sea-kangaroo's Favorites

Tidepooling. Very exciting Halgerda-ish find under a rock! When I turned the rock over this critter did the usual thing of immediately heading at top speed for the other side of the rock, but on its way it happened to intersect a patch of little purple tunicates, which it hung out on for a while. I was suspicious it was eating them, and indeed it was! Last two photos show the before and after of the tunicate patch. Those photos are only 5 minutes apart, so it didn't take very long for it to take two whole pieces out of the tunicate pie.

Long story short:
This young chick was walking slowly down the middle of the sidewalk near Fisherman's Wharf, completely oblivious to getting out of the way of people's feet or wheels. While I was on the phone with the SPCA a well-meaning but completely-ignorant-about-seabirds guy picked it up and set it down by the water. It was unable to submerge but able to slow paddle through the boat slips just inches from my reach for an hour. When it eventually got out on the boat ramp I scooped it up in my hat and took it to the folks at Monterey Kayaks, who are a pick-up point for the SPCA and had a lined animal carrier box all ready to go.

He seemed perfectly healthy, just way too young to be utterly alone, so should be back in the wild in pretty short order I think! Godspeed.

Cattle Egret
with Barn Swallow it has caught
Dry Tortugas, Florida
1 May 1988

Cattle Egrets are a species known to wander. They made it to the U.S. on their own in the early 1950s and are now a common species all over the Americas. I once found a dead Cattle Egret on a rocky beach in Antarctica. There are no insects on Antarctica, so that particular Cattle Egret just wandered too far. Such might be said for Florida's Dry Tortugas. They are called "dry" for good reason. There is no fresh water. Birds that end up there and are too tired to move on, simply die. It is a daily task of employees at Fort Jefferson to walk around and pick up and discard the Cattle Egret carcasses before they open the fort to the birdwatchers each spring day. On this day my group watched a starving Cattle Egret (there are few large insects for the egrets to feed on) grab a Barn Swallow. It certainly made for a strange scene!

This is the most amazing display of Calochortus kennedyii we've ever seen! The display extends 3 to 5 miles south of the Haiwee reservoir road and equally to the north. It extends from hwy 395 to the reservoir to the east. There are 5 to 15 plants per square meter. It must be 100,000s of plants, in full bloom on 5/13.

This leucistic individual is Salamander C. This one has been photographed and observed since 2010 many times by Don Scallen and it had at least been alive two years before that, making it thirteen years old- two years older then me!

Too-cute puffball that showed up under house eaves after the recent nighttime temperature drop. Thought it was a second Black Phoebe joining the first one that already sleeps here, but after turning fill light way up on this photo it looks more like a wren.