2023 in sights seen

C in the waves at Second Beach, Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge, Washington. (jby)

To bring this photographic retrospective to a close, we come to images I took of the landscapes in which I found birds, plants, mammals, and other critters. These include lots of mountains and forest trails, but the most dramatic ones might be views from Second Beach at Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge. The beach is shadowed by rocky prominences that loom dramatically out of the tidal spray, some big enough to host patches of coastal forest.

Continue reading

2023 in invertebrates

Boisduval’s blue butterfly on a weedy geranium, on Santa Cruz Island. (jby)

As a final taxonomic catch-all for my 2023 nature photography, let’s go with … invertebrates? If I’m not taking a photo of a plant, a bird, or a mammal, it’s most likely an insect visiting a flower. I do love a good plant-pollinator interaction. And while larger animals are a challenge to manage well with my 150mm lens, I can frequently catch some nice close images of butterflies nectaring, like the blue above, or the Clodius parnassian below.

Continue reading

2023 in mammals

Santa Cruz Island fox, at the Scorpion campground. (jby)

My last year of photography had broader taxonomic scope than birds and flowering plants, of course. I got some good images of mammals across the range of habitats I hiked and toured. Top billing has to go to the miniature foxes of Santa Cruz Island, above, which have fully taken over the campground where we spent two nights, napping yards away from occupied campsites and always on the lookout for unguarded snacks. It was like camping in a cat cafe, if the cats were a protected species.

Continue reading

2023 in plant life

A western Joshua tree in bloom near Mojave, California. (jby)

Following on from my post of 2023 bird photography highlights, here’s some of my favorite flowering plant images I captured in 2023. Flowers are, of course, easier photography subjects, but I’m still learning how to balance lighting and depth of field to really capture details with the most aesthetic interest and botanic value.

Above, the example with the greatest professional value: Joshua trees in flower this spring, after record-breaking winter rainfall across a lot of the Mojave Desert.

Continue reading

2023 in birds

White-crowned sparrow at Asilomar State Beach, California. (jby)

It’s been more than a year since I decided to return to photography beyond what I can do with the (deceptively good) camera built into a smartphone. In 2023, I took quite a lot of photos with my entry-level mirrorless Olympus digital, almost all with a 150mm lens that achieves good enough optical zoom to go beyond anything I’ve done with any camera I’ve owned. So this was my first full year carrying a camera that can in principle capture images of wildlife — though not yet the strongest skill set using it. Or, indeed, as much lens as I really ought to have for images of anything that can run or fly away from an aspiring paparazzo. Nevertheless, I’m pretty happy with some of the images I got, including enough birds to merit a personal retrospective, in this post. Many more are on Flickr, tagged appropriately.

Up top: one of the white-crowned sparrows I saw on the dunes at Asilomar, in between sessions at the first in-person meeting of the American Society of Naturalists I’ve attended since 2020.

Continue reading

The biology behind a superb superbloom, in the Los Angeles Times

California poppies, fiddlenecks, lupines, and other wildflowers at the California Poppy Preserve back in early April. (jby)

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times has an article that goes into some of the biology behind this spring’s “superbloom” in California — plants all over the state responding to an exceptionally cool, wet spring with profuse flowering. Corinne Purtill, the author, called up some rando to enthuse about all that spring greenery:

Those 31 atmospheric rivers delivered steady, nourishing rainfall from October to March. Regional temperatures remained moderate as well, without any sudden early-spring heat waves to kill off fragile baby plants.

The combination of those two factors has produced “an absolutely glorious spring,” one that has been more vibrantly colorful for longer than any in recent memory, said Jeremy Yoder, a Cal State Northridge biologist.

As the headline says, everything is blooming everywhere all at once, and it reflects how the life histories of plants in many California natural communities are adapted to periodic drought. Check out the whole piece for more from me and my fellow plant nerds on the science behind a spring bloom that has us all agog.

Natural history apps introduce people to the biodiversity around them — even if they don’t know quite what to look for

The Washington Post “climate advice” columnist, Michael Coren, has a great article up today about his experience trying out apps that identify plants and wildlife [gift link] from smartphone images or audio recordings, like iNaturalist or Merlin. It’s clear from Coren’s description that being able to put names to the living things in his neighborhood gave him a new connection to that urban biodiversity

I’m not a master naturalist, but I have one in my pocket. Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees.

If I’m honest, it’s the kind of thing I would normally miss while walking or pedaling to work. Birdsong might be gorgeous but I’d barely hear it. I’d note “pine tree” as a catchall for conifers.

That has changed. I’m now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings.

This is very much the experience I hope students have in my undergraduate plant systematics course, and I’m delighted that smartphone apps are making it more accessible. (This year I actually started providing my plant systematics class with explicit guidance in using iNaturalist as one resource for plant identification, in concert with formal botanical keys like the Jepson manual.) But Coren also illustrates the article with images of plants he’d identified using apps and … they’re not very good?

Continue reading

New paper: Conservation challenges and solutions for the Mojave Desert

Burned Joshua trees at the site of the 2020 Cima Dome fire in Mojave National Preserve (Flickr, jby)

A big review article, written with Joshua Tree Genome Project co-PI Chris Smith and a bunch of other Joshua tree experts, went online today at Biological Conservation. In it, we attempt to comprehensively describe the challenges to biodiversity conservation in the Mojave Desert, and outline solutions — more detail over on the lab blog, or check out the paper itself via this sharing link, which provides free full-text access through January 20, 2023.

A (late, oops) Flickr update

A black-throated sparrow perches on the dried-out inflorescence stalk of a Joshua tree. (Flickr, jby)

A couple weeks ago I realized I’d neglected to post photos from the tail end of summer, and updated my Flickr page with the best of August and September — and then failed to post here, on what’s meant to be my online home. Oops. You can go browse the whole set on my Flickr photostream, but here’s a few highlights from the only real camping trip C and I managed this summer, an afternoon at the Getty Center, and (at the top of this post) a September trip to Joshua Tree National Park for a planning event.

All of these are taken with an Olympus E-M10 Mark IV, the first “real” camera I’ve used in strange ages — I bought it for the Alaska trip, and I’m still getting the hang of it, but it’s a major upgrade from what my smartphone can capture, especially for wildlife.

Mastodon is also not rocket science

Weeks after Elon Musk took possession of Twitter and proceeded to tweet fast and break things, this Scientific American article by Joe Bak-Coleman offers a general theory of why it’s going so badly: social networks are complex systems rather than complicated ones.

On a social network, interactions between individuals create dizzying feedback loops and chaotic interactions that render simple mathematical models next-to-useless for predicting the future, let alone controlling it. Musk’s gamble is that applying his tinkering philosophy to Twitter will take him where no one has gone before: ownership of a large, healthy and profitable social network. The problem is that, unlike the moon or Mars, we have no idea how to get there—and that’s a challenge that engineering fixes cannot solve.

I saw this linked from Mastodon, where I (and now a pretty large fraction of my former Twitter network) have taken refuge. People there are generally passing it around in the spirit of schadenfreude that imbues most discussion of Twitter in the “Fediverse” distributed social network. However, I don’t see much awareness that what Bak-Coleman identifies as a problem for Musk running Twitter is also a problem for a network of mostly volunteer admins running Fediverse-connected Mastodon instances: we don’t actually know how design and moderation decisions will ultimately add up to create the decentralized social network we’re all using now.

Continue reading