We have long been fans of Bay Nature, a lively publication serving naturalists in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, we were delighted when Dan Rademcher, Editorial Director for Bay Nature, approached us to develop an article based on Hidden Ecologies.

After several pleasant meetings, a fine Sunday hike to the Weep, and drafts aplenty, our article “Out at the WEEP - a curious search for life in a ditch” is now on the newsstands in the current issue of Bay Nature. Read on to learn about a public hike to the Weep later this month.

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Wayne Lanier, PhD, will be giving “Field Lectures” in Salt Marsh Microbial Ecology this summer at both Environmental Education Centers of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Please see SUMMER ACTIVITIES - pages 10-13, of Tideline Newsletter for the Summer 2009 schedule.

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Reaching into his shoulder bag, journalist Tim Leslie rummaged for a fresh pencil then returned to taking notes during our Sunday afternoon hike at Crissy Field. His efforts led to a nicely written article for California magazine describing my kite aerial photography and the Hidden Ecologies Project. Tim is a fun guy to work with and I hope we are able to collaborate in the future. (click on the photo to go to an online version of the article without the supporting images).

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The annual Maker Faire is coming to the San Mateo Fairgrounds on Saturday, 30 May and Sunday, 31 May. As before I will be on hand to man a KAP Collective booth and this year will be displaying a set of photographs taken over the South Bay salt ponds. It is a fun event, so if you are anywhere near inclined to attend, then stop on by. You will find us in the Sequoia Building.

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Over my half-dozen trips to Alviso this spring it has been interesting to watch the flat just north of the Alviso. This depression fills with runoff from the winter rains and then slowly dries out as we head toward summer. The image pair below shows the flat in images taken one month apart.

There are more views of the flat on Flickr from April and May.

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Last weekend marked another presentation at the Environmental Education Center in Alviso (my third in two months). This time it was a “Talk & Walk” event for the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). The format combined a presentation on KAP technique and the South Bay with a subsequent session out on the Center’s boardwalk to demonstrate KAP technique - altogether a fun afternoon.

Workshop attendees on the boardwalk.

I have posted an online set of aerial images taken during this brief demonstration. I have another set of images online from a relatively normal KAP session at the New Chicago Marsh last December. This set has much more varied images.

I was amused on arrival at the EEC to find Wayne lanier just concluding a workshop for the Don Edwards national Wildlife Refuge on microorganisms. Hidden Ecologies has established quite a presence in Alviso.

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I have been spending a bit of time lately exploring the growing collection on Google Books. This is a pretty amazing resource. For instance, you can now peruse all back issues of Popular Science, all the way back to 1872. Better yet, you can search all of these articles with the miraculously fast Google engine to find results such as Popular Science articles mentioning to salt and evaporation.

Google Books also provides online, indexed access to some pretty obscure journals. I had a pleasant read through the 1915 Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers wherein I found, lo and behold, a vintage photograph of the very windmills I have been photographing along a former channel of Mt. Eden Creek.

A view (above) of the windmills from 1915

My aerial photograph of the same scene from January 2009. I need to recreate the older view in a ground-level image.

Google apparently scanned the transactions while processing volumes from a University of Wisconsin library. The transaction article goes on to provide interesting descriptions of the San Francisco Bay salt industry c. 1915. Such a world we live in.

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Every now and then I look through my aerial images for what I call serendipitous stereo pairs. These are pairs of images taken in quick succession with essentially the same view. During the time between exposured the camera’s position shifts a little bit and, if one is lucky, the direction it moves will create a stereo pair. In this case the subject is one of the Archimedes screw windmills that lie in ruin along the former course of Mt. Eden Creek. The photographs were taken during a visit in November 2008.

Click on the image to get a larger version, then see if you can get the stereo view using the crosseyed technique. One click will take you to the image in Flickr. From there select all sizes and select a larger view.

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This post is a working roster of my visits to our weep site just north of Alviso and the aerial photographs taken there. Wayne and I are working with Dan Rademacher at Bay Nature on an article describing our unassuming weep. This list is a means of putting a variety of images and brief observations on the virtual table.

The roster is organized in chronological order. For each visit I am including representative thumbnails, which link to larger images on Flickr (which link yet again to even larger images on Flickr via “all sizes”). In many cases, to get a good sense of the image you will have to visit the larger version. Below the thumbnails I have made a link that will pull up a slightly larger set of images from that session (generally 6 - 12).

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Date: August 2006
Kite aerial photographs using a Canon SD700is
Occasion: Hike with Wayne
Weep conditions: Quite wet with good laterals from railroad grade and longitudinal flow, this is perhaps the wettest visit
Image notes: Mid afternoon light, just a few high views but they are pretty descriptive

Additional images from this session.

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The fine folks at California Coast & Ocean used one of my salt pond aerials for the cover of the most recent issue.

The image selected is one of my early salt pond shots taken near Mowry slough when I was conducting my early explorations of the East Bay wetlands. This link will take you to the location in Google Earth.

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