Travel and wildlife photos

As I didn’t have much time to post travel and wildlife pics on my recent trip to California, I’ll try to post a few every day.

On the day after arrival, we visited Año Nuevo State Park near Santa Cruz, one of the protected sites where Northern Elephant Seals (Mirounga angustirostris) bask and breed. Thanks to reader and biologist Bruce Lyon, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California at Santa Cruz, we were given special access to a restricted beach where bachelor males and young seals were resting before going to see to feed.  On the drive to the beach from Santa Cruz, we saw tons of birds, especially brown pelicans (Pelicanus occidentalis).

A young gull:  According to Bruce, this is actually a cool gull, and an adult. His description:

The “young gull” with the red beak is a Heermann’s Gull adult (Larus heermanni). They are interesting because they breed mostly in Mexico but have a reverse migration and head north after breeding. They show up here in late summer. There is a tiny breeding colony down by Monterey—they apparently breed on the roof of a building owned by baseball legend Reggie Jackson. He does not want the gulls breeding on his building so he put netting up and they no longer breed there.

The trek to the beach over the dunes. Walking on loose sand, especially uphill, was pretty hard. We were accompanied by three naturalists who studied the sea lions, all arranged by Bruce, in the middle here with his big lens. We all had to wear “UCSC Research” jackets so the rangers wouldn’t mistake us for interlopers. It was a swell visit.

When we got there, there were tons of fat seals lazing on the sand. These are big ‘uns: as Wikipedia notes,

“The huge male northern elephant seal typically weighs 1,500–2,300 kg (3,300–5,100 lb) and measures 4–5 m (13–16 ft), although some males can weigh up to 3,700 kg (8,200 lb). Females are much smaller and can range from 400 to 900 kg (880 to 1,980 lb) in weight, or roughly a third of the male’s bulk, and measure from 2.5 to 3.6 m (8.2 to 11.8 ft).”

The males have long noses to help them vocalize (this is all about sex and female choice, of course, as males contribute nothing to offspring care). Here are some pictures:

A beach full o’ seals:

Two males engaging in mock combat (during real fights, they bloody each other’s necks with their sharp teeth, and can even kill each other):

But they are ineffably cute:

Most of them are tagged with markers like this one (I think it goes through the flipppers):

A piece of molted sea lion skin found by one of the naturalists:

Two videos. The lassitude of the colony is broken up only by mock fights and the constant flinging of sand over the seals’ backs with their flippers. That serves as both sunscreen and to cool the sea lions, as the whitish sand masks the dark, sun-absorbing coat:

The seals move with difficulty, humping their blubbery bodies along the beach. Despite that, they can move with surprising speed, though they can’t catch a fleeing human. (We weren’t allowed to get closer than 20 feet anyway, so we didn’t disturb them.)

Two out-of-focus brown pelicans:

After the seal viewing, Bruce afforded a tour of a nearby redwood trail in Butano State Park, which was lovely. Along the way he heard bird calls, and tried to call them in using a bluetooth box connected to bird songs on his smartphone. We didn’t manage to lure in birds, but apparently during the mating season you can get the birds to come right up to your face (the males respond to calls in a territorial way). Here is a big banana slug (Areiolimax columbianus), the official mascot of the University of California at Santa Cruz:

And a Pacific Slope Flycatcher (Empidonax difficilis) nest inside a shattered tree:

Here’s a photo of that lovely bird from Wikipedia: