Greenish sheen

 

Muir's Hairstreak (Callophrys muiri) nectaring on Western Wallflower (Erysimum capitatum)

Photographed in The Cedars (near Cazadero) on 8 April 2016

Note the greenish sheen, especially on the hind wing.  This is a feature I looked for last year (see post from 29 April 2015), but missed.  It was nice to see it!

 

Can you believe your eyes?

Well, I'm out of time tonight, but I mentioned the amazing mirages visible during yesterday's heat wave, so I'll post a few pictures so that you can start enjoying and puzzling over them.  [Click on the images for slightly larger versions.]

These photographs show the shoreline north of Bodega Head near Jenner (the Goat Rock area and further north).  Note what appear to be incredibly sheer and improbably tall cliffs (at least for this area) at the waterline, and strange inversions of reality:

 

 

 

The next image is a boat offshore.  My basic (uninformed) impression is that there could be four images.  Starting at the bottom: (1) the boat at the ocean surface, then (2) an inverted image above it, then (3) a second image of the boat upright, and finally (4) a second inverted image above that.  I'm not sure about this, so see what you think:

 

When the weather clears, I'll photograph the same shoreline shown above for comparison.

Breathe, sip, sigh...

What a crazy day — an air temperature of 84°F (29°C) in Bodega Bay on April 6th!  The heat created dramatic mirages along the horizon in the early evening (those pictures will take a little longer to sort out). 

For now, I'll show a few other favorite sightings from today:

 

Spouts of two Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)

 

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) nectaring on a Seaside Daisy (Erigeron glaucus)

 

Looking west across Bodega Harbor at sunset

Glorious

 

Glorious Top Shell (Calliostoma gloriosum), photographed 2 April 2016

The northern geographic range limit for this species is often listed as San Francisco, but I've found several specimens — broken shells like this one — washed ashore in the Bodega Bay area during the last 12 years. 

Glorious Top Shells are supposedly more common in deeper water, so perhaps they occur offshore, and it takes a lot of wave energy (like we've experienced this winter) to push them onto the beach?

P.S.  Recently, I've shown two other top snails — Channeled Top Snail (Calliostoma canaliculatum) and Purple-ringed Top Snail (Calliostoma annulatum), but I have yet to show the most common top snail in this area, Blue Top Snail (Calliostoma ligatum).  Some day!

Right off the bat

 

I started walking down the beach tonight, and immediately noticed this Juvenile Bat Star (Patiria miniata) with a beautiful color pattern.

Okay, I'll admit it.  This bat star was fun (juvenile sea stars are always nice), but it also seemed appropriate to use a baseball phrase today.  Happy Opening Day!

Blue Toadflax

 

Blue Toadflax (Nuttallanthus texanus, formerly Linaria canadensis) 

 Photographed in the Bodega Dunes, 24 March 2016

Two mysteries solved

This is a tale of two mysteries solved.

This year, Eric and I have found several shell fragments of a mystery snail washed up on Salmon Creek Beach.  We have encountered five of them (one just today!), but here are the four that we had found by late March (in order of discovery, from left to right — they range from ~2-3.5 cm long):

 

The first three pieces were fairly incomplete, and didn't provide enough clues to identify the snail.  However, the fourth piece was more substantial.  Here are two different views:

 

 

Finding this larger piece gave me hope, and I started looking through various identification guides for a match.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any luck identifying this snail using that method.  (Frustrating!)

Then, one day, I was browsing Jim Watanabe's website for a different reason, and I happened to scroll down to the bottom and realized I was looking at a beautiful picture of our mystery snail!  

Meet Carpenter's Turrid (Megasurcula carpenteriana).  You can see Jim Watanabe's picture of a live animal here.  It appears that Bodega Bay is the northern limit for this subtidal snail.

Then came the second epiphany.  Years ago, Jim Carlton brought me a broken shell that one of his students had found on a beach near Bodega Head.  None of us knew what it was at the time.  For years I have been keeping that shell in the back of my mind, hoping to identify it some day.

 

Just after I figured out that our shell fragments were Carpenter's Turrids, I realized that it was very likely that Jim's student's shell was also a Carpenter's Turrid.  Whew!  It's fun to have mysteries, but it's also nice to solve them.

P.S.  In 2014, I shared pictures of some wonderful snail larvae (veligers) that we thought might belong to a turrid snail.  As a group, turrids are predominantly southern, but now we're wondering if the veligers with the pretty orange spots could possibly be Carpenter's Turrids?  As is often the case, when one (or two) mysteries are solved, others appear!