Here come the exclamation marks!! SO, you may remember from my posts a couple of weeks ago that when I went to Mori Point I was “practicing” with my 24-105mm lens, because I wasn’t expecting to see any wildlife and I wanted to get used to using my DSLR for landscape shots before I go on a European trip this fall. Usually I keep the 400mm on the DSLR and use a compact Lumix for landscapes. I wasn’t expecting to see much wildlife at Purisima Creek and I thought it might warrant using the DSLR as it was kind of dark and foggy. Of course, I packed the 400mm in my backpack, but most of the photos I’ve been posting from that day were taken with the 24-105mm on the Canon. But then I came to an opening in the trail and I saw a hummingbird. Now, I didn’t need a picture of that hummingbird, but something inside me said, “SWITCH LENSES NOW”. So I stopped right where I was and switched to the 400mm. Then I stood back up and looked up the trail in the direction I was heading, before even putting my pack back on. AND GUESS WHAT I SAW??!?!?!
Friends, that is a gray fox! How fortuitous was the timing of that lens swap?? I had never seen a gray fox in the wild! This was extremely exciting! Especially since I LOVE foxes, and gray foxes have a very special place in my heart. When I moved to California, I thought red foxes were superiorly beautiful to little gray foxes. Then I MET a gray fox, specifically, a baby gray fox that was admitted to Sulphur Creek and couldn’t be released because she had been raised by a human and was VERY habituated. We kept her as an education animal, named her Topaz, and moved her in with our existing education red fox, Ruby. And Topaz is the greatest animal on the face of this planet after my cats.
In addition to Topaz (who I will be helping undergo conditional training!), Sulphur Creek also has THREE baby rehab gray foxes this summer, two of whom were originally admitted to Lindsay Wildlife (where I also volunteer) on separate occasions and were transported by me and who had to spend the night at my house, and well, basically I love, love, love foxes.
In retrospect I shouldn’t have been QUITE so surprised to encounter this guy because I had been seeing a lot of what I was nearly certain was gray fox poop on the trail. So I was pretty sure they were nearby, but I NEVER expected to see one.
I’ve been wondering lately that people don’t seem to advertise the obvious about things these days. I recently upgraded to a Galaxy S8 from the S5. I chose the S8 primarily because it was supposed to have the best camera of any current smart phone and although I never use my phone for “real” photography, it’s usually all I have on me at the wildlife hospitals and I was always very disappointed by the crappy photos I took. I figured the S8 would be nominally better (after all, when I bought the S5, IT was supposed to have the best camera), but then I was playing with it when I got home and figured out YOU CAN SHOOT RAW. There is also a “pro” setting that gives you some manual control. WHY IS THIS NOT THE NUMBER ONE THING REVIEWERS TELL YOU ABOUT THIS PHONE?? Giving me RAW files is HUGE! Anyway, same sort of thing with Purisima Creek Redwoods: there are lots of reviews and blog posts about this place, and everyone raves about it, but not ONE mentioned any foxes. Maybe I just got really, really, really lucky to see one (I FELT that way!), but there was REALLY a lot of fox poop on the trails; I CAN’T be the only person to see a fox there. Why isn’t this the number one thing people have to say about the place?? Not long after seeing the fox, I passed two women hiking and gabbing and they asked me if I had gotten any good pictures (people ask me this a lot when they see my camera; my answer is usually “not really”). “YES I JUST SAW A GRAY FOX!!!!!! IT WAS SO AMAZINGLY GREAT!!!” They were all congratulating me, haha.
In conclusion I love foxes and I love this park.
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