Better Than SeaWorld

I have been having remarkable wildlife sightings recently. One day a couple of weekends ago it was seventy degrees out so my friends and I went down to Bastendorf Beach. We found a sea lion pup on the beach and thought he/she must be stranded. We kept our distance and one of the Marine Biology students with us called their professor. The professor suggested the pup’s mother had left it on the beach and gone in search of food. I was still worried because I thought the mother might have been scared off by the unusual number of people at the beach that day. So, I was glad to hear that when the Marine Bio student went back to the beach, the pup was gone, hopefully back in the ocean munching kelp with its mother.

The next day I was out at Cape Arago for an after-dinner hike and saw a group of California Condors soaring in the skies. On my way to Cape Arago that evening I saw a baby deer trotting along the side of the road.

Last Friday I sat down at a picnic table on the corner of the Charleston inner harbor on my way back from the post office. While sitting there enjoying the fresh air ::pop:: a shiny silver speckled harbor seal floated to the surface. Then ::pop:: ::pop:: two more harbor seals came to the surface farther across the channel. This continued until I had identified at least five individual harbor seals. All the while a seagull was staring at me, thinking I was the true spectacle at that moment.

Then there were the bunny rabbits in the Shore Acres forest, the muskrat on the Coquille River jetty, and the bald eagle flying over Simpson Reef.