Today's walk report: 122919

Usual suspects in typical places.

She was listening to the camera beeps and turned around.

Today's walk report: 122819

Just one cooperative male Calypte anna hummingbird in the grape arbor.

The walk centered mostly on the music attached to my head, an album entitled, Handmade Cities by a cat named Plini Roessler-Holgate. His artist name is simply, Plini. He's an Australian guitarist and songwriter. Steve Vai named him "the future of exceptional guitar playing".

This is the first song from the album, Electric Sunrise. It alone has given me hope for the future of progressive rock music and young talent.

Today's walk report: 122719

Snow, the Santa Susana Mountains and behind me, a mere 10 miles away, we have the Pacific Ocean with girls in bikinis and people surfing and stuff.

I usually make panoramas using some sort of legitimate aspect ratio, Not this time. This image was cropped to the width of my monitor, 2560 pixels. Blogger is going to change that. The panorama was composed using 14 images, each 5184 x 3456 pixels in size with 40-50% overlap

 I walked up 137 steps that I wasn't particularly inclined to walk up to get this image to share. I hope you appreciate that.

Today's walk report: 122519

Christmas Day, 2019.

I do believe that I was peed upon by the famous Allen's hummingbird, Rusty G. Alpha this morning. There has to be some sort of special honor in that, some message of good fortune.  No?

Here are the pictures I took shortly before Rusty peed on me.

Remember last week I mentioned Rusty was looking a little winter plump? Well...

This is right before he took off toward me and overhead.

It was from this approximate perch that I was tinkled upon. Actually, he may have peed in flight on the way up.

That's it. That's all I've got. Don't have a freakin' Christmas cow about it.

Today's walk report: 122419

Welcome to the Bunny Hop.

It appeared to me that they were having fun. It certainly was fun to watch. One rabbit would run under the other as it jumped in the air.

 This is a one, two shot.

Music on the walk was Celebration Day, Led Zeppelin in its entirety. Hey, Stairway to Heaven is kinda Christmasy, you know, if you listen very hard.

There you have it. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah or whatever else you might be celebrating.

Today's walk report: 122219

One picture.

Yellow-rumped warbler (Setophaga coronata)

Today's walk report: 122119

It was a fine walk, 70º f for the duration.

Here are some pictures.

Aphelocoma californica.

Female Selasphorus sasin, 3 poses.

Male Calypte anna, color on, color off.

"Yeah, I made that mess. A squirrel's gotta eat."

That's all. Comments are welcome. Have a happy/merry. Don't forget to bang your tartookas, bang your gardookas, slam your slooslunkas and wham your whowonkas!

Today's walk report: 121719

Counting crows.

It was a large murder of crows (seriously, that's what they're called) I counted 42. This one was quite vocal.

That's all I have. I actually took a camera because I wanted to get a picture of this one Christmas decoration. It's a little Santa Claus about 14" tall riding a bicycle. I found it amusing the other day but I guess I forgot where it was.

Music was Visions of the Emerald Beyond by Mahavishnu Orchestra. I wore my vinyl copy of this record out in 1975.

Wildflowers 2019-2020

I was asked about the status of wildflowers around the house today. Wildflowers for spring has been a project here since 2012-2013. Seed goes down in tandem with the first rain activity on the property. This year that was November 30th. That's about one month later than the past several years. I think 2016 was the nicest display out front.

And the nicest showing in the backyard was this year, 2019. But this image only represents about 120 sq. ft. The entire "field" of wildflowers took up approximately 700 sq. ft. Some of these poppies were close to 5' tall and the clarkia was often close to 4'. 

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to approach posts on this because at first I thought I'd simply edit this 1st post with additions, then I asked myself if that was a good idea and couldn't come up with an answer. It's either that or new posts titled Wildflowers 2019-2020 Part 2, 3, etc. or I don't follow through at all or hardly at all. If you have or have had a blog you know that somewhere along the line, and sometimes with frequency, ask yourself, why the !$#&* am I doing this?

On to today... seedlings.

