Last month's nearly full moon.

F3 Workout

I took my Nikon F3 on a Memorial Day hike in the Lime Ridge Open Space. I wanted to get some nice nature photos and see if any wildlife was active. None was, but I managed a few nice shots in the open space anyway. I shot eleven rolls of film, including a roll of mystery film that exposes at ISO 1.6. It came in a container labeled Kodak 2383, and the film matches the general description of 2383, but it lacks the edge markings. Anyway, here are some of the better shots, taken on various films, from the hike.



















Here's a sample shot from the mystery film. You can see it has pretty nice tones and incredible detail, but it's ISO 1.6 and I just don't know what I can even do with that.

Round Valley Regional Park

A few weeks ago I took in Round Valley Regional Park in an attempt to see some golden eagles. Following my mis-identification of a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks as golden eagles, I decided to see if I could find some real eagles to photograph. Low Vasqueros reservoir has some trail closings, so those eagles would probably be  inaccessible. Round Valley State Park has had historic eagle sightings, and no current trail closures.

To spoil the plot early, I did not see any eagles. Lots of eagle food:


ground squirrels and rabbits, for instance.



But the trip wasn't a total wash. I managed to get some great photos for my Panoramio account. Have you checked that out yet, by the way? I have, right now, about 800 photos active in Google Earth. Here's a link to all my photos on the Panoramio map. It's a fun website, by the by.

Anyway, in the park I found an old stone building along Marsh Creek. I don't know anything about it yet, but when I have more details I'll go back and take more photos for another blog entry. In the interim, here are some photos of the stone house.


It was kind of warm that day, so I stopped to take this photo under a tree.


Some interesting deadwood by the house.


I could have done a better job of not blowing out the highlights on this shot. The stonework turned out nicely, though.


More really blown-out highlights.


It's worth noting that none of the shots on this page are high-dynamic-range images. It's possible to expose an image in a DSLR for a wide dynamic range without using multiple images and having software slap them all together. In fact, one of the reasons I chose my Pentax (an earlier model than but similar to this one) was because of the camera's range.



Lest you think, though, that all Round Valley has to offer is the stone house, here are a few other photos from the hike:




A California Aligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata)


An old tractor with caterpillar treads


What I'm pretty sure is an American Goldfinch


I know there's a squirrel earlier, but this one wanted to play hide and seek with you.



This photo is just heartbreaking to me. It's a good angle, nice framing, and a good atmosphere, but the problems from the camera metering the images different make it a severely flawed finished product. I'll have to re-take it.

Nature Hike Part 3: Distant Hawks

As a child I often wandered in the forest behind our home in Maineville, Ohio. Willow Creek separates Maineville from Loveland Park and between Willow Creek Road and Lilly Drive provides a forested open space with hills, running water, standing pools, frogs, and box turtles that can endlessly occupy the eyes and imagination of a child who looks to the mud for entertainment and education. My near-daily walks in Willow Creek, unattended, losing more than one perfectly good shoe to deep mud, picking up salamanders, and walking through poison ivy were both encouraged by and the bane of my parents early thirties. Now older than they were then, even without my own children, I can imagine that it was a lot of work to take three-hundred-and-fourteen  splinters out of my arms and thighs one afternoon and two-dozen bee stingers from my neck and back another.

But what I found in Willow Creek was not simply mud and turtles and spider bites but also an intense love of nature. Even now, as an ostensibly mature adult, I will take a lost mayfly in my fingers and carry it from the office bathroom to the front door. Sure it may be eaten by a bird later that day, but it won't be smashed and flushed, its life and death having passed entirely for naught.

As I aged I began looking up from the muck and slime that ringed my childhood fingernails, stained my childhood clothes, and filled my shoes with permanent debris that would wear my toes and feet raw wile eroding socks like water on sugar. In college I began to look around at plants and other wildlife. In grad school and afterward at the sky. Now, as a mid-thirties adult, I am back looking at the muck, though not at the cost of looking into the blue. No single thing other than sky provides so much to see in something so featureless.


