Burrowing Owl

Burrowing Owl -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland, CA
Canon EOS Rebel T5i, EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II, 1/2000s, f/5.6, ISO: 1600

Four burrowing owl dens have been built near Arrowhead Marsh in hopes of attracting these cute little owls to the area.  Last year an owl was a fairly common morning sight for a couple of months.  This year I've only seen an owl a couple of times.  I've never seen multiple owls.  I hope the place becomes popular with the little owls, but I'll be surprised if that happens.  I think the dens are too close to the road and the last time I saw an own here it barely escaped being carried off by cooper's hawk.  Hawks and harriers are common in winter, which is when the owls are visible.  I've heard that the owls used to be seen on the lawn area but I've never witnessed that.

Photo selection inspired by Geogypsy's Foto Friday Fun 110, image #1688.

Somewhere in Utah

A view from State Route 12, UT
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS

The drive from Capitol Reef to Bryce Canyon I took a couple of years ago on Route 12 yielded a plethora of nice photos, this being one of them.  I don't know the names of most of the places I captured on film, though.

Plethora?  Can you tell I watched Three Amigos last night?

All Your Ducks Are Belong to Us

Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, CA
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS

Northern pintails and northern shovelers are packed in tight in this photo from a couple of years ago at the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge.  The populations can get a bit dense in the winter.

Color in Yosemite

Bridalveil Fall -- Yosemite National Park, CA
Canon EOS Rebel T5i, 1/100s, f/7.1, ISO: 100

I recently posted a black and white photo from a similar spot on a different day.  That one was taken earlier in the day before the shadows take over.  The sun was low when this photo was shot, turning the cliffs in the background blue and lighting up Half Dome and the Cathedral Rocks.

I haven't been there in months, I need to rectify that.

Great Horned Owl

Great Horned Owl -- San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, CA
Canon EOS Rebel T5i, EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II, 1/2000s, f/5.6, ISO: 320

Kinda tough getting a shot of this guy (gal?) through the tree, but I think this one worked out OK.  This was my second crack at this guy.  He was in a tree in the union of the two main driving loops at San Luis.  The light was better in this later set of shots I took after driving the waterfowl route and before before splitting off on the elk route.  This was the only usable photo from that second set.  Better light, but either the picture was blurry or the branches were blocking too much of the face in the other photos.

A Turning Tern

Forster's Tern -- Arrowhead Marsh, Oakland, CA
Canon EOS Rebel T5i, EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS II, 1/1250s, f/5.6, ISO: 100

I enjoy watching the terns fish at Arrowhead Marsh.  I see mostly Forster's terns and occasionally a Caspian's tern.  The Forster's terns hover until they spot something they like, then they do a barrel roll and dive straight down into the water.  Looks like fun.

Is There Life on Mars?

Natural Bridge Canyon, Death Valley National Park, CA
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS

It's not too hard to imagine this shot was taken by a Mars rover, is it?

This canyon has a lot of evidence of erosion by water, including chutes in the rocks carved out by waterfalls and of course the natural bridge that gives the canyon its name.  Hiking this canyon is like hiking back in time.  It's impossible to not try to imagine what it would have been like when water was more plentiful here.  It's also easy to imagine you're on another world entirely.

I was just reading about how some scientists now believe life started on Mars.  They're quite serious about this and it's not as crazy as it sounds.  The gist of it is that the Earth of 3.5 billion years ago or so, when life is suspected of having started, wasn't a place that would have been conducive to stringing together the right chemicals that would become the early historical stages of life.  The planet would have been covered completely in water after having been bombarded for millions of years by space debris, some of which came from Mars which itself was being bombarded.  Life probably started in a shallow pool, but a planet covered in ocean obviously can't have any pools.  Mars, on the other hand, had such things.  A meteorite or volcanic activity might have shot rocks from Mars into space (something that can happen on Mars because of its lower gravity) and those rocks might have had these early microorganisms as stowaways and one or more of these rocks might have found its way to Earth where it found the ocean and atmosphere was to its liking.  Mars would have been the place where the early complex processes of producing RNA would have occurred with natural selection driving everything once the microbes got to Earth.  That's the abbreviated I'm-not-an-expert-I-just-read-it-in-a-book version, anyway.

Science is cool.

Photo selection inspired by Geogypsy's Foto Friday Fun 109, photo #168.