California is overwhelming me!

So far fulfilling my dream of seeing – and photographing – a bobcat on New Year’s Day has really set the tone for me this year. For one thing, I saw a second bobcat in January! Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture that time, but I had eye contact with him and that was nearly as exciting. Then I finally met my months-long goal of photographing a burrowing owl, though I wasn’t especially pleased with the photos. So I went out and found a second burrowing owl! I’ve also photographed a species of owl I’d never even HEARD of (of course you’ll be seeing that one soon!). And this happened to me just this weekend:

It stresses me out to try to make a post here every day, but I have a lot of photos I want to share, so what I’ve been doing is dedicating a couple of hours every couple of weeks to scheduling posts in advance to publish themselves every morning. The only problem is California has been so great to me, wildlife and photography-wise, this year, that I am ending up with a huge backlog of posts I want to make. This is a far cry from when I first arrived last summer and was all “why are all the parks so brown and boring?” and “where is all the wildlife?” and “maybe California is not as great as I thought it would be”. Now the parks are all green and far from boring, and all the wildlife is flying over my head all the time, or sleeping 50 feet from me (as was that fox above), or perching in a tree exactly where friends said it would be, or just being completely awesome like that burrowing owl I found yesterday. I don’t really have a point other than I’ve had a great time on my hikes this year, and I LOVE winter in the Bay Area (I HATED it in Maryland and Virginia), and I’m about to schedule 24 DAYS of posts (starting a week from now when my previously-scheduled posts run out) that include some animals I am wildly excited about, and by the time those posts have all published, I might have 1,000 more photos lined up. I recently updated my portfolio with some new images (and removed some of lesser quality), and I already need to do it again. I may never catch up! I can’t think of a better problem to have!