As a Teen I has less open space at my disposal. We had moved to Gurnee, Illinois, and the open space around us included a flat retention pond behind the house and a farmer's field across the road. Though I did not spend as much time outside, my activity in Boy Scouts provided time to explore semi-wild areas. At least until my parents' divorce and my father's and my subsequent and (somewhat) mutual disinterest in continuing Boy Scouts involvement.I forget if a photography merit badge existed or not. If so, I definitely did not earn it. If a video games merit badge existed, though, I would have earned that. I played a lot of F-zero. 



And animals continued to fascinate me. I had two pet ferrets, a cockatiel, and the dog I had grown up with in the creek behind the Maineville house. These and my brother's rabbit provided enough animal life for me to photograph and kept alive a tiny ember that sat, untended for years, until late last year. Photographing seagulls along The Embarcadero, I felt a stirring that recalled, brought fully into flame this ember, the love I had of photographing wildlife and natural scenes.


I'll never be a world-renowned wildlife photographer, but that's okay. With being good comes the responsibility of being better and continuing that for ever. And sometimes, instead of the pressure to go out and take ever-better photos, I just want to play Forza.

Nature Hike Part 2: Red-tail Hawks

Writing last night's narrative was fairly draining, so I hope tonight you'll excuse me if I simply share some photos. I took these on my March 22 hike. The macro shots were with my 400mm Vivitar (Tokina) fitted with some macro tubes.

Nature Hike Part 1: Black-tailed Deer

I managed a hike on March 13 to Lime Ridge. I hiked along the Ridge Trail up to the water tank. For most of the trail, the wildlife was what one sees in Lime Ridge:

Red-winged blackbirds,


Western Blue Birds,


And Canadian Geese. Basically, the standard, pedestrian birds that make up much of ornithology and human experience with nature. But even though we experience these birds regularly, they are still attractive and important parts of the ecosystem.

And so are people. Valuing our open spaces and natural habitat, learning to live with these spaces around us and, in many cases, separate from us are the only way we can really preserve nature for its inhabitants.
Along the trail I, at one point, had a strong and impending sense that I wasn't alone and that, more importantly, I wasn't at the top of the food chain. No crickets chirped. No birds trilled near me. No field mice or voles moved in the underbrush. All became stillness and quiet except for the ocean-sound of a gentle breeze in my ears and the faint electrical hum that all people with a working nervous system are burdened with from birth onward. No one can experience perfect silence.

During graduate school I tried. In Park Lake, Utah, I took a mountain bike up a chair lift and rode it down a summer ski slope. I rode away from the lift toward a lower peak I scouted on an earlier trip. I rode the bike down the narrow, worn lane paved of cracked earth and dried pine branches. I rode it past a fence, too close, catching my knee on a metal shard and opening a gash that would birth a scar I would keep four some years.

Riding up the peak, my legs pedaling like a sprinting mad man but the bike moving with the speed and gusto of an inebriated log, I realized I had escaped the sound made by the chair lift. No clacking every twenty seconds as a chair passed through guide wheels. No other mountain bikers shouting to each other. In the winter this hill would be considered out of bounds. Were I under a ten-foot snow pack, there would be no help, no rescue, no noise. I would be alone, I realized, with silence. I knew then that this hill was where I would find and experience the truest, deepest silence available to man. I would understand what it meant for my ears to be, for the first time in my then twenty-six years of life, to be totally devoid of auditory input.

Would they struggle for sound? Would silence hurt? Would my ears simply shut down and not come back?

I walked my bike up the peak through grasses that came to my belt. Pin-sharp seeds and brushes raked across my knee gash, tore at the bare and sensitive nerves like an electric stove burner. The pain coursed through my leg like venom and more than once I stopped to fold my skin back into place and hope a clot would form to keep it there.

