Pupping Season at Pt Reyes National Seashore

 

One of my favorite things to do at the end of December, beginning of January is to visit Pt Reyes National seashore I'll be heading back down again soon, but these photos were taken about two weeks ago on a trip with my daughter.  

Go ahead and see it full size, if you want to see the new pup in the photo.  Unfortunately, they were pretty far off when I took this photo from the Elephant Seal Overlook trail (off Chimney Rock Rd).  

I didn't even see the pup until I went through the photos much later.

Some of the better seal photos were taken from Drake's Beach.  

For the most part, there are younger seals on Drake's Beach, and a lot of young males who just aren't ready to be beachmasters yet.

However, this year it seemed a little different.  Last week we had planned on a trip down to Drake's Beach, because we had heard there were pups on the beach, however, we found that Drakes Beach Rd was closed by the park, something they generally do when there are seals in the parking lot.  So I'm not sure if the pups were too close to the parking lot, or the seals had come up off the beach into the parking lot again, but the long and short of it was we ended up canceling that particular trip, and I'm hoping to go back again maybe next week.

One of the things I like best about Point Reyes is the tremendous amount and diversity of wildlife.  There are often tule elk and mule deer by the roads, and a number of birds, including quite a few raptors. On this trip we were also surprised to see a couple coyote out in the middle of the day.

I think for me the most fun sighting was coming back from the Elephant Seal Overlook heading toward the dock (which is closed). From a distance, I saw this:

and if you look very carefully, you can see a very light strip that looked shiny in the sun on the top left edge of that first rock, which I immediately identified as a harbor seal. 

a closer look:

and at this point you can also make out more seals on that same rock.

For me it's always fun to be able to spot and I.D. something from a great distance. I am, however, totally hopeless when it comes to IDing birds, except for a very few I know very well from my seabird monitoring training, and from my experience growing up in the northeast, which has been pretty useless here except for Redwing Blackbirds.