Antepasados On Microfilm

In search of Siria Castro Alvarez 
Michael Sedano
 
“What are you?” “Where are you from?” As a kid in Redlands in the 1950s and early 60s I got those questions with regularity when I ran into the wrong tipos. In Redlands of those days, there were a lot of wrong tipos to run into.

When I reach high school in 1960, I have a practiced routine for those people. I’m from here, and I’m an American. This rarely satisfies persistent interrogators. “Where is your father from?” Here. “Where is your grandmother from?” 

Here. 

I am California Mexican, Chicano. My grandfathers and one abuela originate in Mexico but that wasn’t the point in those racist Redlands interactions. Those questioners wanted me to know I do not belong, neither in that place we stood, nor in this country. I recognized that, even as a mocoso. 

My insistence on belonging pissed off most questioners, John Birchers and Legionnaires for the most part. I developed a conversation stopper, “My grandmother was born here. My great-grandmother was born here, and her mother was born here. As far back as people have lived in California, my people have lived here.”

I am in process of validating that claim, now that the Huntington Library has microfilm of Carmel Mission records and I have reading privileges in the research library.

Familia lore has it that bis-bis-bis- abuelos in early California, had a forbidden courtship, a Mexicana and a Yaqui. Love prevails in the story and that’s how the familia got here today. 
What details we know are fodder for a family of storytellers. The ardent indio, the fair Mexicana maiden, the irate parents and social convention. Madness. Marriage.

All versions of the familia origin story hold to that pair of relatives from más antes. What do we know for sure?

Thanks to genealogical and historical research of Isabelle Secor I know the basic outlines of the family history that starts with a woman named Siria Castro Alvarez, born 1832. I went in search of Siria Castro Alvarez and her offspring. 

For me, the familia story has turned into a fun and challenging research quest in at San Marino, California's Huntington Library, a highly likely place to find the origins and offspring of Siria Castro Alvarez, if she was a catholic subject, and lived under the Carmel mission's aegis.

The Huntington’s microfilm is a gem of a primary resource. The library’s shelves offer rich background resources so necessary to a reading plan of nineteenth century handwritten Spanish language texts. Deciphering script orthography is not only a literacy challenge, it’s also a challenge to decipher arcane spelling and abbreviation conventions and idiosyncacies of individual priests and brothers doing grunt work for church bean counters.

Date 1860, but a property inventory, not accounts of gente de razón and other residents of church properties. This handwriting isn't difficult to read nor are abbreviations an issue. That's often not the case.

Carlin, A. Roberta. A paleographic guide to Spanish abbreviations, 1500-1700 = una guía paleográfica de abreviaturas Españolas. Boca Raton, Florida, 2003.

Letter "A" abbreviations cataloged by Roberta A. Carlin. Writers preferred elaborate ritualized honorifics and highly stylized abbreviations seem recreational as much as communicative.

 
Finding pages written within a date range is a physical task, fast-winding the 35mm filmstrip and stopping for a date scan, then back or forward until the next stop. 
 
Death records. Baptismal records. Marriage records. San Carlos de Borromeo mission is today’s tourist destination, Carmel Mission. In its ascendancy the mission had sucursales across the rich region. Secor’s research places Watsonville as birthplace of Siria’s daughter, Petra, my bis- bis- abuela who picks up the Villa name in 1894. I scan those microfilmed pages for San Juan Bautista since Watsonville doesn’t come about until the year that abuela is born.
 
California Mission records collection [microform], 1770-1965. San Carlos de Borromeo (Carmel): Index of Baptisms (1840-1877), Marriages (1772-1908), Burials (1770-1915), Record books (1770-1831), Account book (1868-1890), Marriage dispensations (1870-1891)

I read something about artificial intelligence deciphering a dead sea scroll. I nominate the Huntington's microfilm reel for similar treatment. Imagine having all that information translated, hyperlinked, and indexed! and digital.

Truth be told, I hold little hope of finding Seria or Siria Castro Alvarez in all this analog ink. If I do, the find will unlock who knows what names and details to answer that age-old question, “Where are you from?
 
 

Siria's name is spelled Seria in Secor's documentation. There's a foto of Siria's granddaughter, my bis-abuela's gravestone, whose name is spelled "Siria". I saw my great grandmother's bier and got susto.

