A brand new baby is feeling quite hungry.

Here is a well-dressed bee. She has some lovely blue boots from the pollen of the Gilia capitata (blue field gilia). The phlox family that Gilia belongs to is known for commonly employing colorful pollen in many of its members. Please, no one step on her blue suede shoes!

Quercus kelloggii (Black Oak) is putting out its leaves for the year. Before they get to be full size and normal, they have a simply fabulous emergence!

Tiny flower alert (nasty camping fingers for scale). I was in the eastern Sierras this last week for a climbing trip and got lucky with lots of annual desert wildflowers!

In this bare bones tub is habitat for the local chorus frogs (Pseudacris regilla). They have found it all on their own, laid egg sacks, and left their little progeny to live their life.

A tribute to California's State grass: Stipa pulchra (Purple needle grass). Once covering swaths of CA grasslands with perrenial roots as deep as 20', this redwood of the grasses is slow and steady. A little too slow compared to the invasive European annual grasses that have out paced them recently.

Some nice winter flowers from Monterey County to get us through till spring blooms.

A flower, a chrysalis, a quick sketch. The pipevine swallowtail is an endangered CA endemic butterfly that relies on the Dutchman's pipe as a host for its catapillars.

Sori i didn't see you there

I found a mostly intact and very clean racoon skull!

When the rains come down, the spores go out and all the little lady's huddle for comfort (or mating?).