humpback whale ~ 09/15/14 ~ Pacific Grove Shoreline Park

humpback whale

Megaptera novaeangliae

We've had an extraordinary showing of humpback whales in the Monterey Bay recently, and today was the best so far!  The Monterey Bay Whale Watch states 70 humpbacks were spotted in the a.m., with 79 midday, and 84 (a heck of a lot!) on a bonus evening tour (as is shown here with that whale watching boat that got way too close).  Most of the road (Oceanview to Sunset) along PG's Shoreline Park was unusually crowded with landlubbers and several seriously ginormous camera lenses that likely cost more than my car, all pointing towards the water.  It was a great show.  Without binoculars, we could easily spot 4 very active areas (lots of blows) that didn't seem to move much.  Usually, the activity drifts or disappears after a few minutes.  This apparently lasted for hours.  Very cool.

Kinda crazy, and just goes to show how ignorant I can be sometimes, but humpback whales are still listed as federally endangered.  Ya.  No kidding.  That surprised me.  They were delisted from IUCN's Vulnerable status to Least Concern in 2008.

Here are extra humpback whale links: SIMoN Special Status Species, Marine Species Identification Portal, Marine Bio, Society for Marine Mammalogy, and Wild Whales (out of British Columbia).

I should mention that there were also 200 long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis), with 1500 seen 2 days ago, September 13, 2014.  Amazing.

sunrise ~ 06/13/14 ~ at home

squid boats at sunrise

There seems to be an unusual number of squid boats this year.  They light up the night with their squid lights, green, red, white.  It's Christmas!  Ooof, now that I read that old post, maybe I say there's an unusual number every year?  Ha!  That's partly why we moved bedrooms, because for several months of the year we had very bright night lights.  Thanks to the incredibly fast growing Monterey pines, that soon may not be a problem for us.  Because of the funny way sound carries across the water, I can sometimes hear their conversations on their boats from our balcony.  Many seem to be from outside of the Monterey Bay area.  I wonder if squid fishermen are nomads, following their catch.  I also wonder what else they catch in their nets besides squid, because surely there are other larger animals who would also like to eat squid. The young male sea lions are making a racket down by the Coast Guard Pier, the harbor seals seemed to have doubled in numbers, and a lone, young male elephant seal is being a bully at Hopkins.  There have been high counts for other marine mammal sightings in the Monterey Bay - 56 humpbacks and 150 Pacific white-sided dolphins on June 11, 2014 in a.m. only!  Just to note, last night was grunion greeting for the June full moon.  I didn't go.  Maybe tonight?

wordless Wednesday

rainbow ~ 02/02/14 ~ at home

double rainbow from home

February 2, 2014

Yeah!  'Bout time.  Supposedly we had some precipitation on Thursday for a whopping total of 0.05".  I think we get more than that on a decently foggy summer's day.  And before that, the last time it rained was December 7, 2013 with 0.25", which got our butts out for a Fort Ord hike.  Crazy dry winter.  As I write this, it's slowly, but steadily continuing to sprinkle.  Yay!

ps - Our Monterey Bay view is quickly becoming obscured by trees! Compare this picture with one 5 years ago on December 15, 2008 and one 3 years ago on February 19, 2011.

sunrise ~ 01/17/14 ~ Monterey Harbor and Marina

Monterey Harbor & Marina
January 17, 2014

After giving Andy a ride to downtown early this morning, I did a quick stop at the Municipal Wharf.  This past week I noticed several fishing boats out on the water at night, and I was hoping to take pictures as they came in for the day.  I'm curious to know what they're catching.  They haven't used their big, bright squid lights, but by the full moon I can tell their boats are often surrounded by gulls.  I think I was too early today, as the fish market fellas were just arriving in their big trucks to prepare for loading and icing the catches.  In any case, I had the chance to watch the sunrise from a different perspective.  It was beautiful.  

