The Wonder of Nature is a window into the mind of God.
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And he does things for our pleasure as well as his own
This one is a stretch. Talk about nature finding a way. Took a walk at a former landfill built out over the bay with my wife and younger dog today. This is a place where people use the old concrete, wood, metal and odd bits to make guerilla sculpture and paintings, and through it all nature keeps trying to assert itself. There are lots of larger, grander artsy bits around but what could be more appropriate on the new year’s eve than this new one which looks like a gravestone to me. Guess it is time to bury the last year and move on.
I didn’t see it until I blew it up but I think that is a surgical mask draped below the skull. Now I like it even more.
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That’s a dwarf palmetto. You can distinguish it by the leaf stalk cutting into the blades by a inch or two
And the fact they often have that fiber string along the blades. They also don’t tend to form clump colonies as much.
The other is a great example showing the saplings of a longleaf pine and a loblolly pine growing side by side. The longleaf is the grass like form.
The other is the peach colored fly agaric mushrooms of the amanita genus in two stages of its life. The bulbous stage is the younger one still growing and developing spores while the disc shaped cap is the older mature form getting ready to spore. They are most likely “siblings” from the same two hyphae meetings snd sharing gene flow to fruit into a offspring.
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These are the saw palmettos I just mentioned. You’ll notice they don’t have leaf stalks that cut well into the blades but stops at them and that it also has a serrated leaf stalk.
The other is the spores of the resurrection fern, on a live oak, which is one of my favorite ferns.
The bright reddish-pink peach colored leaves are those of the Devil’s Walking stick in fall. They mostly only episode branches at the tips of the tree and drops them afterwards leaving a tall thick trunk wrapped with very sharp thorns.
I don’t know what insect makes these. I have a small collection of them. They are made up of leaves and are very strong. I tried to rip one open before and could not manage it. I will look it up though to see what insect creates this sac. I always enjoy finding them and sometimes I’ll hide a small piece of bamboo in it poking out with a coordinate on paper wrapped in plastic inside it. I know someone occasionally finds them because I’ve found the same sac from an hour north down at the coordinates where I had a small geocache tube with a $50 in it poking up out of a hidden spot of a few rarer pitcher plants and inside the geocaches was the sac with the coordinates lol.
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Edited.
What I thought was some sort of insect egg in this picture turned out to be a species of beetle called “Hemisphaerota cyanea” the Palmetto Tortoise Beetle”. Never heard of leaf beetles until today.
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The dawn photos are from a walk with our dog yesterday. My son and I found a whimsical snowball and scar tree face someone had made on a walk as well.
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Fun to see different surprising species mixed in with native ones. I am pretty sure this is a feathery asparagus in the bramble of an old farmstead.
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These purple splotches in the woods around our house are a bit of a mystery. However, there is soft, dark, vegetable material at the bottom, with a halo of stain spreading outward. There are many of them! I think they are wild cherries…or maybe the processed remains of them from birds, as there are no pits so far.
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The purple splotches are interesting. I know a lot of bird waste is often blackish purplish in color. But purplish colors do show up in many plant species as well. I found what I think is escaped beet, or maybe some kind of wild lettuce thing today that was purple as well. It stood out against the green carpet look from a distance.
I that’s obviously not what yours is. But thought it was amusing something purple popped out at both of us recently. If you have a local nature group for where you live maybe they could tell you. If it’s on a path that others have walked it could also be something tossed by a person.
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That is so interesting! Thank you for that. I put it into the Seek app, and it says yours is Lyreleaf Sage . I am not sure if that is right. It looks like an escaped kind, to me, too…beautiful.
Great idea about the nature group. I don’t know any local ones, but I will post my purple spot to I Naturalist and see what they say (@jpm and @LM77 alerted me to that).
It is interesting, that about purple things showing up for both of us. Maybe it reflects the color of storage sugars this time of year.
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Ended up going on a really long hike today. About 17 miles through creeks, climbing up 20 foot clay and rock walls, and even army crawling under shrubs and fall trees. Really exhausted. But wanted to show something a bit different from normal. This is all mostly clay and sand with various mineral compositions. I sat down that purple piece and could not find it. Was so mad. Possibly heading back there again tomorrow to hike the other 14-16 miles worth of trails and power line cutaways.
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When someone would ask if a certain plant required full sun at horticultural meetings in San Francisco there was a fellow who would always quip “more like full fog here”. Looks like you know a thing or two about fog though I suspect for you it is seasonal?
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Yes, and this much this long is unusual. It is still foggy this morning, but a little closer to 32°F and a little more air moving, so there is much less of the hoarfrost that is so gorgeous.
Do you get to hear foghorns in the bay? I remember from my youth staying overnight in NYC with windows open in the summer and hearing them. And the sound travels!
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Apparently that’s the older nymph stage of the common sand dragonfly. I had to get help to ID it. Was hiking in a new creek today and saw it. They burrow themselves under the sand. I found it grabbing bits of clay and saw it swim out and then start digging down.
I believe that’s some kind of assassin bug that I’ve not seen before. It was very well camouflaged for that twig. I almost did not see it except that it turned us tiny little head and I caught on the movement and was not sure what I saw until I got down and looked better. It’s head was still angled towards me.
That’s the area I was hiking today. When I got out of the creek I headed up some hills towards an area I’ve been too before and found this old cemetery there again. It’s near the dwarf pawpaw tree I showed half a year or so ago. Thought the headstone was kind of funny. I want that on my headstone. Probably Mi. Xd
Also learned that the creek there is full of quicksand. I sank repeatedly. Although Hollywood is completely false on how it works, quicksand is basically always only 2-3 feet deep. It still startling to suddenly sink that far. I quickly realized that if there is a lot of pebbles around, and then there is a 3-4 foot section with none despite them ringing it, then it’s most likely quicksand and that’s why you don’t see any pebbles.
I’m glad it’s far from being that cold where I live. Today it was 71°f and I got a bit of a sunburn lol.
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I rarely hear a fog horn as we’re across the bay from the Golden Gate bridge (and my hearing isn’t that good).
I guess you get some fog since you’re in a low lying area with a bit of water about. We get some in Berkeley and San Francisco but Pacifica, south of SF on the coast where I lived after HS, was much worse and fog in the Sacramento valley was the worst I’ve ever seen. Had to pull over and stop on my way up there to visit a buddy who had gotten an internship with a state legislator one night after work. At one point I opened my door and looked straight down but was unable to find the center line. So I waited for a HWY Patrol and followed him out of the tule fog.
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Interesting photos from the mountains of NE Tennessee, where I lived for a rural med rotation on 2004. The bare spots stuck out among the evergreens near the top of Roan Mountain, and it is thought they are leftovers from an ce age, and even maybe mammoths feeding for many years.
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I’m glad you did. Exceptional!
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