These are curiosity #1. I don't know what they are. I suspect due to location and my not recognizing them that they are from a sack of bird food. And my best guess on the type of birdseed is milo, grain sorghum. Two shots here because some critter has been digging around and chewing on this and I want to point that out. If it/they keep at it this is probably going away. You see, there's a lot of stuff nearby. No digging allowed.

The dominant plant in the next image is Dimorphotheca sinuata. It's a type of African daisy. That's the flower that takes over the first image, with the house. There are 4 or 5 color options on that flower. There's a thing or two in there I'm not sure about but also nearby are common storksbill (Erodium cicutarium). I've wiped out 1,000s of those seedlings recently. They took over the front and side yards last year. It's the plant that looks a little like a parsley leaf. It's also allegedly edible. Also, if you look left side, center, the little almost heart-shaped leaves. That's common mallow (Malva neglecta, I think). It too is edible. I hula-hoed a few 100 of those out of existence today. Maybe I should map out the entire yard in macro photos so I can find all the problem children.

(If you don't know or aren't thinking about it, this is a good time to click to enlarge images)

Here's the common mallow showing both the heart-shaped first leaves and a mature leaf. It's a modest ah-ha moment for some people. This is a focus stack of two images by the way and I wasn't planing that when I took them, so if it looks a little funky--that's why.

There's some major inventory on these guys. Another mystery.

This is an easy one. This is Arroyo Lupine (Lupinus succulentus). Arroyo Lupine is showing up all over too.

More Dimorphotheca sinuata coming in with perhaps some very young Dimorphotheca sinuata.

California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) acting as a  perennial. They've been sitting around rather dwarf-like since spring.

That's it. That's all the pictures I took and when I took them, moments before I started this post, I didn't know I was going to do this. Stay tuned.

Today's walk report: 121519

The strength of the moment lies with you.

I was tardy. I meant to leave about an hour earlier than I did. I don't know what happened. Upper 50ºs plus a nippy breeze. It's all relative.

Here are some photos.

When I was much farther away than this and was looking pretty much right into the sun, I thought this might have been an American Kestrel. I got a little excited because I haven't seen one for at least... well, let me look... A quick cursory search on my computer indicates I haven't taken a photo of an American Kestrel since January of 2015. That bothers me. I have reasons for it to bother me. However, I won't bother you with them. Anyway, turned out this is a young red tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis),

Some random milkweed and a random location.

And finally here are a few shots of the trusty Rusty G. Alpha (Selasphorus sasin). Winter plump?

Music taking me home was randomly accessed.

Tales from Topographic Oceans and it was side two (22:22 into the YouTube video)
"The Remembering (High the Memory)"
 But you should listen to the whole thing because you probably never have and never will otherwise.

Today's walk report: 120819

Today (see yesterday) I looked at and trusted the weather.com hourly prediction which stated that I was in the clear on precipitation for at least a few hours. I even took the advice of a wise man who stated in an email to me this morning "to watch the animated maps on that website, using the ‘future’ setting." That showed the rain moving way north of me.

There were patches of blue sky and some sunshine was beaming down around me. But it wasn't going to last. The entire walk home, about 1.25 miles, I was getting poured upon. Nevertheless, for the most part, it was a really nice peaceful walk.

See the blue sky...

Only 10 minutes later...

It's getting gray again, was this turkey vulture an omen?

By this point I had circled the garden twice. I did not see a single hummingbird, I was looking for hummingbirds and it was starting to drizzle so I decided to leave. Standing under a palo verde tree on my way out I stopped to take this picture of one of its fallen flowers. That's when it started pouring. Total walk, 2.7 miles or 4.34 km.

Music was on shuffle. This song took me home...

Today's walk report: 120719

It wasn't much of a walk and there was all sorts of something doesn't feel quite right. But it was the weather that turned me around. The one thing I always seem to check, the hourly forecast, I simply zoned out and forgot. BUT, I had checked just two hours earlier and I looked safe then.

What I got were showers. About 3 minutes before the rain started I took this picture of 9 doves. Moments later I tied a plastic bag over the camera (yeah, thought of that).  Another couple 100 yards in it was obvious I needed to turn around. The total walk was just over 1/2 mile, about 1 km.

The music attached to my head was and still is...