“Naturaleza” por Xánath Caraza

“Naturaleza” por Xánath Caraza

 

Art by Adriana Manuela

Este poema inspiró Naturaleza por Adriana Manuela

 

La que se mueve fuerte

Produce flores rojas embriagantes

Y los poemas más sensuales

 

Está lastimada

Sangran sus cañones

Sus montañas se desgarran

 

Su corazón rojo profundo tiembla

Vibra su centro enardecido

Las casas caen

 

Granizadas de plata

Cubren los verdes campos

Con la ira azul de ehécatl

 

(Kansas City, otoño de 2012)

 

 

Mother Nature

 

Art by Adriana Manuela

This poem inspired Naturaleza by Adriana Manuela

 

Stirring strongly she

Produces intoxicating red flowers

And the most sensual poems

 

She is wounded

Her canyons bleed

Her mountains are torn

 

Her dark red heart trembles

Her inflamed center vibrates

Houses fall

 

Silver hailstorms

Cover green fields

Ehécatl’s blue rage

 

(Kansas City, fall 2012)

 

“Naturalez / Mother Nature” are part of the collection Corazón pintado by Xánath Caraza (Pandora lobo estepario productions, 2015)

 

Xanath Caraza

Art by Adriana Manuela and cover art by José Jesús Chán Guzmán.

  

Xanath Caraza

Finding Space For All: Writers in Workshop

On Taking Up Space in White Artistic Places

Margaret Elysia Garcia

One of my biggest gratitudes to the universe is living in California. Californian by birth: Southern Californian by the grace of the Goddess/La Virgen. This, of course, holds true for many aspects of life in the golden state: weather, biodiversity of our geography, and best of all, we humans that inhabit this space. 

I love California for its opportunity, its solidarity, its commitment to keep trying to fix things even as one out of ten Americans calls us home. It’s a tall order. One of my favorite hallmarks of living in northeastern California was the live and let live attitude of the place. I carry that with me wherever I go as if the mantra imprinted from the decades of living—me, the Chicana hippie goth girl next to rifle-racked hunters who like their women rights-less. I educated their children; they plowed my driveway. Truce be told.
           

I don’t get out of here very often, and in these fraught times, I’ve never been happier to call the Republic of California my home (I fly the Bear flag, not the other one). I feel safe here—like I don’t have to explain myself, like I don’t have to be the representative of a people because we are legion here—and in particular Southern California where I live. I have always been adamant however that rural spaces, our national parks, our recreational wilderness is ours too. 

We’ve too long surrendered rural spaces to an entitled white population who see it as solely belonging to them and that—we—are visitors. In my first few years in the Sierras, I got this a lot and I’d stop to talk to people who, turns out, had only been there a couple years longer than I had. If you want to live by ownership of land, then those of us who have lived in the northeastern Sierra know that the land belongs to the Maidu, the Paiute, the Washoe, Shoshone, Miwak, Concow. 

But when we come down to it, living or visiting the rural spaces as a member of the global majority is necessary for all involved. For us, it’s a chance to be in the outdoors, to commune with nature, to experience a different part of ourselves. For those who feel entitled to those spaces, it serves as an opportunity to remind that they are not first peoples and have no more claim on it than anyone else. A decentering, if you will.
           

 I feel the same about artistic spaces.
          

Last summer I applied and was accepted to Macondo Writers’ Workshop—the dream retreat for Chicanas/Latinas—and it was absolutely nothing short of amazing. It was the very first time I ever did a workshop (fiction that time), where critiques didn’t come back exoticized. I didn’t get words shaken over my manuscript labeling it “colorful” and “saucy” and “fiery.” I got an honest critique that concerned cohesiveness and character development for which I am so grateful. It took me three tries to get into Macondo and now I have a family of Latina/Chicana writers I can call upon in two different countries if I need them and I am in turn there for them as well.
           

