If you’ve driven any length of the Sonoma Coast and northward, you’ve probably seen these signs:

These warnings are almost always accompanied by a family or group of tourists doing precisely what the sign says not to do. And every year, people drown after being caught unawares by sleeper waves.
It’s the deceptive nature of sleeper waves,
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone . . . including you wild and free turkeys among us.
(Wild Turkey portraits snapped in Berkeley’s Tilden Park)
Related: A Turkey-Friendly Thanksgiving

Excerpted from Herb Caen’s What Is San Francisco?
“It’s the magic towers of a steel fairyland — the beacon atop the proud Mark, the red, thermometer-like cap of the Drake, the sturdy, four-square crest of Mother Russ, the sudden, blunt end of Coit Tower — that make up the minarets of a metropolis . . .”

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I’m becoming a curmudgeon and I’m not happy about it. I vacillate between the extremes, one day a sentimental fool, the next day, a hard-wired cynic. It’s not that illogical (or chemically imbalanced) when you consider that cynicism tends to be the flip side of idealism. You’d think I’d embrace this by now —
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I just came upon some great footage on You Tube, from David Neils. It shows three elk playing in a forest puddle. Embedding is disabled on that particular clip — but you can link to it here: Three Elk Calves in a Puddle.
This companion video below, also from Neils, shows what most people would construe
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This was a first for me . . . witnessing a down and dirty fight between American Coots intent on keeping each other off coveted turf. Neither bird was hurt. Well, maybe emotionally. The loser scrambled across the water to escape the victor.
American Coots can drown in territorial battles, although it’s not common. They
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It starts with a whistle, but a whistle so faint it’s a whisper across the leaves. And then the sound of raindrops, but it’s not rain. It’s the patter of falling berries, pyracantha and holly, dropping into the blanket of debris below the trees. Finally, we see the face — peeking through the branches with
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