Since childhood I have suffered random, and fortunately not increasingly frequent, episodes of tinnitus. Hereditary, I will be saddled with this ringing for it is with me in the same way as my breath. My father had it and, with age, it became progressively worse. I remember periodic episodes of his tinnitus so cripplingly painful he clutched his ear like a monster attacking his face and threw his head about as though in mortal battle with the noise. I had never experienced tinnitus that inflicted pain, though I was told that one day I would and that as I aged it would become worse, and the pain would set it with time and that it, too, would become worse. In my fifties, I can expect, if my tinnitus progresses as my father's did, to, with only seconds of warning, suddenly be gripped by ringing that feels like frostbite, though with no mechanism to stop it except its own comings and goings which occur without ascertainable reason.

In time I reached the peak's summit. As I neared the top, the day's gentle, favonian breeze stopped. The air, which had done well to keep me cool, turned warmer in an instant. The temperature changed as drastically as a temperamental lover with fire for blood. I laid the bike down in the grass and set my helmet on top of it. I closed my eyes and listened to my breathing slow, my body returning to rest. The sun, unfiltered by a cooling breeze, warmed my face and brought sweat forward to my clothes.

Around me was what I called silence. I could hear no identifiable sounds. And my hearing stretched outward, seeking distant sounds. In time, I could hear a highway I didn't know existed, a plane so far away that the engine sound warped like a well-played record. My hearing reached, desperately like a starving man for bread, to hear any sound and I swore I could hear mice in the grass a mile away.

Then I realized I had never been without sound. In the background I became acutely aware of a soft buzzing, like a high-tension wire in morning fog. Variable, soft, electric, like the sound of galactic background radiation. It was not tinnitus. I knew that sound well, that ringing that sounded like a refrigerator compressor. No. This was something entirely. This sound I could not lose for it was my brain and my nerves -- the sound of my body talking to itself; the sound I make simply for being. And I realized I could never, never escape this sound and I could never experience a moment devoid of anything audible.

My leg had caked in dry blood and when I, at last, moved to pick up the bike the dried block cracked and fell in pieces like an avalanche. The thin layer of dryness that kept my loose skin in place broke and, like a frozen lake in the spring, blood seeped through and re-dried in moments. I knew it would be a thin scar, but right then it was a shin-guard-size block of crumbling red that fell into my sock and shoe and felt like wet sand.

My bike welcomed me back to my seat and I began riding back to the trail. Tinnitus has a harbinger. Seconds before an episode, an ear loses its hearing. More precisely, sound becomes filtered, like someone has stuffed a cotton ball into it. And then, after a brief moment of extreme auditory muting, the ringing begins. No jaw movement can stop it; only time and the tinnitus' willingness to leave can stop it. Halfway down the peak the hearing dropped from my left ear. I kept riding, having never before experienced painful tinnitus. I expected this to be about a minute of intense ringing followed by a return to normal hearing with a perceived improved sound quality, like hard-rebooting my ear. But this tinnitus was different. My ear felt like it clenched shut in a cramp and I clutched at it with both hands, twisting my head around involuntarily to quell the pain. The bike's front wheel, free from my hands, caught on a rock and turned. I went over my handlebars and had a brief, distinct moment where I looked at the sky and a single cloud and all was beauty and pain and ringing until I landed in the tall grasses and rolled to a stop.

Humans were not meant to experience silence. We are sound. Life within us exists as sound and we cannot escape it until we escape life. To attempt to escape sound is to attempt to escape life.

I sat up, the ringing and the pain subsiding, at the hill around me aware that the crickets and birds had stopped. No field mice nor voles moved in the under brush. Something else was there; it stalked me; in time, and later in life, it would catch me and my days would be filled with that ringing and clenching. That day in Park Lake and, later, just weeks ago on Lime Ridge, were precursors, teaser trailers for an inevitable future.

And then I heard the black-tailed deer in a bush up ahead, and the ringing stopped.

