September 2024

Bewick's wrens have a distinctive, trilling song. The version I've heard most often is "WHEE-ooh-WHEE-EE-EE-EE," but there are many patterns.

In Santa Cruz, where I became a birdwatcher and photographer, I heard Bewick's wrens sing almost daily from the redwood outside my bedroom, and from the willows and oaks of Neary Lagoon, where I took walks to think or birdwatch. However, like all wrens, they are somewhat shy, and they flit about, never staying put for long. Despite my best efforts, for a long time I only got to appreciate these wrens through their song, and could scarcely catch one in my binoculars, let alone take one's picture.

A female Anna's hummingbird, by far the most common hummingbird here in California.

Acorn woodpeckers make pleasant photo subjects. For bird photography, you generally want to focus on the bird's eye. Many birds have dark pupils and irises, so unless the lighting is just right, it can be a challenge to catch their eye colors in a picture. As you can see, acorn woodpeckers have black-and-white eyes reminiscent of cartoon characters; these are much more forgiving to the photographer, and everyone finds them cute.

Here, our subject turns her head to the side, obligingly giving us a view of her species' distinctive red crown/hat/yarmulke. We know this is a female because the black of her head, chest, and back continues unbroken around the forehead, forming a barrier between the white face and the crown. On males, there's no such extension of the black area: instead, the white face coloration travels farther up and directly touches the crown.

I can actually derive a certain hopefulness from the game being so unusual, in a way that tempts DMs to give up on rules. Despite D&D having been around for half a century, so little work has been done to truly push its boundaries. However, that means those of us who do work to improve our games should be optimistic that with sufficient time spent striving and searching, we will break through to one frontier or another, and discover new and precious knowledge about how to improve the functioning of the game. The field is wiiiiide open.

I won't give this book a score because I didn't really give it a fair shake -- but after 30-40 pages, I still didn't give a shit about the characters or what was happening to them. I'm also deadly allergic to the technique of using Capital Letters to make otherwise ordinary Nouns seem Portentous.

This black-crowned night heron stayed motionless in this position for I don't know how many minutes, waiting to spot a fish.

Then a snowy egret flew up. As the night heron shrank away awkwardly, the snowy egret nabbed a fish almost immediately.

The night heron seemed irritated at being outclassed.