{"id":7554,"date":"2010-06-13T01:35:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T09:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sparselysageandtimely.com\/blog\/?p=7554"},"modified":"2023-12-15T11:18:50","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T19:18:50","slug":"the-wildlife-around-my-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/?p=7554","title":{"rendered":"Wildlife around my cars on the Serengeti Plain of West Marin"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our willingness to do anything<\/strong> to get a photograph, we wildlife photographers, like paparazzi, sometimes seem to have no shame. If you’d seen me on my deck in my shorts Friday snapping pictures of a coyote, I’m sure you would agree.<\/p>\n

As it happened, I’d spent the afternoon using a Weed Wacker to cut back grass along both sides of my driveway, which is about a tenth of a mile long. Needing to wash up after the work, I had taken a shower and was just starting to get dressed when I looked out my bedroom window and spotted a large coyote in the field below.<\/p>\n

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Without pausing to pull on a shirt or trousers, I grabbed my camera and hurried outside as quietly as I could so as not to scare the critter away. By now, the coyote had crossed my field and was nosing around near my parked cars.<\/p>\n

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I wondered if it was sniffing around for this doe I’d spotted by my cars earlier<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The coyote stuck around long enough for me to take its picture before it disappeared into a clump of (appropriately enough) coyote brush. As soon as it did, I called my neighbor Jay Haas about the sighting, and from his vantage point, he managed to spot the coyote too.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A bobcat wanders around a car belonging to two guests<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what it is about my parking area<\/strong>, but it attracts wildlife as if it were a watering hole in the Serengeti Plain.<\/p>\n

I’ve been able to photograph both predators and prey hanging around my cars, coyotes and deer, bobcats and rabbits, as well as wild turkeys, great blue herons, and countless other birds.<\/p>\n

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A brush rabbit, also known as a cottontail<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Near the bottom of my driveway<\/strong> is the top of my neighbors Skip and Ren\u00e9e Shannon’s driveway, and they have their own ecosystem of squirrels, crows, hawks, and owls.<\/p>\n

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Fledgling great horned owl. Photo by Ren\u00e9e Shannon<\/em><\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9e, who is the business manager and ad director for The Point Reyes Light<\/em>, last month told me Skip had been outside when a young great-horned owl fluttered down from a pine tree and landed in the grass. Skip quickly called to Ren\u00e9e to get her camera, and she was able to photograph the bird before it managed to fly a short distance and land on a woodpile.<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9e then phoned ornithologist Jules Evens of Point Reyes Station, and he caught the fledging owl and took it with him to a Tomales Bay Watershed Council meeting in the National Seashore.<\/p>\n

Someone at the meeting was on her way to San Rafael, so I gave the owl box to her, and she delivered it to Wildcare (Patient #488), Jules told me later. “Apparently it had a fairly common blood bacterium [found] in owls and hawks.” The “prognosis,” he added, was “not good.”<\/p>\n

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Mystery skulls. Photo by Linda Petersen<\/em><\/p>\n

My story took an odd turn<\/strong> a week ago when Ren\u00e9es counterpart at The West Marin Citizen<\/em>, Linda Petersen of Point Reyes Station, discovered two animal skulls on the ground between her garbage cans and back fence. The immediate question was: what kind of animal?<\/p>\n

Linda checked skull photos online and decided they looked like pig skulls. I emailed photos of the skulls to Jules and to Chileno Valley rancher Mike Gale, and both agreed Linda was probably right. “They appear to be medium-size porkers,” Mike wrote back.<\/p>\n

That, however, doesn’t explain how the skulls ended up on the ground between Linda’s garbage cans and back fence. Did someone hold a luau and chuck pig heads over her fence? “Pretty rude of someone to toss them into her yard, eh?’ Jules mused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our willingness to do anything to get a photograph, we wildlife photographers, like paparazzi, sometimes seem to have no shame. If you’d seen me on my deck in my shorts Friday snapping pictures of a coyote, I’m sure you would agree. As it happened, I’d spent the afternoon using a Weed Wacker to cut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,19,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-the-point-reyes-light-newspaper","category-west-marin-citizen","category-west-marin-nature","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7554"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40124,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions\/40124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sparselysageandtimely.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}