Macondo was a wild who’s who of Latino literature. And an absolute bucket list moment was running into Sandra Cisneros at a traffic light just as she was crossing the street after listening to our reading. I had read my poem “Leave Frida Kahlo Alone,” and Sandra said that she thought my delivery was great and that she really enjoyed the poem. I saw stars and could barely speak. It was a life-changing honor to be there, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world and I loved how the organizers fed us well, encouraged us to use the pool, do laundry (why do we Latinas love to do laundry every other day), participate in spiritual ceremony, and had mariachis play at the opening ceremony. But my poetry professor had nominated me to go to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I couldn’t do both, but Juniper said I could defer for the year.
          

I disappointed an organizer for Macondo by not coming back this year, but I helped read fiction applications and I will attend next year as alumna. It’s easy in places like Los Angeles, to be in a closed artistic world. We thrive here as Chicanas in a literary world because there are relatively so many of us here. But we also should, in my opinion, experience and move within white artistic space. This doesn’t mean representing as the sole Latina (there was a Brazilian fiction writer, an Afro-Latina Puerto Rican poet, and an amazing Salvadoran American young man that I swear is the reincarnation of Federico Garcia Lorca). I have no patience to teach culture to those who chose cultural illiteracy. But it’s vital to art itself to see what others are doing; to see how they are addressing this moment.
           

To Juniper Institute’s credit, it had already decentralized cis white male writers as the focal point of the institute. We didn’t have a single white male presenter among the faculty for the week. We had instead, award-winning alumni of the institute who happened to mostly be women of color based on the east coast. 

The student body for the week however was probably about 85% white—something I’m no longer used to in artistic spaces probably because I live in southern California now where no one ethnic group has a real majority anymore. That’s how I like things and that’s how I feel comfortable. But art needs un-comfortability to thrive at times, and I was there for it. It wasn’t just in my head. I spoke to the two east Indian writers and Asian Americans who felt that same difference in this setting. 

I took an eco-poetics workshop with Craig Santos Perez who hails from Guam originally and now teaches ethnic studies at a college in San Diego. I was workshopping poems that I am editing for a manuscript of fire aftermath called Conflagrations After (anyone want to publish it for me?). I got to hear poems from Chicago poets, New England poets, Caribbean poets, Asian poets. I was reminded of the interesting ways we can present a poem on the page, cut that fat of extraneous words, do interesting things with line breaks. I got to hear what they were writing poems about: family/grief/climate change/the destruction of both soul and land that capitalism is so good at doing. 

The same themes that I write about.

But more importantly, by interjecting myself into that space, they got to witness my work as well. They got to learn about California and drought and fire, and the diaspora of fauna and humans caused by wildfire—informed too by my identity. I realized it been quite a while since I injected myself in such a space. It reminded me that I’m a good poet—not just a good practitioner of Chicana poetry, but a kick-ass poet who can hold her own at another excessively hard summer writing workshop to get into. It was good for me; it was good for them.

I highly encourage all of us to step into those spaces.

I am on my way home. I spent the day editing poems for a new chapbook addressing this crazy fascist regime we are collectively facing. I am marking down the atrocities in print, less people forget or gaslight their behavior when it’s all done. I am telling our history in it at a time when Texas board of education is voting to erase us. Eleven other poets besides myself went home with my perspective—ten of which were not Latino. I’m coming home having learned more about the American destruction of Hawai’i and Guam. The Ozarks. The DeSantis grip on Florida. All of us artists are in this together.

There is so much to witness; there is so much to fight.
            
For me, it was important to go into a nearly all white creative space too. 
            
            
             
 

On Turning 80, and Being in Love

 On Turning 80, and Being in Love

by Thelma T. Reyna

 

 

We carry what we can, water carriers that we are, and leverage our octogenarian body, heart, and mind to be as impactful as we can be, to be relevant in this world…and yes, even to fall in love.

 

Only three percent of the world’s population (four percent in the U.S.) attains this milestone. On average, in a random roomful of 25 people, one is age 80. So we are rare birds. Most other mortals have departed that room, one by one, year by year, leaving us to wonder at times why we’ve been allowed to live this long.

 

I am the second eldest of nine siblings: seven brothers, one sister. Only the two youngest brothers, suffering chronic illness, still tread this earth with me. Their steps are numbered, as all our steps have always been, making each footfall even dearer now. For many years, I’ve lived in California 1,700 miles away, seeing my seminal Texas family once a year, defying distance to keep love and memories alive.

