Archive for the 'Nature' Category

Update:Amie’s kind comment combined with the bright sunshine of today inspired me to head out and take another series of shots of Ms. Garden Spider in the high sun such that I could also have a green background.

And, as Amie (an old friend, btw, with a neat weblog who also happens to be a founder of the very cool EBSQ Art collective) suggested, the green background is really quite pleasant.

Ms. Spider grabbed a meal overnight, as can be seen.

All in all, I think I like this shot the best, now, from the whole “Spider Focused Photograph” perspective. I still dig the metallic photos just because the thought of a spider running around with a carapace made half of molten metal strikes me as pretty cool, too.

Original post: Roger and I are hanging at my parent’s pad for a while and that means lots of nature, bug hunting, temporary pet management, and — of course — photography.

Roger found a beatiful garden spider sitting in the middle of its web in an easily accessible spot. After reading strobist for a bit, I decided to take a handful of photos from different angles with different lighting. (No strobes, though).

The differences are striking.

This particular photo was taken at sunset with the sun behind and to the left of me. I was slightly below the spider and, thus, caught a bit of the reflected sunlight in the silvery parts of the spider.

Click on through for 3 more shots of Ms. Spider with different lighting.

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Since moving into our ‘62 Eichler, I have been slowly upgrading various bits of infrastructure. This weekend, my goal was to rip out the 30+ year old rusted porch light fixture that illuminated about 30% of the chimney and that was only if the bloody thing worked. Useless. Must die.

Unfortuntely, a quick glance with a flashlight revealed quite the extended family of wasps had taken up residence in the fixture. Now, normally, leaving the light on for a few hours would be enough to drive the wasps out. Not so, in this case, as I had long ago replaced the existing watt-burner wth a compact florescent that did not sit well in the ancient socket and, thus, did not work.

So… me vs. the wasp mob.

Fortunately, the nest seemed relatively docile (No clue why– doubled the paranoid factor). And, thus, I was able to slip a freezer bag around the entire fixture and zip-loc it at the top (Christine’s rather brilliant idea — of course, did she volunteer to do the actual baggin?!?! No way!). Insufficient the zip seemed, so I added a couple o’ layers of duct tape. Bit of a difference between “shake shake spill” with food vs. “shake shake spill-oh-crap-i’m-six-feet-up-a-ladder-with-dozens-of-wasps-looking-to-kill-me”.

Wasps apparently aren’t really into the whole “nest in a bag thing”.

After unscrewing the fixture from the junction box — a tense moment as I had no idea whether or not the wasps could pass through the junction box — the nest went straight from “docile” to “exceedingly pissed”.

Now, I really don’t have anything against wasps. Paper wasps don’t sting — they have a really nasty bite — and, thus, do not tend to cause allergic reactions. They are voracious eaters of all kinds of garden pests.

As well, the wasps are generally non-aggressive. This family had been living on our porce for quite a while. Roger had been bitten once, but he likes to catch the wasps. With his bare hands. Quite good at it, too — knows how to hold ‘em so they can’t bite him. Mostly.

They are only really aggressive in the fall after the first few cold nights or first frost. Then their food supply crashses and the wasps get a bit desperate. I’m not exactly sure what wasps due during the winter.

Anyway, I didn’t really want to kill the wasps.

I left the bagged nest in a protected spot until the temperature (and their oxygen levels) dropped off a bit. Once the family calmed down a bit, I took ‘em out to the fron yard and cut a corner off zip lock and shook the wasps out on the ground. Amazing, the entire group of wasps crawled off — didn’t fly — and disappeared within 15 minutes.

It’ll be interesting to see if they show up at the location of the new lamp tomorrow. Fortunately, it is relatively wasp proof and, since it works, it’ll deter their return. Unfortunately, one of the stupid spot CFLs I installed burned out within 10 minutes of being turned on and that side of the fixture is currently quite welcoming to the little buggers.

Low maintenance groundcover plants that are willing to grow in poor soil with little irrigation are generally quite welcome in most areas.

And the plant pictured certainly looks pretty damned healthy for something growing in hard pack clay and gravel with no water and zero protection from the blazing hot sun.

