Heron dreams (and some more stone)

[holyschist]

After eyeing a Black-crowned Night Heron through binoculars for several minutes, I turned around and holy crap! There was one preening in a palm right in front of me. There were some stairs across from it, so I decided to quietly walk up them, turning back if the heron looked agitated.

The heron went to sleep.



Personally, I am very glad not to have to sleep standing on one leg on a swaying palm frond, but the heron seemed quite happy.





A few days earlier we took a guided hike out to see where lava is flowing into the ocean from the Puʻu ʻŌʻō vent. On the way, we crossed fields of very fresh (a few months to a few years old), largely unweathered pāhoehoe. Unfortunately, it was getting dark and I only had a long lens, so I only got a few halfway decent pictures, but it was gorgeous. Fresh pāhoehoe has a spectacular number of amazing textures which I had never seen in weathered lava before, and it's a deep, almost metallic shiny black.

My favorite was the part that looked like folded fabric:

Comments

[holyschist]

Thanks!

The textures were really amazing--so many of them get lost as the lava weathers.