Category: Ecotourism
-
Rich Stallcup died December 15, 2012. He was a kind, wonderful guy and a brilliant naturalist. Once he told me a story about a bristle-thighed curlew, and the people who admired it. Before the story I want to say what a freakily great bird the bristle-thighed curlew is. First, the bristle thighed curlew (Numenius…
-
On the whale-watching trip in Monterey Bay we were lucky enough to see not only humpback whales but also blue whales – the largest animal that has ever lived. The humpbacks and the blues both had calves with them. We had the happiness of seeing that these species were reproducing, and of glimpsing (barely) their…
-
Pier 39 on the San Francisco waterfront is an open mall, with music, performers, a merry-go-round, people who will do a caricature of you-with-an-enormous-head, and stores for the left-handed or sock-mad. There's an aquarium and a marina. You can catch a ferry. The pier was originally for commercial shipping. Then it was redeveloped as a…
-
Ten thirty at night, driving through Oakland's Chinatown, we glimpsed a large bird perched on a sign. We went around the block and there was a black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) on the LEFT TURN ONLY sign, two more on a jewelry store awning, and another on a pho restaurant awning. We knew that night…
-
Yesterday we went to see salmon spawning and of course it ended in a fight in a bar. We went to Lagunitas, California, to the lovely Leo Cogan Fish Viewing Area, and eventually saw a large female coho on her redd, redd being the word for the nest area she excavates in the gravel, where…
-
Doug Bertran, a filmmaker who made Orca Killing School, told a story after the showing at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City. This is the film about which the program cautions, “Warning: violent animal scenes.” He was at Peninsula Valdez, Argentina, filming some orcas who've perfected a trick of lurking offshore at…
-
Long long ago, people brought dingoes to Fraser Island, a big sand island off eastern Australia. The dingoes went wild and self-supporting. Nowadays, dingoes in most of Australia have had the chance to breed with more recently imported dogs. (Don't get silly. I do not speak of the dingopoo, the cockadingo, the dreaded dingohuahua.) The…
-
It's hard work being high on the food chain, and predators are always looking for labor-saving ways to catch prey. In national parks in Kenya, the lions have not only gotten blasé about trucks full of ecotourists, they've started to use them as cover. They'll sneak around behind a vehicle and then rush out to…
Site Title 