CIRCLE WITH A DOT

Holy fucking shit AI is causing heaps of problems in the botanical identification world. Northwest floral had an incredible id tool where you could type in various subspecies of a plant and it would give you side by side comparisons in minute details. They've turned it off because of ai bot scraping. Jepsons eflora now makes you take a math test to prove you are human. Kew went to blank pages, This is a fucking nightmare. Grass ID is hard, it can be incredibly confusing and now because of fucking AI my life has become harder. I am proud of botanical sites standing up to ai .... But shit #fuckAi

In 2020 and 2021, some pot growers to comply with regulations, were required to weedwhack 6 miles of road. ( I had a really bad feeling about the weed whacking, and that gut instinct was more right than I ever could have imagined) , I asked them not to touch my side of the road, they did it anyway.
The meadows in my watershed were a rare remarkable example of a California native meadow ecosystem. That one act of weed whacking two years in a row, at the wrong time of year, with dirty weedwhackers, containing seeds from three high invasive grasses, (avena fatua, briza ( rattlesnake grass) red rip gut brome, and star thistle) has destroyed and changed the our meadow ecosystem throughout the watershed in just a few short years. There are no simple solutions. Invasive annual grasses are the tinder that drives out of control wildfires in the west, and creates a fast acting loss of biodiversity . Though some invasive grasses like rattlesnake grass can be controlled with fire, other like avena fatua, cannot be. Avena fatua is even immune to herbacides, and can dominate after a fire. It is unbelievable how dense these grasses grow, taking up every square inch of soil, nothing can compete. They create thick mats of material that dries out in late spring.
Four years ago I started experimenting with hand pulling the avena fatua that dominated a steep cut bank. What happened is I got a bank of native clover.
The first year it dominated, this year I only found 5 stalks, and the seed bank that it was suppressing was three species of ca native clover. Tom Cat, foothill, and red, and ca wooly sunflowers popping up too. What a little weeding can do!

@NorcalGma2
I love pumpkin pie and could eat it year round

@wanderinghermit
Those camper shells that have a pop top are cool!

@wanderinghermit
Nice campsite!

The patriarch gets everything, Absolutely Everything Wrong, female birds .. Sing.....A Lot...all the time infact, male ornithologists just couldn't be bothered, so stuck are they in patriarchal thinking. They didn't bother to collect recordings, or find out what female birds actually do.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/19/hidden-world-of-female-birdsong-book
#FemaleBirdsong