Category: Videos
Nom nom nom…
Joslyn’s Visit
Darlene’s niece, Joslyn, came out from Wisconsin for her spring break from school and I think we managed to fill her time here. We visited Shark Fin Cove, Pigeon Point Lighthouse, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and saw dolphins while flying the drone from the sea cliffs near Pescadero. We spent one morning to see the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park and a deserted Roaring Camp Railroads. We introduced her to the sea otters at Moss Landing and got in a guided walk at Año Nuevo to see the elephant seals (lots of weaned pups at this time of year) and she and Darlene stayed overnight at the Monterey Zoo and fed the elephants. Besides a couple of movie nights and several interesting board games, we also went up to Tahoe for three days so she could learn to ski – and she was careening down the mountain in no time!
Click through for the full gallery:
Flying Over Humpbacks
I saw this news article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel this morning talking about how active the humpback whales have been near shore off of Santa Cruz and Aptos these past few weeks. So Darlene and I grabbed the drone and dashed down to Seacliff State Beach. I’ve been wanting to try flying the drone to get nice, aerial views of the whales. (A lot of the coastline is protected via the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary but flying in this area is allowed.)
There were probably a dozen of them near shore – you could see them popping up every which way! The lighting wasn’t great (completely overcast) as the marine layer had yet to burn off but it was still very fun to hang around with the drone waiting for them to appear.
It’s quite the challenge to find them and stay with them using the narrow view of the drone’s camera – even when you can easily see them from shore. Darlene was helping by watching the feed with the goggles because it’s also hard to see small/distant details on the iPhone or iPad screen, particularly when you’re outside. It’s much easier to see with the goggles but then of course all you can see is what the drone sees.
It was hard tracking them too because once they go under it’s hard to predict where to be looking when they come back up. You want to get closer for more detail but if you’re too close you won’t see them at all when they resurface off camera (which happened repeatedly) – and of course not so close as to harass them. I should point out that the limited view angle of the drone’s camera makes them appear closer than they really are and yet I still had to heavily crop every one of these clips to make the whales appear large enough in the frame – even in the most distant shots.
I did put a polarizer on the drone camera to try to cut through the reflection of the water surface but it didn’t work that well with the diffuse overcast light so it might work better in directed sunlight.
Need more practice! ;-)
A Gray Whale Threesome
Darlene and her mom and I took a whale watching tour out of Santa Cruz on March 23rd with Stagnaro Charters. (I didn’t know whale tours were available out of town here in Santa Cruz – super convenient as opposed to driving down to Monterey.) We were very lucky to get to first come across a threesome of gray whales in the midst of their courtship/mating – something that apparently gray whales do in groups of three or more:
What appears to be mating, however, is simply an elaborate courtship in which two males can be seen attempting to mate with a female.
Christopher Fitzsimmons, an education specialist at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explained that mating in pods of three, with two males and a female, is entirely common among gray whales.
“This rolling and rubbing we see is believed to be the whales familiarizing themselves with one another and making sure the female is receptive to mating,” said Fitzsimmons.
Gray whales engage in often elaborate courtship practices before mating. Males will use their pectoral fins to coerce and align females into mating positions. Females have even been observed avoiding the attempts of males for days.
And then later we came across four more gray whales, one of whom did several breaches in front of us. All very cool!
Monarch Butterflies at Natural Bridges
Some pictures and video from a December visit to see the Monarch butterflies wintering at Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz:
They winter here from November through February, depending on the weather. If you go, choose to get here during the warmth of the middle of the day or they won’t be very active. And bring binoculars and a long telephoto because they’ll be mostly way up in the eucalyptus trees.
Bed and Breakfast and Elephants
Two weeks ago, Darlene and I enjoyed a weekend stay at the Vision Quest Ranch in Salinas, CA. It’s a facility that keeps and cares for a host of 100+ various exotic and domestic animals. Their prime business used to be training and providing animals for use in the film and television industry, but with the increasing use of computer-generated, all-digital animals, they’ve turned more to adopting at-risk or retired animals, doing more educational programs and training programs and transforming the facility into a fully, open-to-the-public zoo, “The Monterey Zoo”. This effort is still in progress and so they’re now only open for short, daily, guided tours while they build out larger, more engaging enclosures for their animals. However, they also run a bed and breakfast service based on several cabin-like tents situated on the property and provide a number of up close encounters with various animals, particularly a couple of retired circus elephants who greet you at your cabin as your breakfast is served.
You can read more about the history of the facility, stories about their numerous animals and information about their various educational efforts on their web site.
Click through for the full gallery of pictures:
Wildcam: Lions and Tigers and…
I bought one of those motion-sensing wildlife “game” cameras and have been trying it in different spots around my property here in the hills near Santa Cruz. Not so many lions and tigers and bears, but lots of deer and coyotes, the occasional raccoon and squirrel, but also caught a bobcat and a couple of bucks sparring in just the past month:
More local Santa Cruz wildlife:
