I see blue sky

My cat lies on the desk, watching (supervising) me at work. She sees the scene differently than I do; she misses the warm reds of the wood (the desk, the cabinet beyond), the pink of the vintage glass lamp and its red and pink shade, and of the pink notecards in their green box. She does see the green box and the green design on my coffee cup. And the green dragon tree in the corner. How does she see my hands on the (grey) keyboard? Grey (the pink) with old lady blue veins (she does see blues)?

The tables are turned when I turn out the light and go to bed, tripping over the footstool I forgot to shove out of the way while I could still see it. I come out in the morning and see that she's been busy all night, disembowelling scatter rugs and chasing her round pink spring down the hallway. She's been sitting on the windowsill again, watching for deer in the dark; she has pushed a plant pot out of her way.

Her eyes have more rods, light sensors, than mine; my eyes have more cones, sensitive to colours, than hers.

I read today that the Elephant Hawk moth sees the colours of flowers by starlight.

At the lowest intensity tested ... humans ... were colour-blind. The moths were strikingly different, they could see colour – they could distinguish a spectral colour from any shade of grey ... (ScienceDirect)

My cameras see things I don't. And vice versa. The cones in my eyes shut down when the light fades, losing first the reds and yellows (now I'm more like the cat), then slowly dimming the greens and finally the blues, leaving me with dim black and white vision. The camera "sees" all the colours, but loses sensitivity to the dark areas while I can still see the details. Software can adjust the brightness of the image, bringing up the colours; that would never work with my eyes, which never even saw the colours.

I drove north and north and north on a grey day, hoping for the snow my weather app promised but never delivered. Off and on, it rained. Didn't matter much; everything was grey or dark grey; sky, trees, the road, the mountains. Farther north, there were glimmerings of white on some of the mountains: snow under grey skies.

Near Keta Lake, in the civil twilight shortly after sundown (which I hadn't noticed; from grey to barely darker grey there wasn't anything to mark a boundary) rifts appeared in the clouds, showing blue sky beyond. I found a parking spot on a logging road and got out. I saw patches of clear blue sky, dim, grey clouds, muted greens of the evergreens, the bright, yellowish green of moss in my headlights. Everything else was dark grey.

Blue skies, green trees, distant blue hill. The camera even picked up some of the red of the alder catkins; to my eyes, they were all black. Image captured in RAW, that allows for "rescuing" the darker colours.

Looking towards the west; here the camera loses detail in the dark areas. A JPEG image, which doesn't retain the darker colours.

A few minutes later, down the road a ways — but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

A Skywatch post.

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Mi gatita reposa sobre mi escritorio, observando (supervisando) mientras trabajo. Ve la escena algo distinto de como yo la veo; no ve los colores cálidos, rojizos, de la madera (el escritorio, el gabinete), el color de rosa del vidrio de la lámpara antigua y su pantalla roja con color rosa, y de las tarjetas para apuntes dentro de su cajita verde. Sí ve la caja verde y el diseño verde en mi taza de café. Y lo verde del árbol Dracaena draco en la esquina. ¿Cómo verá mis manos sobre el teclado (gris)? ¿Gris (el color de rosa) con venas de vieja azules? (Porque sí ve el color azul.)

La situación cambia cuando apago la luz y me voy a la cama, tropezando con el reposapiés que se me olvidó arrimar mientras todavía lo podía ver. Salgo en la mañana y veo que la gata ha estado ocupada toda la noche, destripando los tapetes ocasionales y persiguiendo su resortito color de rosa por el pasillo. Ha estado sentada en la repisa de la ventana, esperando ver venados; arrimó una de las macetas para abrirse lugar.

Sus ojos contienen más bastones, sensitivos a la luz, que los mios; mis ojos tienen más conos, que perciben los colores, que los suyos.

Leí hoy que la palomilla Deilephila elpenor ve los colores de las flores con solo la luz  de las estrellas.

En la intensidad más baja que se midió ... los humanos ... eran daltónicos. (No veían los colores.) Las palomillas eran notablemente disferentes, podían ver los colores — podían distinguir un color del espectro de cualquier tono de gris ... (ScienceDirect)

Mis cámaras ven cosas que yo no veo. Y a la inversa. Los conos de mis ojos dejan de funcionar cuando no hay suficiente luz; pierden primero los rojos y amarillos (en este momento tengo visión parecida a la de la gata.) y luego se van disminuyendo poco a poco primero los verdes, luego los azules, dejándome con blanco y negro. La cámara "ve" todos los colores, pero pierde la sensibilidad a sitios oscuros mientras yo todavía puedo distinguir sus detalles. El software de la cámara o de programas de edición puede ajustar las imágenes para hacer resaltar los colores; eso nunca funcionaría con mis ojos porque los colores no han sido capturados.

Tomé la carretera hacia el norte, siguiendo adelante mientras duraba la luz, esperando ver la nieve que me prometieron los meteorológicos pero que no apareció. De vez en cuando, llovía. No importaba; todo, con o sin lluvia, estaba gris o gris oscuro; el cielo, los árboles, la carretera, las montañas. Más al norte se veían pequeñas manchas de blanco en algunas de las montañas: nieve bajo un cielo gris.

Cerca del lago Keta, durante el crepúsculo civil que sigue la puesta del sol, (que no había notado; de gris a gris un poquitito más oscuro no había gran diferencia) aparecieron desgarrones en las nubes, revelando el cielo azul que habían escondido. Busqué un sitio para estacionarme en un camino de madereros y salí a caminar un poco. Veía areas de cielo azul pálido, nubes grises, los verdes  apagados de los árboles, el verde/amarillo brillante de musgos en la luz de mis faros. Todo lo demás era gris oscuro.

1. Cielo azul, árboles verdes, cerro distante azul.  La cámara capturó un poco del color rojo de las candelillas de los alisos; yo las veía completamente negras. Esta imagen fue capturada usando el formato RAW, que permite rescatar los colores perdidos.
2. Mirando hacia el oeste; aquí la cámara pierde los detalles en las areas oscuras. Una imagen JPEG, este formato no registra los colores oscuros.

Unos minutos más tarde, camino a casa ... pero mejor dejo esto para mañana.

Shades of grey. And red.

 It was one of our trademark grey days; the sky and the water light greys, the colours leached out of everything else. I went to Baikie Island, thinking there may have been still some snow on the ground to add a bit of light, but it had all melted into the layer of soggy leaves.

Grey, grey, grey. With hints of brown, and then ...

View from the bridge to the island.

Bufflehead female, making waves.

Alder branches bearing catkins made a tracery of black against the grey sky. From a metre or two away, though, their reds were visible; a promise of pink masses lining the shores. Soon.

Red alder catkins. Even the new stems and buds are red.

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Era uno de esos dias grises, tan comunes en la isla; el cielo y el agua pintados de gris claro, los colores de todo lo demás perdidos. Fui a la isla Baikie, pensando que tal vez habría todavía algo de nieve en el suelo, para reflejar un poco de luz, pero toda la nieve se había derretido, mezclándose con la capa de hojas viejas y empapadas.

Gris, gris, gris. Con algunos recuerdos de café oscuro. Y luego ...

1. Vista desde el puente que da a la isla.
2. Un porrón coronado hembra, creando olas.
3. Y los alisos rojos hacían un encaje de ramas negras contra el gris del cielo. Pero de cerca, desde una distancia de uno o dos metros, se distinguía el color rojo de sus candelillas, una promesa de nubes color de rosa que cubrirán los bordes de los rios y carreteras en pocas semanas. Hasta los tallos y botones nuevos son rojos.

Sleeping settlement

When the news is bleak, I find myself looking at my photos of grey days. This is Brown's Bay, last week, taken from the hill above the town*. On the hills, in the woods, the snow was deep and the creeks and little lakes were frozen, but down by the water that warms the air, the grass was still green. Heavy clouds hide the mountain tops in the distance. A normal Vancouver Island winter scene.

In the centre, the marina and the restaurant.

*Brown's Bay. A town, I call it. For those not used to our sparse northern island population, I'll define the term. Brown's Bay doesn't turn up on any population charts, so I blew up Google maps and counted the houses. There are 15, and 9 little tourist cabins, which are, of course, empty in the winter. As are the spaces for RVs; in the Google photo, taken in mid-summer, there were 25 slots used. There's the marina, a restaurant and hotel, a hall, and a fish cannery. That's it. That's the town.

For me, that grew up in a town with a permanent population under 25 people, it seems normal. Your mileage may vary.

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En los dias cuando las noticias son tristes, desanimantes, me hallo mirando otra vez fotos de los dias grises de invierno. Esta muestra el pueblito* de Brown's Bay, la semana pasada; la vista es desde el último camino, subiendo el cerro. Atrás mio, en los bosques, en los cerros, la nieve cubría todo, y los riachuelos y laguitos estaban congelados. Pero aquí, cerca del agua que modera la temperatura, el pasto seguía verde. Nubes pesadas esconden las montañas. Una vista normal para la isla de Vancouver.

Foto: el pueblo de Brown's Bay. En el centro, se ve la marina y el restaurante, cerrado ahora.

*Un pueblito, lo llamo. Brown's Bay. Para los que no están habituados a nuestra población atenuada aquí en el norte de la isla, habrá que definir la palabra. Brown's Bay no sale in ninguna de las listas de población, así que abrí el mapa de Google y conté las casas. Hay 15. Y 9 casitas para turistas, más bien cuartos con baño. Estas, claro, están vacías ahora por ser invierno. Tambien lo son los espacios para remolques y vehículos de recreación; en la foto de Google, 25 espacios tenían huéspedes. Hay una marina, el restaurante con su hotelito, una sala para reuniones, y una empacadora de pescado. Eso es todo. Eso es el pueblo.

Para mí, que crecí en un pueblo con una población permanente de menos de 25 personas, eso me parece normal. Como se dice, "Tu kilometraje puede variar."

Grey day

It's been a typical Vancouver Island summer; a few hot days, and the rest are cloudy or rainy. Yesterday was about normal: rain in the morning, a ray or two of sunlight around noon, then the warm light vanished, and everything turned a soft grey. Grey skies, grey water, greyish green trees.

Before the rain started up again, I walked around Oyster Bay. When everything is grey, the different colours of grey stand out. The grey rocks had more colour than the grey seas.

Rocks along the breakwater, looking south. There's a hint of blue sky thataway.

The breakwater, looking north. Logs and rocks and the edge of the inner bay.

A couple of multicoloured rocks.

And on one of those rocks, a sea slater, Ligia pallasii. A creature of the night, not often seen in daylight.

I tracked the sea slater for a while, trying to get a head shot. He wasn't interested. I hadn't even seen the little fly until I looked at the photo. These flies were all over the shore,looking mostly like hopping sand grains.

A quibble

I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely seas and the sky,
And all I ask is ...
(Apologies to John Masefield)

A dose of reality: that loneliness is deceptive. The sea has no space for loneliness. Under that apparently calm surface are teeming multitudes of busy lives.

And the sky; from here, we don't see the mobs of mosquitoes, flies, butterflies, ballooning spiders, and the like. The swallows see them though, and dart through the clouds collecting supper for the little ones.

I had gone down to the boat ramp to get new water for my aquarium. The day was cool and grey, welcome after a taste of summer; as I left, it was starting to rain. The tide was turning and everything, air and water and rocks, seemed momentarily in stasis.

One "lonely" crow.

But there were crabs and jellyfish in the water at the foot of the ramp, snails and barnacles on the rocks. And that crow is watching a quarrel, a horde, a squabbling, shrieking, greedy melee of gulls, fighting over the cat food I had just left at water's edge. (The cats had rejected it. I think they read the labels and refuse to taste anything other than the most expensive brands. But it was full of fish and chicken innards and ground corn and fish oils; ideal gull food. They had left all their perches on the rocks around to come to the party.)

A few seconds later, the crow joins the fun.

Fishing harbour seal, leaving the school to come and see what was going on on shore.

Every so often, out in the channel another black head would pop up. Harbour seals, following a school of fish. I counted four heads up at the same time: no telling how many were down there feasting.

One of the gulls on the boat ramp, taking a breather. The food's almost all gone, anyhow.

... And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

Can't argue with him there!