Today, which will be yesterday by the time I post this, I decided to spend a day at the beach. It has been over a week since I have chosen to do that, well....because that’s what I felt like doing today. I went prepared with all those things that make it the most enjoyable and it appears that my camera has become part of my requisite beach toys.
This first pic is the beach of which I speak. At the present time and for the past month I have been the only one here to enjoy this incredible place. My trailer is only 150 yds from what you see here so it takes little effort to get there. You can see my yellow kayak at the point where the reef starts out to the right.
While reading yet another book I saw further down the beach a rather large bird and thought it might be a Great Blue Heron. Now I have seen many of them before but I have never been in a position to photograph one with a telephoto lens so I began walking slowly down the beach towards it. I could soon tell that I was mistaken and it was a California Brown Pelican. The thing is it was really large even for a pelican and I was curious so I kept approaching it. As I got near enough I could see that yes, it was an old, quite large pelican so I took these shots. Check out the wingspan in the second pic. I would estimate the span to be at least 5 ft, maybe 6.
The second two shots are of a butterfly that I can only tentatively identify as a Mimosa Yellow. I first saw this one and then realized there were dozens of them flitting all around me and as far as I could see up and down the beach. Once again the incredible evolutionary gift of sexual mating was taking place like a beautiful yellow ripple in space-time, increasing the variety of the gene pool and insuring the survival of the species....and to a very real degree you and I too.
As I continued back to the beach palapa I saw ahead of me this perfectly colored and structured sea gull. I have seen these before of course but again I now had a camera that could do justice to its beauty. The gulls down here don’t eat human trash; they are instead in perfect accord with a natural food chain that is sustained as much by them as for them. They are therefore very healthy. This happens to be a Yellow Footed Gull, closely related to the Western Gull found in The States.
The last pic is of yet another Sandpiper (?) but I am having a terrible time identifying it. I don’t think it is the same as the ones I saw the other day but I am not sure. I realized today that I have a very dear friend, Dolores Toivonen, who is a bird person and might help me with the identification. I will send her the pics and report back.
For those of you reading these posts I wish you all well and I hope my “critters” bring to you what they do to me...a profound delight and awe of this planets manifold expressions of the Life Force.
Namaste
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