A fine day for rattlesnakes, Brett declared. It was warm and overcast. The first one, I straddled with the truck on the road on the Carrizo Plain. Lucky snake, I missed its stretched-out body. As Laura’s first rattler ever, it couldn’t have been a prettier snake. In dominant light yellow trim, this one was most unusual. Laura was so excited about the encounter as she video taped everything from a safe distance. We declared her ruined since any further encounter was sure to be anti-climatic.
It was a good week for snakes. A black rattler turned up on a neighborhood trail hike. A whipsnake (worth googling this guy: enature.com/flashcard/show_flash_card.asp?record Number=AR0104) slithered through my kid hike a few days earlier. This is a very beautiful, slick looking reptile. For its rapid and erratic movements, whipsnake seems a suitable moniker. I was very glad this is a non-lethal snake due to its close proximity with my young charges.
Later on the day of the yellow rattler, we spotted two more on the road. A good day indeed. I must keep in mind that not everyone enjoys meeting up with legless critters, especially the venomous variety. Better to read about than to encounter, I suppose.
At the only grove of trees for many miles we were fortunate to meet a birder who had spotted a baby great horned owl and one of its adult parents high in a eucalypt tree. The parent slept upright on a nearby limb while the one baby we could see was active and awake in a large nest. The fuzzy owlet stared right down the barrel of our spotting scope. Contact with those two straight-ahead eyes felt like encountering a wise being without doubt. Another case of anthropormorphism! From the vice-grip talons of the adult to the super soft gray feathers of the baby owl we observed a very wide range of owl characteristics.
Many other birds flitted about in the grove and throughout the camp ground about it. Male bulock orioles fell from limb to limb atumble in a seasonal chase that was all flash and fury. Fire-orange plumage of the males is an liquid, iridescent mimic of the setting sun. Says phoebes reigned over an age-browned shed, the only remnant of an old ranch. Brighter than usual pink-fuchsia house finches sat above a carpet of yellow gold field flowers in a wild clash of colors. More bird species and individuals made our heads turn to keep up with the action.
Cottonwood Canyon was an unplanned side trip we made before arriving at New Cuyama. Yellow outlines on the hills were aglow in the mid-day sun as though a giant crayon had run once over the ridges. Coreopsis and not the expected mustard colored the hills for miles. Pink owls clover covered the near ground in other areas and we spotted a single white blossom of the same species. Over the two days I saw many species new to me, fire poppies, thistle sages, cream cups and cream puffs. Blue lupines punctuated the bright yellow coreopsis on a hillside above the road.
This is the trip from Hell for those with mall-crawl fever. There was one store. We bought food there and four bandannas. One orange, one yellow and two green; a fashion statement. Our two-day outing to the Carrizo Plain was a shopping spree of the naturalist kind. We shopped for wildflowers. We shopped for birds, and we shopped for reptiles and insects. Red-backed beatles the size of quarters flew buzzing loudly at head height everywhere we turned. Who knows what species they are. We looked at the San Andreas fault line where it slammed up the Temblor Mountains on the northeast edge of the plain. Water courses from arroyos veered north with the Pacific Plate as it slides by the North American. A sharp escarpment marks a sudden change of height between plates leaving a brown earth scar. The soda lakes in their dryness blew up their own wind devils spouting waterless white plumes of salt. We were rewarded in every regard with the extra bonus of good fellow travelers. So often we have traveled and not felt compelled or ready to stop and appreciate. It’s a fine thing to do so now.
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