Reader Fred Dyer sent a variety of photos (and remember to send me yours!).
I am responding to your recent request for wildlife photos. These were mostly taken in La Jolla in the fall of 2014, along the beach in the Torrey Pines Reserve. The species ids are informal, although I think they are right.First, two showing groups of Marbled Godwits (Limosa fedoa):
Next, Royal Terns (Thalasseus maximus). [JAC: I thought the picture was distorted, but other photos of this species make it look dorsoventrally compressed as well. Lovely birds.]
Next, an interaction between some kind of gull that I didn’t identify and a Western Grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis) that had washed onto the beach and couldn’t get back to sea. The gull seemed intent on eating the grebe. Grebes are pathetically poor at walking on land.
Next, an invertebrate related to the Portuguese Man O’ War. This is Velella vela, and it is a colonial hydroid. This one was about 1.5 cm across. They were all over the beach and I didn’t know what I was looking at until I found news stories reporting that lots of them had been washing up on the beaches of San Diego that fall.
Next, not wildlife per se, but rocks:
Finally, an image not from California from Maine. This was taken in Goose Rocks Beach (part of Kennebunkport). A fungus, I presume:
Richard Bond made this comment on yesterday’s post on zebra stripes:
The stripes on young zebras (at least on Plains zebras; I have not seen either of the others) are brown, and I have photographs to prove it. I would find an explanation for stripes more credible if it could account for this.
And sent this photo (from Nairobi National Park) to prove it. Richard notes that the stripes get darker when the animals age, but are still discernibly brown in near-adult zebras:
Finally, since today’s the start of International Squirrel-Feeding Month, I’ll show some photos of what you should be doing for these animals. These come from Anne-Marie Cournoyer of Montreal, who delights in photographing the local squirrels. She points out that the squirrel’s tongue is visible in the last photo.
A hard climb:
Made it!
Yum—suet!
Sure hope that squirrel knows enough not to lick a cold steel pole!
Reminds me of A Christmas Story.
“I triple dog dare you!”
The rocks under water are especially wonderful even if not alive.
Agree, really nice rocks.
The rocks may not be alive, but the scenery is definitely not dead. The stream is an active part of the landscape ; the rounding of the rocks speaks of falling mountains – and therefore of rising mountains ; and of rock flowing like tar several hundred kilometres below your feet. The mix of rocks – granites and basic intrusives, by the look of it talks of the separation of high-melting and low-melting minerals and the growth of continents. There are also what look like limestones or quartzites in there – at the far end of the sedimentary processing chain, and ready to return to the depths to become a new magma’s protolith.
“No vestige of a beginning ; no prospect of an end.”
That is almost poetic, Aidan! 🙂
I shall wash my pharynx out with vitriol!
This is the photographer (Fred Dyer)…nicely put, and it captures why I like those assemblages of rocks. They represent a jumble of rich and complicated histories, and I wish I knew more about what I was looking at. They were in a depression on the beach, by the way, and the ripples were from waves brought in by the rising tide. And I like that in the image is a single strand of some kind of sea grass, still green though it had been torn away from whatever place it had been rooted to.
Pretty active beach then! Don’t just take a towel, but a foam mat too.
Yes, if I were to pick one of these shots to hang on the wall, it would be the rocks; with Aidan’s post as a caption hanging next to it! The animals are wonderful to look at, but there is such a surfeit of gorgeous wildlife photos in the world.
FWIW, I believe the green strand is likely algal…though I might have heard some algae–“seaweed”–called sea grass before. I agree that it adds a nice, thought provoking element to the composition–the rocks last for ages by being solid and slow to change; the alga by continually growing…
Wonderful pictures. And you definitely have an eye for finding an artful picture.
La Jolla, CA. Torrey Pines Reserve. I lived in La Jolla for several years many years ago, as a post-doc at UCSD.
*Sigh*.
I just wanted to add that.
I’ve noticed then whenever you mention your days in CA, you invariably write *sigh*. Obviously you miss your time living there. Perhaps a good place to retire? When I moved from the Northwest, I had the same feeling. Eventually I was able to make it back and am very glad I did.
Thanks–I appreciate that comment! (Fred Dyer here)
This was a fun series of photos.
The fungus looks like Red Tree Brain fungus (Peniofora rufa).
Good to know (Fred Dyer here)
So how does the grebe story end? Don’t keep us in suspense!
I said in response to Diane (under my wordpress name), we helped it by putting in deeper water, and it did start swimming out to sea. We didn’t wait around to see whether it made it.
Nice photos! The gull is almost surely a Western Gull (Larus occidentalis).
Nice to know. Fred Dyer here.
Perhaps zebra stripes darken with age for the same reason the hair of human children darkens with age: maturity. Would suppose increased levels of sex hormones would be to blame, at least since human hair darkens as a result of puberty.
Love the birds, Fred!
I don’t suppose you know if anyone gave that grebe a hand, do you?
We tried. We lifted it into the waves and it did try frantically to swim out to sea through the waves. It looked pretty tired, though. And we didn’t watch for long. It would have needed to be past the surf zone to be able to take off.
Too bad; death by gull is probably not pleasant. Sounds as the grebe’s beaching may have been secondary to some other problem it had.
The picture of the young zebra’s brown stripes reminded me of my neighbors: they had two large, white French poodles that I would see them walking. One day, they had two white ones and a obviously young, tan one. A few months later I saw them back to two white ones again and asked what happened to the tan one. They pointed to one dog and said, “Nothing- that’s him, right there.” Apparently they turn white when they mature, something I had never known….