thebark's Journal

Not that it is any sort of model but just to explain the uneven quality of my photos.

Back about 2013-14 I bought a Nikon D3100 NIB off ebay with 2 kit lenses. No warranty, and that was a risk but it turned out okay. I should have spent $150-200 more for a store-bought D3200 or D3300 with better sensors and higher ISO. Penny wise and dollar foolish, but that has been my life story; hey, I was raised by people for whom the Great Depression was only yesterday and due to come again real soon.

But the D3100 has been entirely adequate and offers a side benefit that expensive Nikon SLRs do not, and that is the ability to work with old Nikon F mount lenses going back to 1959, whether AI'ed or not. Being a bit of a gearhead I take pleasure out of using a 45 year old lens on my D3100, no adapter needed. Obviously they don't autofocus and the camera won't meter light, but trial and error or the sunny-16 rule work fine. Some portraits made with my mint condition 1974 105 mm f/2.5 bought from a seller in Sedona are like, wow, man.

The build quality of Nikkor lenses made in the 1970s is awesome, not equaled by any other manufacturer at any time, and while the optics of modern autofocus lenses is very good, modern lenses feel like they were sold at Dollar General for $10 new. For those of us who like to feel at one with photography of the past, it is hard to do that holding a plastic toy instead of precision phosphor-bronze and aluminum equipment that was machined on a lathe and intended to last into the 22nd century.

I don't remember when I decided to photograph birds, but it might have been as early as 2013 or 2014. I tried, but the telephoto zoom sold in the kit that went out to a measly 200 mm focal length just wasn't adequate. On Craigslist I found a 300 mm Nikkor telephoto made about 1974 offered by a former newspaper photographer. Not dirt cheap, but he threw in three teleconverters, two from Nikon that had a combined suggested retail of over $900 back in 1982, and a Bower 2X with full electronic linkage.

That old 300 takes a 72 mm filter and is heavy. It's like carrying a 2 lb telescope around attached to the camera. The focus is stiff, and while the optical quality is good, it takes a wizard to get a decent pic of a moving bird. In 2016 I found a low cost alternative, the 75-300 Nikkor G lens. That lens sells used on ebay and the Goodwill auction site for around $35. The REASON it is cheap is because it has no internal motor and will autofocus only on cameras with a focusing motor that links to the lens. Which are NOT the consumer grade Nikon SLRs.

That's what I've been carrying around, the 75-300 zoom mounted on the Bower teleconverter giving in effect a 600 mm DX telephoto [comparable to a 900 mm on a 35 mm camera or an FX full-size sensor digital!]. It does not autofocus, and I have to set the camera on shutter priority at 1/1000 sec to reduce shake when the lens is hand-held which is most of the time. Because the 2X teleconverter reduces the effective widest aperture to f/6.5 or f/7.5, I have to set the ISO to 1600.

Screw-ups occur when I use another lens and forget to change the settings back. Then there is the problem of focusing with my weird eyes that seem to vary one hour to the next.

An imperfect set-up, but a cheap way to get 600 mm DX.

I have some 200 photos from 2-3 naturalizing mini-expeditions to sort through before posting on here. One problem is my bete noire, procrastination. The other is the utter confusion of my photo files. Somehow, partly by something I did, my recent photos have all gotten filed in a file containing earlier photos. I need to sort through and recategorize the pictures stored on my computer.

Here in Lubbock, we have two conditions that promote the reclamation of roads and slabs by plants. First, there is an abundant supply of subsurface moisture, trapped under paving and available to plants that grow in cracks and send down roots to tap into it; surprising in a semi-arid climate. Second, there is wind-blown dust -- less now than i remember from the pre-CRP era of the 1950s through the 1970s -- that is trapped by plants growing in pavement cracks and collects to form a soil along the cracks.

My use of the word "reclamation" reflects a bias, since to me development and urbanization are temporary conditions, brief interruptions by an overweening species of the long biological march. But those who see plant growth in parking lots, on slabs, and in and alongside roads as weeds to be controlled should equally be interested in observing and studying the process.

