Today's Valentine: Laukki

 Laukki is a Selasphorus sasin, AKA, Allen's hummingbird. There's more on Laukki and why I named him that in this post from January 26th. For reasons too complicated and too uninteresting to explain I was on a sort of mission to visit with Laukki this morning. 

Here are some pictures from today's walk...

February 14th.

Apple blossoms. 

 A western fence lizard and not a very good picture. I took it because I was amazed by how many lizards were running around while, just 12 days ago, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow predicting six more weeks of winter.

 Monarch butterfly on Eremophila racemosa x maculata 'Fairy Floss'. This shrub is a hummingbird magnet but I think this may be the first time I've seen a butterfly on it.

 Here's male Allen's hummingbird Laukki. You can tell he's been poking at flowers on the Fairy Floss bush because he has a bit of floss stuck to his beak. The Eremophila is just below this eucalyptus tree.

 A bee on Melaleuca radula flowers.

 Erynnis funeralis, commonly known as the funereal duskywing. Funereal (pronounced /fjuːˈnɪəriəl/ or fyu̇-ˈnir-ē-əl) is an adjective describing something sad, solemn, gloomy, or suitable for a funeral. It signifies a deeply mournful, dismal atmosphere or appearance. Yeah, I know, some jerk human gave it that name. Pretty little butterfly.

 Monarch butterfly on Grevillea juniperina.

 Last image in this post I mentioned an injury to what I now believe is the female of this pair of red-tailed hawks. They've been around this specific territory for quite a long time. Red-tailed hawk males and females look nearly identical in plumage, but the species exhibits reversed sexual dimorphism, with females being roughly 25% larger and heavier than males. While males tend to defend the outer boundaries of their territory, females are more aggressive in securing the immediate nesting site and in defending it. Appears to me she may have lost a tail feather or two.

 Meanwhile... part of what got me walking and sort of looking for a sense of comfort in hanging out with Laukki this morning is due to feral cat, Vit is seen here playing with Junimoon last July 17th. Vit has a relatively serious injury right now below his right ear (you don't want to see it). He was AWOL for about 3 days and showed up on my patio yesterday. I fed him and he got about 100mg of amoxicillin. I need to see him and dose him some more. There are some good healing signs. I've been using Google Gemini AI to help advise and that's one thing AI LLMs can be very good at. Anyway... Positive vibes for Vit coming around, please. I'm really bummed I didn't see him again today. 

 Also, the odds that Vit is Juni's dad are very high. Even if he isn't he was Juni's protector once her mother pushed her off after weening and while I was befriending her on the patio.

Speaking of Kitties and Valentines here are my two girls, Lucy and Junimoon, taken today. Lucy will be 20 first week of April. Juni will be 1 that same week. I will also be older in April. Both Lucy and Juni combed out flea free yesterday and today, so yay. I haven’t retreated from the front lines though. 

 Music for today's walk was Steven Wilson's, Impossible Tightrope: Live In Madrid. Here is the studio version of the song, Impossible Tightrope.

Harmony little sister 
Find your way through the fog  

A bed of silence. The howl of the wind. 

 

Weekend walk report: Hiding shadows

 The title comes from post work on photos. I went out for my Saturday and Sunday walks within a 1/2 hour of the same time, the harsh light of 10:00 AM. I did what I could on the photo front. Here are some images I took along the way...

Saturday, February 7th.

Azalea flowers.

 Eastern redbud.

 This was the second year I was out for a walk in the local arboretum and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was out training search and rescue (SAR) dogs. There was a small plastic crate for carrying milk bottles that I passed, it was turned upside down and had a sock in it. I was too far away to go back once it dawned on me... son of a gun, an odd sock.

 Osteospermum. This is one of the spots where I have collected seeds for these plants now flowering in front of my driveway.

 Apparently Mockingbirds either can't read or they simply don't care.

 
Aeonium arboreum.

Palo verde flowers in a cactus.

 

 Male Allen's hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin). His name is Laukki. 

