Comments on the photos below

Doing a quick search in Flckr on "Sea Ridge" to find our photos, I discoverd this photo set by Snake Oil.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36484036@N00/sets/72157600195463962/show/

Nice photos of the Point Reyes area! The building is our cottage. I particularly like his photo of deer in Divide Meadow since it seems to include all the local species. (see below)

Also, he has some nice pictures of Shell Beach at low tide. Shell Beach is just a hike down the hill from Sea Ridge.

Note that you can click the photo to get to Snake Oil's images and then choose the little zoom / all sizes link to get a much enlarged view of the photo. This, for example, makes the deer easier to identify.

Shell Beach #1

Shell Beach #1
Originally uploaded by snake oil.

at low tide

Divide Meadow

Divide Meadow
Originally uploaded by snake oil.

It looks like all three species of Pt Reyes deer are here. The native Black Tails and exotics Fallow and Axis deer.

Kayaks and Quail

More when I get photos from our housemates camera but here's the sight that greeted us one morning...about 40 quail working their way accross the yard...

Okay, well, maybe you had to be there. Those brown lumps are quail, honest.

And here's my son and I in a very interesting kayak designed and built by our friend Sebastian von Nagel:

Elk and Rhodies from June Solstice, nearly.

It has been an very hectic last 30 days and I'm just now getting around to posting pictures from June.

An acquaintance from my son's school told me his best Pt Reyes hike was in the elk perserve on the solstice. Mother elk hide away very tiny babies but when they reach a certain size they rejoin the herd and frolic near sundown. This we had to check out even though we were a week of so early.

Alas, we saw only a few baby elk. Perhaps 'rejoin' is the wrong term above: one tiny one we spotted quickly disappeared into the grass not to be seen again. Perhaps the younger ones are simply hidden away with the herd most of the time. At any rate, sundown does seem to be a good time to see elk. Repeated visits indicate that the herds pick that time to move en masse from place to place...or less traffic means they're willing to move near the road. The youngster pictured above is pretty good sized. We weren't quick enough to get a photo of the tiny one.

Here's another shot from late afternoon the day before.


Meanwhile back at the ranch:

> the Rhododendrons are in full bloom;



> and much of the rest of the garden is blooming, too, for example;



> and, finally, we have new balconies large enough now for deck chairs.

From May 26: Lupin, Rhodies, and the Red Necked Phalarope

Spring is definitely here with alternating fog and sun, nesting birds, and blooming wildflowers. Here are pictures from the property. First some native foxgloves blooming at one end of the garden as they are throughout the meadows of Point Reyes.

The roses are also in full gear. Nice as they are, they pale compared to the grove of Rhodie that wraps around the house and spills down the hillside past the pond to the treehouse. Here are a scattering of photos that capture some of them.

Here you see the house through the Rhodies. Below are more photos from taken along the path that winds through them.

We hiked the short but interesting Woodpecker Trail (off the end of the Bear Valley parking lot), and Pierce Point looking for baby elk. We didn't see any but did see a weasel scouting down the hillside a mile or so along the Pierce Point Trail. Our favorite was the Abbott's Lagoon hike due to the large number of bird species. We were welcomed to the lagoon by this little guy. The salt marsh looked particularly colorful against a semi-gray background.

Home and hike

At the homestead the daffodils and lilacs have faded but the wysteria is still going strong and the rhoddies are just really beginning. Here is one of the first plants to go into full bloom with a second pink one starting up behind.

We took a hike to Abbotts Lagoon and saw Eared Grebes looking quite spectacular. The next day we went up from the Bear Valley Trail to Mt Wittenberg. All the new green vegetation is quite gorgeous. We saw some Axis Deer right at the top and on the way down these Turkey Vultures sunning (or cooling) perched with wings spread in the pines along the meadow on the Meadow Trail which we took back down. My camera doesn't really zoom much so you'll probably have to squint a bit.



Here's a photo of the Grebe (stolen off the internet, alas) that is almost precisely what we observed.