Dustin Mulvaney

California brown pelicans dive for fish.

Moon rising over Earth’s shadow, Monterey Bay.

Green dense canopy, very tall trees, blackened tree trunk of redwood trees.

Redwood canopy recovery, five years after a crown fire. 🌲🔥 #CZULightningComplex

Brown pelicans dive bomb the anchovy buffet, Monterey Bay.

Twilight, brown pelican feeding frenzy. #CAwx #MontereyBay

Brown pelican armada, floating in wait. #MontereyBay #seabirds 🪶

striking, concentric, multi-colored bands .. brown, tan, white, orange, gray shelf fungi.

Turkey tail like the recent rain 🍄‍🟫🍄🍄‍🟫 #WhenItRainsItSpores

Redwood bark with stripes of char filled with new bark

Redwood tree growing out of its charred trunk, five years after #CZULightningComplex🌲🔥

A prior fire probably got in there, and 2020 fire burned it out more.

Sea otter momma shares a meal with her pup, an unwelcome guest waits for scraps. 🦦🦦

This is the same tree five years ago. #CZULightningComplex

Tutu school is very entrepreneurial.

Just signed our kids up for a Halloween themed K-pop Demon hunters weekend dance camp hosted by our daughter’s ballet, the Tutu School. 🎃🩰

can we think of the gull as the service industry person who's there to clean up?

S/he might be rushing the diners a bit, but . . .

Compact Grant Strike Faculty need to send a clear message about what's at stake, and to follow through.

In which I suggest that tenured faculty at universities that have been invited to join The Compact should pledge to go on a federal grant strike if their university sings-on to it.

brendancantwell.substack.com/p/compact-gr...

A committee of tribal members named the place tooromakma hinse nii (pronounced toe row mock ma hēēn say knee), which, in the Mutsun language, means “bobcats wander here.”

Redwoods grow so fast they quickly can burst out of a charred trunk. As they grow, charred bark also flakes off.

The redwoods fared exceedingly well. 97% survived in one study of Big Basin. The big trees that didn’t fare well were Doug fir. Quite a few two and 300-year-old giant Doug fir out there dead from fire. :(

Mama otter teaching a pup to forage and the seagulls are trying to snag anything that gets dropped.

A Land Back Success for the Amah Mutsun Within Its Historical Territory - Bay Nature The tribe has been without a land base for more than 200 years.

The Amah Mutsun are getting #LandBack within their ancestral territory of Juristac, in the Pajaro watershed, for the first time since dispossessed by mission San Juan Bautista.
baynature.org/2025/09/20/t...

Oh interesting! Thanks for sharing. We’ll have to take a look when we go up that way.

This is the same tree five years ago. #CZULightningComplex

Driving through the Santa Cruz Mountains and the CZU Fire footprint, unless you know wildfire ecology or notice a few obvious spots and reset ecosystems like pine forests; you’d hardly know this landscape burned just five years ago; the response generally is pretty remarkable.

I can send you a link to a masters thesis defense from our dept last spring. Will send to your email.

What to do about the ceanothus explosion postfire is a hot topic in SCM fire recovery/ecology/fuels mgmt. (pun intended!)

The forest understory postfire here is an impressively dense thicket of ceonothus, tan oak and redwood samplings. This used to be a very open forest with sparse vegetation, but many of the old tan oaks and some dougfir died in fire, opening up the canopy for all the new growth. #CZULightningComplex

Moon at twilight, lots of birds.. Monterey Bay.

Bright yellow slug on bark

Banana slug, Ariolimax dolichophallus.. climbing a tree.

Green dense canopy, very tall trees, blackened tree trunk of redwood trees.

Redwood canopy recovery, five years after a crown fire. 🌲🔥 #CZULightningComplex

Redwood bark with stripes of char filled with new bark

Redwood tree growing out of its charred trunk, five years after #CZULightningComplex🌲🔥