Back to the Santa Rosa Plateau

On Saturday, Libby and I made our way back to one of our favorite places: the Santa Rosa Plateau. Situated on the Eastern part of the Santa Ana Mountains, the plateau is a unique preservation of grassland prairie and oak land. Libby and I love the beautiful rolling green hills, and so made a point to return there this Spring after the recent March rains.



We took our binoculars (of course), and saw a lot of birds, but nothing new or out of the ordinary. There were a lot of raptors: we saw kestrels, Red tailed hawks, vultures and white tailed kites in abundance. We also saw a robin, spotted and California towhees, juncos, house and lesser gold finches, a house wren, lots of yellow rumped warblers, lots and lots of western meadowlarks (this is the best place in So Cal that we know of to see meadowlarks), and some savannah sparrows. I was a little surprised at the paucity of sparrows, but what's there is there. And of course, we can't see everything there is to see.

In some of the oaks that you can see in this picture was a group of three deer. Binoculars came in handy for seeing mammals, too. We saw three deer, some rabits and ground squirrels and eight (8) coyotes. I've never seen so many coyotes in one day before. We saw five of them together near the end of the day, hiding in grass near the plateau's famous vernal pools.




The grass wasn't as long as it was last year: last year you couldn't really see the remains of last year's grass like you could this spring. I missed the waves of grass blowing in the wind, but it was still refreshingly beautiful and lonely out on the trails.



This was a strange old bus stop that we found in the middle of the preserve. Maybe it isn't a bus stop, but Libby gave waiting for the bus a go.



This looks like a skink. We found two of these lizards on the trail, and I can't find a picture of them anywhere else on the internet. If anybody knows what it is, let me know. We also saw several other species of lizards (including Southern Sagebrush Lizards, a big black beaut on a fence post, Coastal Western Whiptale, and one Coast Patchnose Snake). I found these species listed at http://ecoregion.ucr.edu/full.asp?sp_num=22. To see them, you can do a Google Image Search.

In all, we had a great day!