Saturday, April 28, 2018

House finch at the Arizona garden by Ariana Baltay


House finch at the Arizona garden: A Nature Through Photography Field Trip by Ariana Baltay
    House Finches nest in a variety of deciduous and coniferous trees as well as on cactus and rock ledges. They also nest in or on buildings, using sites like vents, ledges, street lamps, ivy, and hanging planters. They are versatile, and use human-created habitats comfortably. As much as any crow, the house finch is the modern day “everybird” who will live in urban centers as well as in rural habitats, and in barns as easily as grasslands, streams, and open forests below 6000 feet. What caught my eye in the photo I took was the ease with which the bird I spotted was able to grip a pointy cactus spear and sit perfectly comfortably. It seemed to indicate his Zen adaptability, which research later proved to be present. It was not surprising to find him in the Arizona garden where cactus abounds since he eats and nests in cactus along with other plants. 
      The house finch eats almost exclusively plant materials, including seeds, buds and fruits. Wild foods include wild mustard seeds, knotweed, thistle, mulberry, poison oak, cactus, and many other species. In orchards, House Finches eat cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, plums, strawberries, blackberries, and figs. At feeders they eat black oil sunflower over the larger, striped sunflower seeds, millet, and milo.
   The birds also exhibit sexual dimorphism. Both males and females have a small size, a conical bill for seed eating, and a notched tail. Babies are covered with indistinct brown wavy lines and the female retains her blurry brown streaks into adulthood while the male develops a rosy red face and upper breast and a more distinctly lined back, body and tail. The male also has a thicker conical bill with a curved rather than straight profile. 
     House finches may seem common, but in the mid 1900s ambitious pet store owners made little starlets of them, dubbing the common house finch as the “Hollywood finch”, perhaps based on its southwest origins. They made a lot of money until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers got wind of their scheme and threatened to collect a hefty fine. Rather than conforming to the laws of the “Migratory Bird Treaty Act” that banned the transport of species to new zones, the pet storeowners decided to destroy the evidence that the birds were ever there. Their method, letting their birds go into the environment, ensured that the house finch would become even more common in the U.S. The birds once again proved their adaptability and became New York finches as well. Soon they populated most of the country.
    House finches are designated as members of the phylum chordate. Chordate means they have a hollow dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, and a post-anal tail for some or all their life cycle and develop an anus before mouth. The house finch’s family, Passeriformes, designates that they are distinguished by their three forward and one backward toe that facilitates perching.
     Predators of adult house finches include domestic cats, Cooper's hawks and sharp-shinned hawks. Blue jays, common grackles, common crows, eastern chipmunks, fox squirrels, rats, skunks, snakes, raccoons, and household cats are all predators of eggs and nestlings.
- Ariana Baltay



Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Animations of a Bouncing Caterpillar by Ulick Malone

In a previous post, I described how I photographed a caterpillar hanging in mid-air from a branch of a tree via a silk thread spun by the caterpillar. This was far from a static scene, and as I took my photographs using an iPhone, the caterpillar was bouncing around quite a bit due to the wind.

I back up my iPhone photos to Google Photos, and as a side effect of backing up my caterpillar photos, Google Photos automatically produced two animations that show the bouncing motion of the caterpillar. These animations are worth a look and show the challenging conditions I was confronted with in trying to photograph this bouncing caterpillar:

Caterpillar Animation 1

Caterpillar Animation 2

Ulick Malone

Monday, April 23, 2018

Software for Compiling Several PDF Files into a Single PDF File by Ulick Malone

In case you do not already have a good solution for compiling several PDF files into a single PDF file (for your dossier), this is the software that I recommend for that (on the Mac): PDF Expert. Here is a link for that software:

https://pdfexpert.com/

You should be able to download and use the free-trial of PDF Expert to compile your MLA 326 dossier. If you decide to buy the software (it's very useful for all kinds of MLA-related tasks), then you should be able to get a student discount on pdfexpert.com (for that reason it's better to buy the software there versus on the Mac app store, which does not allow a student discount).

