Elk-cellent Time of Year

This time of year brings elk out of the woods. The females are calving [and can be really obnoxious--a safe viewing distance is a must!]. Last year’s calves, feeling the pains of growing up, are still begging their moms. This year’s calves are appearing, wobbly-legged and spotted and as cute as possible!

A family photo! A young male, called a ‘spike’ to the left; two young calves, the right one just a handful of hours old; and perhaps an old cow on the far right.

A cow probably carrying and almost ready to give birth. A 35 pound baby isn’t something I would look forward to having without modern medicine!

Mountains out of Molehills

It happens. A nice weekend, with splendid weather [the exception and not the rule], comes about and it’s overrun with work.

Sometimes, I get jealous of people’s grand weekend plans. All the elaborate adventures they take part in, filling their conversations for the next week or so. Two days never seems like enough to have an adventure. When do you catch your breath??

While my weekends are a little on the bland side at times, I feel a twitch of embarrassment when I work all the way through them.  Why yes, I did happen to get up at 6:45 am on my weekend to catch a webinar on social media and am trying to write up a training on how to give interpretive walks.  In the grand scheme of it all it, it’s all molehills, not mountains. As long as I don’t let work overrun *every* weekend, and as long as I don’t “NEED” to have an adventure every weekend to feel like I am validating my life, either, I suppose keeping a good sense of perspective and loosing my weekend to work is a decent trade-off.  Come the end of summer, I’ll be wondering where all the work went to anyway.

Wake Up, Sleepy!

Found this Yellow-faced bumble bee snoozing while I gardened today. Tried to place the species, but it turns out there are two virtually identical species here along the coast, Pyrobombus caliginosus or vosnesenskii. What a handful of names right? I really get a kick out of the Pyrobombus part!

I decided not to pass up the chance to shoot the flowers themselves, too, so I started snapping and dropped the camera strap right into the floral bed of the bumble bee.

She was sluggish enough she didn’t fly off, but instead looked like she remembered what she was doing.

…Oh yea…pollen.

Good Heavens, Slow Down!

In between the general hubbub of getting ready in the morning with 6 pets who are doing their best theatrical representations of starving to death, coupled with a broken water heater, trying to straighten out plans for an upcoming trip back home, and writing 7 emails, I had in fact sat down originally to edit photos from the previous evening and I saw this quote scroll by on Facebook:

“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day–unless you are too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”

So with that, I am going to write a blog post. About nothing. I feel like every time I sit to expound some grand idea into a post, it never gets finished, mostly because it leads to other tangents. My latest attempt, for example, is to pictorially represent the California Coast from peak to ocean, but it cascaded into my fight with Lightroom catalogs [turns out, my backup drives weren't copying the lightroom edits!].

So, instead of doing all that for the time being, I present to you two sunset shots for your meditative pleasure. I feel better now.

Flower Flurries

Nothing marks Spring’s arrival like flowers do!

Here in this part of California, even though we are not warm, we see a long growing season, like that of the Deep[er] South. Flowering starts in February and doesn’t often end until November or some such month, but it is possible to find flowers all year long, especially since we have a huge selection of non-natives that love this area. Out of the native group, the trilliums, currants, and Cardamines [toothworts] are the first to pop up.

Below are some of the current bloomers around the redwood area: [Click to enlarge]

California poppy, My Front Yard

Currant, Hiller Park, McKinleyville, CA

Trillium, Arcata Community Forest

Colt’s Foot, Arcata Community Forest

Some ornamental tree, my neighborhood

Redwood violet, Redwood National Park

Milkmaids, or Coast toothwort, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Wild strawberry, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Milkmaids, or Coast toothwort, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Candy flower, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Young Lupine, Lyons Ranch, Redwood National Park

Likely a plum, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park