A little road trip with dogs in tow is getting to be an annual tradition.
Byron was ready to be out of the city.
Half an hour away, and like someone else’s world completely.
Ditto found his moment of serenity in mid-hike, middle of the trail.
I expected to marvel at the dunes, but the thing that really took my breath away was this vast sea, vast view of only trees. So deep that the brush of ten thousand years passed it right over.
From here, the city looked very far away.
This is the hillside where I spotted this nasturtium, trailing toward the bay. I love its shady, pooly green tranquility, but I do wonder what it would look like in full sun, with all those blossoms blazing firelight…
And this is the last of my photo parade from San Francisco. As soon as my beloved little camera is replaced, I’ll have new moments from around Chicago to share with you. It’s time—the city’s wild flowers are in their glory just now, and we will celebrate them all together.
Another bird, another flower. In my mind, it’s always going to be spring in San Francisco.
I could look up what kind of bird this is, perched in the lovely datura branches. But unfortunately I’m apartment hunting, and I can’t spare the time away from compuslively refreshing craigslist. When that spacious, air-conditioned 2-bedroom treehouse comes on the market, I need to be the first to know. So meanwhile, nice bird, nice flowers, and so on. Enjoy.
Back in San Francisco, this time for just this drift of wild leaves, lit big by the sun, full of sun to bursting.
(Click for larger image, showing very cool eye)
We resume our photo parade through San Francisco with the gull, as promised.
In addition to not assaulting me, this nice gull is also giving us a perfect view of the brilliant red spot on its lower bill. We know that this spot is used by hungry chicklets, who tap it with their own beaks to beg for food. But behind the habit lie interesting details about the nature, or nurture, of animal instinct.
The laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) was the star of Niko Tinbergen’s studies of sign stimulus and food regurgitation response, later expanded by Jack Hailman in his intriguingly titled Scientific American article “How an instinct is learned”. Returning to the nest, an adult laughing gull swings its head from side to side. Peck the red spot and the chick receives food. Tinbergen’s experiments using model birds revealed that, if the red spot were anywhere else on the head, the young gulls would fail to peck. Ignore it completely. They’d tap to elicit food only when the spot was in the right, er, spot.
But the swinging action of the bill, too, has its role to play. In their first feedings, baby gulls would often miss the moving target. With practice, their accuracy increased until they reliably pecked the red spot in motion.
It’s a complex interaction: the stimulus of a precisely placed spot instinctively evokes pecking, and the swinging motion promotes learning of visual and muscular skills. Through observations like these, ethologists came to understand “instinct” not as inborn, unminded and ancient response, but as a behavior pattern pre-programmed to develop.
(And if you think this is fascinating, wait until we uncover Tinbergen’s juicy revelations about the life of the three-spined stickleback. Ooh, as they say, la la.)
Pleasant touristy picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Except that I didn’t realize at first there was a bridge in it. I = worst tourist anywhere ever.
These were my last hours in San Francisco and I felt so restless for more of it. Walked the way I hadn’t been yet, which was Chinatown, and North Beach, past Fisherman’s Wharf, ending up at Fort Mason and this skinny spiral walkway deep into the bay. Out there I got obsessed, dazed with all the astounding, shadowy tones of blue surrounding: in the sky, between the hills, under the crook of each little wave. And the gulls there, biggest gulls I have ever seen, and how the blank and solid massy white of them was so different from the vague shifting sea-light blues, those unreal blues—so opposite and so evolved to cut through them, transcend them.
Anyway, when I tried to photograph all these self-indulgent daydreams, this particular transcendent bastard flew directly at my face with muscular determination. I may or may not have squealed. Then he flew away and a bridge was behind him. The end.
(Coming up next: a real gull, standing still and managing not to scare the crap out of me. Some bird-rescue-volunteer-slash-intrepid-world-traveler I turn out to be.)
 (click for larger image) |
Have we talked about my love for the octopus? Oh, we will. Meanwhile, be teased by this pert little specimen, edging his way out of the waters for purposes unknown. |
*I hope you will feel free to sing this title to the tune of Jawbreaker’s ‘Ashtray Monument’. Also to ponder how very apt the (para-)phrase “Octopus… monument… a life spent waiting on cement…” is to this bronzed octo-gentleman, suspended in mid-slither on his concrete slab, as it plays hopelessly round and round in your head.
| Nasturtiums, growing wild on a hillside near Fort Mason. I grow them every summer on my little balcony, double blessings, double explosions of firecracker color and hot peppery savor.
I saw them growing leggy and wild in East Africa, and told my guide Tumaini that they were popular to eat here at home. He found this quite eccentric. |
I spent a breathtakingly lovely weekend in San Francisco for work last month. As sun-struck and charming as Chicago is these days, I still remember that trip as a luminous bubble of time, a sweet and so perfect lucky-charm of time that I will hold tight to. Windy and clean, air without color, walking over hills to meet each morning. So indulge me while I reminisce, with some favorite pictures from that trip.
This is the first photo I took there. Even though I remember the simple streetside shrub planting where I found it, the image still feels wild and without bounds to me, just a blink of a huge world of wind and light.
