Category: conservation ftw
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An Afternoon at Birch Aquarium
A couple of days ago I visited the Birch Aquarium with a friend. It was a very nice little aquarium with a focus on local (southern Californian) sealife. I learned a lot about local fish and a bit more about the tide pools (that I still need to re-visit). My favorite exhibits were of the octopus…
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Southwestern Wildlife Spotting: Volume 1
The following are some accounts of wildlife I’ve seen since moving to California. This isn’t an exhaustive list, mostly just of those animals I’ve photographed, but there are a few I’ve ID’ed with no photo (which makes me sad… but still happy I saw them). Not all of the photos are fantastic, but they “work”…
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California Whale Watching: Gray whales, dolphins and sea lions
Last Thursday, J and I went whale watching off the coast, past Point Loma. It’s migration season for gray whales, coming up from Baja California and going back to Alaska and that region for the summer months. I’ve never seen gray whales, plus it was a chance to take a boat ride through the harbor…
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Painted Rock Petroglyphs
This will be a short post. On the way back from Casa Grande we made a short detour to a places called Painted Rock Petroglyphs, in the Painted Rock mountains. The glyphs are from a wide age range, some ancient, some from a few hundred years ago and some from the 19th century. They are on…
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Well, I SAID I wanted to see the Sonoran Desert.
So here’s the thing. I’ve been trying to go to as many national parks (or historic sites, as the case may be) this year as possible. I’m excited about my passport stampbook (as I’ve previously posted) and especially since we now live in the half of the country with all of the huge natural areas,…
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Seals and Sea Lions and Pelicans, oh my!
At the end of February, J and I went to the northern part of San Diego (to La Jolla) in search of the famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) seals. It wasn’t exactly hard to find them. La Jolla has a lot to offer in the way of shopping and dining, and beautiful…
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Catching up on February, plus WHALE BABY.
I’m currently uploading a ton of photos, first to an album of random things from February that I never got around to uploading. The last month has been hectic, between finishing the unpacking process, J coming home from deployment, and then heading out to explore southern California (and Arizona!) together. J’s mom visited in mid-February…
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Baby Panda. That is all.
Okay, so as a reward for (finally) having a functional (and neatly organized) closet again, I got myself up earlyish today and went to the San Diego Zoo during the morning BABY PANDA viewing. I’ll just leave this here… I would say that I could just quit the internet for today… but I really ought…
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Thoughts on Chimpanzee (the movie, not the animal)
As this weekend was Earth Day, it was also the opening weekend for the new Disneynature movie, Chimpanzee. And as I have every year, I went with a group from the zoo to go see it. It’s always interesting to go see an animal movie w/ zoo people because we see things with that perspective. So…
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Life Lessons from the Zoo
I realized today that I have learned several important Life Lessons from my time spent at various zoo and animal-related places. Here are some of them. Easy humor is not the same as smart humor and usually not clever or original. Put some thought into it. (Just today I got the oh-so-clever line, “And what…
Joanna Volavka 