[CINC] 2/25 on SRI...

[Joel E. Justin]

I had the opportunity to escort 14 visitors for a half day trip to Santa Rosa yesterday. The marine layer hindered the visibility, but they still got good views of Anacapa and Santa Cruz on the way over. The wildflowers on the island are probably near their peak, but with the reduced rain this year, not quite as brilliant as the last two years. None the less, yarrow, California poppy, paintbrush, Island monkey flower, Morning glory and blue dicks were all in bloom.

The two highlights of the trip were seeing two island foxes as we hiked towards the ranch. While foxes are “no big deal” on Santa Cruz, the fox recovery on Rosa hasn’t been nearly as dramatic and the foxes there aren’t as used to humans, so they tend to be much more elusive. The visitors were very excited to see a pair of only 350 or so in the world.

The second highlight was spotting a juvenile bald eagle soaring along the coast towards the ranch. We were at the top of the Torrey pines trail when the eagle was spotted. It was being harassed by a Red tailed hawk. As the eagle did its acrobatics to allude the hawk, we could see the mottled topside and what I thought looked like a head beginning to turn white. Also evident were the two blue wing tags indicative of a Northern island born eagle. Unfortunately I couldn’t read the tag numbers to get a positive ID on the bird.

Every day spent on the islands is a special day, but this one especially so.

Joel...

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.rain.org/pipermail/channel_islands_naturalist_corps/attachments/20120226/89f93c18/attachment.html>