Eastern Sierra Field Trip

This is a photo of tufa from the South Tufa Scenic Area at Mono Lake.

I just got back from this summer's field trip up to the Eastern Sierras. We saw Manzanar, the Lower Owens River Project, various hot springs, Mono Lake, Bodie, Rush Creek, Lee Vining & Lee Vining Canyon (a glacier-carved canyon), and Tuolumne Meadows. I'll post more photos in time...this is a study break. The trip and the company--my classmates and a professor and his wife--were fantastic, but it was sure nice to get home and take a hot shower! My hair still smelled of camp smoke last night.

The tufa posts out in the water are home to several osprey nests, which you can see through binocs or a telescope. They are formed by calcium carbonate precipitates from fresh water springs that bubble into the highly alkaline, carbonated lake. The weather was hot, and the scenery was a little surreal albeit gorgeous. Lots of seagulls bobbed around like bath duckies because of the buoyancy of the water as they ate brine shrimp and brine fly larvae.

field trips

Who says Los Angeles isn't beautiful? Blue sky, summer days, shiny buildings, trees...There was a sliver of moon above those buildings which is why i took the photo. I'll have to adjust it and see if the moon shows up.

birding

Yesterday our sambucus provided habitat for a bird we hadn't seen in our yard before. There were two of them; they bonked their beaks against the branches, looking for bugs. My mother and i can't agree on what it is though, because our three bird books have very different pictures for a variety of species. We do agree that we hope it doesn't start bonking holes in our house. (At least there are no acorns around here--i've seen redwood trees and gazebos jammed full of acorns to the point that they no longer look structurally sound.)

According to one, it looks very much like a ladder-backed woodpecker, but their range is East Coast. It looked a bit like a flicker, except that the back seemed more white with black stripes than black with white stripes. It looked a bit like something else, but because we didn't get a very good view (i had just groggily awoken from a nap, the binocs were downstairs, the sun was in our eyes), i think it had a red head but she thinks it had an orange head--and that makes a big difference! Hopefully we will be better prepared when it comes back and i can add something else to my life-list. Yay!