Month: September 2012

A Monday Moment

If an author tells you that you “should live in the moment,” you know he’s either a fool or a hypocrite. Authors don’t write about “the moment”; they write about the past, or, at best, some imaginary future. It’s impossible to do otherwise.

It is equally impossible to blog about the moment, but I’ll fake it and take a brief break from my Santa Rosa trip to blog about my Monday visit to Pt. Defiance Rose Garden because if you live in Tacoma you need to visit the Rose Garden now, during our current spell of sunshine.

It’s obvious the roses love the heat; they look like they’ve been reborn, showing none of the scars from the late Spring rains we experienced here.

Rose

Even the peripheral gardens look as beautiful as they have all summer.

White Flower

Most of all, the Dahlia garden is in full bloom; even the bees know enough to visit now.

Bumblebees On Purple Dahlia

There are several varieties I don’t remember having seen in the past, like this orange and white variety.

Orange-White Dahlia

There were much larger varieties then this red-tinged beauty, but none struck me as quite as beautiful.

Red and Yellow Dahlia

If I really believed in living for the moment, I’d be outside enjoying today’s sunshine instead of sitting inside polishing images and describing a beauty that’s already days old, nearly forgotten already in the beauty of yesterday’s trip to Mt. Rainier.

Any joy I feel in revisiting these beauties pales in comparison to the joy I felt in observing them first-hand. I can only imagine what it must feel like to experience them only through a computer screen thousands of miles away.

Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake

Amazingly I’ve been walking around Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake for nearly 17 years now, longer than I’ve been birding. I’ve always enjoyed walking, enjoyed being out in nature. But birding has made it even more enjoyable. No matter what time of year we visit there are interesting birds here, year-long-residents and constantly-changing migratory birds.

This is one of the few places where I can count on seeing a Snowy Egret,

Snowy Egret

perhaps my favorite member of the “heron” family, if that’s the family it belongs to. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only person who has trouble deciding what is or is not a heron as Wikipedia notes, “The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology.”

I started seeing Green Herons when I was there last Spring, but I saw several Green Herons both days I’ve walked on this trip. This mature Green Heron was the first bird to greet me as I walked out of the parking lot,

Green Heron

And I spotted this immature Green Heron later at Spring Lake.

Green Heron

There were also lots of songbirds like this Black Phoebe,

Black Phoebe

which seem to be common in California, but one I never see at home.

It was a special treat seeing a small flock of California Quail.

Quail

It wouldn’t be Summer, though, without the ever-present dragonflies.

dragonfly

Despite the huge number of people I see walking around the two lakes, I see relatively few birders, which is really a shame considering how many birds that can be seen.

Hard to Believe this is the same place I visited this Spring

After all those years of rushing by the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge thinking there was nothing there, I wasn’t about to go to Santa Rosa down I-5 without stopping to see what might be there. Luckily, though, I didn’t have great expectations because I knew it was mainly a winter refuge.

In fact, if this had been the first time I had ever stopped I might not have ever stopped again. There wasn’t much there except for lots of rabbits,

Jackrabbit

Egrets

,

Egrets

lots of dragonflies,

dragonfly

and a few stray shorebirds like this sandpiper,

Pectoral Sandpiper?

which looks like a Pectoral Sandpiper to me, though all I know is that it’s one I haven’t seen before.

Just another reminder that timing is everything in birding. It’s easy to imagine someone who has heard others rave about the Sacramento NWR showing up at the wrong time of year and end up thinking the other people must be crazy. I’m careful when I refer a particular beach area to other birders to specify the importance of tide in seeing birds.

Disconnected

My lack of recent posting was due to an extended trip to Santa Rosa, California I just returned from. Normally when I’m about to leave on a birding trip and am not going to have internet access I’ll try to post several blog entries that will appear on upcoming dates while I’m gone. I didn’t feel that would be necessary this trip, however, because Mary has a high-speed Internet connection and I thought I would have lots of time to post entries.

I knew she had been having problems with her provider, but we completely lost the connection over the long weekend, making it impossible to post an entry from her house. It turned out squirrels had been chewing on the lines making the connection unstable. Strangely, exactly the same thing happened to our service in Tacoma a couple of years ago. I wonder how common the problem is?

Actually, though, I found the intermittent dropping of the connection more frustrating than simply not having it available at all. It seemed like every time I was about to post a blog entry the connection would cut out. Under such conditions, I found it difficult to get motivated enough to spend the time writing copy or even cropping pictures.

Not only was I unable to post entries, I was unable to read several of the ebooks books I had taken with me. I was surprised to discover that much of the commentary in my iPad book on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience required an Internet connection because they were served from YouTube. The same was true of a biology textbook I’m reading.

I have long been aware of how much time I spend on computers but much less aware how much of that time is spent connected to the internet. Looking back at my journal, which automatically tracks my time online, it turns out that most of my time spent on the computer lately is connected to the internet. The internet has become so woven into my daily life that it’s nearly impossible to live “normally” without it. Not sure I like that, but life certainly seems less pleasant without it.

Anyway, I should return to my normal schedule of posting four or five times a week once I’ve caught up here,. I’ll start with pictures from the trip and then attempt to make some comments on Joyce’s The Dubliners, which I finished while cut off from the internet, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.