- Ulick Malone

Photographing a Small Caterpillar in Challenging Conditions Using an iPhone by Ulick Malone

On Friday April 20, 2018, the day after my final Thursday-night MLA 326 "Nature  through Photography" classroom session, I was out walking in our neighborhood in the Murdock Park area of West San Jose with my wife Pat. As the course had just wrapped up, I was taking a break from photography that day and so was not carrying my Sony camera, though I did have my iPhone 8 Plus in my pocket.

During the off-road-trail part of our walk, Pat noticed and showed me a photography-worthy situation: a small caterpillar was spinning silk thread and was hanging from this thread about six feet above ground. The silk thread was hanging from a branch of a tree above us. In my mind, this scene of the caterpillar suspended in mid-air seemed to demand to be photographed.

According to the Wikipedia Caterpillar page: "Some caterpillars can evade predators by using a silk line and dropping off from branches when disturbed." The caterpillar that Pat and I encountered had this capability to spin a silk thread that it could use to lower itself from the branch of a tree when it wanted to move away from the branch.

Although I was taking a break from photography, I wished that I could photograph this caterpillar and regretted not bringing my camera with me on the walk. There seemed to be no point in going home to get the camera, as it was unlikely that I would still find the caterpillar in his current location when I returned with the camera.

I decided to try and photograph the caterpillar using my iPhone. I was pessimistic about my chances of getting a good photograph of the caterpillar using my iPhone for several reasons. The caterpillar was small, a little less than an inch long. A mild wind was blowing and now the caterpillar was swinging back and forth with a pendulum-like motion. The caterpillar had also reacted to the interest of two humans by starting to climb back up the silk thread and would soon be out of range for photography. A small moving caterpillar did not seem to be a subject that the iPhone's built-in camera app would be able to lock onto for the purpose of automatic focus. My assumption was correct and when I tried to photograph the caterpillar using Apple's built-in camera app, all I got was a very blurry photo of the caterpillar with the trees in the background in focus. The Apple camera app auto-focussed on the background scene, leaving the caterpillar in the foreground completely out of focus. To solve the focus problem, I would need to be able to manually control the focus of the iPhone's camera. Now I really regretted not having my Sony camera with me—that camera has a very nice manual focus user interface.

Apple's built-in camera app on the iPhone does have a basic touch-driven interface for manually controlling focus. This requires touching the object on the phone's screen that needs to be in focus. This feature was inadequate for my immediate need to focus on the caterpillar, since the caterpillar was moving around too fast on my phone's screen, making it impossible to manually focus on the caterpillar using this method.

I was feeling quite determined to solve the manual focus problem on the spot. Just then I remembered that I had a number of third-party camera apps installed on my iPhone (though I had very little practice with any of these apps). I picked an app called Manual to see if it supported manual focus, and I quickly found that it had an intuitive manual focus user interface that was more suited to the task at hand than the manual focus feature of Apple's camera app. I quickly got the hang of the Manual app's manual focus feature, which works like a traditional camera's focus feature and allows continuous adjustment of the distance from the phone that is in focus using a touch-driven "slide interface" (see below for a more detailed explanation of that interface). The swinging motion of the caterpillar still made this photography task challenging, but I was soon able to get a pretty good and reasonably well-focussed shot of the caterpillar suspended in mid-air:


Caterpillar iPhone 8 Plus Photograph by Ulick Malone
ISO 20  6.6mm  f/2.8  1/607
Manual iPhone Camera App Developed by William Wilkinson

This photograph benefitted from the two times optical zoom capability of the iPhone 8 Plus. The version of the photo shown here has been cropped significantly but not to the point where digital artifacts from the cropping process are becoming problematic. The thin vertical silk thread from which the caterpillar hangs is not visible in the photo, with the exception of a tiny white blob near the top of the photo.

This view of the caterpillar appears to be of his "underneath parts"—the part of the caterpillar that would be facing down if he was crawling on the ground. A pair of eyes are visible near where the two antennae connect to his head.

Though I may have been able to get a better caterpillar photograph in this situation with my Sony camera, I am still quite pleased with this iPhone photograph achieved with the help of 2X optical zoom and the manual focus feature of the Manual app. This may not be a great photograph, but individual caterpillar hairs are visible and are reasonably in focus.

