One of our destinations during the recent eastern California trip was the dramatic and amazing Mono Lake and its crumbly, gradually ephemeral tufa groves.  Tufa towers are mineral formations deposited underwater when calcium-rich spring water pours up into carbonate-rich lakewater.  The resulting mixture precipitates calcium-carbonate which builds upward into the lake water, sort of like stalagmites in a cave, but underwater.  If the lake level drops or the lake dries up, the towers are exposed (like the Trona Pinnacles).

>> Osprey-nested tufa tower, Mono Lake.  The tips of the hen’s primaries look like a little black alligator head, if you click to enlarge.

Lots of birds and mammals use the pinnacles to perch, shelter, forage, and nest.  This tufa tower, about 15 feet tall, is completely surrounded by water — a pair of ospreys has built their nest on the platform of its top.  The Osprey hen, sitting tight on either eggs or chicks, is barely visible as two black wingtips sticking up just over the the middle of the untidy stick nest.  She’s hunkered low down in a whipping wind.  Her mate, not in the photo, was coursing low over the water nearby.

This streaky, buffy-lored Savannah sparrow was hunting along the highly alkaline, hyper-saline water’s edge, like a very tiny T-rex, searching for alkali flies and larvae, yum.  The cold temps and wind made it fearless or at least heedless — hunger does that — and it passed right by me, intent on finding a late afternoon meal. >>

Mono Lake is also the second-largest California Gull rookery in the U.S.  Below is one, bright and bold, who landed on our truck roof to see if we had anything to eat.  I suppose this photo might qualify as a “The Bird Spots You.”

(All photos A.Shock; click to enlarge.)

The Mono Lake story is a complicated one of rich natural history, ruthless water-greed, and hard work by a lot of dedicated conservationists and politicians, for better or for worse.  Check it out here.

<< check out the orange “gape” or flexible skin at the corner of the mouth, all the better to gulp down bickies with.  We did not oblige.

After much battling, litigation and legislation, current policy is to let the lake fill naturally, so the South Shore tufa towers pictured above are slowly being inundated.  A good reason to visit now, if you’ve never been; in a few short decades, these tufas will be underwater.

[This is a Spot the Bird, although it’s less of a quiz than a photo series. All photos A or E Shock.  Click to enlarge.]

Here are some feral date palms, growing wild at a substantial oasis in Death Valley, CA.  The date palm is Phoenix dactylifera (“finger-bearing”), but in this case we could call it P. bubifera, “owl-bearing.”  There’s an owl in this palm, although you can’t see it. >>

Owls seem to like roosting in palms.   Every birder the world over checks palms for owls.  Great horned, Barn, Grass, whatever the local species are — if there are owls and palms together in a habitat or region, they are likely to be acquainted.  This is because palms (like pine trees) provide what owls like: concealing, sturdy roosts, and habitat and food source for prey items.  An owl perched hidden in palm fronds has a grand view of scurrying, foraging rodents at its feet — imagine regularly finding dinner on your very own kitchen floor… or, to quote Homer: “Mmmm, Floor Pie!”  (that’s the epic Homer Simpson, not Homer the epic poet).

Spot the bird: In the center of this photo, you can see a vague milky blur on the right edge of the darkest dark: the vermiculation, or fine breast barring, of a Great horned owl, Bubo virginianus. >>

It’s nearly invisible because its distinctive yellow eyes aren’t visible; owls roosting in plain sight will often consider themselves concealed by squinting.  When even one eye is revealed, the bird become easier to spot. <<

I’ve checked a lot of palm trees.  I never find owls in them (although I know others who have), but I keep checking.  This repeated optimistic searching is known in our family as checking for lard. The term was coined after a cat named the Beefweasel found an unattended pile of chopped fat on a windowsill in our St. Louis apartment, waiting to be put outside for winter-hungry titmice and chickadees.  Making good her name, the Beefweasel wolfed down the yummy chunks.  Balancing on her hind legs and sniffing hard, she checked that bountiful window-ledge for years hoping for a fatty repeat.  Birders are well-known to check for lard, too: there was a nut tree in St. Louis that was searched every winter by local birders on field trips because once in a decade past it had hosted an out-of-range Bohemian waxwing.  Among birders, places to check for lard are passed down as oral tradition: I knew about that pecan tree, but the waxwing that made it famous alit there long before my time.

