San Francisco, 8:07 pm

Cliché-shmliché.

Hummingbird

Anna's hummingbird ♀ on fuchsia
motion blur at 1/1000 sec

Horsetail

My new hobby is nature-journalling, inspired by an online course I'm taking (free) and a book I bought this week (rather expensive). At present my kit contains only an HB pencil and an eraser, so the sketches are pretty bare-bones. But on the plus side, they only take a few minutes to complete.

Oliver Sacks offers three reasons to like horsetails: "their simplicity, their antiquity, and their mathematical elegance." It is said that the decreasing size of the segments inspired John Napier to invent logarithms.

Speaking of simplicity, the notebook pictured here – A6 recycled-paper from Muji – is an absolute joy to use.

The Thieving Carpenter

The cottage where I'm staying in California has Mexican bush sage in the garden. Like all salvias, the flowers have a 'staminal lever mechanism'. To get at the nectar, pollinators have to push against one arm of the stamen. This activates a lever mechanism; the other arm swings down and deposits pollen on the pollinator's body.*

But some animals cheat. Instead of entering through the front door, they bite a hole at the base of the flower and steal the nectar. Today I caught a carpenter bee in flagrante delicto.

And here is the hole, with my thumb for scale:

*	To really appreciate this marvel, see Fig. 1 of Stöbbe et al and Fig. 2 of Claßen-Bockhoff et al.

Owl Haiku

Yesterday was Rabindranath Tagore's 157th birth anniversary. Of his 18 (!) volumes of collected works, the one I have read most often is probably volume 3 which contains কণিকা (Konika), a collection of proverbs, aphorisms and philosophical musings in verse.

Tagore visited Japan three times; he was fascinated by haiku and translated a few into Bengali. When I was a teenager, I tried translating some of his Konika couplets into English, in haiku form. There is only one for which I still know both the original and the translation by heart: Konika 65, titled শত্রুতাগৌরব (Feud-Pride):

পেঁচা রাষ্ট্র করি দেয় পেলে কোনো ছুতা,
জান না আমার সাথে সূর্যের শত্রুতা!

The Owl announces
Every chance he gets, "I have
A feud with the Sun."

Unity, Equality, Love & Bicycles

My (borrowed) bike on the Ohlone Greenway, California