Images

I always like looking up at rays of sunlight coming down through water.

In the last few weeks, thousands of Painted Lady Butterflies have started migrating from Mexico to the Pacific Northwest through Central California.  I’ve been enjoying watching them come through our area.  They are quite pretty with orange/black/white wing tops and a delicate under wing with a lot of fine detail.

I found a few of them that had been killed by cars, so I decided to take some microscope images of their wings.  The fine structure of their wing surface is neat to see up close.  It’s impressive that such delicate creatures can migrate so far.

I took this photograph off the coast of the Monterey peninsula.  Three humpback whales just surfaced after lunge feeding.  It’s pretty amazing to watch.  In this case, the whales would come up as a group (3-7 whales) directly under a school of sardines.  Each of the whales would take a large gulp of sardine filled water at the surface and then slowly squeeze the water through their baleen as they sink back into the water.  You can see that as the whale on the right descends, the water spilling out of the side of the whale’s mouth is full of escaping sardines.

Morning light filters through a grove of giant sequoias along the western Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

When I was young, one of my favorite places to visit was the Rio Grande Bosque.  It’s a great place to visit year-round, but I especially like it in the fall.  As an adult, the Bosque makes me feel very nostalgic: the smell of the cottonwood trees, the sound of ducks flying overhead, and the warm golden sunlight.

I photographed this little green Pacific Chorus Frog in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains in Central California.  These little frogs are actually quite common with a habitat that spans most of the lower Pacific coast of North America.  It always surprises me when I see or hear them in the winter (even when it is snowing) or at high elevation in the mountains.  They are certainly hardy little animals.

These are Giant Clams that I photographed on the Great Barrier Reef. These Giant Clams live in warm shallow waters in the south pacific. They can grow quite large (several feet), but most of these are less than a foot across. They are filter feeders and are open most of the day. They close very quickly if startled or if a shadow moves over them.

One of the most interesting things about these clams is that each one is a different color and pattern. Some are bright colored, others have intricate patterns, and some are relatively plain.