May field trips

Last weekend I drove a van with 10 passengers up to Hi Mtn. Lookout for a field trip with my Cuesta College Community Programs class entitled “Condor Country”. The next day 6 participants with the group ‘Friends of Lopez Lake’ also arrived on a field trip to the lookout . Both days staffer Noll Roberts demonstrated radio telemetry and picked up signals from condors at Pinnacles National Monument. I was fortunate to find a peregrine falcon soaring near Hi Valley Rock while viewing through a spotting scope from the lookout catwalk. The flowering coffeeberry shrub (near the cistern) and the yerba santa shrubs flowering alongside the lookout road were full of hundreds of honeybees, a mix of butterflies, and the occasional assassin bugs lying in wait to ambush the other insects visiting the flowers. Found one large whiptail lizard up along the ridgeline.

Steve Schubert