Archive for the ‘Nature’ Category

I recently planted a new herb garden.  It’s in a small area on the east side of the house.  It only gets the late morning sun, but it can get pretty intense.  I hope not too much so!

There’s Italian parsely, cilantro, spearmint, tyme, and sage.    Much of this is supposed to do better in the ground, rather than in pots.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes.  And I’ll be making irregular updates.

Fish on!

Maybe it was two years ago that I had the idea to do some fishing again. I hadn’t been fishing in quite a while, and so I planned a little trip to Putah Creek. But now it looked like a dumb idea; the sky is overcast and threatening to rain. I head out anyway. I don’t even know what I’m going to fish with; I’m bringing a spinning outfit and a fly rod.

I arrive at my destination and the weather is no better; in fact the clouds appear even darker. None-the-less I attack  the water with my spinning rod; I’m using a Mepps #2. No luck! Over and over again I cast, but still nothing. The water seems to be a bit murky. Then I remember a successful fishing trip to the Walker river with my friend Sarge. There he introduced me to the technique of “dead drift nymph” fishing. I switch to my fly rod and tie on a nymph ( probably tied by Sarge ).

I cast upstream and let it sink, drifting downstream naturally in the current. I see hesitation in the floating line and pull the rod up smartly. Fish on! After a good fight I managed to net him; a beautiful rainbow trout! And now the sun is coming out. and I’m feeling much better about the day.

Mergus merganser

I saw three mergansers swimming rapidly downstream in the creek the other day. In fact they were moving so fast that I only managed to snap a photo of  one. They were diving and popping up unexpectedly downstream. It looked like the fishing was pretty good!

 The common merganser in a large diving duck, with a long bill for catching fish. Apparently this is a wintering area for them.

dining in San Francisco

From time to time I like to review what’s going on in the world of wildlife news.  Today I read that the leaf cutter ants have escaped from their high-tech enclosure at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences.  It had taken three years and countless hours to rebuild, but just months for the leaf cutters to engineer their escape.

And that wasn’t the only incident;  apparently the giant octopus had been sneaking into the crab enclosure in the evenings.  Then, under cover of darkness, he had been dining on the tasty crustaceans.

I’ve been informed that security has since been tightened.