Limekiln Wildlife: Critters Edition

Here are some pictures of the animals we saw during our Limekiln camping trip:

In the first five minutes after getting there, there was a deer roaming the grounds, and I caught him like a ghost in the upper right-hand corner of this exposure:

An obvious addition to any trip to a California coast--seabirds:

Banana slugs in the wild! I'd never seen one before. It was pretty small, and I remember thinking, Who left a golden pepper out here? But it was moving! Cool:

Be careful and wary: smelly elephant seals brawling in the surf:

And sunning on the beach:

The big male on the upper right is nearly as big as my old Datsun 240-Z.

Look Out!

Piranhas! Attacking the Jungle Cruise ship, a rare specie that loves the sunny afternoons of Anaheim:

Pretty cool effect, anyway...

Columbus Circle

There was a cool scene from Taxi Driver where they frame the Senator Palantine during one of his speeches at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with his arms raised matching the statue, but both heads being cropped out of the picture, to show Travis' disconnect from the rest of the world. But I went by and took a few pictures of the zone for myself. The first two are of the same statue, Columbus, but from different angles:

The specific statue from Taxi Driver:

Going for a taste?

Who gets it?

Me and my Wire references...

Taking Pictures of my Computer Screen

The above picture is of my computer screen as I examine Google Maps. It was late at night and I was trying to get a sense of my morning bike ride. I ride from the white arrow on the right hand side to the whitish patch a half-inch away from the pen's point.

Sometime soon I'll have some better pictures of this area, otherwise known as "The 'Hood".

Shrike's Spikes

Sometimes I get maybe too into a subject. I'll spend hours reading about it online, and usually relay ideas here or work them into different aspects of other pieces I'm working on. One thing you learn if you're like that--having an insatiable thirst for knowledge and data--is that there's always something else cool that you've never heard of.

I've typed plenty of words over my plenty of blogs about the extant dinosauria--birds. I, like so many others, am intrigued by birds. On Netflix we found a BBC documentary series on birds, eight or nine episodes, and having watched them, another crazy piece of bird knowledge was bestowed upon my humble head.

Shrikes. I had never heard of the shrike, a series of passerine birds. Passerines are the perching-birds, but you would easily recognize other members as crows and ravens and jays and cardinals.

One of the crazy things about shrikes, though, is that they have a special way of storing food:

They leave their dead and/or dying prey impaled on thorn bushes or barbed-wire fencing or other sharp objects. They do it to bugs and lizards and small mammals, like the above I nabbed from a Google search.

How had I never come across shrikes before?

Not Quite Babylonian Gardens...

...But we have some hanging produce:

The large tomato plant that starred in my Lonely Harvest post has grown through the wire grating even more, and the weight of the tomato currently growing from it has caused this dangling look. I took the above picture from the street looking up at the balcony.