I met up with Urban Sketchers Los Angeles at Santa Monica Pier yesterday; it was much easier to sketch the seated sketchers than the tourists walking by!
sketchy business
Author: Hashi
curious and curiouser
On Sulphur Mountain I saw a curious phenomenon—clusters of baby acorns on one of the coast live oaks. This makes no sense to me, for multiple reasons:
- It’s autumn, not spring. The year’s acorn crop is ending, not beginning.
- Acorns don’t usually grow in thick clusters like this. They grow singly or in pairs.
- There was no evidence of male flowers, whose dried catkins usually linger for quite a while after the female flowers are fertilised.
I know we’ve had a weird weather year, but I only observed this phenomenon in a single tree out of many hundreds I passed. Why would only one tree be affected, if weather was the cause? What’s going on here?
wood rat nest
Our nature journaling trip to Santa Cruz Island was cancelled by the transportation company due to strong winds. Instead, we climbed the Sulphur Mountain Road Trail and journaled frogs, jumping spiders, mutant acorns, wood rat nests, and more. I saw my first northern harrier! What a lovely day with kindred spirits.
mise en place
Prepping lunch for my Santa Cruz Island trip with the Channel Island Nature Journalers. First time I’m going there, and I’m excited!
Scleroderma verrucosum?
Found this chewed fungus in the middle of a track at the Park; left by whom, I wonder? I think it’s an earth ball, Scleroderma verrucosum, but I am no mycologist.
under the toyon
I spent a quiet half hour with the hummingbird sage under a toyon tree, enjoying the colours, the coolness, and the calls of oak titmouse, red-shouldered hawk, white-breasted nuthatch, and acorn woodpecker. Time under trees is an essential component of my mental and physical health—is it for you?
Buildings homework
Roof angles are tricky!
4-direction landscapitos
I sat in the garden and sketched in the four cardinal directions. Not pictured: the Anna’s hummingbird on the bougainvillea.
I live on USA’s west coast, but the coastline actually runs east-west here, so the ocean is to the south of us. It was interesting how the sky colour was so different in each direction (this was done mid-afternoon.)
In the top image, those are not two electric poles. The one to the left is a raptor pole that K built. It gets good use by owls!
Oncopeltus fasciatus
Large milkweed bugs are seed-feeders; their main diet is, not surprisingly, milkweed seeds. So I’m not sure what this lady was doing on the sweet potato vine.
Pieris rapae
The cabbage whites (Pieris rapae) are all over my brassicas, of course, but I’m also seeing them in the Park and on ornamentals in the neighbourhood. They seem to especially like purple lantana flowers. Do they also lay their eggs on the plant? Do their larvae eat the leaves, as they do my kale?
On the subject of lantana, it’s highly invasive where I‘m from. It covers an estimated four million hectares in eastern Australia, often to the exclusion of wildlife, people and livestock. So it’s taken me a long while to get used to seeing it as a cultivated garden plant here in Southern California.
Eat up, cabbage whites—lantana not kale!