Better yet, look at how it is spreading so nicely to cover the ground while maintaining an extremely low growth habit. Looks like it might even be a really pleasant ground cover for paths or walkways.

Closer inspection reveals that it even has these really pleasant little yellow flowers!

Cute, even! And it is covered in them!

How can anyone not love this plant?

But, wait, what is this?

Every one of those little yellow flowers turns into a seed pod. The fruit of the vine, if you will.

And every one of those little seed pods breaks apart into four or five sections, each with quarter inch spikes.

While the spikes are semi-hard when green (hard enough to puncture skin), they turn iron-hard when dry. The design of the little seed pod sections is such that they spikes point up.

How hard are they?

Hard enough to go through bike tires, thin soled shoes, people feet, animal skin, and — even — small car tires.

And they hurt likely bloody hell. Typical to thorns like this, the surface has some kind of irritant on it that causes the puncture wounds to be extremely painful.

Roger and I have been on a personal vendetta to eliminate this evil plant wherever we find it. It is one of the few plants that I might actually consider using chemicals on.

As you can see in the picture, this ground crawling vine can get to be quite large. That isn’t even the largest one we have eliminated in the area.

Tribulus terrestis is an invasive species that has gained a foothold across most of the warmer climates of the world. It is the bane of bicyclists and open shoed hikers.

Recently, I ran into a nasty patch of it on one of the trails in Cupertino that I ride my bike to work on. Obviously, an infestation of puncture vine along a public walkway can be very painful and unpleasant to folks using said path.

I contacted Cupertino Parks and Recreation and they had the plant eradicated within a day! Very impressive!

Update: As the summer wore on, a couple more sprouts popped up here and there. Cupertino Parks & Rec eliminated them in short order. Clearly, they keep an eye on outbreaks! Nice!

Fraser has been having quite a bit of fun with his Canon 30D and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens.

This morning, he posted a beautiful capture of a green iguana. I also have that lens and used it to grab this shot of an iguana in Mexico last spring (Canon EOS 350D Rebel XT, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro
1/500 @ f/7.1, ISO 100).

Lovely lens and iguanas are cool.

Our neighborhood and community garden has been planting and trading Iris for a couple of decades. Every spring, there are clumps of iris of all different color combinations throughout the neighborhood. When the clumps need be divided, people simply place the removed portions of plant on their yard waste piles. Few of these ever get scraped and hauled away, though, as a neighbor will invariably see the potential plants, grab them, and stick ‘em in a hole somewhere around their own house.

This spring has been a particularly spectacular year. And yesterday’s morning rain and intense ambient cloud filtered light made for a perfect opportunity to photograph some of the beautiful flowers throughout the area.

Actually, the abundance of flowers almost made it difficult simply because framing a shot to highlight a particular flower almost always included a neighboring bloom.

This one is one of my favorite colored blossom. It is all pastels from a desert palette like one that O’Keefe might have used.

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The rather long point of this is to point people to this flat out incredible site. Animated knot tying instructions with historical information, application notes, and words of warning about failure modes.

Another excellent knot site.

Did a bit of gardening today. Beyond the typical weeding and planting, I had to make some vertically oriented growing structures for beans and grapes. That is, I needed trellises.

In the past, I have used concrete netting (i.e. wire mesh with 6″ openings) and, when feeling extra lazy, I have used pre-boat trellises (jasmine in our atrium, for example).

Expensive, that. A far less expensive solution which also has the added benefit of being fully customizable is to build trellises myself using posts and twine, rope or wire, depending on how long the trellis needs to last.

You’ll need two critical tools to make this easy. First, you’ll need a post driver. Why the Amazon product link doesn’t show the driver, I don’t know.

Anyway, a post driver is simply a steel tube hollow one one end and weighted on the other with a couple of handles. You slide the post driver over the post you want to drive, lift up, and let it drop (or pull down if you want to drive faster). The post driver does the work of driving the post without the risk of smashing the crap out of your feet.

