The Vernal Equinox: Equality in Unequal Times

The sun set today on an unequal and unbalanced world. But for a day, the whole world shared a moment of equality, the day and night being more or less equal at all latitudes. Supposedly the day and night are both 12 hours long no matter where you are. There is a bit of squishiness in that statement, given that the refraction of the image of the sun makes the day last a few minutes longer, six minutes or so.

The sun sets due west on the equinox, which allows for interesting pictures in an otherwise mundane location like an absolutely flat valley with lots of east-west roads and irrigation canals. Some years I try to be out running errands, but today I was at home, so I went a few blocks west to where one of the canals has just been filled for the irrigation season.

 

Doo, doo, doo, Lookin' Out My Backdoor: What to do when you're stuck on the couch on rainy day

I have had few chances to write about my geological journeys for the last year, because there have been precious few geological journeys. Well, literally none. I'm blessed by having the Tuolumne River flowing by a half-mile from my house, and I'll spend a bit of time there almost every day exercising and searching out birds and other life forms. But rain turns the trail to mud, so I was pretty much stuck on the couch for the afternoon.

The rain has been rare this year, and the air outside smelled delicious (that's also truly rare in this valley). So the back door stood wide open during the afternoon while I sort of napped on the couch. But I kept the camera at my side. Who knows what could happen?

The main goal of the day was to catch a few pictures of our truly rare birds for this time of year: a pair of Hooded Orioles. They are tropical migrants, and so far this year only five have been reported on eBird in the entire San Joaquin Valley (there are more in Southern California and the central coast, as they are starting their northward migration). Our area used to be the northern boundary of their range, but with a warming climate and the planting of ornamental palms, they are found as far north as Arcata. They like the palms to construct their unique hanging nests, and as I've found, they love the sugar water in Hummingbird feeders. They've been coming by a dozen or more times a day, a male and a female, for a drink. Normally I can only take pictures through a window and blinds, but with the open door, I got some sharper images. The male is the brighter one with the black face and throat (below).

While waiting for another appearance of the Orioles through the narrow doorway, I saw fluttering in the far distance, about three backyards away. Zooming in I saw a flock of Cedar Waxwings. They fly through the neighborhood every so often looking for fruits, berries, and insects. I haven't seen any for a month. I must not have been looking...

The Orioles aren't the only birds that like coming to a Hummingbird feeder. We have a pair of Anna's Hummingbirds that visited today as well. They are the only Hummingbirds who stay in our region through the winter. Black-chinned and Rufous Hummingbirds will be arriving as spring progresses.

One kind of bird has been a constant visitor in our yard all winter: the White-crowned Sparrow. Most of them will leave the region in a few weeks on their way to breeding grounds as far north as the Arctic Circle. They do a great job of picking up the sunflower seeds that get scattered on the ground by the other birds.

The House Sparrow is a Eurasian native that was introduced to North America in the 1850s, and they quickly spread across the continent and are among the most common birds around. We see them so often that we become inured to their presence. I suppose we should admire species so adaptable as to be able to live successfully wherever humans do.

We have House Finches and Purple Finches that spend time at our feeders, but I was not successful at getting decent pictures today. Later on we had one more visitor, another bird seen so often in our region that one can sometimes take it for granted. But familiarity can't take away the stunning beauty of the California Scrub Jay (until somewhat recently called the Western Scrub Jay). They are found along the Coast Ranges from the Puget Sound to the southern tip of Baja California. There are dozens of them along the Tuolumne River this year, perhaps because of a huge acorn crop this year. But they also like the seeds available in my yard.

And that was the nature I experienced today through a narrow sliver of the landscape visible while looking out my back door.

Mars Landing! And a Speculative Question: What Spot Would You Pick on Earth?

 

Courtesy of NASA

The landing is almost here (or by the time you read this, it's happened already, for better or worse)! I hope, hope, hope that all goes well. Mars is a tough target, and I've seen to many failures and disasters. But...if they are able to stick the landing, we'll have an incredible adventure ahead of us, exploring the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient sea and river delta complex. It's thought to be one of the most likely places to find evidence of any life that might have evolved on Mars.

Jezero Crater delta complex, landing site of the Perseverance Mission

Lots of good resources and landing schedules can be found here: Landing Toolkit: Perseverance Rover - NASA Mars. I've checked out things ahead of the landing, as you can see below, and the rock samples look intriguing.

(You can do your own pic with the mission toolkit)

I'm curious. The Mars landing site was carefully chosen as to glean the most information possible in a small area. If you had a single chance to land a rover on Earth for an only exploration, what place on Earth would you pick for the landing? And why? Answer in comments!