As it happens in my blog reader, Shaina from Middle of Everywhere mentions the Belt of Venus.  Oho!  I never knew that pink glow that so often accompanies sunrises and sunsets has a name.  Cool!  I also want to mention that I've been seeing an awful lot of shooting stars (2-14 over the course of an hour and a half before sunrise) in the north skies since mid-December.  Has anyone else noticed this, too?

wordless Wednesday

habitat ~ 12/23/13 ~ Jacks Peak County Park

Jacks Peak County Park

December 23, 2013

It's as if someone pushed the pause button on the seasons.  While the evergreen coast live oaks seem to be holding their own as usual, the Monterey pines look thinner and yellower around the edges.  Closer to the ground, there's a sense of bursting at the seams, of impatiently waiting for the starter's pistol of winter rains.  The push towards spring cannot be contained.  Dustings of green grass are making their best efforts despite the lack of water.  I also found fuchia-flowered gooseberries and monkeyflowers just beginning to show their cheery reds and oranges.  I'm curious to see how everything will fare in the coming months.  Surely, we will get rain, someday?

Honestly, I wasn't expecting to find much for IDs, but I really enjoyed this heart-pumping, hilly hike. The rich smell of pines that's so distinctive to Jacks Peak and the amazing views never cease to amaze me.  In the first picture above (click to enlarge) are several locations I feature on Nature ID, starting at about 11:00 along the water's edge: the Monterey Bay Aquarium towers, Cannery Row, San Carlos Beach, Coast Guard Pier, Rec Trail, Fisherman's Wharf, Wharf No. 2, and Municipal Beach.

habitat ~ 11/25/13 ~ Monterey Harbor & Marina

Monterey Harbor & Marina
November 25, 2013

I'm so glad we decided to stay home for the holiday.  With an easily walkable view like this, can you blame us?  Despite our desperate need for rain, I have been enjoying the gorgeous weather we've had.  This picture was taken from the Rec Trail that I so love. The City of Monterey has a nice site on the history of the Harbor, which I just discovered.  On this section of trail, I've been keeping an eye on a family of night herons, a laughing herd of Heermann's gulls, western gulls, several kingfishers, snowy egrets, great egrets, great blue herons, brown pelicans, and new seasonal gulls with spotty grey around the eyes that I have yet to ID.

habitat ~ 05/28/13 ~ Monterey Municipal Beach

Monterey Municipal Beach
(often mistaken for Del Monte Beach or Monterey State Beach)

May 28, 2013

Considering our two incredible grunion greeting nights, Dr. Karen Martin wanted to make sure our City's beach maintenance crew knew not to groom where the grunion eggs are safely nestled in the moist sand of the highest tide line.  Yeah, you read that right, as in beach grooming.  I had to chuckle a little bit, because this is Monterey and we're a little more casual about such things. Karen hails from Malibu, where the likes of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson run around flashing toned and tanned bodies for Hollywood cameras. With all that flashiness down in SoCal, apparently the beaches also get the star spa treatment... which is bad news for grunion eggs.  After a few phone calls and e-mails, I think we're set in making sure our local grunion eggs are not disturbed until they hatch when the next highest tides return with the new moon.

Even with the assurances from City Parks Division and City Public Works, I was a little worried children would have dug huge forts in the sand during the warm weather holiday as I've seen them so often do, so I stopped by the Municipal Beach before lunch to see the beach conditions for myself. Phew! It looks like nothing untoward has happened to the hot spot of hidden grunion eggs. I could be wrong, but I think the only time our crew grooms the beach is before the winter storms and they use a bulldozer to create a massive sand barricade in front of the Rec Trail.

