Hopper Mountain Visit

Hi all,
Following is an interesting report from Cal Poly student and Hi Mountain Lookout volunteer Ali West, regarding her recent field training and orientation tour at Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in Ventura County. This was the second field training opportunity our lookout interns and volunteers have been provided this summer. ‘Thank-you’ to the staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for making this valuable field experience possible.
Steve Schubert

Ali’s message….

Hey Hi Mt. Crew~ Just wanted to give you an update on our Hopper trip!  Kathleen, Joel,
and I had an awesome time.  After a very long, hot drive there…we spent a fabulous day with Dave, an intern from Minnesota.  He was really nice and spent his entire day being our personal tour guide. We visited the flight pens, checked out a blind they use near one of the feeding sites, and of course saw about 20-something Condors feeding at another feeding site.  We also got acquainted with the telemetry equipment that they use, and came to realize how off some of our frequencies are from theirs, for most of their birds.  Needless to say, Kathleen made sure to record all of those frequencies so that we can experiment with them at the lookout and see if we have better luck trackng Hopper birds. I would have to say, and I’m sure Kathleen and Joel would agree, that the highlight of the day was hiking way down into the valley to meet up with Jenny, another intern, who watches over the Condor chick in a nest across the valley.  On our hike down we walked right past these
huge snags only to find two magnificent Condors roosting in them!!!! They were so close!!!! Like twenty feet up in a tree! I got some great photos! Once we got way down in the valley, and met Jenny, we were lucky enough to watch the chick through a telescope and have Jenny explain to us everything she records about it’s behavior throughout the day!  Very awesome.  Just before we turned around to head up the trail Joel spotted a Black Bear in the distance….a nice place to spot
a black bear…I say.  But that was really neat too.  The hike back up was pretty hard-core and we were all quite impressed that Jenny did the hike every day. We didn’t get back to the ranch until around 8pm.  We did sooo much on Tuesday, that we decided to head out around 10:30ish on Wednesday.  After a little car trouble and a nice lunch in Santa Barbara we were home.  All-in-all this was a great experience that we all gained a lot from.  We were sure to remind everyone down there to try and make it to our open house on Oct. 2nd! Anyway, Just thought I’d fill you all in!  

Talk to you guys soon.   ~Ali

Read More

Hi notes

It’s been eons since I posted the happenings at Hi Mountain Lookout…even though I still make my weekly visits to paradise! Yesterday was an especially unusual day, however, and needs to be
shared! On my usual morning walk down the road from the lookout, I stopped to look at a covey of California Quail through my binoculars and what should meander into my field of view but a Mountain Lion! And she was much closer than binoculars warrented! Not having encountered any Mountain Lions in the past, I wasn’t sure if I should try to scare her away, sneak away, or just watch. I decided on the later and was rewarded with 10 minutes of observation as she strolled down the road, sat down a couple of times and just seemed to be enjoying the view towards Huff’s Hole. Gradually she became aware of me and I could see her body language change as she became more wary (kind of the way I was feeling for the last 10 minutes!). She got up from her sitting position and began to lope away down the road. She seeemed to float on the air, her movements were so fluid and effortless. Such a beautiful sight…I was spellbound! It’s been a great summer sharing the lookout with the Cal Poly Interns and volunteers. The Condors have been regular visitors to Hi Mountain for a couple of months now (although they haven’t favored the middle of the week when I’m there!). Jeremy, Ali, Jenn, Amy and Joel have had great views of up to 8 Condors at a time…and mostly on the weekends! Visitors are always welcome and you may be lucky enough to see Condors or Hi Mountain Lions!

Kathleen

Read More

Recent Events

Hi all,

Last week Kevin Cooper conducted an onsite field trip to Hi Mountain Lookout attended by 15 U.S. Forest Service staff. This was the new Los Padres Forest Supervisor’s first visit and orientation to the project. The Forest Service staff were very appreciative and supportive of all our efforts at the lookout.

On Aug. 26th we had a 5 hour planning and discussion meeting in San Luis Obispo at the conference room of the Cal Poly Bio. Sci. Dept. Attendees were volunteers, staff and agency personnel from the Hi Mountain Lookout Project, U.S. Forest Service at Santa Lucia Ranger District, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Hopper Mountain NWR, Morro Coast Audubon Society, Cal Poly Biological Sciences Department. Ventana Wilderness Society, National Park Service at Pinnacles National Monument, and Friends of the Carizzo Plains National Monument. It was an opportunity to get together for a meeting in a centralized location, improve future communications and exchange of condor radio and GPS tracking data between our different groups, and to stay connected. This working group expects to continue meeting like this more frequently in the future.

Our interns and volunteer staff at the lookout this summer continue to be rewarded for their long hours of work by visual sightings of Californa Condors flying by, nearly every week!

Steve Schubert
MCAS Volunteer Coordinator

Read More

Lion at the Lookout!!

Hi all,

After receiving a thorough onsite training session from Kathleen- benefitting greatly from her experience and expertise- I staffed the lookout Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. I had a number of projects to work on before our 3 Cal Poly student interns and volunteer staff come on to staff for the rest of the summer field season.