The following screen-shot (from the Web page shootmanual.co) shows the user interface of the Manual camera app running on an iPhone:



The manual focus control in the above image is the horizontal row of white dots above the ISO 300 indication. Manual focus can be manipulated by using the touch interface to slide the row of dots to the left or to the right. The current focus adjustment is shown by the position of the small vertical line within the row of dots. I found this to be an easy to use and intuitive interface. I did not have to read the manual to figure out this manual focus method when trying to focus on my caterpillar subject.

This was truly a case where iPhone photography saved the day. Without the iPhone in my pocket, I would not have come away with this nice shot of a caterpillar suspended in mid-air.

- Ulick Malone, April 23, 2018.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Conserving Fog Bank Ecosystems: San Bruno Mountain State Park



        We are visiting the mountain on which the SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO sign stands? Really, it looks barren. I can’t image what we will see there, I thought to myself. In fact, San Bruno Mountain State Park is considered one of the most important, and threatened, biodiversity hotspots in the world. We are lucky it exists in our backyard.
This park captures 2,416 aces of the northernmost portion of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is home to a variety of endangered butterflies, plants and one snake. The park is maintained both by the county of San Mateo and the state of California.
First settled by the Costonoan tribe, cattle and sheep grazed the land 1769. By the 1870s, various quarries littered the mountain. At the entrance to the park, such a quarry can be seen to the south. During the Cold War, a Nike Missile early warning radar was installed at the mountain summit. Evidently, remnants of this relic can be viewed today scattered among the numerous radio and cell towers.
By the mid 20th century this area became the garbage dump for the city of San Francisco. The smell was noticeable and kept urbanites from settling here. Some say garbage saved San Bruno Mountain. By 1976, San Mateo county purchased 80% of what now is the San Bruno Mountain State Park.
What makes San Bruno Mountain State Park so special it that it lies within the Franciscan Fog Zone created the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean on either side. Edward O. Wilson, known as the father of biodiversity and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, considers San Bruno Mountain as one of the most important, and threatened, biodiversity hotspots in the world due to the endangered species found there as well as encroaching development pressure. In his book, The Diversity of Life (1999), Owen makes this claim about three sites including San Bruno Mountain. The other sites include Usabara Mountain forests, Tanzania and Oases of the Dead Sea Depression, Israel and Jordan.
The fog bank found here creates a variety of microclimates and dramatically different weather patterns. Drip from the fog can provide significant moisture even when rain is rare. An important ecosystem found in San Bruno Mountain is the Coastal Prairie Grassland which is home to all of the endangered species found here.
Friction between conservationists vying to protect these habitats and developers led to the production of the first Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) in the United States in 1983. This plan allowed for the development of some of the fragile habitat while assuring that other parts were restored and maintained. Thus, the San Bruno Mountain State Park. Many conservationists consider HCPs to be inadequate protection for endangered ecosystems. In 2010, a movie entitled Butterflies and Bulldozers documents the struggle to conserve the San Bruno Mountain ecosystems.

Gina Haney




Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Peacock ar Filoli by Ariana Baltay