So out of habit and hope, I was checking these particular palms with my binoculars, searching the deepest shadows for Good Feathery Detail (vermiculation).  And there was an owl.

>> The bird never fully unhid; this was the maximum best sighting it allowed.

It was a Great horned owl, tucked in out of the breeze, and not at all worried about us (although we didn’t go very close, being equipped with telephoto lenses and optics — owls are like cats; sometimes you have to respect their invisibility, even if it’s just in their heads).

It’s so delightful to luck into a surprise owl (which, mostly, they are), that we talked about it for the rest of the trip.  We referred to this bird as “the Boss in her Office”, because she reminded me of a boss I once had, who lurked invisible at her desk most of the time.  Although she was hidden from us as we scurried around busily, it was never a good idea to forget she was there…

…without a bird.  Not that there isn’t something to spot. And it is spotted.  Also, toes are pretty much always a giveaway. (Photo A.Shock; click to enlarge for easy viewing)

This is an “interim” Spot the Bird because about a third of our photos from our Mojave camping trip are locked onto a recalcitrant memory card.  The jpegs are intact — we can view them when the card is in the camera — but communication between the card and our computers is currently at a standstill.  There are images I’d like to share (like the one of The Boss in Her Office), but until we pry them free, there are other things to look at such as the image above: the hindquarters of a Canyon Tree Frog blending in with Aravaipa Creek bed gravel. Oops, I gave it away.

(This is the sixth installment of a series.  Read the others chronologically by clicking these links: first, second, third, fourth, fifth)

Within a month, a letter from Professor Harrower had arrived requiring me to return to the Ganskopf Institute to draw another selection of mysterious “Owl Fetishes” from the Institute’s diverse collection. The project was still making little sense to me, because of its sporadic and leisurely timing, the odd, anachronistic communication style of my employer, and the curious nature of the pieces themselves. But the money was welcome – a freelance technical artist’s pay can be unreliable at times – so of course, when summoned, I went.

And at last, after prehistoric pebbles, pine-bark souvenirs, Attic coins, and other miscellany, the Special Collections librarian Miss Laguna had brought out something really odd – two items that conformed a little more closely to my expectations of what “mystery relics” ought to be. It was a pair of strange straw owl “dolls” – really just owl-like shapes about 8 and 10 inches tall – bound with colored twine and smelling a bit mildewy, like an old barn. One was an extremely rudimentary representation, faceless, and owlish only because of its proportions and an aura of eyeless alertness.  This was due to the presence, perhaps deliberate, of “ears” at the folded axis of the straw representing its head. The other, held together with a faded purple cord and made with a greener straw, was owly and anthropomorphic, with stunted wing-like “arms” jutting out to the side, and thick-thighed legs. It had more of a face, with eyes and beak stitched on in the purple cord, and straw blossoms jutting up in a V to indicate “horns”. The stitched eyes looked blank, and its slightly torqued posture gave it the impression of motion, but also made it look impaired somehow, damaged: the effect was unsettling. Equally disturbing was the fact that both owls appeared blind – not the standard presentation of open-eyed owliness, especially common in folk-art.  Neither figure stood upright, but appeared to be meant to either hang, or simply lie flat.

Their straw was spotted and stained, and the pieces looked fragile; in fact, each had shed a few crumbs and fragments of dry fiber onto the black velvet pillow. Miss Laguna allowed the crumbs to lie there, and gently passing a non-latex purple-gloved hand above them, explained that all the bits and pieces would have to go back in the drawer with the objects after I was through. She set them down a little farther from me than usual, then looked at me and said seriously, “Please, I must ask you to not breathe on them. They suffer in the presence of moisture.” This earnest instruction, together with the moldy smell of old straw, had the instant effect of making me need to sneeze, which I tried to suppress as I nodded my head and began to set up my gear with watering eyes.

