Mike in the Wild

Starting with its dozens of mile of coastline, San Diego offers unlimited spots for seaside adventures and relaxation.  The city may be most renowned for the sandy beaches where Arizonans like me - we're not so affectionately referred to as Zonies - descend en masse during the hottest months of our long, baking summer.  Even COVID-19 didn't keep us away this year as we masked up in the large crowds visiting the coast.  But it turned out the masks would come in handy for another reason: the stench. A well-known area of the sprawling coastal city is La Jolla - Spanish for The Jewel - noted for being one of the most expensive communities in the United States to buy a home in.  But it's also famous for its geography, situated on a rising bluff over the Pacific Ocean where spectacular views of the sea are one of the reasons for the astronomical real estate costs.  Much of the neighborhood's coastline includes cliffs punctuated by cozy, sandy beaches.   ...

Tides are as familiar to experienced beach-goers as all the items they pack for a day at the shore: blanket, beach chair, beach umbrella, sunblock, ice chest.  The sea level's rising and falling play a critical role on exactly where we pitch this camp for our fun in the sun and surf.  Everyone of us has a story of the time an especially large wave washed over our encampment as the tide stealthily creeped higher up the shore, stealing a sneaker or a shirt on its return to the ocean. On rocky coastlines tides cover and reveal a world teaming with life that's especially adapted to these regular periods in and out of water.  Last weekend shortly after sunrise I investigated exposed tidal pools in La Jolla, California during the first low tide of the day.   Tides are the result of the gravitational effect of the moon and the sun along with the Earth's rotation on our seas.  They're mostly on a predictable schedule, ebbing and flowing twice a day, resulting i...

You'd think that joining a whale-watching tour with the specific objective of spotting a blue whale would be a slam dunk success.  After all, the blue whale is not just any whale: it's the largest animal that has ever existed in the history of Earth.  That's right, it's larger than the brontosaurus and the tyrannosaurus rex and every other dinosaur that ever roamed on land or swam in the sea.  So how could you possibly miss one? Unfortunately all whale species faced the same fate of near extinction due to rampant hunting that lasted well into the first half of the twentieth century.  As a result of a global effort to stop the slaughter, many populations have rebounded; today there may be over ten thousand blue whales navigating throughout our planet's oceans.  In the eastern Pacific there are over a thousand, at least one of which was my target off the coast of San Diego. Like many whales, blue whales migrate great distances from feeding grounds in cold...

Bugs are something to reliably count on seeing every summer evening in Prescott, at least for now.  Luckily they're usually not the annoying ones: houseflies besetting your face, mosquitoes biting your ankles.  Instead more colorful, less hyperactive nocturnal insects creep out of the shadows.   When the porch lights switch on after twilight, it only takes an hour or so before moths appear on the scene.  These lepidopterans share a large family with skippers and butterflies, varieties that I mostly see during the daylight hours.  The nocturnal moths are just as attracted to my home's lights during colder temperatures in the fall and spring.  While many are colorful, it's their wide variation in size that's most notable, ranging from a tiny couple millimeters to almost the width of a hand when the polyphemus moth pays an infrequent visit. If monsoon rains have drenched the landscape, June bugs - despite the name, it's usually July when they start sh...