The heron is preening after spending most of the day on the nest. I could have cropped the picture much closer than I did but I wanted to show the nest. If you enlarge the pic to the largest size, you can see how intricate it is, and how many little perks there are for the kids. There’s shady spots, and even some strategically placed leaves to give a casual observer the impression of presence where there is none. If you come in really close, you can see at least one very small young heron in the picture. They’re really still too small to photograph coherently, but I know what I’m looking for so I keep at it, hoping for that one magic tiny great blue heron photo.
More to come…I’ve got over 1,000 shots but only a few worth publishing right now.
It has burned through at least 18,000 acres, including Sycamore Canyon and Wood Canyon, which used to have deer, bobcats, butterflies and wildflowers in them. Now I’m sure they’re a charred mess. I don’t even want to know what they look like, to be honest.
I’m pissed that our firefighters didn’t have the resources they needed right out of the gate to get this thing under control before it mushroomed into a habitat-killer. I’m going to be even more pissed if I find out it was arson, which wouldn’t surprise me given that at least two fires have been started near freeways heading uphill — this fire and the one in Chevy Chase canyon in Glendale, not far from where I grew up.
Yeah, I know conventional wisdom is that it’s all about the Santa Ana winds, but we’ve had this weather pattern for at least a year now and this is the first time a bunch of fires have sprung up out of it. I’ve heard someone tossed a lit cigarette out of their window too. Really? Someone is stupid enough to do that right where it would catch an entire canyon on fire on a day when the Santa Anas are howling?
I suspect arson. But even if it was arson, I remember the times where we had enough forestry resources to be pro-active about brush clearance and fire breaks.
Not this time. And it sucks.
