Visit the kelpforest....

Talked my brother into coming down and trying to go grunion watching, as it was an early 10 pm run, and the kids didn't have school the next day. We went to Seal Beach because it's one of hte few that doesn't close at 10 pm. He brought a bunch of friends with him, including new beau from Sweden, and his dog Luna, an Italian greyhound who's completely blind now. Unfortunately, we got skunked; nary a scout even showed up. I felt a little bad because one friend had come before and we hadn't seen any - he's going to believe they don't actually exist. I'm a little floored at how international Doug's friends are; the other two were from France and South America.

Seal Beach Pier and no grunion
Seal Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
24 May 2009

( +2 )

DeviantArt paid account is expired again. Boo. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and pay a whole year at once. And now they have big damn ads right in the middle of your gallery -Gah!

Avalon is going to a Tai Kwon Do class with a friend from school this evening. We'll see if she likes it. We need to get her into something athletic - she's got more energy than the rest of us combined. I was trying to talk her into rock climbing because of this; she had been reluctant but has recently shown glimmers of interest. Honestly, she climbs as if she had a tail and thumbs on her feet.

And John and I went to watch the grunion last night. The run started shortly after we got there, and we kept waiting for it to get stronger but it never did. Probably a Walker Scale 2 at the most. A couple of the houses on the bluffs had flood lights on; they weren't really bright, but after my eyes adjusted I could see we were trailing shadows right down to the water and we may have been scaring them off just by ourselves as we walked up and down the beach. I like going to Crescent Bay, though. It's a nice small beach and it's easy to cover the whole thing several times during the course of the run. We didn't get back until 1:30, so I'm a bit wiped out at work today.

First grunion observation for the Grunion Greeters of the season (for us anyway). We kept hoping the run would get stonger, but it never did; fish were only coming up on the beach in handfuls at a time. Meanwhile, I had to replace my batteries and then discovered my 1GB card was full and had to clear the thing! One lone beach escapee was all I got.

Then later I realized that I'd only uploaded the previous weeks photos to Flickr and never downloaded them to my harddrive. I can at least save them from there, but they're only half the resolution they would have been. >:( Oh well, at least they're not lost completely.

Crescent Cove grunion
Laguna Beach CA
Sharp VE-CG30
07 May 2008

We seem to have a new neighbor! I have lived in this neighborhood in Orange County since I was a small child (going on 40 yrs), and I have never seen tree squirrels here, a mile from the beach. Ground squirrels occasionally, but not tree squirrels. I've seen this one on my street, and I saw a group of three of them a few blocks away. This one does not have the typical fluffy tail, but he holds it like a tree squirrel, and he's got the right coloring.

My brother lives in West Hollywood, and I will sometimes see them scampering down the power lines when I'm visiting, but he isn't too far away from the Hollywood Hills, which probably serve as a wildlife corridor. This is a suburban area probably a good twenty miles from the nearest place I've seen a tree squirrel. Someone suggested the fires last fall in the Cleveland National Forest might have driven them into the city, but much of what was burned was charparal, not trees.

Tree squirrel
Huntington Beach CA
Sharp VE-CG30
16 April 2008

Crossposted to urban_nature

Edit: Definitely fox squirrels - The Southern CA Fox Squirrel Page (someone's master's thesis, apparently) says -

Fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) were introduced to the Los Angeles area in about 1904. Civil war and Spanish American war veterans residing at the Sawtelle Veteran’s Home on Sepulveda and Wilshire Boulevards brought fox squirrels to this site from their homes in the areas surrounding the Mississippi Valley (possibly Tennessee). Other introductions of fox squirrels to the Los Angeles area may have taken place during more recent times but detailed records are not available.

( ...and grunion greeting! )

Getting to be that season - if you live in southern to central CA and are interested in particpating in a bit of Citizen Science, why not volunteer to be a Grunion Greeter? Workshops are coming up (oops, some are this coming week!), so go to:

www.grunion.org

and sign up for a workshop near you. They give out a small reward for a minimum number of nights (last year it was a cool beach towel), but you have to have attended a workshop to receive it.

(I can't believe I didn't already have a grunion tag)