Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
Normally I enjoy seeing new species but this one made me sad as the only reason I saw my first Sonoran squid was because a fire destroyed its habitat. It still has a little green, as does the barrel cactus and saguaro behind it, but they are the walking dead.
📷: Nikon Z 7II | Nikon 105mm macro
🗓️: September 29, 2023
Thumbs up, looking for a ride, sometimes you can’t wait on plate tectonics to take you where you need to go.
A quick snapshot while hiking out of the park, the moon rising behind saguaros in the east, the sun minutes from setting in the west. In a world that can be so relentlessly awful I’m thankful for the places that cradle me in its beauty.
I believe the artists who created this scene are termites, the left side showing the protective mud layer they place over the hardened black areas at the base of old saguaros, the right showing where they have recycled most of the bark-like material and returned its nutrients to the desert soil.
One of my favorite sights of spring in the Sonoran Desert is when the birds have faces completely pancaked with saguaro pollen. When I finally got around to getting my first Nikon so I could do more macro photography I wanted to get a close-up of these large flowers, the desert’s powder rooms. However each saguaro blossom only lasts for about a day and I needed to find one on a day off when I was up early and with no wind and with a saguaro with an arm that bent towards the ground and was right next to the trail and which wasn’t covered in bees. It proved to be a tall order but on Memorial Day I was up before sunrise and found an obliging giant.
Due to some mix of the early hour and lack of practice and a general tendency to forget to setup the camera properly when I get excited, I left the shutter speed far too low and even with almost no breeze ended up with a little motion blur. Plus I should have stopped down one more stop so there would be less blur in the focus stack due to the large separation between stigma and stamens.
Nevertheless these shots will bring a smile to my face for years to come. As I wrote in my hiking journal while lamenting my mistake but hoping the pictures would come out: “It was great fun regardless”. The breeze soon picked up so I went home and got Bear and came back for a hike out to see the saguaro I call Witch Hazel, my first time seeing her in bloom.
Just a lovely day all around.
Diffuse light from the rising sun falls on a white-winged dove and a bee and the very tops of the saguaro flowers, but not yet on the ripening fruit or the saguaro below. One of a seemingly infinite set of pictures as I play with light arriving or departing the desert, taken on a rare pre-sunrise hike without Bear a couple of months ago.
I call this soaptree yucca “A Boy & His Pup” in honor of Bear and I, though the appellations aren’t quite appropriate for either of us, consider it artistic liberty or a nod to our spirits and not our ages. We’re looking south on the Redbird Trail, the trail closest to our house and a favorite for dog walks. The yucca is close to the area where we enter the preserve and I’ve wanted to photograph it for a while, on this day in May both arms were in full bloom and as I turned to look back at the end of our walk saw the sinking sun was only falling on the flower stalks and the distant hills. I took several compositions but at the moment this is my favorite, one in a long series of the light arriving into or departing from the desert.
I had four days off for Memorial Day and was able to get up before sunrise on three of them, taking a short photography hike before a quick trip back home to pick up Bear and bring him along for a longer hike. Only possible because the trailheads are so close by, one of the main reasons I wanted to settle in this part of the city. I call this saguaro “The Muppet” as its center arm has a face that reminds me of something I might have seen on Sesame Street while growing up, though this muppet lives on the Latigo Trail. Taken as the light first cleared the mountains.
Saguaros have been flowering for a little while now but this one had extra blossoms courtesy of a gentle breeze and its palo verde neighbor. A quick snap with the Z fc while walking Bear this morning.
Yesterday as Bear and I took an afternoon walk around Cone Mountain, I took a few snapshots of the desert in bloom as mementos of our time together on the trails. Later on as we circled the mountain, as we passed a boulder closer to the trail than this one, the tall grasses began to shake and rattle. I instinctively told Bear to leave it (we’ve been practicing whenever my beloved lizards scamper across the trail) but he wasn’t showing any interest in any case. To be sure he understood what I wanted him to ignore, I backed up a few feet, still far outside striking range, to make sure he saw the rattlesnake. He looked at me the same as when I stop for a picture, ready to go when I am, so we continued on our way.
I’m delighted he didn’t try to position himself between me and the snake, or show any interest at all, but the snake was fairly hidden in the tall grass so perhaps it would have been a different story if the snake was slithering on the trail in front of us. Odds are highly in favor of it being a western diamondback but it was so obscured I couldn’t tell with a quick glance and didn’t take a picture since I didn’t want to risk disturbing it any further or to take my eyes off the pup.
Bear gets formal snake training in a few weeks but I’m glad to see he passed the test, this was his first rattlesnake. It’s a test he’ll have to pass repeatedly to be allowed to hike in the desert in the warmer months. Sadly our afternoon hikes will come to an end soon as hot weather is fast approaching, then it will be early morning hikes only for him. There are more dangerous things than rattlesnakes.
Boolie 