Mike in the Wild

You'd think that joining a whale-watching tour with the specific objective of spotting a blue whale would be a slam dunk success.  After all, the blue whale is not just any whale: it's the largest animal that has ever existed in the history of Earth.  That's right, it's larger than the brontosaurus and the tyrannosaurus rex and every other dinosaur that ever roamed on land or swam in the sea.  So how could you possibly miss one? Unfortunately all whale species faced the same fate of near extinction due to rampant hunting that lasted well into the first half of the twentieth century.  As a result of a global effort to stop the slaughter, many populations have rebounded; today there may be over ten thousand blue whales navigating throughout our planet's oceans.  In the eastern Pacific there are over a thousand, at least one of which was my target off the coast of San Diego. Like many whales, blue whales migrate great distances from feeding grounds in cold...

A day at sea is an ideal way to observe the wide variety of wildlife that lives much of its life at the ocean's surface, where salt water meets air.  Of course only a small percentage of fish species regularly breaks through this barrier: the flying fish is one.  Meanwhile hundreds of varieties of birds know how to dive underwater hunting for food.  And many mammals like whales and seals thrive in this zone, as they spend all or significant periods of their lives swimming through the seas. So whether your interest is in birding or whale watching, a plethora of tour companies offer an itinerary that will satisfy your curiosity about these surface-visiting animals.  Hornblower Cruises, for one, offers a three-and-a-half hour winter trip twice a day out of San Diego for sightings of gray whales as they migrate between Alaska and Baja.  I wasn't disappointed on my sunny, mid-January trip when the staff pointed out eight individual southbound gray whales, incl...

Santa Catalina Island might be the most famous of the Channel Islands, an archipelago that lies around thirty miles off the coast of Southern California.   Its only incorporated city is Avalon, where the vast majority of the island's 4,000 residents live.  Most of the rest of the island is primitive and undeveloped, an untouched 75 square mile landscape protected by the Catalina Island Conservancy.  A number of endemic species (i.e. found nowhere else in the world), like the Catalina Island fox, benefit from this management. But for the first-time visitor like me, Avalon and its surrounding hills, canyons and coastline might be the only wildlife habitat explored on Catalina.   Shorebirds, especially gulls, thrive in the crowded seaport.  Mockingbirds and warblers populate many of the non-native  trees in town.  The sea just beyond any beach seems to teem with kelp and fish, a wonderland for exploring snorkelers and divers.   And a...