Other than 2 blog posts on crow and sea lettuce and godwit, willet, gull, my numerous photos of Monterey Municipal Beach are dark, fuzzy, and often moonlit from many nights of grunion greeting. So, here are a few pics taken in the daylight for my habitats documentation.  I added additional names in the ID above, because this beach is often mistaken for the others.  In fact, I called this Del Monte Beach in most of my older grunion greeting posts.  Nope.  It's all really a continuous stretch of exposed sand curving northeast, but with very different slope and wave conditions and managed by different agencies. We tried grunion greeting at Monterey State Beach once, but it was extremely dangerous, especially in the dark.

habitat ~ 03/03/12 ~ Jacks Peak County Park

Jacks Peak County Park
March 3, 2012

Sometimes I feel a bit ho-hum blogging about places that I often hike. I've already blogged about this rare native closed-cone Monterey pine forest, how Andy regularly runs to this highest peak of the Monterey Peninsula from home, and the incredible views one can have from this big hill. Given the nature of the Monterey pine forest, I haven't noticed too much change through the seasons or the years, and yet it still takes my breath away. With the very warm 83.1°F this day, the scent of the native pines was soothing and amazing. For one little tidbit of new info, Jacks Peak is named after the same man who sold the first Monterey Jack cheese.

habitat ~ 02/04/12 ~ Monterey Harbor & Marina

Monterey Harbor & Marina
February 4, 2012

Often on our days off when we don't want to be in a car and deal with the traffic to get out of town for a hike, we will walk along the Monterey Bay Recreation Trail from Pacific Grove to Monterey. From home it's about 1/2 mile to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row and 2 miles to the Monterey Municipal Wharf No. 2 (shown in the second pic above). The Rec Trail is great for tourist watching (I love hearing all the foreign languages), but after a while we get fed up with all the rented bike surreys and dawdling tourist groups that hog up the trail, especially on weekends and area special events like the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf hoopla. On our way back home, we sometimes take a shortcut through the Monterey Presidio. Very few people seem to know that the lower part of the Presidio is still open to the public. From this little hill, there are incredible views of the Old Fisherman's Wharf (shown in the first pic above), the Municipal Wharf II (shown in the second pic above), the Monterey Harbor, and the Monterey Coast Guard Pier.

Sheez, I'm starting to feel like a tourist guide. Considering I haven't decided if I want to use google maps due to my own blog policy that I not use others' graphics (although, the background of this blog is part of the templates google blogger offers), I realized I haven't done a habitat post of the area that I most frequently visit. So here it is. To see my past posts of this area, check out the following links:
Monterey Municipal Wharf No. 2.
Monterey Fisherman's Wharf
Monterey Coast Guard Pier
Monterey Bay Recreation Trail (for the areas shown above)
Monterey Bay Recreation Trail (all)
Monterey State Historic Park Secret Gardens

gray whale ~ 01/21/12 ~ Rec Trail

gray whale
Eschrichtius robustus
for more information click here, here, and here

Yep, these are not the best pictures. It's really challenging to get decent photos of whales, btw, at least with my slow, poor-zoom, point-and-shoot. You can see the mottled back of the whale just to the right of the man in the second picture. This whale was incredibly close to the shore and was moving north around the Peninsula. Considering Nature ID is essentially my personal nature journal, I wanted to record the date and species of this particular whale sighting. I borrowed a marine mammal book from a friend that had cute little graphics of how one is supposed to distinguish between different cetaceans based on the shape of their spray. Ha! A couple times a year I spot various whales in the distance from home, mainly thanks to numerous whale watching boats that circle around any whales in the Bay like sharks. This time, it was thanks to a crowd of folks on the Rec Trail all pointing their cameras that we thought to stop and look. It's been a few years since I've seen a gray whale so close to the shore. The last time (unfortunately, I never recorded when), I was able to run alongside a close-to-the-shore gray from the Monterey Bay Aquarium all the way through Cannery Row, past the Plaza Hotel, and to San Carlos Beach. I've included numerous links above, because there seems to be some conflicting online information about the status of gray whales.

habitat ~ 10/29/11 ~ Hopkins Marine Station

Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station
October 29, 2011

This past Saturday, they held a rare Open House. Andy heard they do this about once every 5 years. It was a treat to go behind the scenes.