For this scrub jay I rather clumsily switched the Playlist on my iPhone to one I have called "Wild Birds." These are all MP3s of bird calls I found on the web one day just about a year ago. I chose birds that I frequently run into for the expressed purpose of talking to them from my phone. The real clumsy part was going from headphones to speaker on the phone since I've never voluntarily done that, certainly not on the fly, and Apple has to make everything hidden, tiny and I don't think necessarily all that intuitive. Anyway, I accomplished that part of the mission and was able to get this jay to come back my way after it had flown off out of vision. The srcub jay call was actually downloaded in the fall of 2021. I first used the scrub jay recording when I would see my friends Bowie and her mate, Mr. Bowie across the street from my house. I would use the recording from just outside my front door and get them into the backyard and treat them with acorns, etc. 

 Laukki again, along with my continuing struggle with the light.

 Opossum cruising a construction site on campus.

 

 Mourning dove.

 Sunday (today), February 8th.

 

Wrinkled or crumpled wings on a butterfly, particularly monarchs, often indicate infection by the parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), just mentioned last week. I thought at first it may have been newly emerged from its cocoon until I also noticed tiny black spots which are a sign of the infection. Hey, it bummed me out too.

 

 This is a California towhee (Melozone crissalis), AKA, a Grumpy bird.

 A walking mocking'. This is likely a female.

 

 This would be her slightly larger mate looking on.

 

 Nearby and a reason for some fuss from the mockingbirds, yesterday's jay.

That's all. Average for the two walks was 2.3 miles and it was really nice to get out. Noted in the complaint department here, I finally got the wands and brush/mop head for my steam cleaner and have been engaged in rupturing the enemy's defensive line on the front and from multiple dispersed locations to disrupt their cohesion. Also, freakin' brutal torture on my back.

This is the song that took me back to my car for the drive home.

 

Weekend walk report: Monarch butterflies, etc.

 Monarch butterflies in Southern California begin their northward migration away from overwintering sites in late February to March. As warmer weather arrives, they break from their clustered, dormant state to seek milkweed for breeding, typically dispersing from coastal groves by early spring. 

That's the Google AI overview for monarch butterflies in SoCal. I was going to get into a longer discussion but I'm tired. I've walked everyday from January 23rd through today, all of this is still going on and to add some additional insect fear, there was this little lady to deal with on Thursday after my mis-IDing her until Wednesday evening and asking Google search by image what her story was. 

The photo was taken just above my kitchen stove. She was coming in at night thorough the vent of a Nutone exhaust fan above the stove. Notice the little orange hourglass on her belly? She's a Latrodectus geometricus, commonly known as the brown widow and is one of the widow spiders in the genus Latrodectus. As such, it is a 'cousin' to the more infamous Latrodectus mactans (black widow). Their bites, though painful, are not considered to be dangerous. They became established in Southern California in early 2000 and they are invasive. This information called for its extermination (death by pump spray hairspray) on Wednesday, January 28th. On Thursday I took the faceplate off the Nutone, unplugged it and went to work on the fan, its housing and everything in and around the stove/ovens with a Wagner steam cleaner.

Okay... wasn't gonna write much but as you can probably tell, most of the above was copy/paste.

Here are some photos from this weekend’s walks.

Saturday, January 31

Monarch 

 Monarch on Asclepias curassavica (Tropical Milkweed) it’s a primary reason they’ve stopped migrating. Since the Tropical variety doesn’t die back in our mild winters like the native A. fascicularis, it allows the OE parasite (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha) to build up on the leaves, which can eventually weaken the very population it's feeding.

 A West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella). An open and shut case.

 Hardy Ice Plant (Delosperma cooperi).

 
Monarch butterfly. The plant is mule fat (Baccharis salicifolia).

 Coming in from a distance I thought it was a flock of bush tits because that's how bush tits travel but instead it was about 10-12 Lesser Goldfinches. I've never seen that. Of course I didn't get any good pictures. The plant is prostrate rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis). 

 Sunday, February 1st (today)

Monarch in a coastal tea tree (Leptospermum laevigatum), an evergreen shrub or small tree native to southeastern Australia. I misID'd this shrub last week as an Eremophila.

 Also on the only few branches showing flowers so far on the coastal tea tree was this Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta).

 This is one of the hawks that was being challenged by four ravens in this post from last week. It appears it has some tail feather damage from some incident. I'll keep watching for it.

Watcher of the skies, watcher of all
His is a world alone, no world is his own
He whom life can no longer surprise
Raising his eyes, beholds a planet unknown