Not as good a photo, but a wider view for context, before they repainted a couple of years ago. The wall and balconies are on the tower to the left of the frame.

Looking up at the walls of a hotel near LAX. The in the first photo is repeated on several other walls around the hotel. Above it are many layers of balconies for the hotel rooms.

Does anyone know the term for this style? It's sort of post-Googie, pre-Brutalist?

I had to be somewhere near the coast this morning, so I figured I'd take 10 minutes to look for seagulls for . I found a lot of them, but they were mostly hanging out on the beach, not flying around. Still, that's plenty for observation purposes, and I did manage to catch this shot too!

Two of many monarch butterflies I saw today on a walk at nearby botanical gardens. Most of them were too busy flying around to stop anywhere I could catch them on camera, but there were a few that paused long enough.

Tonight's . One shot for the daylit crescent, the other for the night side lit by (with some clouds as a bonus). 8YO helped with focusing the telephoto lens.

The second shot is a lot noisier than I'd like since I was adjusting levels on the jpeg, but I have the raw file, so maybe I'll be able to do something better with it.

I found this while looking for old pictures to submit to iNaturalist. I don't think there's *quite* enough detail on the seagull here to identify the species!

The ship, incidentally, is the Queen Mary, launched in the 1930s as a transatlantic liner. It's been permanently docked in Long Beach, California for several decades and is now run as a hotel.

Discarded seed pod. A dried-out fig, maybe? It was under an olive tree, but it's definitely not an olive!

Best guess: a squirrel or something grabbed it from another yard and didn't finish it before scurrying off.

Managed to identify the not-iceplant. It's Blue Chalksticks, or Blue Chalk Stick. Either way, it's remarkably descriptive.

Posted it to iNat even though it's cultivated landscaping in hopes that the info will help both the AI and human identifiers.

Now that I've had more time to look through the photos from this hike, I like this wider crop of the first shot.

WARNING: Use of may lead you to do things like following wasps around with a camera instead of backing away slowly and looking for the nest.

Please use iNaturalist responsibly.

(That said, the wasps showed no signs of aggression and I got some decent photos!)

Two crops of the same photo taken on a quick walk around the block. I really like the landscape crop showing the fiery skipper as it flies from one flower to the next...but after I cropped it, I noticed the bee also flying in the foreground of the original, and I just had to find a way to keep them both in the frame and still draw attention to them.

I've been spotting monarchs lately, but haven't caught any photos until today!

The first paused up in a tree. I was surprised I could get a clear shot.

The second monarch is injured. I couldn't see that its wing was torn, but I could tell it was hurt by the way it was flapping its wings on the ground, trying and failing to fly. It did eventually take off, but it landed again soon after.

Bonus: a from farther down the trail.

Final Landing Approach!

Another shot from the hike at the marsh preserve earlier this month.

The flowers, apparently Matilija Poppies, had huge, flat white petals with these large yellow centers. They looked like fried eggs.

Flower observation:

More photos from the hike:

This squirrel bounded along a wall carrying a walnut in its mouth as I walked down the sidewalk. It stopped and looked at me as if it had been caught in the act of walnut burglary. I had enough time to snap a couple of pictures with my phone *and* pull out my camera for a better shot before it scampered away.

Finally got a picture of one of the sparrows nesting in the parking structure!

Oh. Well. So much for that idea.

One of these days....

Western spotted on a hike at the nearby marsh preserve over the weekend. This was before my camera battery ran out of power and I was stuck finishing out the hike with my phone. (I still can't believe I forgot to bring the spare.)

I did manage to get a photo of the in focus, and I had a much clearer view of a second rabbit later in the same hike.

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