                                                Peacock at Filoli
         I took my own photography field trip this week to see some wildlife at Filoli Nature Preserve, a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Woodside. The estate spans 16 acres of spectacular gardens, along with natural ecosystems that cover 654 acres of wildland preserves that adjoin the 23,000 acre Crystal Springs Watershed, a designated state wildlife preserve. The native Ohlone Indians once walked and made their home here. Many birds and mammals are found at Filoli including the rare California weasel, foxes, coyotes, voles, mountain lions, deer, garter snakes, raccoons, and red-shouldered hawks. But the most inspiring event turned out to be in the garden with a peacock who at first seemed quite tame, but whose behaviors turn out to be complex and quite innate.
     My choice shot depicts an Indian Peacock with his tail feathers fanned out in a grand display of shimmering feathers covered with boldly colored “eye” images. The peacock seemed to sense my arrival and did not shy away. Instead he fanned his tail, which made it rise up about four feet above the ground. Then he slowly rotated himself in a full circle for all to see his beautiful feather display. I wondered if this was a game for visitors or a naturally evolved behavior that reflected his biological needs. Perhaps it was both. Research revealed that Peacocks do use their bold colors to attract a mate. I speculated that there weren’t any peahens on the filoli estate, causing him to endlessly display his feather features for every human visitor as if he hoped he would someday find his love.
     It was a grey day, with a few drops of rain dripping down, and so I used a slower ISO speed. I wanted to get close up, and so zoomed my lens. I took multiple exposures and many shots to get the best angle as he turned. It was possible to get a close up of his head and beak, at which point I was careful to watch for the light glinting in his eye in response to Professor Siegel’s advice to consider the eye as a key focus in a good photo. This was an Indian Peacock, a species called Pavo cristatus, that seemed happy to show off his bright blue neck feathers and gorgeous green body and tail that trailed five feet behind him. He moved slowly and proudly as he promenaded in the garden.  I wondered how he learned to show off this way, and guessed that he was doing a deeply rooted kind of dance that served a biological function, not just showing off.
    It turned out that peacocks indeed have a unique system to attract their mate’s attention, one that has led to an evolution of exceptionally beautiful plumage. Their unique musical motion creates a high pitched sound in much the way a cricket does by rubbing together his feet in quick repetition, except the peacocks sound is too high to hear. In addition, the physics of the vibration are evolved to create an enticing vibrancy in the tail’s feather background from motion, while the eyes of the tail appear still, an effect which scientists have studied and found to enhance attraction of female peahens. It was amazing to once again uncover complex mechanisms rooted deeply in scientific principles that were demonstrated through such natural beauty. It was striking to think of how much we observe that has a story just beneath the surface. Photographic study did not in this case reveal the motion mechanism or sound, but it led to capturing the sheen and drama that begged to raise the question why the peacock displayed such regalia and how he survived and evolved in the wild. More details are in the slide show, but clearly even the most accessible wildlife has much to reveal and photography is a great way to make the connection to much that there is to learn.
-Ariana Baltay



Jasper Ridge Field Ant - Ariana Baltay


Ariana Baltay
MLA 326, Prof. Siegel
Spring 2018
4-7-2018
                        Field Ants and Habitat: Jasper Ridge Field Trip Write Up
         As our class meandered along a path through the upper edge of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, located in Portola Valley above Stanford University’s campus in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, we looked out over more than a thousand acres of teeming natural habitat. The privilege of exploring this untrammeled research area was awe inspiring and rewarding for our project of photographing and researching the inhabiting species there. We moved slowly and saw flowers, trees, rocks and life all around us. A quiet, life-filled buzz seemed to fill the air, a communion of insects, the rustle of wind as it moved leaves and branches, and organisms from birds and toads, snakes and lizards, woodpeckers, owls, and other birds. Our fist large bird sighting was of a turkey Vulture that circled gracefully above our heads. He looked magnificent although Prof. Siegel commented that we would not think he was so beautiful if we saw him up close. We were on a mission to produce a photo we could share and learn from and it had to be good enough to present to the class. For many of us who were not expert camera hands, managing camera settings was a challenge compounded by identifying species and deciding how best to present them to others. Thanks to the rich rewards of Jasper Ridge, all found an exciting topic. Mine was the field ant, and the amount which I learned about it was a waterfall I had not envisioned when I first saw the small creature in his busy community in his under-rock home.
     The photograph I chose from this experience was of a field ant who had crawled onto a stick that raised him above his teeming community of ants and larvae. He lived under a knee height  boulder. The bright moss and lichen that covered the rock complemented the bright red colors of the ants, making the sight rich in color and stunning natural beauty. I also liked the ant as my subject because of the excitement of the moving workers who darted eerily with the movement of a spider. For the main photo selected I used a zoom lens because the ants were small and I did not wish to get too close. There was lightly filtered light so I used a medium ISO of 400, an aperture of ten, and a speed of 1/80th of a second. As I was startled by the initial discovery, I rushed to take multiple shots. For a few seconds I just kept snapping, while adjusting settings a bit to be sure to capture a good shot. I did want to interfere with their movement by putting anything in their path, so I was lucky to capture the ant selected. I did not know I had gotten a shot of him until later.
   At home, I scanned each photo using the enlarged viewer on the computer, and in this way I discovered the one ant that displayed my story. It seemed telling that he was vertical and stretched out his arms and legs like a person. It took quite a while to hunt along the crowds of busy ants portrayed until I found a single ant in focus that I could highlight.I cropped around the ant so that he filled the shot, allowing me to see his double segmented body, pointed beak, and pearly grey lined hind body.
      It took hours of comparing close up of Jasper Ridge Ants to identify this ant’s species, Formica Moki. Several close relatives appeared like the ant in my photo. Only by tracing the descriptions of behavior, and size carefully could I be sure to identify the right species of ant. This was made based on the number of segments of his body, his quick and aggressive behavior, his red color and silver back end, and his size, which was quite large compared to the usual household ant, about 6 mm.
    I most enjoyed the contrast between the internet photos of dead, limp ants that appeared as if pinned, as if lying limp and hunched on a slide. The Field Ant my chosen photo depicts is of a specimen in his own habitat, a richly colored home of ochre yellows, bright greens, and earthy chocolate browns. His bright red body glowed and flashed with energy as he worked near bright white larvae. Although I was a bit put off at first sight of thes crawling insects, I learned much about their food, numbers, behaviors, and invasive Argentine Ant neighbors. Taking a photo and researching its subject proved to be an excellent way to build awareness of this bountiful natural reserve.
  -- Ariana Baltay



