Quick Post - Sanderling lineup

A pup's life

Around this time of year at Año Nuveo State Reserve, most of the adult northern elephant seals have gone back to sea, and all that's left are the weaners (the term applied to the young seals that have been weaned and left behind to fend for themselves). The shots in this post are from when the seals are much younger, only a few days after they are born in January. Our annual winter trip was full of babies this time, and it was great to be on the ground-level with them.



When these cute little pups are born they're jet black, weigh around 75 pounds, and live on a diet of their mother's very rich milk (over half of it is fat). In the 28 days or so that they nurse they'll gain around 10 pounds a day and weigh upwards of 350 pounds when they are weaned. This is an incredible growth spurt, and it is quite taxing on the mother who fasts during her entire stay.



And while all of that growing might seem a bit tiring...



...its not all about lounging on the beach, feasting, and looking cute. After those relatively easy first four weeks their mothers will disappear back into the ocean, and the pups are very suddenly weaned. At this point they are completely on their own, and need to figure out how to swim, and even how to eat.



By the end of April the self-taught pups will follow their instinct and head out to sea. Amazingly, they'll all individually head north to feed along the coast and won't touch land again until they return to this same beach in September.

Running through the rain

These plovers are always surprisingly large to me, perhaps since I've most often seen the much smaller snowy and semipalmated plovers. This guy was hanging out with a handful of other shorebirds at Pillar Point Harbor. I have yet to get a really good shot of one of these, and while I was attempting to do that this one decided enough was enough, and he sprinted away. Well actually he sprinted right in front of my in order to get over to some rocks.

Resting giant

By now, most of the large male elephant seals are likely back out at sea, where they'll stay without coming back to land until sometime in July. This shot is from my trip to Ano Nuevo State Reserve in January, and is of a sleepy large male along the loser's beach in the park. Since these guys are usually thought of as big ugly aggressive beasts, I like to show their more mellow side -- and really, they spend most of their time resting anyway. In this shot, I like how clearly you can see their eyebrows, which is a clear patch of nine fat hairs.

Quick Post -- Great Blue on Blue

Spent some time over the weekend with this handsome great blue heron while it hunted for a late dinner.

Blackbirds at Ano Nuevo

I'm going back through all of my unposted shots from a January trip to see the elephant seals at Ano Nuevo State Reserve in hopes of putting together a post about the pups, and remembered that I took a few frames of these curious blackbirds as we waited for our tour to start. These birds seem to hang around the picnic areas there, and were happy to land on posts only a few yards away.



I really like the pose in this shot (it looks sort of like he's mid-dance), although I wish the head was turned just a bit more so it was brighter.

Elk with a view

There are many places along the California coast where I'm just in awe of the view that the cows seem to get! Driving down CA-1 from San Francisco to Morro Bay, I'm not sure how many awesome pastures we passed right on the coast. The same is true for the tule elk in the Reserve on Tomales Point in Point Reyes National Seashore -- although, I must say that this seems much more fitting! There are of course spectacular views of both the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay over the whole trip out to the end of the peninsula, and about 2/3 of the way there we encountered a herd of elk that were taking in some really nice views across Tomales Bay. Well, I'm not sure if they were taking in the views -- but it was nice to try to get some of the dunes and beach behind them.



From the looks along the hike, that looks like a beach I would like to check out sometime -- nice large beach area and beautiful dunes.



The area was becoming developed though, as you can see with a bit of a house in this shot -- it's not nearly as distracting as the pickup trucks and port-a-potties I got in the backdrop of some other shots though!

Scent on the wind

A bull tule elk taking in the smells in the air -- as you may have expected, his nose took him right to a female. From our hike out the Tomales Point Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore. This is the same bull as in a previous post, who was the dominant male in the first group of elk that we found along the trail. While he was certainly a fine specimen, he did not appear to be the biggest or have the largest set of antlers out of all of the bulls we saw that day, but he must have made up for it with his fighting skills. It was interesting to see the dynamics of the herds we saw, as there was always one large male within the main harem and typically a smaller group consisting of what must have been the losing males hanging out on the outskirts. They were usually within eyesight, but never venturing close enough to warrant attention from the big guy (at least at this time of year).

While this shot is similar to the first (minus how I framed the image), what I really liked about it is how you can see how symmetric his rack really is. Definitely not something I would want to tangle with.


After sniffing the air for a while, he followed his nose right to this relaxing cow, who was not all that happy to see him and quickly got up after this shot was taken, and strolled down the hillside.

Grazing tule elk

This lovely female was a member of the first group of tule elk that we found along Tomales Point Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore. She was fairly close to the trail which allowed for some great viewing, as well as the chance for some shots of her going about her morning routine. She was quite interested in her breakfast, and really didn't pay much attention to us as she browsed. Occasionally we would shift further up the trail to get a new angle on the scene, and she would raise her head to watch us in motion, but as soon as we stopped she went back to feeding.



Since we started this hike early, there was still some fog in the air when we encountered this group on one of the higher ridgelines on the trail, and the speed at which the density changed was really something. One moment you could just make out their shapes in the grass, and then right before your eyes the details would emerge. These two shots came from one of the nicest breaks in the fog we got while watching this group, and in my haste to get off the shots with the new lighting, I nearly clipped off her ears. Fortunately, they just fit, even if I would have preferred a bit more space.

Bull tule elk along Tomales Point Trail

Hiking the full lenght of the Tomales Point Trail (listed as 4.7 miles one-way) in Point Reyes National Seashore is something that had been on our list since moving to the Bay Area. This is a beautiful trail that stretches through coastal scrub and grasslands all the way to the the tip of Tomales Point with Tomales Bay on the east side of the peninsula, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Perhaps the biggest attraction though, is that the trail runs through the Tule Elk Reserve, which hosts a reintroduced herd of tule elk, which now numbers ~440 elk. We attempted it once when we had family in town, but it was raining and fairly miserable, so after we saw a few tule elk far off the trail we decided to turn around only a few miles into it. However, two weekends ago the conditions looked great with a forecast of overcast skies and no rain, so we decided to attempt it again.



As per my usual, we arrived right around sunrise and were the first car in the parking lot, meaning we were the first feet (of the human sort) on the trail. We had to go probably around 2 miles before we saw our first elk, and unfortunately it was at the top of a ridge that just happened to have fog rolling across it. However, we kept going a bit further and made it right into the heart of a herd of ~20 animals. While the females were quite beautiful, it was really the male who kept drawing our eyes -- and the shot of him above is from when he first came over the hillside and into view.

He doesn't look quite as tough though, with his tongue sticking out!