You Can See Yosemite Valley from the Tuolumne River! In a Manner of Speaking...

Those of you who know the layout of Yosemite National Park will also know that the title of today's post must come with some kind of caveat because any hiker or cartographer knows that the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park flows through a vast gorge the depth of the Grand Canyon (it's even called the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River). You just can't see the one valley from the other.

But...the Tuolumne River also flows across the flat plains of the Great Valley of California, and if we count "Yosemite Valley" as being also some of the significant peaks and cliffs that ring Yosemite Valley like Half Dome, El Capitan, and Sentinel Dome, you can in fact see the valley from the Tuolumne River.

This is not one of my occasional posts about the better-known spot for viewing Half Dome from Hall and Keyes Roads near Turlock. I get in enough internet trouble over that one, but it is indeed possible to see the very top of Half Dome and El Capitan from my daily walking trail along the Tuolumne River in Waterford. But the additional caveat is that it has to be a really clear day, and we have precious few of those over the course of year. Sometimes weeks can pass between sightings of any mountains at all. But following our huge storm this week, the air was crystal clear today.

The additional caveat is that you need binoculars or a good zoom lens to see the domes and cliffs. With the naked eye, the mountains are difficult to distinguish from one another. But on those rare clear days, and with the right equipment, and knowing where to look, you can indeed see some of Yosemite Valley's most famous landmarks. In a way of course it is frustrating. I'd rather be there than here, but chances will start increasing as the pandemic finally begins to subside.

If you are wondering about the cranes in the foreground, our 1964 vintage bridge is being replaced by a safer, wider bridge. The anchoring columns of the present bridge are unstable during floods; all bridges are perfectly safe, the engineers say, right up until they are not.

In any case, if you couldn't make out the various domes and cliffs and peaks in the opening picture, they are labeled below. 

If you live in the Central Valley (we call it the Great Valley) and wonder if you can see any particular Sierra peaks, check out caltopo.com and find the dropdown command for "simulated view". You can adjust the map for a view from anywhere covered by the program. Below is an example of the view I used to label the peaks shown in this post.

A Beautiful Scene for a Horrific Day

There aren't many days like this. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing. My country was rocked by a coup attempt and the Capitol Building was invaded and vandalized for the first time in centuries. It dominated my day and little else was accomplished, other than to stare unbelievingly at the screen where the events unfolded in Washington D.C. and various state capitols. When things settled somewhat, we had to get outside, away from the media. And we discovered it was one of the clearest days of the year.

We headed a few miles east to the single best viewpoint I know of in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada: Turlock Lake State Recreation Area. The lake mainly serves as a fishing and boating site (as well as being a principle irrigation reservoir), but there is some interesting geology, and a wonderful view.

The dam is constructed on the sediments of the Turlock Lake and Mehrten formations, and a number of interesting fossils have been found in the area: mastodons, camels, horses, huge tortoises, and gigantic 9-foot-long tusked (really!) salmon.

East of the main picnic area there is a paved road that climbs to the top of the highest local hill, and on a clear day like this one was, the view extends from the high peaks of Yosemite National Park across the Central Valley to the mountains of the Diablo Range, and the rest of the Coast Ranges. Today was one of the clearest days I've seen in a long time.

Some lenticular clouds were building over the Sierra Crest, making me wish I was I could be up there and a little closer, but that wasn't to be this time. Maybe soon...

Postscript (1/30/21): Anonymous asked what peaks were visible in these pictures. I checked on caltopo.com and found that we were looking at the heart of the Yosemite high country. Here are the caltopo.com images for the last two views above. The first shows from left to right Mt. Simmons, MaClure, Lyell, and Clark.

The second shot shows Mt. Clark, Gray Peak, and Red Peak.

 

A Reminder of What Once Was: An Evening at the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge

What is it like to see ten thousand birds take to the sky all at once? Do you have to live on the African Savanna to find out? Sometimes one has to merely look in one's backyard (so to speak) to rediscover the extraordinary nature of where one lives. For instance, my home is in California's Great Valley (called by some the Central Valley). The valley is sometimes derided as a boring place to live, an endlessly flat expanse of agribusiness farms and poorly planned urban centers, and there is certainly a truth to that idea. A full 95% of the valley has been altered by humans from the original prairies and wetlands.

But the other 5%? Astounding at times.

