This time last year, they’d appeared through the trees, as huge and unexpected as jet-powered flying dinosaurs. The Blue Angels were tough to photograph as they blasted by, but this was another year and another opportunity.

Blue Angel

A bike-rider passing by stopped to talk. “Too much already,” he said of the roar the jets made. “It’s giving me a migraine.”

These were the sounds of the forest: breeze-rustled leaves and the screaming of a hawk and the caw of ravens and what sounded like a woodpecker tapping. A few songbirds calling. A persistent emergency-vehicle siren.

And the thunder of the Blue Angels jets, which underlined how quiet it usually was in the sound-absorbing forest, where sirens are the only outside noise that gets through the trees.

Blue Angel,upside down

Yesterday, Tank Hill offered a different perspective of jets over the forest.

Sutro Forest, with low-flying Blue Angels and high-flying Hawk

From Tank Hill, Sutro Forest with Blue Angels