So, grab your post driver and some posts. I use both wooden and metal posts, depending on what is available. Sometimes, I’ll drive a metal post really deep, then a wooden post a couple of inches deep next to it, and tie the two together with my wire clamp tool to make an extra tall post (as I did for the grape trellis).

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As I have previously mentioned, my son has a natural rapport with all things bug and bug like.

Last fall, Roger found a chrysalis on a fence at a friend’s house during a party. He carefully collected it, brought it home, and stashed it away in his room. We had completely forgotten about it.

This morning, Roger found the pictured swallowtail butterfly crawling up the leg of a chair. The butterfly had emerged!

So, the morning was spent teaching a butterfly how to fly. It is doing quite well.

As far as I can tell, it appears to be an Anise Swallowtail common to western North America. The caterpillars eat plants from the carrot family, the citrus family, and the Apiaceae family.

We have seen old chrysalises — chrysalii? — hanging from birch trees, off of various plants, and on fences. Fairly common in the bay area. Keep a eye out for ‘em as the caterpillars are easy to care for and the emerging butterflies are both extremely beautiful, very educational for young ones and a lot of fun.

A 4.2 quake hit just northeast of Berkeley at 8:40pm this evening.

It jostled my chair ever so slightly (an Aeron in full bouncy mode) and made the shelves / TV pop a little. I wasn’t the only person to feel it.

I knew what it was when it happened and didn’t really even think about it. It was quite minor here, but likely caused light damage near the epicenter. Shook up a basketball game a little bit, too.

I fully expect to lose control of all bodily functions when a quake that size happens nearby or when a much larger quake hits in the area.

Tally? 4 quakes since moving here nearly 4 years ago. One was a 3.4 basically directly under our house — woke me up. One was at Apple; just a bit of movement caused by a good sized quake south of us. One was at home; my wife had just gotten done with a rousing round of Dance Dance Revolution and stated that either she was having a heart attack or we were having an earthquake. Thankfully, it was another medium sized quake south of us. And now this one.

Oh, and I sort of woke up, but mostly slept through, a quake in mid Missouri when I was about 8.

A while ago, I was contacted by the Plant Conservation Alliance’s Alien Plant Working Group (National Park Service). They were asking for permission to use this Yellow Star Thistle photo (left) in their 2007 calendar

Sure! Cool!

I received email today that the calendar is now available as a hi-res PDF. Free, too.

The above photo appears as the February plant.

Funny, this isn’t the first time that I have been contacted about the yellow star thistle photos. There is a book in the works that will likely be using the photo.

Just for giggles, here are the 5 lightning strikes (so far) that I have been within 100 feet of:

• While a teen, lightning struck a tree right outside my bedroom window. Immediately rusted a supporting wire of the tree, killing the crown of the tree above the wire, and screwed up a couple of electronic items in the house. The tree is still alive, but didn’t quite grow in the same pattern as is typical for its species.
• Lightning struck a tree right outside of the window of my cabin at summer camp. Stuck little bits of wood into the screen near my head.
• Lightning struck a tree about 75 feet from me as I was running between the mess hall and my cabin at summer camp. Knocked me on my ass, temporarily blinded me and left me deaf for a while. Nothing like sitting on your ass in a puddle in a rain storm blind, deaf, confused, and wondering why the hell your world has just exploded.
• While we were home, lightning struck a telephone pole outside our house in Chicago, traveled down the phone line, shocked both my wife and I, blew up the phones in the house, took out my fax modem, a serial port on my NeXT cube, the HP PA-RISC workstation, the hub in between and the network card in an Intel based workstation.
• Again while we were home, our house in Connecticut was struck by lightning. Took out the TiVo’s modem, a hub, the DSL modem, an airport base station, and — oddly — the garage door opener.

I have been within a couple of hundred yards of lightning strikes many times, often knocking out electricity or taking out a random electronic component somewhere in the vicinity. My parent’s house — same one in the first bullet above — has been struck at least one other time, maybe twice. Took out the fridge, garage doors (what is up with that?), a TV or two, and the central heating/air conditioning, but didn’t muck up the computer. Go figure.

What have I learned?

Lightning is very bright. And loud. And that whole “doesn’t strike twice” thing is a complete lie.