My best friend, Fortinbras, was up visiting from LA a few weeks ago. He is, among many, many, many other things, a recording artist and he’s currently working very hard on an album, and to that end, he brought his entire home recording studio with him and installed himself in my home office for a week. Because he was so busy with his work, although he wanted to hike with me every day, he kept requesting that I choose parks within 30 minutes of my house. Most of my favorite parks are a little outside that window. There are many, many parks in the East Bay, and there are many within 30 minutes of my house, but my general workday travel-time-to-parks window is closer to 45 minutes, which nets me some really fantastic destinations (such as Sunol, which I’ve been featuring lately). Probably the most picturesque park within a strict 30 minute travel time of my house is Coyote Hills, so on Saturday I took him there. I wanted to check something in the Visitor Center before we took off, and while I was there a friendly ranger (I love park rangers!) told me there had been a Great horned owl in the eucalyptus tree right by the Visitor Center a short while ago. Sometimes I don’t like drawing attention to myself by carrying around a big lens and a tripod, but I have to say, more often than not, I get good tips from people who assume correctly I’m looking for wildlife and will offer me advice. People here are generally very friendly. Anyway, Fort and I looked up into the specified tree but didn’t see the owl, so we took off. I usually walk through the marsh at Coyote Hills to look for birds and raptors, then I make my way over to the hills for the bay views. I hadn’t seen Fort in over a month, so we were gabbing up a storm and I barely even LOOKED at my surroundings as we meandered through the marsh. I think I fired my camera a grand total of twice in two hours. Then we had to leave before making it to the hills because we had dinner plans with friends, but I wanted to pop into the Visitor Center again to pick up a few maps. While I was looking at the maps, two rangers again approached me and asked what kind of animals I was most interested in finding and of course I said raptors, so they talked a bit about the most common raptors at Coyote Hills and said they thought the Great horned owl was still in the tree outside. So Fort and I trooped back out to the tree and this time, with a bit of searching, we spied him – or rather, he spied us…the ranger had said the owl would probably see us first, and sure enough, the easiest thing to see was his huge yellow eyes staring down at us.
Raptors (and other animals) have a third eyelid called a nictitating membrane that periodically cleanses their eye. It will occasionally show up in photos, probably confusing people who aren’t familiar with what it is. Generally you’ll delete these photos and keep the ones with their pupils showing, but I’ve posted this photo just so I can talk about nictitating membranes. You’ve probably seen nictitating membranes most often while viewing various reptiles, though your cat or dog has a modified version that you may see appear every once in a while when they are waking up.
I told Fort I’d been feeling a little weird about pretty much having taken zero pictures that day, but seeing the owl TOTALLY made up for it. I’ve had excellent luck viewing owls in California!
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