Bonus Photo

I couldn't fit this into tonight's blog post's narrative. So here is a photo I really liked and wanted to share.

Walnut Creek: Rara Avis

On my Wednesday hike the other week, I explored a new area. This led to an interesting discovery -- a northern burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia) in its burrow. Now, how big a deal is this? From 1989 to 2000, only 17 burrowing owl sightings were recorded in Contra Costa County. Of those, only five could be reliably re-spotted. So this is not a common bird.

Nationally, burrowing owls are considered 'at risk' -- the technical term is "national bird of conservation concern." In Canada, they are endangered. In Mexico, they are threatened. This means there's no habitat protection for them and that these birds, which seek the same refuge year on year, are vulnerable to development and habitat destruction. And there's not way to stop the habitat loss because they are not yet endangered.

Burrowing owls, however, don't construct their own homes. They use the abandoned (forcibly or not) burrows left by ground squirrels for nests and shelter. This means that where ground squirrels are eradicated as pests, burrowing owls are also preventing from taking residence.

One cause for special concern is that burrowing owls like exactly the type of land developers like. In 2010, in Antioch, not far from Walnut Creek, a developer (whose name I will post if I can find out who it was) forcibly evicted 12 burrowing owl families from land prior to development. The process involved placing eviction doors over burrow entrances. This allowed the birds to leave, but not re-enter. This apparently happened during the breeding season leaving one to wonder if the owls, returning home and unable to re-enter their nests, had chicks left to starve.

So why should we protect these owls? Aside from humanity's duty to be good stewards to our planet, these owls benefit people a great deal. During the day they hunt insects. At night they hunt mammals, like mice. So everything they eat is a nuisance. That should be enough reason.

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In addition to the burrowing owl, though, the hike showed off even more animal species.
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A ground squirrel. These animals are very skittish. Getting close enough to obtain this photo with the Wondertube was exceedingly difficult.

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Great Egret. This bird is enormous, and much faster than it would appear to be.

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Anna's Hummingbird. About 1.5 million of these hummingbirds live in the wild -- worldwide. That's not actually very many. They survive on nectar and insects, catching the latter in mid flight.

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Black Phoebe. This is a juvenile, so it's still in its brown feathers.

Lime Ridge: Quest for the Golden Eagle

As part of my Achilles tendon surgery recovery, I've been hiking in the Lime Ridge open spaces over my lunch breaks. Walnut Creek has a number of fantastic open spaces (for more info, visit www.wcosf.org) that are free, clean (because the users respect them) and a great place for people to see and appreciate wildlife.

A few weeks ago I saw a golden eagle flying over one of the Lime Ridge open spaces on my drive to work. The next week I set out to photograph it. Using my K-7 (bird photography with film is tough and wasteful) and Vivitar (Tokina) 400mm 1:6.3, I set out at lunch on Monday for my first attempt.

There were a number of birds, but no golden eagles. This was fine, I decided. I had four more days to reach my goal of photographing the golden eagle that week.

Red-tailed hawk or some kind of Merlin

The first bird I found, and the last later in the hike, I have not yet positively identified. All I can say for sure is that it's reddish and has darker-red spots on the back of its head. I'm not a bird expert, so I'm poor at identifying some of them.

The winds in Lime Ridge move quickly and gives predatory birds ample up draft for hunting. And it's always a thrill to watch these raptors dive and fly off with a field mouse.

The Vivitar 400mm, the same lens I used for the air show last year, is very difficult to focus. It back-focuses somewhat (this may be a function of my focusing screen, not the lens) and the DoF at f6.3 is thinner than a guilty man's alibi.


White-tailed Kite

As I oriented myself, I noticed a white-tailed kite hunting prey about 75 or 100 feet above me and up the trail a bit. I hiked a hill until I was slightly below the kite and took about 55 or so photos. This one turned out the best of them.

For the bird photos, I simply set my camera on auto-drive mode and held the shutter release. On my Monday trip, in one hour, I took more than 800 photos.