The valley was once an expanse of open prairies, riparian corridors, and vast shallow lakes. A diverse fauna grazed the flatlands, Tule Elk, deer, antelope, horses, camels, bison, mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths. They were preyed upon by a fearful assemblage of carnivores: Saber-toothed Cats, Jaguars, American Lions, Dire Wolves, Coyotes, Black Bears, Grizzly Bears, and huge Short-faced Bears (nothing else was short about them; they stood 12 feet tall). Much of the megafauna disappeared around 10,000 years ago for reasons that are still debated, but the valley still supported a healthy ecosystem when the European colonizers arrived and started changing things.

The valley supported millions upon millions of migratory birds. The valley for a variety of reasons has some of the mildest winter weather in North America, and arctic species for millennia utilized the wetlands for a winter home. Agricultural development deeply altered the available habitat and the birds suffered for it, but a string of wildlife refuges were established decades ago to help them survive. I'd love to say it was for preserving the natural habitat, but it was often to provide the birds a place where they wouldn't destroy crops, and to provide hunters a dependable target. But still, the refuges are islands of relative safety for the birds, and many species have thrived. 

The Aleutian Cackling Goose was once thought to be a subspecies of the similar Canada Goose, but they are now considered a distinct species. They were decimated by changes in their winter refuge, but also in their breeding grounds in the Aleutian Islands, were introduced foxes had exterminated most of them. By 1936 they were thought to be extinct. In 1962 a few hundred were found on an isolated island, and they received protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Since then their numbers have rebounded, with a population today of nearly 200,000. And a very large percentage of them spend their winters only eight miles west of the biggest shopping center in my town.

We had a package to pick up at that shopping center today, so Mrs. Geotripper and I decided to run out to the viewing platform on Beckwith Road west of town. The platform overlooks the fields of the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge. I have visited the spot dozens of times in the last six years, but I had never seen so many birds as were there this afternoon. I made a rough estimate of 4,000 Aleutian Cackling Geese, as well as around 12,000 of the white Snow and Ross's Geese. And as we watched, a large percentage of the geese took flight, which I caught in the video at the top of the post. It was an astounding sight.

It's not just geese that call the Great Valley their home. There are a large number of other strange and exotic birds that can be found here. This evening we saw some other interesting species. There was a flock of 200 or 300 Long-billed Curlews in a field north of the road. They have impossibly long beaks for exploring the mud for worms and bugs.

There was also a flock of around a hundred White-faced Ibises. They look very dark from a distance, but closer observations reveals a colorful iridescence. The white face only shows up in breeding season. They are unique to the Americas, and apparently evolved from the far more widely distributed Glossy Ibises.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

I've lived in the Great Valley now for more than thirty years, and I've long extolled the fascinating geological story of the valley, including the extensive fossil record, but I was appallingly ignorant of the fascinating species that still call the valley home today. I had never seen the tens of thousands of geese take flight all at once until around six years ago. I now look forward to the privilege with the approach of every winter season.

The Conjunction Station in the Red HIlls: A Report, and a Santa Claus Sighting

The view with my handheld camera

The weather gods decided to make things difficult for us in regards to the rare celestial event that took place tonight. We finally got rain last week, and when the rain comes to the Great Valley of California, the Tule Fog follows. Earlier this week the fog cleared in the late afternoon allowing me to get a few experimental shots of the approaching conjunction, but the fog has not relented for two straight days. If we were going to see the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (the closest approach visible in 800 years), we had to do something a little drastic. We headed up into the Sierra Nevada foothills to get above the inversion layer that traps the fog at low elevations.

The telescopic view using the smartphone

I knew of a likely spot in the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern near Chinese Camp that would have a good view. We got there a bit before sunset and set up our gear. 

Preliminary shot with the telescope and phone

I don't have fancy astronomical gear. I borrowed the old Questar telescope that we keep in the department at the college, and brought my own Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot (but with the 60x zoom; good for my birdwatching). Lacking any attachments, I used my phone to snap shots from the telescope lens.

You've maybe noticed that it is easier to identify an oncoming car in daylight, since the headlights overwhelm the details in darker conditions. It's like that when viewing planets. The first picture above was taken as soon as I could see the planets in the darkening skies. The rings of Saturn are clearly visible (and in fact this was the first time I've ever captured a distinct view of the rings with my camera). Later in the darkness I took the picture below and the planets are too bright to see the rings well. On the other hand, three of Jupiter's moons are visible. There's always a tradeoff!

I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that a bunch of other people had the same idea of coming to this particular spot, but they were doing the right thing and masking up and keeping to their own groups. I had to wonder though if we weren't in the presence of a rather famous person...

 You'll have to be the judge, but the man's telescope is red, and presumably could pass for a giant candy cane. And he doesn't really have to work for another couple of days...