7 May 2016 The last excursion of our California trip! A day out on Santa Cruz, one of the Channel Islands that lies off the coast near Los Angeles. What’s special about it is a species of fox that is only found on the Channel Islands, a very small fox called (originally) the Island Grey » » »
Posts Tagged ‘national parks’
4 June 2016
Townsend’s long-eared bat attack
5 May 2016 So naturally we had a fairly easy start today. For us, that meant leaving the motel around 9ish. It was a perfectly decent motel, by the way, nothing at all special but nothing wrong; the Hollister Inn. Just in case you ever find yourself in Hollister, California. Which you won’t. We stopped » » »
4 June 2016
Overdone kangaroo rat
4 May 2016 On most mammal watching holidays we hit a day when we overdo it. This was that day. It started really pleasantly, with some early morning sea otter watching from the shore at Elkhorn Slough. There was one dozing on the sand less than five metres from us. Because it was grey and » » »
15 May 2016
Allen’s chipmunk chin-up day
22 April 2016 Well, we finally saw one chipmunk. Out at Hetch Hetchy, a much less visited part of Yosemite National Park in the far north where we had a lovely flower-filled hike alongside the reservoir in the sun. We were a little alarmed to find red newts (or maybe salamanders?) on the path wherever » » »
15 May 2016
Coyote cokey
21 April 2016 Ignore yesterday’s grumbles. Yosemite is undisputably one of the loveliest places on the entire planet. And we’ve visited a whole bunch of the planet’s most renowned treasures and wildernesses, so I’m pretty confident with my statement. If I wanted to try and tease out a reasoned explanation for why this is so, » » »
15 May 2016
Grey fox graduation day
20 April 2016 I do love to hate National Park Rangers. Although I need to be clear: I mean the cheerful and useless tourist-handlers at the information desks, not the dedicated conservation officers out in the field. Whether it’s Yellowstone, Yosemite, Banff or Flinders the conversation is always roughly the same… Me: “We’d like to » » »
25 December 2013
Rainforest experience? Right.
20th December 2013 We’re back from our two nights in the Corcovado rainforest at Sirena ranger station. We were slightly perturbed by the rustic accommodation, but Corcovado is one of the best places in the Americas to see rainforest wildlife so it would be odd to pass it by. Almost… almost wish we had. The » » »