 

Eight decades of living gather the dust and glitter of memories simultaneously. My dust is the stage, curtain, and backdrop of Kingsville, my small, tumbledown hometown where few homes had green lawns but where  children could climb giant cottonwoods and oaks, play championship jacks and marbles in smooth dirt, run flag football at the elementary school down the street, and huddle at the brand-new Pizza Hut on 14^th Street till midnight. King High School, the lone granter of diplomas, gathered to its bosom the town’s entirety of adolescent Sturm und Drang; and-- through stellar, dedicated teachers—elevated us to better versions of ourselves. They were the glitter who helped us shine.

 

In 80 years I’ve had my fill of schools and books, first at a kindergarten desk where I learned English with the teacher’s ruler punishing mistakes. My home with nine children had no books, but schools and rules and library stacks whetted my appetite to

know. My life has centered on the written word: as an English teacher, author, editor, publisher, poet. Thousands of fellow travelers have walked these paths with me, students and colleagues, filling my life with their precious light. Enlightenment brightened with joy and love.

 

After 80 years, there is ample emptiness, spaces once filled with brothers, sister, mother, father, elders, other flesh and blood. These absences of loved ones sit clearest in ruminations, for losses hurt the hardest when the love’s been deep and strong. But so are my memories of them, of all the people whose humanity and kindness made even the angels sing. They reside eternally in my spirit’s core.

 

And now: about falling in love.

Two deeply wounded souls were adrift in grief, a widow and a widower who had each celebrated over 50 years of marriage shortly before their separate losses.  As friends, they turned to one another for consolation and support. Three years later, these octogenarians have fallen in love.

Who knew?

 

#          #          #          

Chicanonautica: Gonzo Writing On-The-Run Diary

 by Ernest Hogan

One thing I do when I teach my class for Palabras del Pueblo is write a story. The first day I gather some material, usually from the conversation, get an idea, and by the final day I have a story. What better way to share my writing process than to be doing it?

This time getting an idea was easy. In their opening presentation E.L. and Ronnie Dukes had us all do a writing exercise about getting a text from yourself from the year 2070. I tend to have doubts about such things, and scribbled some unusable gibberish, but the prompt got my diabolical imagination going. 

I’m old and will be 115 in 2070. Maybe it would be better if it was about a younger guy. Ronnie had us do a drawing exercise, so I drew what I would look like. A lot of my characters start out as me, then get off on their own.

To further complicate things, in the week between the Palabras weekends Emily and I had planned to do a three-day getaway from the killer heat of the Metro Phoenix Area. I was going to have to write the story on the run. Gonzo!

I decided to keep a diary of the story. And share it with my students. 

Of course, I’ve done some revising, correcting, and rewriting first:

That night, after midnight, a brainstorm woke me up. One of my brainstorms is literally like a lightning storm in my head. I took notes: mental health . . . Robots . . . Franchises . .  . Dying . .   Drones like giant mosquitoes . .  . Taser-headed robot dogs . .  . Like rough, unpolished poetry. Fragments hung on an awkward, jagged framework.

Then I had a dream of running up and down rocky hills on the way to a protest. 

It came in no kind of order. Gonzo information gathering. Cook the rasquache scramble into mutant huevos rancheros later. Like cubism. Sometimes I compose stories like Hieronymus Bosch, Diego Rivera, or S. Clay Wilson.

I didn’t get enough sleep, so I had to gonzo it with caffeine and antihistamines. My days of abusing caffeine to almost hallucinogenic levels are long behind me, but I’ve found that when I do need a boost, a little dab will do me. The muses (Xochiquetzal included) don’t give a damn about your schedules and obligations.

Also, Google was getting glitchy. I copied the stuff from the Drive file to my sketchbook in case I couldn’t access it. Keep your analog. You might need it!

After a first thing in the morning line, I made some decisions: The world is ours, right now–only worse. I still had no face on the main character, but he was younger than me, and a chronically unemployed recent college grad.

Then I decided not to think about it for the rest of the day, concentrate on the class, let the riders in the backseat of my brain work on it.

Later I re-read what I had from the beginning. I’ve found that's a good way to get back into it, and a chance to make changes and corrections.

I named the character Tavo and incorporated stuff from Ernesto Mireles’ talk–about the grim future of Chicano studies. I also decided to change the sex of a minor character because there were no women so far.