I followed the kit a bit, but at considerable distance. The 400mm lens functions similarly to a 600mm on my K-7 due to the crop factor; add to that the image cropping I did and the kite appears much closer than it actually was. But that's why people have super telephotos -- birding.



I decided for this image to convert it to monochrome and give it a film grain look. No reason why, except that I thought the result would look good.


Lime Ridge Bike Path

As I continued my hike, from the top of the hill I decided to take some scenery shots. No birds were out and I was beginning to feel my hunt for a golden eagle would be a fool's errand.

'What if you catch your foot in a hole and damage the tendon? What if you fall and hurt that foot and break your camera? What if you get too tired to walk back to your car, or simply can't?' I punished myself with self-doubt and looked extensively at the three paths down the hill, judging which would be the least strenuous.

I opted for a path with a wind-gnarled oak tree. It was not the easiest, but would put me close to where a hawk was gliding, hunting for a squirrel, mouse, or vole.



The bird flew to a different hunting ground, and I decided to practice my tree photography. Last year a friend asked me for a tree portfolio with the chance of doing some tree photography. I realized, assembling the portfolio, how weak my tree photographs were. So one goal for this year was to take better -- and hopefully one good -- tree photograph.

I like Lime Ridge for this because the trees exude character. They seem to almost come alive out of the landscape. In singlets or small, but disparate groups, they yield little or not usable shade, but instead provide a visual interest to otherwise barren and similarly shaped hills. They make the hills something other than two-dimensional cutouts in a diorama and provide depth, purpose, and interest. And some look good in monochrome, too.



I headed down the path, back to my car, having spent much of my lunch hour worrying too greatly about re-injuring my Achilles tendon or damaging the hardware which was only three months into its remainder-of-my-life service. Someday, if I am cremated, what will remain will be a pile of ashes, four metal anchor assemblies for plastic reinforcing bands, and some tiny screws. And a pile of ashes. In a perfect world, my ashes will be scattered in the bottom of a barbque pit so that I my remain can flavor steaks and burgers.

At the bottom of the hill, an Anna's Hummingbird sat on an impossibly thin, fragile, dried shrub branch. Even at only an ounce or three, however much these weigh, the dried branch bent precariously under its weight. In the wind, the branch swayed toward and away from me with each gust, more as the bird's profile caught the air. 




Anna's Hummingbird

Behind me I heard mice or lizards in the grass rustle, and I saw a new bird hovering, hunting, biding is time for the now-spooked rodents to regain their courage or need for food and scurry from cover. The red-tailed hawk hovered and watched carefully at the ground. I took a few pictures, bu decided to find a better vantage point. I wanted to be directly in front of it, to see about what a mouse or vole would see when leering up from the grass, searching for a raptor and gauging the safety or looking for seeds.


Red-tailed Hawk

But before I had taken five steps, it was gone. Disappeared into a tree that quickly. And then a shadow moved across the ground in front of me. And a second. No bird I had seen yet cast a shadow. Only one bird I could think of was large enough to cast that shadow. And above me, circling, hunting, and screeching appeared two golden eagles. The sun back-lit their feathers and gave them trails of fire. They circled slowly, like lumbering jets, moving with the confident, timed pace that comes from knowing nothing higher on the food chain.


Golden Eagle

They circled together, and then opposite, and rose, as though caught in an invisible tornado, higher, even higher until my eyes could see only dots and my lens could not find feather detail.


Golden Eagle

They flew in front of the sun, invisible, circled there, descended carefully, but casually. Their heads moved around slowly, but in time they both focused on one area, one general spot, one specific target, and with the speed of a mouse trap their wings folded backward and they dove faster than I could track with my lens, faster than I could follow with my eye behind a hill and there was a scream and silence.

After some seconds they flew back up from the hill and off. They were too far for me to see, even with the Vivitar, what they had caught. They flew off toward they nest and, hopefully, a chick.