PHOTOS: NATURE SHOTS

On the last Bridge Walk we enjoyed very much the company of Len and Patti Blumin, our nature loving friends who not only identified but described how they fit in as to a number of the colorful plants and birds that we encountered along the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, and back.

Len was using his multi-hundred-power tripod-mounted monoscope to spot distant birds, fill the viewing screen, and then snap off a photo image.  I posted the one of Mr. Red-shouldered Hawk in the item entitled "Crissy Marsh."

All this inspired me to take a few shots on my next walk, using my 210mm Nikon, hand-held.

Here are the results (click to enlarge):

Mr. Hummingbird...

  Crissy Marsh in background...

  This little guy and his best girl hang around the same spot.  I know where to look, now..

  These look like yellow daisies to me.

This is a Purple Bush.

  Yellow Bush.

  Buttercups.

  Big Yaller.

  Purple with Yellow background.

  Purple & Blue.

  Snaky Red.

  Scary Plants.

As you can see, I've invented my own names.

Richard Feynman tells the story of being on a nature walk, as a boy, with his father.  On learning the name of a plant or bird, Richard thought he'd accomplished something.  His father thought otherwise, teaching the child that knowing the just name of something without knowing anything else is not knowing very much.

There's a lot to know about how plants fit into large systems of interacting living and non-living things.  I believe the study is called Ecology.  Knowing and protecting one specimen of something is fine; but understanding and protecting whole systems of living things, and the conditions on which they depend, is an order of magnitude greater.

Each generation has to learn anew the value of living things.

It's been about a century since the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and others, spearheaded a movement to protect the environment.  Since the white man began settling this continent in earnest less than three centuries before, they cleared out and otherwise destroyed a lot of trees, birds, marshes, and other essential environment.  The Conservation movement began with them. 

The Haas Family made great donations to restore the Crissy Marsh.  A marsh is an early  stage in the food chain of the plant and animal world.  Developers don't like marshes very much, however.  They're, well, marshy.

Remember those Levi jeans you wore as kids?  Levi Strauss was the grandfather or great-grandfather (of the Haases) who made tough denim canvas pants, using rivet fasteners, for the gold miners of 1849, thus starting one of the great American companies, emblematic of the West.  It's nice to take our Bridge Walks on the Promenade made possible by those Levis we lived in but that our mothers wouldn't let us wear to school.  It's nice of the Haases to be so generous.

This idea of using scopes to make bird images reminds me of the time one of my lifeguard friends, Louis Mandel, built a telescope using an eight foot long cardboard tube, and brought it to the beach.  The front lens, which he ground by hand, was 10" in diameter.  Lou built it for looking at Saturn's rings, Jupiter's moons, and green-cheese on the moon. 

But since it was daytime and we were at the beach, we found better things to focus on. 

Have you ever tried to aim an eight foot astronomer's telescope at some cute young thing sitting on a blanket way...over...there???  It's pretty hard to do, certainly unobtrusively, but then again, she had to be pretty far down the beach and couldn't see us very well without a scope of her own.

Usually it was easier just to walk over to her blanket, smile, and say, "Hi, Welcome to my beach; lovely day, isn't it?"  We did that a lot, unburdened by artificial optics other than sunglasses.  If she returned to her book, you knew you'd been shot down.

Son Rick won a tripod mounted astronomical telescope in a company raffle recently.  I'm going to have to see whether we can find a camera mount and use the scope for nature photography on one of our Bridge Walks.

You listening, Rick? 

Comments

[rs]

Stan holds down the Florida contingent.

[Cousin Stan]

Ellen Sue sent me your latest. Sounds like fun. We love birds, have a Cockatoo and lovebird and about 15 migrating Purple Martins breeding in our house/nest in the yard. They will leave for Canada as soon as the babys can fly.

Stan