for even better frost subjects survived the frequent and relentless onslaught that the mowers carried on at the Floral Park entrance to Great Hills Park all through 2016.

(I’ll occasionally interrupt pictures from the Southwest trip with a current post about central Texas.)

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman