Hey! I’m Dan.

I’m a docent with the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District and have a Naturalist Certification from the UC Environmental Stewards Program. I'm mostly active in the Santa Cruz Mountains bioregion, with a particular interest in plants, fungi, insects and post-fire ecology.

Currently I’m using an OM System TG-7 for my observation photos.

Many thanks to all the people who take the time to look over my observations. All feedback is appreciated!

The lands on which I observed many of these species is the unceded ancestral territory of at least four contemporary Indigenous communities: the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, Muwekma Ohlone, Ramaytush Ohlone and Tamien Nation. These groups have survived centuries of oppression and displacement, and are the past, present and future caretakers of this land.

“Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking. The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth and squeaks to you -- you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens."

• Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art Of Tramping

“What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill … where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods … and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?”

• Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Grupos de especies (taxa) favoritos

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