Nature teaches us
Suspect every corner
Something may be waiting
Cover: Flower crab spider waits for his time.
As I traversed the trail up the hill, the remnants of an altercation with one of the quail revealed itself.
AMBUSH
Month: May 2025
Cerveau de Monarque (Monarch Brain)
It’s not ADHD
OCD
It’s not.
Is it?
Turkey, quail, coyote, lynx, mice, rabbit, deer, fox. They are all around here doing their life. I bring them around. Entice them so I can see them up close. Well, actually, most of them I don’t bring in. They just show up.
I had high hopes with mourning cloak caterpillars. Maybe I could document some of their life cycle. Then they scattered one night. Not to be seen again. Now it’s the monarch butterfly who’s piqued my interest.
We were gifted a milkweed at Christmas and managed not to kill it since then. I was in the middle of completely ignoring it when one afternoon I caught sight of a monarch circling the plant. Grabbed the FX30 and shot some footage and jpgs. The specimen graced the plant with some eggs and now we’re expecting.
Something new to read up on or “youtube” to get to the bottom of rearing the hopeful new grandkids…grandflies?
Anyway, as usual, I really don’t know anything. You start digging and pretty soon it’s all about propagating more milkweed. “You likely don’t have enough or “Watch out for this, be careful of that.”
It’s a rabbit hole alright.
We’ll see what happens next.
The FX30 is not a photo-centric camera, but it does ok. (No viewfinder…oy)
Still, with a little practice:
What I do like about the camera is 240FPS with 4:2:2 color. Float like a butterfly.
Patterns
Nature’s plan
Void
Of emotion
Another of my “hopes dashed” sagas.
A moment of peripheral movement piqued my interest. A bird exiting from under the eaves of the house could mean a new nest. Walking to the eave, a house finch protested. He was atop a gate, feet apart in a defensive stance. Our eyes met and I walked away.
Within a week, there was a full nest.
Again, I started planning to document the life cycle in video and photos. I dug up an old action cam that I can operate with a phone app. But how do I mount it? Looking through my hardware, there were some steel straps that could be modified perfectly. Everything was ready down to the 1/4-20 anchor. I was pretty sure the eggs were in the nest. The plan was to install the camera in a couple of days.
The next day, the nest was on the ground and the eggs eaten (partial shell in the photo).
Seems one of our scrub jays took the opportunity to nourish himself with a high protein snack. He had been hanging around the eaves on another side of the house hunting a grasshopper (which I appreciated).
Maybe next time.
Deflated
Nature has a way
Of promise
Without promising anything
Earlier this spring as I was tending to our landscape irrigation, I noticed some little black dots on the ground under the Chinese elm. Looking up, there to my delight were dozens and dozens of caterpillars grazing on the leaves.
Immediately I started planning to document the life stages in video and photos. I read SOME of the information and started planning. Within a few days, they were gone. Completely, utterly vanished. Searching the property was futile. Stuffing my head into trees and bushes for many days, I must have looked like a weirdo.
The part I did not read said that when the caterpillars fully mature, they drop from the tree and move to another spot to become butterflies. They disband as well so they are not all in one spot.
Maybe next year?
Since then (mid April), I’ve only seen one of the adults and I can’t be sure it was from one of them.
Nymphalis antiopa – (Mourning Cloak)
New Weird Not Weird Now Normal
Looked up
With someone else’s eyes
What was it?
On the ninth I had placed a trail cam face up on a table and accidentally left it overnight. The next day I reviewed the footage and saw lots of moths and a few bats. In two of the clips there were some weird lights that came into view.
At first I thought it was a drone. That creeped me out. Then yesterday I told my daughter and her husband about it. He explained that it was a Starlink Train. Apparently, multiple satellites will launch and travel in a line in a low orbit until they deploy to their respective final orbits.
So, not weird, new normal.
From the provided data, a key Starlink launch occurred on May 9, 2025, at 20:19 PDT (00:19 GMT on May 10) from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, deploying 26 satellites (Starlink mission 257). Vandenberg is approximately 200 miles northwest of Ramona, and satellites launched from this site often follow a southbound trajectory, making them potentially visible over Southern California shortly after launch. Another launch occurred on May 10, 2025, at 02:28 PDT (06:28 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but this is less relevant due to the distance and orbital path.
(The trial cam date shown is incorrect)
Photographic Impressionistic Illusionistic 