I love contemplating how actually scary this is. Nothing in horror movies affects me anymore but I get the most wonderful chills from the idea of these beautiful, haunting, mindless things just hovering in this murky water like a minefield for anyone foolish enough to go swimming or unlucky enough to fall in. How it’s still not as bad as being a fish small enough for them to paralyze and consume. How they regularly paralyze and consume fish but evolved before anything like a fish ever existed. A fish is such a complex creature that can see and think and navigate and be afraid but sometimes it touches these brainless, boneless, ghostly things that were just already there, millions of years sooner, and it dies and it never understands why that is. The thing that killed it and ate it doesn’t know either, it doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have enough of a brain to even realize it has killed and eaten something. Some of its cells simply fired little harpoons into the cells of the other thing, and squirted deadly chemicals into them, and hauled up the paralyzed body to digest it. It’s a spider’s web without a spider but it still fills things with venom and eats them. :)
The best jellyfish are those that seem to trail off into forever. Like Chrysaora achlyos my beloved…
Sometimes when I’m birdwatching I see things that aren’t birds.
I’m covering East Pinery tomorrow for the Cachuma CBC. It won’t look like that; that was on May 20, 2018 (eBird list), and the lupines were blooming.
This will be winter. There’s a storm watch for tomorrow calling for 6”–12” of snow above 5,000’, but I’ll be a little below that, and I suspect for me it will mostly be rain and wind.
Pete, who organizes the Cachuma count, is worried about what the weather will mean in terms of people bailing on their assignments. I’m going to be there regardless as long as the forest service doesn’t close the road; I should be able to drive to the locked gate at Ranger Peak, and from there it’s just a couple of miles to my assigned location. If I can park an hour before sunrise I should be able to walk up the road and be ready to start birding on East Pinery at first light.
Montane birding in winter can be tough. The birds are few and far between, and when you do find some they’re often high in the canopy and hard to see. Add wind and rain to that, and, well, let’s just say it’s going to be challenging.
I don’t care. It’s about the experience, not the number. It’s an excuse to be out there at a time and place sensible people don’t go, counting birds on a mountain in a storm. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
Thanks! If I have cell coverage (which I might have, at least some of the time) you’ll be able to see my checklists as I submit them in my trip report here.
Sometimes when I’m birdwatching I see things that aren’t birds.
I’m covering East Pinery tomorrow for the Cachuma CBC. It won’t look like that; that was on May 20, 2018 (eBird list), and the lupines were blooming.
This will be winter. There’s a storm watch for tomorrow calling for 6”–12” of snow above 5,000’, but I’ll be a little below that, and I suspect for me it will mostly be rain and wind.
Pete, who organizes the Cachuma count, is worried about what the weather will mean in terms of people bailing on their assignments. I’m going to be there regardless as long as the forest service doesn’t close the road; I should be able to drive to the locked gate at Ranger Peak, and from there it’s just a couple of miles to my assigned location. If I can park an hour before sunrise I should be able to walk up the road and be ready to start birding on East Pinery at first light.
Montane birding in winter can be tough. The birds are few and far between, and when you do find some they’re often high in the canopy and hard to see. Add wind and rain to that, and, well, let’s just say it’s going to be challenging.
I don’t care. It’s about the experience, not the number. It’s an excuse to be out there at a time and place sensible people don’t go, counting birds on a mountain in a storm. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