Next morning I did the sex change, thought about rearranging things. Let it stew.

I also had to go to my day job. It’s always interesting to go to work with an embryonic story growing in your brain. Kinda like drugs.

The next day Emily and I went on our road trip. As usual, I take a sketchbook/notebook. I do what I call cherchez le weird. I get a lot of my crazy ideas that way.

At one point, we got a flat tire. I took the following notes while waiting for AAA to rescue us:

[KEEP CHANGING MY MIND ABOUT THINGS I WANT TO REARRANGE & LEAVE OUT OF THE STORY. THERE IS STILL TIME TO WAFFLE . . .]

[SHOULD THERE BE MORE PEOPLE ON THE TRAIN?}

[THE PROTESTORS / RIOTERS - WHO ARE THEY?]

[WHEN THE TRAIN STOPS, IT IS NEXT TO AN ABANDONED SHOPPING MALL. TAVO RUNS INTO A NEARBY NEIGHBORHOOD, WORRYING ABOUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN, WILL THEY COME AFTER HIM?]

[TAVO THROWS A ROCK AT A ROBODOG. PROTESTERS CHEER]

[HE FLIPS OFF A DRONE]

[IN THE END, HIS PHONE RINGS AGAIN, WE GET THE “HERE WE GO AGAIN.” SUGGEST OLD TAVO IS IN A SIMILAR SITUATION.]

And the folks at Enterprise switched us to another car, getting us back to running around, having fun in record time.

The next day, while reposting the new Chicanonautica about my preparations for the class, I realized that its main purpose is triggering creativity rather than instruction. I am not an academic. I’ve never been comfortable in a classroom. I set out to deliberately be non-academic. If I can get to students to experience creativity, I consider it a success.

Later, I had a beer with dinner (a Corona lager) and a couple of chocolates from a Whisky Row shop that contained alcohol. I usually do my writing after dinner while traveling, so I decided to experiment with gonzo writing under the influence . . . I wrote my usual rough draft with one finger on my phone. The booze didn’t slow me down, but then I’m a professional who’s been publishing since 1982.

I even got to the end of the story.

Of course, I was not finished. Lots of people go on social media at this point and cheer about being “done.” No, this is not the end. What you have now is a creative mess. This is where the real work begins, the pick-and-shovel stuff. The gonzo frolicking is over. Switch over the other side of the brain, engage critical thinking, get into editor mode—Dr. Jekyll instead of Mr. Hyde.

It’s the part of writing you don’t hear much about, except for impassioned bitching.

The next morning there was no need for a warmup sentence/paragraph.

I felt that the ending needed something. Things kept occurring to me. After thoughts and second guessing. Stuff bubbling in the depths of my brain. I let it. Then worked on making it ready for an editor.

The rest of the day I concentrated on having fun.

Ernest Hogan will be teaching again at the Fall Palabras del Pueblo workshop. Meanwhile, he will be committing random acts of Xicanxfuturism, and wonder what the world will be like in a few months.

Pura Belpré Award Celebración 2026

1:00PM - 3:30 PM (CDT)

Hilton Chicago 

Waldorf Room

Chicago, Illinois 

The Pura Belpré Award Celebración is the annual event held during the ALA Annual Conference to honor recipients of the Pura Belpré Award, a prestigious recognition for Latino/Latina authors and illustrators whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in outstanding children’s and young adult literature. 

Named after Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library, the award was established in 1996 (originally biennial until 2008) and is now given annually. It is co-sponsored by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and REFORMA. The Celebración serves as both a celebration of the award’s legacy and a platform for honoring the authors, illustrators, and communities whose stories are recognized.

Belpré Children’s Illustration Award

“Popo the Xolo,” illustrated by Abraham Matias, written by Paloma Angelina Lopez and published by Charlesbridge.

Belpré Illustration Honor Books

“A-Ztec: A Bilingual Alphabet Book,” illustrated and written by Emmanuel Valtierra and published by Arthur A. Levine, an imprint of Levine Querido

“The Invisible Parade,”illustrated by John Picacio, written by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio and published by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Belpré Children’s Author Award

“The Pecan Sheller,” written by Lupe Ruiz-Flores and published by Carolrhoda Books, an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

Belpré Children’s Author Honor Books

"A Hero’s Guide to Summer Vacation," written by Pablo Cartaya and published by Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House

“The Island of Forgotten Gods,” written by Victor Piñeiro and published by Sourcebooks Young Readers, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids

“A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez,” written by María Dolores Águila and published by Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing.

