☽ Fantastic Creatures ☀

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Photograph by Dick Bartlett | with permission

I took this picture of my friend’s frogs and it weirdly exudes the same energy as those solemn 1890’s couple portraits where the husband and wife are embracing each other but staring at the camera with dead eyes and zero expression. Well, that’s the vibe I get at least.

But we are never ever, ever, ever getting back together.

One of the rarest and most remarkable insect encounters one can experience in California is laying eyes on a female rain beetle (genus Pleocoma). The vast majority of their life is spent underground, with grubs sometimes taking up to 13 years to mature. The adults hatch from their pupal shells in late summer, but they do not emerge immediately, for rain beetles are aptly named. They will wait patiently beneath the earth for weeks or months in anticipation of the first heavy rains of fall. Once the rains come, the beetles may spend no more than a day or so above ground. Males fly long distances tracking the pheromone signals of potential mates, and are occasionally drawn in by outdoor lights. The females, however, are flightless, and once mated they return to the soil again to wait for the right moment to lay their eggs. The only way you will ever see one is to find her emergence burrow, on the one day of her decade-long life that is spent on the surface. Needless to say, I am very lucky. The only surviving remnants of an ancient lineage of primitive scarabs, rain beetles are found along the west coast of North America, from southern Washington to northern Baja California. Little is known of their natural history, largely due to how difficult it is to cross paths with them. If you’d like to find one, you’d better be prepared to get rained on. Sonoma County, California, October 2018

a signed version of the fixed chart, for reposting

From tidepooling to witnessing Oregon’s tallest lighthouse, there is something for every visitor at Yaquina Head. Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area extends out from the Oregon coast, one mile into the Pacific Ocean. Standing 93 feet tall at the westernmost point of the basalt headland, the lighthouse has been a bright beacon of the night, guiding ships and their supplies along the west coast since the light was first lit on August 20, 1873. In the tide pools, visitors can see marine life such as anemones, urchins, mussels,  barnacles and seastars. Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management (@mypubliclands).