I feel like I am cheating posting another photo of a Brown Pelican, especially that my dedicated Brown Pelican posting was only a month away. But I am a bit overwhelmed, and my anticipated posting on the Klamath River Yoruk tribe commercial fishery will have to wait till next week. To tie the post together, here’s a photo of an osprey looking for fish.

During my move to northern California a few months back, I stopped by the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, Oregon. It is one of my favorite public aquariums by far, although I haven’t made it to the Monterey Bay Aquarium yet, and I hear it’s quite nice. It was a January morning with very few visitors, so I had the aquarium mostly to myself.

A large display with Sea nettles captivated me. It was very meditative watching slow-moving jellyfish in a dimly-lit room. For these shots, I post-edited the images, desaturating the deep-blue color of illuminated water, emphasizing shapes and colors of the jellyfish.

It’s hard to miss these peculiar brown birds gliding, in small groups, above braking waves of the ocean edge, disappearing into the fog. The Brown Pelican is the smallest of the 8 species of Pelecanus. It’s mesmerizing to watch them glide 30 feet above the surface looking for aggregations of small fish, bomb-diving for them, once spotted, head straight down, wings half-stretched, often disappearing completely under the surface.

I’ve noticed that a feeding pelican is often accompanied by a single sea gull that follows the pelican around, landing a foot away when the pelican emerges with its mouth full of fish, the gull hoping for the spills. Just like the best place to see the Bald Eagles in Alaska is around municipal dumps, a good place to watch pelicans in coastal California is around newly-returned charter boats filleting fish and throwing guts overboard.

I’ve been spotting California sea lion and harbor seal pups lately around beaches from Fields Landing to Crescent City, California. As adorable as they look, it’s not a good sign that they mingle so closely with people. Being so young, they are very trustworthy and the Crescent City-based Marine Mammal Rescue Center has been busy capturing and rehabilitating them. Last week, I almost tripped over a sleeping harbor seal pup on a beach in Trinidad. He was so out of it, sleeping in the sun on warm sand that if I didn’t look down at the last moment, I would’ve stepped on him. As a California Fish and Game employee, I have no enforcement or jurisdiction over any people – marine mammal interactions, but have found it effective to use my badge to keep tourists from cutting the pups’ access to water and preventing people from touching (!) them.

As I was driving along Highway 101 to my new temporary home town of Arcata, California, I stopped overnight in a charming fishing town of Newport, Oregon. Besides great CouchSuring hosts, another highlight of Newport was the Oregon Coast Aquarium, with their Passages of the Deep and the Sea Bird Aviary. Even though it was January, and the birds weren’t in their bright mating outfits, it was still very enjoyable to watch and photograph their frolics.

The very top photo is of the Common Murre or Common Guillemot in its winter plumage. According to Wikipedia, “It has a circumpolar distribution, occurring in low-Arctic and Boreal waters in the North-Atlantic and North Pacific. It spends most of its time at sea, only coming to land to breed on rocky cliff shores or islands”. The photo just above is of a Black Oystercatcher. Again, from Wikipedia: It is “found on the shoreline of western North America. It ranges from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to the coast of the Baja California peninsula”.

The last photo is of the Tufted Puffin, albeit in its winter plumage, which would account for the lack of white ear “tufts” and the chalk-white face.

One of the largest mammals of North America are a mere half-hour drive from Arcata, northern California. Roosevelt Elk (Cervus canadensis roosevelti), the largest sub-species of elk, can often be spotted between Humboldt Lagoons and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Parks. In fact, after the Redwoods, they are the easiest to spot drive-by attraction here, spending most of their time grazing in open pastures or resting on creek banks.

In early spring, the cows are busy giving birth and tending to their calves, which are spotted, as is common among deer species. The bulls, which stay in groups separate from cows and calves, begin to regrow antlers that they shed the winter before. Towards late summer, the bulls will have grown their full sets of antlers for the rut, the mating season,  when males challenge each other for females, and to protect their newly-founded harems. Males, females, and calves will also grow thicker winter coats and neck manes for the winter.

So for now, I am just getting the stock shots of the elk and looking for the more interesting mother-calf interactions. It will be a wait of 4 months or so until large male bulls, with full antlers and manes, will begin challenging their opponents. I have found one spot where cows give birth and hide the new-borns. I am still figuring out how close I can safely approach them on foot without harassing them (i.e., having them charge me). I carry my red can of slightly-used (Alaska!) bear spray with me, just in case, hanging on the waist belt next to the lenses. With bears it was easy – what Alaskan hasn’t petted or held or posed for pictures with a black bear cub, while his mom was busy eating salmon berries or fishing for salmon in a nearby creek. But, if I got too close to a calf, would his mom try to trample me with her head up and eyes open, thus being susceptible to the spray? Or, would a 900-pound bull, with tiny velveted antlers try to charge me with head down and eyes closed, thus preventing any capsaicin (“and related capsaicinoids) reaching his lungs and eyes in time? Do they bluff-charge? Can I use a stick as a rapier (and will I remember anything from my childhood’s two years of fencing)?

And to make things more interesting, according to Wikipedia, In California, the container holding the defense spray must be less than 2.5 oz. Mine is 8.1, minus what I accidentally sprayed myself with, while quietly crawling close to brown bears fishing for sockeye salmon on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska last summer. But that’s another story.

The sun was lazily rising up, trying to break though a grey cloud cover. I got to one of their hang-out locations where a number of younger ravens were making a commotion on the ground. Perfect! Standing across the street, I pulled out my camera. As if a gun went off, the ravens scattered in an instance. Some flew up into tree branches and on building roofs, just far enough to become black dots in the viewfinder. I patiently waited for them to resume their business, remaining motionless as far as the chilly weather allowed, but to no avail. The birds curiously looked down on me, from the heights of their perches, vocalizing and changing positions, but remaining unreachable by my lens.

After an hour of trying, I went for a cup of mocha and a muffin at the Valentine’s cafe. Their cranberry muffins looked especially good, so I bought a second one in case the ravens would share my taste in pastries. For $2.50 a muffin, one muffin was all they were getting. When I threw pieces of it on the ground, a black cloud of ravens descended  at once. It worked! I was about to raise my camera, when the black cloud was overcome and displaced by a molted-white cloud of gulls. The gulls swallowed every single piece of the muffin at once, and proceeded to leave me without a doubt that they wanted more. They were very demanding, following me at an arms-reach, like a flock of ducklets. The ravens flew back to their perches and silently watched from above.

The next day, I went to a local supermarket and bought several one-dollar muffins. The gulls weren’t there, so I threw pieces of muffins on the ground. A couple of ravens made a low-flying pass over the muffins but decided against landing. The rest of them remained motionless on trees and roofs. Apparently, a generic breed of muffins from a local grocery store was not up to their standard. Only when I hid around the corner of a building did they land for a tasting, and at my first appearance quickly scattered, refusing to land again, no matter how far I walked away. I was against a worthy opponent!

***

It’s been several weeks and many a number of tries to get interesting, captivating photos of the raven. I am slowly figuring out how to get their photos with my shorter telephoto, but for one, I have just received a new telephoto lens – 160 to 640mm (35-mm equivalent). That should certainly help me get shots of the older birds, who are too cautious to come close. And I’ve learned a few tricks that help me get the shot I want – it seems, for the most part, being mostly about hiding my camera while taking photos.

I will be adding more photos of ravens to the  album Tame and Wild over the next several weeks.