Up until now, the only Hopkins Marine Station location posts on Nature ID have been done outside the fence, essentially from the Monterey Bay Recreation Trail. Being neighbors to the very popular Monterey Bay Aquarium and all the tourists, they're extra diligent keeping people out with fences and coded gates. I know, because I was kicked out during one of my morning walks. Hey, the gate was open one day, and I was curious to see the views.

I haven't yet decided if I'll blog about the different labs I visited, including Andy's running friend whom I've only heard "works at Hopkins." Little did I know he seems to have written half the books in their library. After meeting various people at the Open House stations, I was very impressed with the squid researcher. He took my questions seriously and looked me in the eye when he spoke. Plus, his grad student seemed to be well-versed in his topic and knew when to defer to his PI. I was a bit disappointed to not meet Dr. Watanabe whose SeaNet site I frequently link to in many of my marine ID posts.

It's too bad I get extremely sea sick, otherwise I might consider marine biology as a postgraduate option. Having grown up in CA, Stanford and UC Berkeley were the only two colleges I wanted to attend because of their reputations and prestige. It's interesting for me to see now how it's not so much the university, but each advisor's personality that makes a difference.

about navigating within Nature ID

view from home of the Monterey Bay
October 23, 2011

I just finished revamping my labels and categorizing them... again. This will likely become an annual blog maintenance duty. As I post new IDs, I invariably end up with new categories.

At the bottom of every post, there's a series of highlighted labels near the share buttons and comment section. These link you to only Nature ID blog posts (unlike WordPress blogs) with the same label.

I've again added the grouped label lists in the sidebar. I have 4 basic groups:
~ shortcut
~ what
~ when (includes seasons, current weather, and hiking/observations dates)
~ where.

A nifty trick of hiking/observation dates (aka archives), is you can click on a year, a month, or a specific date to see all the posts for that time period. I publish entries in a specific order, with individual IDs first and then usually a step-back, look-around habitat post. I've found clicking on specific dates to be very helpful, e.g., Pinnacles on June 10, 2011, where the habitat is shown at the top of the page and specific IDs follow. Scroll down to see all the posts.

I prefer having grouped lists, because I often find it difficult to locate past posts for my own nature journal needs. I've included search widgets at the very top left of the blog and towards the bottom of the sidebar. They don't always effectively locate items. Until I figure out the coding to automatically update the grouped indices, they will often not be complete or have nonworking links. If you want to see the most updated list, check out my complete index to Nature ID page.

As I've said before repeatedly, Nature ID does not follow the usual blog format like a daily diary. I generally post to the date of the pictures, regardless of when I happen to be online to work on this blog. I'm still behind on backdating posts and haven't even completed July of this year. Until I get caught up (haha, nature keeps going even though I have other plans), there will be an occasional feature at the top of my blog titled "newest blog entry" that will link you to new posts that are backdated.

Also, I'm testing to see how LinkWithin works with thumbnail pictures shown towards the bottom of every post. I haven't decided yet whether it's a good thing for my blog or extraneous visual stuff.

Check it out. Thanks for following my blog.

ps - The coast Douglas-fir tree that I'm featuring in The Tree Year project can be seen with its brown cones in the lower left of the photo above. Dreamfalcon has kindly included me in her latest post.

http://thetreeyear.wordpress.com/tree-year-posts/around-the-tree/weather/

about the organization of Nature ID

sunrise from home
June 6, 2011

Nature ID is my online nature journal. It serves as a learning tool and helps me keep track of what, when, and where. As such, I post and organize this blog in a peculiar way so that I can quickly reference a past post. However, this doesn't make it easy for people to "follow" my blog.

To cover the when, I frequently backdate. This means the date header on an entry is the date I took the pictures, not necessarily the date of when I posted to the blog. My blog archives serve as actual hiking/observation dates. I'm currently posting from a hike on May 14, 2011 at restricted Fort Ord - Army Lands.

For the what and the where, I liberally use labels. At the bottom of every post and grouped to the right in the sidebar are highlighted labels that link back to specific Nature ID posts (this is different from WordPress blogs, where a "label" will take you to a listing of multiple blogs with that particular tag - I don't personally like that, so I don't do it).

