The Odd Sock: Today's walk report: 082822

Find yourself a better way
To meet the future
It’s all that you crave
A silhouette of the new day*

Most mornings there are two things in my head as I enter conscious awareness, the remnants of a dream and a song. I realized (finally) today that I should let the song take the reins to start my day and allow the dreams to quickly fade away.

Here was today's walk. The first picture was taken at 6:50 AM. The sky was gray and remained that way for the duration of my outing. The only radiance was on the phone, talking with Docken. Some birds rescued me on the photo front, barely.

First I'd like to mention... We're in a freakin' drought. Consumption is currently restricted by several water conserving ordinances and this is the first thing I see coming onto the local college campus. One, their address doesn't fall under the Sunday schedule, two, some of these were stuck in one spot (I think there were 8 running), three, one of these was watering concrete (seen here) all the way out to that foreground sidewalk and four, I'm sorry, we really need to water baseball fields, seriously? Put in some astroturf. They did that for the football stadium (then they locked all of the gates, um, "Community College"). Please don't get me started on the environmental disaster known as golf.

I did my best to adjust images for shadows under gray skies.

Originally I had this pegged as a young red-tailed hawk now, after looking at a few other equally poor images and tweaking the shadows to the hilt, I decided this is a Cooper's hawk.

The very woody "mulch" I was walking on is 6"+ deep, it's awkward to walk on. I noticed a fair amount of mycelium mixed in and then saw several of these mushrooms. I thought it pretty odd considering how hot it's been... for weeks.

Also, these are not the mushrooms I'm looking for. I didn't take a picture but there was about a 350 square foot area of mud nearby with lots of tracks and other mud digging and pushing evidence of a small skip loader. Obviously a pipe had broken but at least it appeared to have been fixed. The darker mulch near this mockingbird is moist, has been turned over and is loaded with mycelium.

Docken and I still talk about this leak from August of 2014. Notice the overflowing bucket under the dripping water? And that was so they could do what with it?

Moving onto the main walkway through the campus I was distracted by a Los Angeles County Sheriff deputy parked in front of me and didn't realize this red-tailed hawk was about to take off a mere 8-10' in front of me from a perch only a few inches taller than I am. This has happened to me before. I have had both re-tailed and Cooper's hawks fly directly at me and over my head by as little as 5-6'. This is NOT a moment where you think, oh, look at the pretty bird.

I LOL'd when I saw this one.

"Thanks for embarrassing me."

Onto the garden, the infamous male Calypte anna hummingbird known as Dusty was about my only subject.

But wait... who's this? Why it's an imposter! Dusty was about 25' feet to the left of this guy. He's slightly smaller than Dusty but notice the very similar pollen residue on the beak? Obviously working on some sort of avian identity theft.

That was it for the garden. I started to go for a loop around the lower end of the campus but soon realized that it was a "Vintage Fair" day. This brings scores of people onto the campus to sell "Etsy-style" stuff they make. At least, that's what it has appeared to be from a distance. Anyway, I didn't care to be around the influx of humans.

Heading back to the car, parked off campus, here's mockingbird number two.