Dragonfly with Raindrops
During an unusual summertime drizzle, I went to Lake Ida Rose near Willits to look for dragonflies. I found this female Variegated Meadowhawk perching on a dead Star Thistle on the earthen dam. Every few minutes it would shake the water off its wings, but it didn’t fly.
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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. A very light rain will cover everything with big drops, while a heavier rain will knock the drops off as they form. Each raindrop can act as a lens, showing an inverted image of whatever is on the other side. To show roses through the drops, I had to find grass stems that were at just the right angle to the rose bushes. About fifteen minutes after the sun came out, the drops were almost totally gone. These roses are old cultivated varieties that have gone wild on the Mendocino Headlands.
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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 raindrop is acting as a lens and inverting the image.
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Flying Song Sparrow
Male Song Sparrow landing on a singing perch at the Mendocino Headlands. Because it’s almost directly between me and the setting sun, the wing feathers are refracting the sunlight into beautiful rainbows. Seeing this does not require filters or anything, it looks the same to the eye, but it’s usually very quick. You can hold a small bird’s wing feather up to any light and see the same effect. I’d wanted a photo like this since I was a kid, but only in June 2007 did I finally figure out how to get it. Each day for about two weeks, in the hour before sunset, I would line up this bracken fern with the ocean in the background and the sun just above, and whenever the sparrow landed I’d try to get it with the wings still open.
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Green Wave
This place is just a bit north of Little River. I took the photo late one windy afternoon in early October 2008. There’s a big rock reaching almost to the surface here, and sometimes when a wave passes over, part of it wraps around the rock and goes back the other way. When the backwards moving wave hits the next regular wave it can make an explosion, a giant fishtail shape, or in this case a very thin walled breaker. The seaweed you can see is Bull Kelp, mostly it gets ripped out by the bigger waves later in the year.
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Red-shouldered Hawks
A few miles north of Ukiah, this nest was set against the trunk of a black oak growing on a hillside overlooking a stream and valley with vineyards. I built a blind of 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 lizards or voles and she would tear them up and feed them to the chick bite by bite.
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