Update from the Lake: Tracks and Things...

...on the beach at Butt Valley Reservoir, also seen here and here.

Probably dog.

Deer?

Sasquatch — I mean, human.

Crawdad.

Small crawdad pinchers. Finger is red from blackberries.

Corbicula fluminea or Asian clam, not zebra mussel.

Jelly blob, probably Pectinatella magnifica, a type of freshwater bryozoan.

Enlargement of the same photo. This is a colony, and each of the circular to star-shaped indentations or rosettes supposedly consist of several individual organisms.

Shaly beach sand. Hopefully we'll see the reason for the odd shape of this sand in a few days!

Kitty Ice Prints...

...or icy kitty prints?

I'm not much of a cat blogger, but I saw paw prints in the making the day before yesterday, when a couple kitties jumped up on the jeep right after it had been washed, leaving dusty prints all over the hood! The kitties were, apparently, interested in drinking water from the bowl-like indentations where the windshield wipers swivel, because all other water that afternoon was in the form of snow and ice.

The next morning, after an ice fog had partly lifted, the hood of my jeep looked like this:

Frozen cat prints on jeep hood.

Enlarged prints.

More prints.

More enlarged prints.

Little ice crystals comprise the frozen prints.

As Jim Lehane recently noted, ice is the solid, crystalline form of water. Ice crystals are hexagonal; the ones on my jeep were too small to examine without my hand lens — and I didn't stay outside long enough in the icy morning air for that!

Ice at Mindat.org
Ice at Webmineral.com
Is Water a Mineral? -- Is Ice a Mineral?

Update from the Lake: Tracks...

...Of a mountain lion, a deer?

Tracks in the snow: if you enlarge the photo and look closely, you can see 4 sets of these tracks going off into the trees in the distance. The animal was probably moving towards the camera in this photo.

The last time MOH and I were at the lake, the snow was 12 to 18 inches deep, with a heavy corn-snow crust such that we were both able to easily walk on top without breaking through.

While walking around in the backyard, MOH discovered some large, widely spaced animal tracks that had been moderately degraded by snow compaction, melting, and time. The tracks were about 10 to 15 feet apart, and MOH said they were similar to tracks he'd seen in snow on Wheeler Peak. At first we thought the tracks might have been made by a mountain lion (cougar or puma). Mountain lions live around the lake and feed on the local mule deer population, among other things.
An enlargement of the second set of tracks, with winter boot for scale, above. The animal probably moved - bounding or galloping - from right to left.
We followed the tracks farther into the backyard, where they eventually went through and around some small trees and manzanita bushes and then toward what appeared to be a deer bed under an evergreen tree.
Here's another close-up of one set of tracks. I think that the animal was moving from left to right in the picture.
This is what the tracks looked like as they went away from the deer bed, towards the original photos and towards the front yard. Behind the deer bed, in another yard, I saw some human footprints. I'm thinking that a person unwittingly walked close to the hidden deer, causing it to leap and bound out of its bed, and then it continued to bound or gallop into our front yard, making wide-spaced tracks in the snow.

I couldn't find many good, online examples of large animals running, bounding, or galloping through snow (or any other substrate, for that matter), but did find examples in a tracking book. Our tracks looked more like the deer tracks shown in the book than the cat tracks, but our tracks were relatively old and degraded. If you have any other opinions about these tracks, let me know. Following them from near our front door, all the way through our backyard, and then all the way back into our front yard, was fun. I like tracking!