It was going to take a long time: my sketches needed to accurately reflect the number and placement of each fiber of straw, and also I wanted to be especially sure to capture the creepiness of the purple-twined figure’s posture. I’d forgotten my watch, so I glanced up through the Special Collection’s front glass to check the wall-clock in the main reading room. As I did, I noticed another patron: once again, it was the sleek Dr. Danneru. He was talking on a cell phone, nonchalantly stationed right under a sign plainly forbidding cell phone use. When he saw me looking, he turned away as if for privacy, although I couldn’t hear him through the glass.  The rules just don’t apply to some people, I thought, and turned back to my work.

The sketches did take a long time. Miss Laguna, despite her concern over the decomposing straw pieces I was drawing, left me largely on my own. This was in order to see attentively to the needs of her other patron, who had finished his phone call, passed through the metal detector and past the security guard into Special Collections, and was currently viewing a Ganskopf item at the table behind me. I was not surprised to see a steaming mug held in one of his hands as if it were too hot to drink, but too coveted to put down. The grassy – and pricey – aroma of green Rooibos tea reached me where I sat, mildly irked by the scholar’s flagrantly bootlegged luxury beverage, when I had been instructed to not even breathe.

A couple of hours passed in the near silence of the Special Collections room. By then my back had stiffened up from leaning across the table to get closer to the straw figures, and it was getting dark outside.  I found it necessary to stand up to straighten out: I extended my arms over head, cracked my neck, and twisted my torso right, then left. Then right again, quickly checking behind me: Dr. Danneru had disappeared – perhaps to fetch fresh tea – leaving his notes on the table, along with the black cushion and his study object. He must have left quietly, because I’d never noticed. Miss Laguna was nowhere in sight, either. As if merely stretching my legs, I casually sauntered over to the other table, curious to see if the scholar was studying an owl I’d already drawn. He wasn’t. I stared.

Now, there was a “mystery relic”…

To be continued…

Here are the Famous Fish Rocks, kept fresh with white paint by unknown artists in Trona, California.  I admit to disappointment when I found out they were not meant to represent T-rexes rising out of the earth to once again dominate the landscape, but, even if they’re just fish… really big fish… they’re excellent.  Each one is the size of a van. I will think of them as Dunkleosteus. The Famous Fish are easy to spot just north of CA State Hwy 178 en route to the Trona Pinnacles.

<< Fish Rocks (A.Shock)

The Trona Pinnacles were our destination: ancient underwater spring deposits now high and dry in the Mojave Desert.  They’re very large-scale versions of the tufa towers on the south shore of Mono Lake, further north, only there’s no water in sight. Predictably, the only creatures there other than ourselves were a traveller in a brightly painted hippy bus, a Rock wren, and a Raven.

The towers are up to 40 feet tall. >>

Perhaps you recognize the setting from Planet of the Apes, or Star Trek V: The Final Frontier?

Surely Shiva abides here.

And also here, at the Trona Community Methodist Church, which has seen fit to adorn its front entrance with smaller yet equally vigorous tufa deposits.  (Click to enlarge.)

Speaking of reverence gone awry, below is a bonus pop religious image of Shiva.  I find this version delightfully goofy: ascetic hermit my butt, there’s Tres Flores in those dreads — this is Shiva El Guapo.  It seems to be a portrait of the artist’s well-fed brother in law who wants to be an actor, rather than the standard idealized image of blue-male deity with the dreamy, stoned I mean introspective expression of the Lord of Eternity. His familiar smile and direct gaze are right out of an AFTRA/SAG headshot — instead of the blessing of Om and the Shiva-linga in his palm, this chap should be flashing us a confident thumbs-up, or making that “call me” gesture next to his Nagraj’s ear.