Characters and Traits

I biked down to the Berkeley Marina, and succeeded in some ways in taking close pictures of organisms. It was hard to take pictures of some really close pictures, like the ground squirrel, kind of the seagull, and the fairly large bird (3 feet tall) eating something in the green pasture. Plants were easy to take a picture of, because they don't fly or scurry away.
Onto some of the characters I focused on: first, the purple flowering plant had fleshy stems, several thin light purple petals, the biggest flower I saw was 4 inches in diameter. I usually don't see a flower with a fleshy stem, I'm wondering if it's a succulent? I also saw a small animal scurrying about and going into holes in the ground. I immediately thought ground hog. But when I looked at it closer, it had a rather skinny tail, has a light brown color with whitish spots (to camouflage itself with the soil I think). I was confused and thought it must be a squirrel that happened to hide itself in it's hole. But so many of these critters kept going in and out of these holes that seemed to pop out of everywhere. Then it made sense, it was a critter I didn't know of. Props to John8 for identifying it. the California ground squirrels I saw were like 9 inches lengthwise. In an initial attempt to take a picture of a seagull (I succeeded the second time, but I happened to be lucky that someone was feeding them to take a close picture), I saw a small 1 inch bivalves in the marina bay. It had several creases, it's white for the most part, it had slight brownish coloring to it. Another character I saw was a purple plant growing on a rock, it was wet and slimy, it was about 5 inches long across. I kind of thought it was related to seaweed or lichen?

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