Sleeping outside on a cot upstairs on the catwalk, I was still awake at 1am watching the Milky Way galaxy, constellations, and shooting stars. A gray fox was vocalizing nearby, and later I awoke to nearby frequent soft mummering sounds that I could not identify.

Walking about still groggy at 5:30am- 15 minutes before sunrise in the soft light of dawn- I was startled into instant alertness looking down at 4-toed predator tracks on the roadway near the lookout (close to the beginning of the stone retaining wall). Mountain lion tracks! I tried to think what else it could be and measured several tracks that were all 3 1/2 to 4 inches long. There had not been any visitors with large dogs since I arrived the day before, and the tracks were fresh from the night before because two tracks overlaid my vehicle’s tire tracks, where I had driven the previous afternoon. The impressions were not sharp enough to look for details like the lobes on the heel pads, but what else could they be? So, once again I have a story to tell of the many, many times in the field over the years having had close encounters and evidence of being near a mountain lion, but I have yet to actually see one!

What woke me up at 5:15 am was not the dawn songs of chaparral birds and a distant-calling mountain quail, but one very large horsefly making a loud humming sound in flight a few feet away from my head. Soon one became nine humming horseflies, all flying in a tight group at the northside of the lookout (the only place completely protected from the light morning breeze). The horseflies chased and darted at each other with amazing speed and rapid maneuvers, bouncing around in the air like a pin-ball machine in fast motion. Soon after sunrise, 30 minutes later, it was all over and the flies were gone, perhaps to go torment living flesh somewhere else. A potential study in crepuscular horsefly behavior?

During the early afternoon on Wednesday I picked up radio signals from one of the Pinnacles condors due north from the lookout, away from the usual location. A phone message with Wildlife Biologist Jim Peterson confirmed that the day before 3 of the condors had flown south away from the immediate vicinity of the Pinnacles release site.

The Anna’s hummingbirds are furiously competing for all the feeding ports at the two feeders. Hummers also perch on the edge of the birdbath to drink and dip their bellies in the water in flight to bathe. Juv. scrub jays are feeding on the apricot tree next to the water cistern, stabbing the fruits repeatedly with their beaks to get at the flesh. Swallowtails and other butterflies are often engaged in

hilltopping” flights. Along Hi Mtn. road the toyons, old man’s beard (Clematis) and chaparral penstemons are flowering. Finally, to emphasize the value of making observations over a period of time in one place, after all my previous trips to Hi Mtn. Lookout I had never noticed until this visit, that there is a solitary madrone tree growing about 1/3 mile distance east and below the lookout, on a n facing slope among the live oaks. A handsome tree to view through the spotting scope.

Steve Schubert

Read More

W-231 at Huff's Hole

Hi All,

To add to Jamie’s experience with ‘lost’ communications: Yesterday while I was at the lookout, I received a call from Jessica Koning from Ventana Wilderness Society. She reported that Condor #242, a 3 1/2 year old male who has a GPS transmitter on one wing , had spent two days in the vicinity of Lopez Lake and Hi Mountain on May 24th and 25th. I was quite surprised to hear this, as I had been monitoring from the lookout on both these days and had received NO signals from him whatsoever. This adds an interesting twist to our information gathering efforts. Apparently these birds can ‘hide’ from our receivers when they are on the south side of the cliff face at Huff’s Hole and at Lopez Lake. We had a similar experience with Condor # 168 whom we had seen and received signals from while actually at Huff’s Hole on April 6th. I was not able to pick up signals that evening upon returning to the lookout, nor the following day. We had attributed this to his failing transmitters, which are

sending out weak signals, at best. Back in March, I had picked up very strong signals from Condors #208, #209 and (again!) #231 right at the lookout and, from Cypress Hill, saw them perched on the same rock outcroppings that Jamie mentioned, to the West of Huff’s Hole. Maybe we will have to set up a floating monitoring station on Lopez Lake! Any volunteers? In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for very large, beautiful black birds soaring over San Luis Obispo County. They are definitely making frequent visits and possibly checking out the real estate for future ‘rooms with a view’!

Kathleen Intorf

Read More

W231 at Huff's Hole

Hello Everyone,
I was at the Lookout on Sunday, May 30, and got just a few signals from Pinnacles birds in the morning. Around 1:20pm, I got a strong signal from W231 (freq. 5703 & 5601) all the way around the lookout. I finally got her signal narrowed down to the direction of Huff’s Hole. I couldn’t get a visual on her from the lookout, so I went over to Cypress Hill and scanned the horizon. She was sitting on the small rock outcrop to the right of the main crags of Huff’s Hole. Jim Miller, my dad, and Andre Garcia, my friend, arrived just in time to grab the spotting scope and join me on the hill. She sat there for quite some time. I never saw her leave the rock, but I lost her signal at 3:10pm. Her signal appeared and disappeared so suddenly that she may have just been on the other side of the rocks. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I kept getting a weak signal from her in the same direction, but I did not see her again. I was hoping she would circle the Lookout a bit, but I guess she just wasn’t interested. It was a wonderful experience for my dad and my friend. They’ve heard all my stories, and now they got to see it for themselves!

Have a great week everyone!

~Jamie Miller

Read More