Belpré Young Adult Author Award

"On the Wings of la Noche," written by Vanessa L. Torres and published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House.

Belpré Young Adult Author Honor Books

“Rosa by Any Other Name,” written by Hailey Alcaraz and published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

"Silenced Voices: Reclaiming Memories from the Guatemalan Genocide," written and illustrated by Pablo Leon and published by HarperAlley, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

“The Story of My Anger,” written by Jasminne Mendez and published by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Tallac Knoll And Pa'lla

Walkabout: L.A. County Arboretum 
Michael Sedano

I began walking regularly for health benefits in 2010 after gut surgery and, not long after, diabetes. I healed, lost weight, controlled that A1C. Walking in gardens, defining my world as what I see in the camera viewfinder, provided respite hours during the years from 2018 to 2023 I lived with Alzheimer’s dementia as my wife’s caregiver. 

I walk with my camera, choosing lenses for the walkabout’s objective. If I seek butterflies and insects I bring the 100mm macro lens. When I seek hummingbirds and other souls with wings in the air, I mount the 300mm lens, with and without an extender. Walking makes people healthy, it’s the “exercise” part of “diet and exercise”. Nature makes people happy, seeing with one's own eyes, and sharing fotos of wonder.

My parents would bring me to the Arcadia Arboretum (link), we called it, with some regularity. The Los Angeles County Arboretum, and the California Botanic Garden in Claremont (when it was named the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden - link), offered a road trip on Route 66; Redlands to Berdoo, Berdoo along the 66 past sleep in a wigwam motel not too distant from Mt. Vernon Street where Rte 66 begins, upwind of Kaiser Steel where I'd one day work, cruise through the muscatel vineyards of Cucamonga where Mom had picked uva as a girl, through the orange grove-lined stretches of Montclair and Upland whose reputation as racist hotbeds kept my head below the windows, first a Plymouth, then a Ford.

For a kid who grew up around orange and apricot groves, Arcadia comes as a new world, the gift of a couple hours exploring and studying trees and plants, reading and making mental notes, enjoying the specificity of taxonomic names to separate the trees from the forest, sabes? Then, as now, the Arboretum lacks fences and stringent borders, allowing gente free roaming through the grounds. 

Several water features make an Arboretum visit a mix of plants, birds, fish, terrapins, crustaceans, insects, and tourists. Excited groups walk speaking Spanish and Mandarin (I suppose). Any visit adds polyglot aural enjoyment. I enjoy good conversations with raza gardeners and, in English, various volunteers. Metiche me, I tell passers-by about that heron pa'lla, check it out and have a great day.

It should be common sense not to harvest fruit nor steal easily-separated cuttings. No fruit hangs within reach at the Calamondin orange trees bordering the main road to the knoll. The avocado grove hangs lots of young fruit. Torongas overipe litter the ground. The Caper bushes are budding. Today, Lake Baldwin's green algae surface prompts signs in Spanish and English, but not Mandarin, reading "do not walk on the lake".

After our Arboretum hours, Mom had to visit south Lake Street in Pasadena where Bullock's department store displayed treasures and luxuries my family owned only with our eyes in those passing minutes on the showroom floor. 

Nowadays, my walking companion, Thelma Reyna, and I make regular walkabout journeys from our homes in Pasadena to Arcadia and the Arboretum. We alternate between here, San Marino's The Huntington (link opens new window). and La Cañada Flintridge for Descanso Gardens (link).

We walked the Huntington yesterday and today we trek to Arcadia intent on climbing to Tallac Knoll, at 583 feet, the highest place in this part of the San Gabriel Valley. I've brought the 300mm lens hoping for water birds and brilliant colors in hummingbird gorgets. 

We've arrived with good energy and make the steep uphill walk with poco stress. Our regular distance takes us a mile and a half and today's route will account for two plus miles with a lengthy uphill trek followed by a steep set of downhill steps to flatland before a culminating incline across deep lawn to the exit. We are good and tired by that last leg of the walkabout.

