I like to get up “early” on the first day of standard time. It’s always nice to get out to the Carrizo Plain before the crowds start to show up, not that it’s ever very crowded outside of the springtime blooming season. This particular Sunday morning saw a very foggy drive on the approach, so I was worried the whole trip would be gloomed out, but the cloud cover started to lift once I started descending toward Soda Lake.
After a pit stop at the overlook, I continued south down the main drag, Soda Lake Road. Right as I approached the intersection with Simmler Road, I saw the largest herd of Tule Elk I’ve ever seen here. (Full disclosure: this is probably only the third or fourth herd of elk I’ve encountered here so far.) It was in the middle distance, with gorgeous yelllow grasses in the foreground and the mist-and-fog-shrouded Temblor Mountains in the background, so I had to stop and take a few shots.
Tule Elk are neat and all, but the real attraction for me out here on the plain is the possibility of raptors. Birds of prey love open grasslands, and the Carrizo Plain is the largest remaining native grassland in the state. I’ve been coming here several times a year now, and I’ve found a bird here, and a bird there. But this Sunday, I found a few birds that I’d been missing: Golden Eagle (seen in my youth back on Lake Cachuma), Prairie Falcon (seen here but not well photographed before), and a life bird for me, Ferruginous Hawk, along with the almost-never-missed Red-tailed Hawk and Northern Harrier:
This was my first time seeing a Ferruginous Hawk, and I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t another winter visitor to the plain, rough-legged hawk, until I got home and was able to see the images on the computer monitor. The dark morph of the Ferruginous Hawk is considerably less common than the light, and the two birds are quite similar when seen from far away: mostly dark bird with conspicuous white on the trailing edge of the underwing. The Ferruginous, though, has a little bit of a white “wrist” inside the dark part of the wing that Rough-legged lacks.
I like to explore on the way home, so today I took Pozo Road from Highway 58. I was expecting it to take me to, you know, the town of Pozo. Turns out it doesn’t, or at least not the way I went. I zigged onto Red Hill Road when I should have zagged to remain on E Pozo Road, so I wound up backroading through the Pozo-La Panza off-highway vehicle area, passing by a couple of campgrounds in the Los Padres National Forest (La Panza and Navajo Flat) before eventually finding a sign pointing me back to Highway 58. If I’d taken a left where it seemed much more likely to go right, I’d have made it to Pozo, looks like:
