Canuck2

Tied for first again now. :yes:

ttt - Let's kick some serious rear end, gang.

It's a seesaw battle, folks. Zip in there and give Mike another surge.:yes:

Been voting regular - in fact, regular enough that it often tells me it already counted my vote. Go Mike!

Awesome day, Steve! Happy birthday to you. With regard to your stated age, here's a reminder that you're supposed to be getting ready for archery in the provincial Senior's Games this year - especially since it will be held in your community. Then next year you need to be ready again, since it will be in my neck of the woods.

That's a bummer, Mike. It would be nice if all this modern technology could actually be useful. I hope the next round is more successful. When I had my shoulders done, I actually fell asleep in the chamber. Well, you know how you sometimes jerk just when getting into a good sleep? I did that and ruined the whole thing. Had to start over.

Very neat; moose have to be one of the most enjoyable animals to see.

Retired high school teacher (Math & Earth Sciences) and geologist.

Wow, declared a winner with 26% of the vote. I feel like a Canadian politician. Congratulations to all who got to participate in this; there were many very fine deer and some excellent photographs. A big thanks also to Jeff, who donated a great deal of his time to make it all happen. RangerClay, nobody gets any credit; the camera did it all by itself. I pack this little tripod along with me and every once in awhile it comes in handy. This is the whole ball of wax right here.

Gorgeous sunrise, buckee, but you know what a red sky in the morning means - especially on Van Island. Cool bear den, too, plus you're 8 sheds ahead of me.

Having stayed at Palm Springs for a month, we stuffed all our gear and new purchases in the car and headed home. We spread the traveling over 8 days, so we managed to hit many points of interest. Some I've already shown in prior posts. Oh ya, there are palm trees in the vicinity of Palm Springs. These are appropriately named California fan palms. The natural ones (as opposed to those planted) sometimes grow in clusters at rare water sites - oases. Often the water comes to surface along fault planes, like the San Andreas, and at certain places there can even be sizable ponds. A single frond. Heading home up the coast, we found the redwoods pretty impressive. The surf was also impressive. There was a variety of cool lighthouses. And the occasional surf fisherman with results that surprised me; this guy caught several barred perch as we watched. . It was a great trip. Now it's back to the real world with all kinds of honey-do's that piled up while we were gone staring me in the face. But worth it.

Really great video, Steve. As disgusting as those critters can be, not to mention how they can impact a salmon population, they are really intriguing. Multiply by a factor of 10 and you have the cacaphony of a elephant seal colony.:wacko: And give poor Shaun a break - he doesn't even know what an icon Orr is. Born way after Bobby was finished playing.

lmbo! - That's one of the best I've seen on here, ever.

I guess it was no great surprise that there were far fewer large mammals hanging out in the desert than I'm used to seeing around home. In fact, the biggest animal I saw in 4 weeks was a single coyote. Only when we headed home up the coast did we begin to spot more and bigger life forms - some of them very intriguing. Nonetheless, the smaller life forms in southern CA were equally interesting. Beep Beep! This bird was making a bit of a fuss in a palm tree; in fact, it almost seemed to be mocking me. I wonder what kind it was? At a coastal town in southern California, Pismo Beach, there is a monarch butterfly wintering grove. They form clusters of several hundred in the trees and are an amazing sight. However, we missed the concentrations by about 2 weeks as the vast majority had finished their overwintering and had lit a shuck. The few stragglers were still pretty neat to watch. The wildlife highlight of the whole trip was a mess of elephant seals hanging out on a beach near the Hearst Castle about half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. These things are huge, ugly, noisy, stinky, and extremely intriguing. They are so cumbersome on land that when a subordinate bull gets too close to a bigger bulls' harem, the big guy will put the run on him - about 4 steps at a time. Then there's a lengthy resting period before another dash of 4 paces. Mostly they lie around like huge boulders littering the beach as far as you can see and honking at the top of their lungs. This was breeding season, which is also done by expending as little energy as possible. Finally, in southern Oregon, a blacktail deer.

Didn't see this until just now. What a nice picture, although I must say I'm not surprised to see it's one of yours, Mike.

What nice light conditions, and you did a great job of taking advantage of them. I especially like the farm house.

Thanks for your kind comments, folks. I'll get to some actual wildlife soon, honest.

We found that one of the most interesting sites near Palm Springs was Joshua Tree National Park, which exhibits a wonderful variety of rock formations and vegetation. Here's a single Joshua tree, which is apparently really a member of the yucca family: A forest: An erosional feature - the granitic rock has weathered along joints and left this round 'rock' perched pretty much in its original position: Another neat formation, aptly named skull rock: One road in Joshua Tree Park takes you to a high ridge where (on a clear day) you get a great view of the Coachella Valley, the valley where Palm Springs and surrounding communities are situated. On this day, the weather was particularly foul with high winds, rain, and cold.

Up north here, we're used to fir, spruce, birch, & poplar trees and such. So we find the foliage in southern - especially desert type - climates especially interesting. Such as: This is a particularly nasty cactus (aren't they all?) called cholla. When these die, they leave a honey-combed woody trunk which is what tourists pick up and take home to decorate their flower gardens with. A veritable wall of cholla. In some areas, there are quite a few barrel cactus/cacti. When these croak, the fleshy part just disintegrates and a tangle of radial, multi-spiked thorn clusters are left. I gathered a couple and they poked holes in my backpack, so I let them go. Then there's this scraggly looking thing called Ocotillo. Typically the plant is 8 or so feet tall. However, the ocotillo blooms are quite nice. They were just beginning to show while we were there. Finally, not a cactus, but the yucca plants were cool. This is left over from last year and is way bigger than any I've seen before, another 8 foot plant. .

lol Mike. I just noticed - as I chat with Abe, I'm wearing my Muzzy hat that I got at Steve B's.

Wow, is that ever neat. I've come across honey bee hives inside trees but have never seen one in the open like that. Way cool.

For most of the past 2 months, my wife and I have been wintering in the Palm Springs area, Desert Hot Springs to be precise. Interesting year - there was unprecedented cold and rain there while southern British Columbia experienced one of the mildest winters on record. Kind of picked the wrong year to go away...not really, as we had a great time regardless. So we took a brazillian photographs, a few of which I'll post in several threads over the next little while. These first few are around Palm Springs itself. Early in the trip, the rains came in torrents. Many of the streets were like rivers and some were closed due to flooding and debris flows. After the storms, when the Sun reappeared, the flanking mountains showed snow about 2/3 of the way down. Here's part of the fairway and green on one hole of the golf course where we stayed. The ducks pretty much say it all. There are many interesting art shops and such to cruise in Palm Springs. Outside one of them, I had a discussion with this distinguished gentleman, who was rather unresponsive to what I had to say. This is in the Palm Springs Museum and is a painting by a name we all know - Remington. He painted it in the late 1800's. Wind power is becoming more and more prominent wherever you go anymore. The wind farms around Palm Springs are apparently made up of around 3000 windmills in all.

Just about as soon as I posted this, I realized it should be in the photography section. So that's where I'll put this and several more threads of the recent Palm Springs trip over the next few days.

Got my votes in the other day; some very nice deer taken.

Oops, wrong place