The prize of the day is a Queen butterfly. A first for my eyes and Thelma's. Our most arresting views are two encounters with a Blue Heron that, on first sight, flies away to lowland waters. We don't see it at the hoped-for pond and move along. Seeing the heron fly overhead toward where we'd been disappointed, we execute an about face to return for some arresting close-ups of the cooperative photogenic creature and the satisfaction of having gone there, and back again.

Through A Lens, Brightly

Canon EOS 6D Mark II. ISO4000. 1/4000s, various apertures. Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM with EF12 extension tube.

Goldfinch wing with Goldfinch.

The goldfinch perches momentarily. I point the 300mm lens. The goldfinch comets away testing my reaction time. I desperately push the button. Just in time.

Bird. Movement (or none). Eye. Brain. Finger. Camera. Lens.  

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4 

Spathodea Campanulata and Colibrí Allen’s. 

A spectacular flaming-orange flower whose gold-trimmed petals open in bountiful clusters draws undoubtedly happy hummingbirds to  nectar in unthreatened leisure high in the canopy of the Arboretum’s African Tulip tree forest atop the Arboretum’s Tallac Knoll.

The tree has bad press as a weed because its delicate seeds float on winds to germinate across nearby untreed tierra. I’ve managed to gather seed but never had one germinate in a greenhouse.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/8 

Blue Heron’s Yellow Eye

Tallac Knoll includes a water garden to walk around on the winding path down to the waterfall. Thelma and I sit on the bench to watch a hummingbird nectaring at Russelia flowers. I stand to peer over the thicket of red flowers and I come eye to eye with a wondrous being—Blue Heron.

The small pond makes for close quarters and wonderfully detailed fotos. This is uncropped at 300mm and five feet distance. The bird moves confidently with water between me and it.

I watch it lift and fly directly away, my reaction time good enough to frame the bird but the autofocus can’t find the bird on the wing. 

The Blue glides out of sight through the tree canopy vectoring toward one of two water features below Tallac Knoll, Baldwin Lake or the Turtle Ponds. I plan on seeing it there, I hope serendipity will be on my side.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7

Queen Butterfly

Here is a lifer for me.

I’ve read about the Queen Butterfly. I’ve seen fotos of Queen Butterflies. Until today’s stroll into the Herb Garden where the Duranta Tree lures colibríes and mariposas galore, I’d not seen one on the wing.

Floating in from the Desert Willow tree and red Salvia thicket comes a bright orange soul. Not a Monarca though the black and orange colors call that name. But my eye notes something’s different about this monarch—not stained glass leading but dots. Spots. My heart leaps, my reward for remembering a picture. 

Now I’ve seen you.

Órale.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5

Anise Swallowtail and Duranta Flowers.

It’s 1124. Sun casts unfiltered light onto Duranta’s profusion of blue flowers and through the mariposa’s beautifully colored translucent wings. 

For its part, the mariposa flies with proboscis at the ready. It aims with unerring accuracy at the blossom’s yellow target to sip Duranta’s flowery nectar, undeterred by the happy photographer looking up from only eight feet.

This is its world, flight and sip, invisible zephyrs carry the butterfly aloft until a wing twist gives it purposive direction. 

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5

Blue Heron Met Again.

Thelma and I make our way down from Tallac Knoll to the herb garden then to the Arboretum’s Turtle Pond. This is a permanent water feature where finding an Egret or Heron happens often enough that I always approach it with warm expectation. Today, I’m encouraged when we see a magnificent sight, the blue heron appears from the rushes concealing Baldwin Lake. It’s flying toward the Turtle Pond. Thelma and I, already challenged by our walk, turn around and go find a cooperative bird, confident as always that four feet of water between it and that guy means he’s a minor distraction. Is that food?

This is not the reflecting pool at the national mall in D.C. The yellow splots come of reflected light off muddy water, not blue paint and algae.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7

Technical Note: Most of these fotos are possible with a smart phone. In all instances, the subjects are only a few feet from the lens. Digital photography with quality equipment--I buy only used equipment-- produces a large file that can be enlarged to enormous proportion to sell or hang on a wall.