The Bay Area has a TON of normal, easy-to-find, conveniently located, wall-mapped, awesome parks. East Bay Regional Parks District is enormous and fabulous. The nearby county parks are all pretty much uniformly nice, and again, easy to find. I go to parks ALL THE TIME and there are many, many parks I haven’t been to yet. I don’t think there is a better place for parks in this country. I am not hurting for parks to go to. Nonetheless, I track burrowing owls on ebird and I decide I’m going to go looking for them and apparently burrowing owls are not quite as in love with EBRPD as I am (though there are a few in some EBRPD parks). Burrowing owls in fact seem to have really strange taste in parks. I have gone to bizarre little so-called parks looking for burrowing owls numerous times. Sometimes I can’t even FIND the park. The other weekend I was looking for a place called Hudeman Slough off Ramal Road in Napa. I recently posted my pictures from Ramal Road, which was very pretty and a simply lovely drive for a convertible on a 70-degree spring day. No complaints – except the place I guessed Hudeman Slough to be had a big NO TRESPASSING sign at a railroad crossing and a big hay barn behind it that I assumed belonged to a farm. So I left and went elsewhere looking for owls I couldn’t find.
At home that night, though, I did some internet sleuthing and learned I could ignore the “no trespassing” sign and that I really HAD been at Hudeman Slough. So I returned the following weekend and parked near the big ole barn and farm equipment. I found an ancient sign and map pretty much hidden by overgrown weeds and wildflowers and confirmed I was indeed at mysterious Hudeman Slough. And just a few feet down the trail there was a big marsh that had been totally hidden from the road, so I did a circuit of it. No signs of any owls, but lots of other birds and some real pretty views. Here are some of the views:
The barn I parked near:
Tractor:
Hudeman Slough, made with treated wastewater, according to the signs.
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