Nom nom!

Gosh how I love this new word - nom nom! It is even better than birdy num-nums! (Points to whoever knows where that comes from!)(Yes I am a nerdy geeky dork.)

Anyway, the caterpillars have been looking for nom noms. Alas many of them get squashed on the path. Here's one I saved (no I didn't touch it cos I am one of those people who get itchy spots from just looking at a spiny caterpillar).



And its "face"


And nomming away on a wild mustard/brassica


We thought they might be giant leopard moths or something similar but those are not found in California, certainly not in the Bay area. Also they don't have red stripes when they curl up. They just have dull red spots where the spines ("setae") stick out. They are some sort of woolly bear caterpillar, which means they are a moth caterpillar. I assume that they are a good sized moth cos the larvae get to about 3cm long.

So the plot thickens! Wish I knew an entymologist around here. Guess I should look online at the local universities.

ETA 11 April 2009. I think we have an ID thanks to "National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America" (Arthur E Evans). The caterpillars are Painted Arachnis (Arachnis picta) instars. They are a form of tiger moth. The grubs eat weedy plants, which fits the bill for the mustards we found them on. Yay! Thanks, NWF!

A little downtown

The other day I trawled around on the buses visiting a couple of op shops (thrift stores). (I much prefer op shops cos the focus is on lucky finds, hence op for opportunity, rather than being thrifty, which has some negative connotations these days.)

Anyway, after I got peeved with Savers cos they had three registers open and a LOT of customers with a trolley (shopping cart) full of stuff and two registers closed just like that, I decided to call DH up and go into town (San Jose) to have arvo tea with him. I had even remembered to take the phone with me! A miracle!

So I caught the 23 bus in to town. Here's a few pics from the little walk from the bus to DH's work.


The Guadalupe River. Downtown. Looks wild!


A male merganser duck swimming frantically upstream. He actually blends in pretty well!


On the road to nowhere - the bike path on the other side of the river (more a creek) just stops. Waaaah! as you fly off the end of the path. I presume there is a barrier on the other side of the bridge.


Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium


In a bed of presumed native plants (except some things are obviously weeds)


A green avenue. It was all nasty brown sticks two weeks ago.


DH's workplace with its signage being coy and its buildings looking wonky due to the wide angle.

No pic of peppermint tea. mmmmm....

Oh my! Caterpillars and butterflies

What a weekend! Lovely weather - absolutely perfect.

It was a weekend of butterflies madly skipping NW-ward. Thousands of them. I have no idea what the butterflies are - they were here and gone before one could do anything apart from appreciate the speed with which they moved. These butterflies were on A Mission. We think they were Painted Lady type butterflies but who knows? they certainly were not fluttering by in the usual butterfly manner - no barely able to fly for these chaps! These were the ferraris of the flutterby world. Hwnce no photos.

Also we've been seeing heaps of fuzzy black caterpillars on one bit of sidewalk on the way to downtown Campbell. They look totally black and are right by a "wild" patch by the freeway. There's oxalis pes-caprae, redwoods, ashes, thistles, and wild oats and other grasses in the area. We have not seen them feeding on anything there. We would love to know what they are. I might be able to get a pic of one before it is squashed.

Umm, where am I again?

This 'ere's the wattle,
Emblem uv our land.
You can stick it ina bottle,
You can 'old it in yer 'and.
(Thanks, Pythons!)


Silver wattle and gum trees against a blue blue sky.

I took these pictures at Vasona Lake Park, Los Gatos, California, USA. Ahem.

South Bay Spring

Nearly a week ago, after getting my first ever flat on any of my bikes (and getting it fixed), I went for my oft-proposed ride up the Los Gatos Creek trail. I had been itching to ride up the creek for weeks and finally the planets were in the right places, etc etc and I could ride!

My goodness it was lovely!

I shall let you judge for yourselves. Click on any of the pics to go to the Flickr sizes page. :-)




(Redbuds - natives)


(the creek from a bridge - all green and growing!)


(A rather small egret in said creek)


(Another small egret further up the creek)


(common fiddleneck - native)


Something lives in this hole, a Californian Ground Squirrel I think but it dashed away before I could get a shot of it. It was being stalked by a presumably feral calico cat.


(Statice - weed)


(Canadians walking on water)


(Percolation ponds looking northish)


(Percolation ponds looking southish/Los Gatos-ish)


(Weedy but very very native - I love Californian poppies!)




(Lupinus succulentus - native)








(Male ?swamp? Baccharis - native)


(Female ?swamp? Baccharis - native)


(Some of the prettiest weeds you'll ever see but boy are they pests. I doubt if there is one native species in that shot.)




(Just below the Vasona Lake weir)


(lake outlet)

I am really enjoying this spring - it is quite exuberant :-)

Spring prettiness

I am a total sucker for these.



Crab apples?



No matter what they are, their daintiness, whiteness and pinkness pull me in like a moth to a flame.

A circular drive

Today we went for a nice drive, courtesy of Nathan's boss. We showed a potential new hire and his girlfriend around a bit of Santa Cruz and then up the coast and across through the redwoods in the coastal range. (I am pleased to report that we didn't actually drive through any trees, just past them.)

We had lunch by the marina, where it was grey when we first sat down



and then brightened up by the time we had finished:



The heiferweizen was a little shaken up it seems - someone had problems pouring it without a huge head.


We walked up almost to the mouth of the river (you can see the dredger and its pipeline in the pic above) to admire the Pacific and the lighthouse.




The breakwater/groin that the lighthouse sits on is made up of concrete "shapes" which totally fascinated me. Obviously the local sandstoney type rock is not impervious enough to the pounding of the waves. (see natural bridges below)

We then found Cliff Road after doing a little tour of the boardwalk area (no pics) and drove up to Natural Bridges. Looking south from the carpark, we saw


BLUE!

And looking north?


GREY! (note there is only one bridge left - I guess the same fate befell the second arch to the mainland as befell our London Bridge in Victoria.)

Which direction were we going in? Guess? Guess why there are no pics of the coastline or of the wildflowers (native and weedy) along the coastline? So we drove up to Pescadero, with brief views of a cloudy and veiled Pacific Ocean on our left, no kite surfers, past rudey nudey Bonny Doon Beach.... Interestingly it was a little clearer up in the mountains! So we stopped on Alpine Road for a little walk through the redwoods.




These are only bubby coastal redwoods - nothing like the ones we saw at Muir Woods and not to be confused with the giant sequoias that live say at Yosemite.



Quite a number of plants are in flower at present in the redwoods or are about to be in flower.

Redwood sorrel, or Oxalis oregana, or Oregon sorrel. The flowers were not very open.



Cardamine californica or milkmaids (different to our milkmaids at home!). The one in the pic below has pointy leaves - I presume it is the same plant as it has the same flower structure.


After a long afternoon of looking, gawping, knitting (for me) and blathering (oops, me again), we hopped across to the Sonoma Chicken Coop for dinner with knitty/crochetty friends and home with a magnificent sunset at our backs.