16 August 2014 - Urban beastiary

I have been in San Francisco with my sister for a couple of weeks. I was able to take quite a few long walks through the city as well as along the waterfront.

On one of my walks I began to notice all the ornamental animals on the older buildings. Because I am never without a camera, I started taking pictures of every one I saw.  The funny part is that my sister is an artist who specializes in one-of-a-kind handmade books. When I was telling her about the Urban Beastiary, she laughed and showed me all the pictures she had taken in the hopes of creating an Urban Zoo book.  Is it shared genes? Or just that we both notice the same kind of things? 

Get ready for way too many pictures. I have organized them into groups. The first group is all lions since they seem to be the dominant animal in the urban forest. Lions appear on buildings more than any other animal. 

Lions will be  followed by other mammals, then birds (lots of eagles), and finally my favorite, gargoyles! and sea life.

Lions

You need to remember that on buildings, these are very high up, which makes it hard to get pictures. In addition, they tend to run along the top of the building anywhere from 3 to 10 feet apart.

 I wish I could get a run of them on a building , but by the time I get one of these in focus, there is no way to get any of the others in the line. 

It is particularly nice when you get several features on a single building such as an upper row of eagles over the lions. 

 

Notice the red eyes!

 

Other conventions that showed up over and over were lions with swag and lions with rings in their mouths. 

That is a fairly good sample of lions. I have many more but since there are several categories to go, I'll stop with these. 

Mammals other than lions. This was a surprising set. You would expect bears, being the California state animal and all, but some of the others?  Check these out! 

 

 

 

I think I'll stop here for now. There will be a Part 2.