Growing in our office. Maybe this doesn't count since it's captive...
This flock of waxwings has been hanging around Mulford for the past week or so, squealing away the afternoons.
I found this wasp near a light on my house. The light was surrounded by araneid orb weavers (probably Araneus). Once the wasp got somewhat stuck, and the spider shot out to nab it, but being rather large and heavy, the wasp fell out of the web in the nick of time. This guy was pretty chunky, maybe 2-3 cm from head to the end of the abdomen.
I need to figure out how to distinguish the White-tailed Kite from the lighter male Northern Harriers. This one had tapered wings and seemed slim overall, so I figured it was a kite, but another guy out there seemed to think it was a Harrier.
Possible in the family Desidae, but I'm not sure. Plenty of these in the amaryllis (?) in the median outside of Cheeseboard. Somewhat tangled, ladder-like webs, with retreats. I collected it for my spider biology class.
Update: Turns out it was a desid, and there's only one in the area. Noice! Also, I think there's a spelling error in my spider manual...
Not sure what species this is, but it had these really cool projections from the flowers.
Super cool little spider that uses tiny hairs to attach sand to itself for camouflage. Also, not being able to add inverts is really beginning to bug me (ahyur). I need to fix that...
Zebra-tailed Lizards are so awesome. Long toes, crazy tails, insanely fast.
One of the few spiders I collected (on BLM land, where it's legal). I just got it under the scope today which helped me make the ID. I'm not sure I could have done it in the field, though the curved tibiae are pretty distinctive.
Radical eyelids! Many thanks to n8 for letting me borrow his 200 mm lens.
Io is one of the best dogs ever.
Thanks to April for the ID, though apparently "bloxamii" is a misspelling of "bloxami." I wonder how we'll resolve this...
I found this tidepooling with John a while ago, and never got around to identifying it. I'd say the central disc was no more than a cm in diameter, and I'm pretty sure I found it digging through the algae.
Some kind of manzanita, to be sure, but which one? This little cluster was about 3-4 cm across, observed in coastal scrub.
After seeing Raphael's photo of the same, I'd been really hoping to finally see one and lo, they were practically falling out of the Ceanothus (well, they were literally falling, after we beat the Ceanothus with sticks).
Yet another parasitic wasp, I'm guessing in the same genus as the one I found near my house (maybe Ichneumon?).
This is a totally awesome beetle that one of the professor's found on our spider collecting field trip. This is either an larva or an adult female (which are neotenic). They specialize in eating millipedes, and since someone also found one of those (they were all over the place), we decided to feed it.
The genus is Zarhipis, I think, but apparently Catalogue of Life doesn't know it. Need to build the uBio fallback...
Gotta love the pupils! This might actually have been my first time seeing this subspecies.
This might have been my first time seeing something in the Orobanchaceae ... or at least my first time recognizing it as such! Most of the them are parasites that don't photosynthesize, and I'm pretty sure this was one of them. Pretty rad little plant. Now I just need to figure out if it was O. fasciculata or O. californica...
Second time seeing (and remembering!) this flower. Blooming in abundance at the lower elevations.