I seem to be fated to be interested in Missouri Foxtail Cactus and Hoary Sandmats. Find these not quite whereever I roam. Also, thistles.

Why ignore fate? Need to learn more about these plants and maybe to cultivate a minor level of expertise in them. But, I must learn more, period. Embarrassingly ignorant of plant classification.

To-date I have located roughly 30 separate Escobaria missouriensis specimens, in Mackenzie Park and 1.5 to 3 miles south along Yellowhouse Canyon near Dunbar Historical Lake. Some of the logged observations include 4-8 individuals.

Here's what I wrote in a comment to one observation:

Cannot overrule the possibility that these originate from one or more planted specimens. There are two clusters of tiny ones on a high point of a Mackenzie Park side canyon [with one larger cactus on high ground] , and two found 1.5 to 2 miles farther down Yellowhouse Canyon, on opposite sides of a lake.

The largest by far is down-canyon. I've tried to report on iNaturalist nearly every specimen I've observed [though one or two observations have several nearby specimens lumped together.

Note that I have observed these ONLY on unplowed, unbroken-by-plow parklands still more or less in native condition. [No longer true; several lie on once graded broken ground near the mountain bike trailheads to the west trails at Dunbar Lake. These are below a large cactus on unplowed ground, and one can imagine seeds washed downhill from that cactus germinating.] MOST of the Lubbock parkland that make up the Canyon Lakes greenbelt has been leveled and planted with non-native grass.

I am wondering how these cactus seeds could be spread; the clusters in Mackenzie Park could have come from seeds spread by gravity from one ancestor, and in fact there is one larger cactus there on the highest ground, but the two downstream, one on a very high butte and higher than the largest of all across the canyon, no. Birds?

I was cagey about location of these cactus, fearing cactus theft, and even located some observations a hundred yards from where they were. No more; unlikely that any local plant thieves would be checking in here. If anybody wants to be guided to these plants or others, contact me. I live only a mile or so away from the canyon and would usually be glad of the company.

My first sandmat was a Hoary Sandmat [thanks, Ellen5] north of the road at Dunbar Historical Lake, then another 2 spp., Hoary and Fendler's at Mackenzie Park north of the Farm implement museum [again, thanks to Ellen5 and Nathan Taylor for identification].

Euphorbia sandmats seemed if not rare at least uncommon. My impression. Boy was I wrong.

Today I found Sandmat City! At least the two species and perhaps a more pointy-leafed species, all together in one area. Let me tell you where it is. Park in the north Dunbar Lake parking lot. Cross the road to the mountain bike trailheads [don't step on the Escobaria!!]. Go near the Sunrise Canyon facility and turn right, taking the northern-most bike trail. Follow it more or less east until you come to a north-south bob-wahr ["barbed wire" to non-native Texans] fence. Along both sides of the trail for quite a distance south and east are a profusion of sandmats.

Now, WHY are they there? Nathan Taylor said they prefer alkaline, caliche soil. Well, the soil there is right next to a plowed field and is nothing like the caliche outcrops and cliffs where other sandmat was seen. Regular West Texas soil, such as it is. Why would seed dispersal favor that area?

The last two months all the naturalist photos I've taken I posted on Facebook, public view. Bit less than a thousand pics, the good, the bad, and the ugly. [A title I tried to get when I set up my Flicker account, but somebody else got it first.]

And three times now I posted 4-6 of the most colorful photos in the Lubbock Camera Club forum. Purpose being in both to interest people in lesser-known natural areas around town. The more voters who cherish those areas and visit them the better they will be protected in the long run.

"There is no Planet B!" -- President Macron

But for many Americans, Christian fundamentalists, there is, sort of. Our Planet A is micromanaged by God and the end will come "soon" as God wills and then Planet A will fade away unneeded like a cast off cocoon. (Compare to the conclusion of the novel "Childhood's End.")

Our problem is the voting power of those who think that way and are willing to bet the lives of their descendants on it.