As autumn deepens, my walk home is coinciding with sunset.

I had a little post about gulls published on Jerry Coyne’s blog today: Reader’s Wildlife Photos

With fall migration underway, many species of birds are passing down the Pacific flyway to winter further south – some as far as Central or even South America.

It struck me earlier this week how poor my knowledge of both Central and South America is, so I spent a little time studying their geography. Political borders aside, what I really wanted to learn about were the ecoregions… the ecosystems that support these birds.

I also couldn’t help going back in time – deep time and evolutionary biology are two intertwined obsessions of mine – to learn more about the Great American Biotic Interchange.

It’s been a strange week and I seem to have gotten lost in between the last days of summer and the first days of autumn. Finding this Pacific Tree Frog helped me briefly escape the idiocy of the world we’ve built for ourselves.

This morning I lead a bird walk for VARC at Jericho Beach Park. I arrived a bit early to get a sense of what was around. While checking one stretch of beach, I saw a spiky dorsal fin protruding from the water near the shoreline.

Upon closer inspection, I was surprised to find this strange looking fish swimming weakly and being tumbled by the tide. I took some photos with my phone and quickly submitted them to iNaturalist, which helped me ID it as a Spotted Ratfish (Hydrolagus colliei).