When I first began this blog on May 6, 2009, I only had 3 labels: flowers, animals, and Fort Ord. I now have 472 labels in multiple groups as shown in the sidebar to the right. Scrolling down from here to eternity is inconvenient. I'd like to remove the lengthy label lists. So, I'm creating an index page (shown as a tab along the top) to help followers navigate within Nature ID.

ps 06/11/11 - Thanks to Janet's comments, I've started adding titles to my ID posts (what, when, and where) to help those who use blog dashboards, readers, and aggregators to easily click directly to specific entries.

pss 07/17/11 - A skeletal index page is up and running. I finally removed the lengthy lists to the right and am in the process of creating grouped index posts which show labels in general categories.

sunset ~ 05/31/11 ~ San Carlos Beach

sunset from San Carlos Beach
May 31, 2011

We were out for an evening walk, enjoying the clearer skies before the summer coastal fog sets in for the summer. The pastel skies and gentle ocean sound always help me feel tranquil. I prefer heading towards Cannery Row and the Coast Guard Pier in the early morning or in the evening when most of the tourists and scuba divers are elsewhere.

Brandt's cormorant ~ 05/31/11 ~ Cannery Row

Brandt's cormorant
Phalacrocorax penicillatus

I've always assumed these are Brandt's cormorants that congregate every year on this remnant of a sardine factory loading dock. However, as I look it up, these birds may be mixed in with double-crested cormorants (P. auritus), which I had previously thought only nested in trees. It's a crummy picture above, because the lighting was low and a fence kept me from getting closer. The third type of cormorant that is found in the Monterey Bay is the pelagic cormorant (P. pelagicus), and I've learned to recognize it by its white butt and solitary nesting behavior. I'll have to take binoculars the next time I walk through Cannery Row.

Oh, that green stuff in the foreground is non-native sweet fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) in the Apiaceae family. I always want to call it anise, which is an incorrect term that several lepidopterist-type like to call it due to the anise swallowtail butterfly. Towards late summer it's quite pretty here with feathery greenery and prolific yellow flowers covering the dilapidation of local history.

ps 06/22/11 - So far this year, I don't have any pictures of cormorants or sea lions from the Coast Guard Pier, because they closed it off from public access since around mid-February for repairs. I was told by Coast Guard personnel that it would only be closed for a week. Ha! While driving home the other day, I noticed the Coast Guard Pier is finally open again with a black chain link fence along the breakwall. I want to get out there to see what's up. I do know we haven't had the influx of sea lions like we did last year.

squid boats ~ 05/15/11 ~ at home

squid boats

I'm not sure why, but I've felt compelled to post pictures of the squid boats we see from home. Ha! They're much easier to photograph than whale spouts and tails. I believe the squid season starts around April 1. It's unusual to see this many boats out during the day. Typically, the boats go out late in the afternoon and have bright lights on all night long. It used to bother us for sleeping. Sometimes one or two will camp out on the water during the early part of the day where you see the boats above. I find it interesting that the fellas take Friday and Saturday nights off.

ps 10/25/13 - As an example of how bright those lights are, check out a satellite image of squid boats in the Atlantic Ocean off South America.

tree year project 2011, #4

double rainbow from home
February 19, 2011

Although we see double rainbows fairly frequently if and when it rains, this was the best photo I've managed to get so far. I like the colorful umbrellas down on the Rec Trail of people turned to watch this natural beauty. If you look closely, my favorite friendly scrub jay is perched on the top of the unidentified pine toward the center of the photo. And, yes, the coast Douglas-fir that I'm featuring in The Tree Year project barely shows itself in the bottom left.

http://thetreeyear.wordpress.com/tree-year-posts/around-the-tree/weather/

sea otter
Enhydra lutris

The Moss Landing touristy area is one of the best local places to see sea otters in large numbers. Since I don't get up there very often, nor do I stop to look, I'm not sure about any seasonal variations of sea otter populations.