Dragonfly with Raindrops
During an unusual summertime drizzle, I went to Lake Ida Rose near Willits to look for dragonfies. I found this one perching on a dead Star Thistle on the earthen dam. It seems to be some type of Meadowhawk. Every few minutes it would shake the water off its wings, but it didn’t fly.
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Raindrop with Mendocino Church
It had been about a day since the rain stopped, but there were still a few raindrops on the bushes. I found this drop on a rose stem right by the trail from the Mendocino Presbyterian Church down to Big River Beach. I had to climb partly into the bushes to get an angle that showed the church, and the people walking down to the beach kept getting startled when they noticed me. The church looks upside down because the drop is acting as a lens and inverting the image.
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Red-shouldered Hawks
A few miles north of Ukiah, this nest was set against the trunk of a tall black oak tree growing on a hillside overlooking a stream and a valley with vineyards. I built a blind with green sheets and camouflage nets out on the horizontal limb of another oak, and watched from there. Mostly the male hawk hunted and the mother stayed with the chick. He would bring in a lizards or voles and she would tear them up and feed them to the chick bite by bite.
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Sunset at the Mendocino Headlands
Mid July sunset, looking west from the northern part of the headlands. By this time of summer most of the wildflowers are gone from the flat areas above, but they’re still going strong on the cliff faces. The purple flowers are Seaside Daisies; the yellow ones are Seep Spring Monkeyflowers. I used a multiple exposure technique called HDR to show detail in the bright area around the sun as well as in the shadows. HDR (high dynamic range) involves taking four or five pictures, identical except that the exposures range from very dark to very bright, and using photoshop to meld them into a single image.
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Anna’s Hummingbird Feeding Chicks
In April, in a grove of bishop pines above the mouth of the Big River, I noticed a hummingbird flying from branch to branch and chirping unhappily at me. I walked away and pretended to leave but really hid and watched. After a few minutes it flew to its well hidden nest, made of spider web and lichen and set on a low pine branch near the edge of the cliff. With hummingbirds, just the females build nests and tend young, and two babies per brood seems to be the norm. The only thing I saw her feeding the babies was some kind of clear liquid, probably nectar.
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Raindrops with Roses
I took this picture in June, just as the sky was clearing up after several days of light drizzle. These drops were on a vetch tendril; the whole thing was about the size of my thumbnail. Each raindrop was acting as a lens, showing an inverted image of the scene behind. About fifteen minutes after the sun came out, the drops were almost all gone. The rose bushes are some of the old cultivated types that have gone wild on the Mendocino Headlands.
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