It’s that
time again
The two young bucks were in peak condition, with glossy coats
and modest racks of antlers.
As we stood in the parking lot outside of the Pinnacles
Campground store on Saturday, they were just across the road,
almost certainly unaware of our presence.
It’s that
time again
The two young bucks were in peak condition, with glossy coats and modest racks of antlers.
As we stood in the parking lot outside of the Pinnacles Campground store on Saturday, they were just across the road, almost certainly unaware of our presence.
The two sparred, locking antlers and pushing one another back and forth in a battle that appeared to us to be a draw.
Suddenly, one of the bucks broke it off and left the scene. The reward for the victor would be the opportunity to spread a little DNA around – in a word, sex.
This time of year deer are distracted. In the weeks after hunting season closes, breeding begins and the deer are focused on breeding with an intensity that can scarcely be imagined.
But it’s a good reminder for all of us that, distilled to its essence, the essential mission in life is to propagate life.
That’s not to trivialize all the personal and career accomplishments we look back upon, but the point of living is to live and the way to do that is to reproduce. Everything else is just details.
We were at Pinnacles as part of last weekend’s Monterey Bay Birding Festival, an annual celebration of our region’s wildlife that attracts people from across the nation.
The deer were an arresting diversion, but as the name of the festival indicates, the focus was birds. We left Watsonville in full darkness at 6:30 Saturday morning, regrouping in San Juan Bautista. Our first birding stop was Paicines Reservoir. While we huddled under a soggy sky, a bald eagle flew past, scattering the waterfowl in front of us.
The reservoir, located just off Hwy. 25 at Paicines, is one of the region’s most engaging spots to watch wildlife. A generous pullout offers ready parking, but in wet weather, caution is in order. The site is home to the stickiest, most slippery mire I know of.
As we entered Pinnacles, the weather began to moderate. A flock of wild turkeys browsed near the road. More than 100 California quail were gathered around the wild buckwheat across from the campground store.
Linda Regan, who lives nearby, was staffing the park’s entrance kiosk. She told us that a California condor was napping in a tree nearby. Out came scopes and binoculars and we shared long looks at a wet, miserable looking specimen of one of the rarest species alive today. Later, we’d watch as two more soared overhead with seeming effortlessness.
As familiar as Pinnacles is to local residents, it always reveals something new. Near the end of the day, we heard the distinctive call of a red-tailed hawk near the trail. Looking for its source, a Stellar’s jay produced the call again. Then another jay replied in kind. A whole flock of jays had learned to duplicate the hawk’s call with uncanny realism, and they seemed to enjoy playing the joke on other birds and people alike.
At the reservoir at Pinnacles, we eyed red-legged frogs that eyed us back through their bulging, golden eyes.
At the end of the day, none of us had collected anything more than a bit of sunburn (Except me. Thanks to a low ceiling in a cave, I’m wearing a scab on my head.)
But long after my head has healed and the sunburn faded, we’ll all carry something more from the day. The memories of a vivid landscape filled with wildlife, the feeling of warm rain and the companionship are souvenirs worth treasuring.
