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I have taken a leave of absence from UC Santa Cruz. My girlfriend Yiming fell ill a few weeks ago and to help her with a speedy and full recovery I am now staying with her in Kiel, Germany where she has a postdoc position. For the time being I am looking for funding or a position to continue my research in Kiel. I may come back to Santa Cruz this summer for a few weeks to do some sampling.

The day before leaving Santa Cruz I went for a walk in the university aboretum taking pictures of wildlife and flowers. The most exciting moment of the day was when I saw a bobcat.

Spring colors

Flowers

Old oak

View from below an oak

Resting deers

Bobcat

Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna)

Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna)

Allen's hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin)

Much of California has been influenced by human activities. In the Santa Cruz we have a former ranch where virtually all redwood trees were lost for lumber or to fuel kilns converting limestone to lime. Part of the ranch is called Pogonip, which is a beautiful hilly area where the trees have been allowed to grow back. I go running there every weekend and brought my little pocket camera along while it was pouring down.

Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) is the only overwintering hummingbird in Santa Cruz. It is also the most common hummingbird on the West Coast and is relative to other hummingbird medium sized (10 cm, ~4 g). Hummingbirds have one of the highest metabolic rates among vertebrates and their heart rate can reach 1260 beats per min (Lasiewski and Lasiewski, 1967)! To maintain this exceptional high metabolism hummingbirds primarily live off nectar. But they also feed on spiders and small insects to get proteins.

In the Arboretum located at UC Santa Cruz it is quite easy to get close to these birds when they suck nectar from Erica flowers. After a few visits to the garden watching their behavior I found out that once I sat still on the ground for a few minutes they would get within the shooting range of my camera. Beside the pictures displayed below, I have posted a gallery of hummingbirds here.

Santa Cruz is a place that attracts a great number of tourists and visitors. The biggest attraction of the town is undoubtedly its great surf beaches. On Sunday, Birthe, Carsten and I counted more than 250 people surfing on the waves. The conditions were apparently perfect because the waves were rolling perpendicular to the shore. We also saw people playing drums and playing with hula-hoop rings. What a great atmosphere!

For the three of us the greatest attractions were all the winged creatures from the thousands of monarch butterflies to  pelicans and hummingbirds. We probably saw close to 100 hummingbirds in the arboretum. On the hills behind Santa Cruz there are impressive forests with redwood. Because everything was forested in the area some 100 years ago the trees haven’t reached their full size yet although some of them are already reaching 70-80 m above the ground.

After spending nearly a month in Santa Cruz I got an opportunity to see one of California’s most beautiful places when my friends Birthe & Carsten came by to visit me. They began their 4 months travel through Northwestern USA in July from Alaska and made it all the way to Idaho on bicycles. To travel longer distances they then changed their mean of transportation to car. As anybody else visiting Yosimete I was taken by the size of the giant sequoias that can reach a height of 80 m and have a volume up to 1500 sq. m (that is just the trunk). Yosemite valley was also very impressive and beautiful. See more pictures from our 3 days trip here: http://picasaweb.google.com/natursyn/Yosemite