Anna's Hummingbird at Felt Lake - Ariana Baltay


Anna’s Hummingbird at Felt Lake
     Early Sunday Morning, April 8th, our class journeyed to Felt Lake just above Stanford Campus with the purpose of photographing nature. The gated reserve is home to trout and bass, cows, mushrooms, mockingbirds, bald eagles, and more. It is part of the Arastradero Preserve north of Arastradero Road and features a scenic loop trail which we walked, discovering new photography subjects at every turn.
     We saw several species of birds defending their territories, perched or hovering above their chosen tree. But it was not the mockingbird or even the bald eagle that captured my imagination so much as the Anna’s hummingbird that sang and danced with stunning acrobatics above a young oak tree near the edge of the lake. In addition to his lithe movement, his intense green-feathered colors were punctuated by a flashing red that appeared around his head at certain moments. It was quite a challenge for a beginner like me to release the shutter of the camera just at the exact moment that his movement glowed red. But with determination, one shot finally captured his flaming head. I had bracketed the shots by speed, testing out a range of shutter speeds from  1/400th of a second to 1/800th of a second, using my full 300mm zoom with f/13 aperture and, since we had bright light, a film setting ISO of 800. The shot that captured his split second display of red feathers was made with a 1/6400th of a second, using my full 300mm zoom, and an aperture of f/13. But it probably would have worked to use a number of other settings as getting his display seemed more a matter of timing the shot since this Anna Hummingbird’s activity came in spurts.
     Identification of the Anna Hummingbird came late, and I would have made an error had it not been for the helpful support of a new website organization called inaturalist. Excited by the day’s events, I had gone right to work writing my slideshow for the next day. I found a webpage displaying a red necked hummingbird called the Ruby-Throated hummingbird and was convinced that he was my guy, given the bright red display I had recorded on film. Just to be sure I joined iNaturalist.org and posted my photo, a step I had better understood after talking with a classmate on the leisurely walk around Felt lake. I went to bed content, but when I awoke I discovered an email leading to my account, which now contained not one but five clear identifications of my hummingbird image as that of Anna’s Hummingbird. I not only learned to check the area where the organism is known to live, but I also understood how powerful and dedicated is the community of amateur and professional ornithologists who cooperate to compile knowledge about birds here and elsewhere.
     Researching Anna’s hummingbird was fascinating, and revealed its complex adaptations for flight that allowed the bird’s helicoptor-like control in flight as well as his distinct color. Professor Siegel also explained the physics of color pigment versus color that came from a physical manipulation of the light as it hits the bird’s feathers, like light recoiling from a soap bubble. I felt it redundant to cover this too much in my report
instead I focused my story on the technology of the wing action which turned out to follow a complex figure eight pattern. As I looked into this, I found that developers of renewable energy had based their wind turbine designs on the design of hummingbird wings. To find so much detail below the surface was astounding, and has made me walk by many more natural occurrences with more wonder and interest. I can’t stop looking at small spiders without wondering about new mysteries that might top learning how the hummingbirds take sticky strands to cement their nests which is just one example of how closely interrelated and intertwined organisms can be, and how close we probably are to some of our smaller natural neighbors.
                        - Ariana Baltay