Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
Photo of a coyote hunting gophers with a snout full of dirt. He’s standing in a patch of thistle. I would have preferred Doug Iris, but this isn’t portrait photography. We shoot what’s there.
Tag: coyote
Bobcat, Point Reyes National Seashore
I’ve been going to Point Reyes National Seashore on a regular basis since January 2010 to photograph its wildlife. Bobcats were the main reason I started going there, but it also has many other species that I like to photograph such as tule elk, badgers and coyotes, plus many bird species. All of my photography there has been in the 18,000 acre ranching area of the park. On January 9, 2025, a settlement was announced to significantly reduce cattle in the park.
It was not a complete victory, but a significant improvement. Only two of the original 14 ranches will remain. The other 12 ranches have agreed to leave for an undisclosed amount of money to be paid by The Nature Conservancy. Rumor has it that the total amount to be paid is between 30 and 40 million dollars. The Park Service had bought these ranches in the 1960s and 1970s for 57 million dollars and let the ranchers remain for extremely low rents even though the Park Service is required by statute to collect fair market value for property it leases.
While many cattle will be removed, the 282 cattle at those two ranches will remain and another 600 to 1,200 cattle will be brought in, as necessary, for “targeted grazing.”
The settlement explains that targeted grazing is designed to prevent shrubs and trees from getting established. Tule elk have done a good job of keeping shrubs and trees from getting established in the “Tomales Point Elk Reserve” at the north end of the Seashore where the elk have been locked up for the past 46 years (but recently freed because about 500 of them have died of starvation and dehydration during two droughts in the past 10 years or so). Hopefully, that job of holding back any encroachment of brush and trees will be left to just the elk at some point as they move out from their former “prison.” I had also hoped the seven ranches and their 635 cattle in the 10,000 acres of ranching in the adjoining Golden Gate National Recreration Area would have been removed under the settlement, but that was not accomplished for some reason.
It will be interesting to see how the settlement improves vegetation quality, water quality and wildlife numbers in the Seashore.
Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
Here is a photo I took in 2011 that I came across recently. I don’t know why I never put it on my website, but I just corrected that. It was taken at sunset in the ranching area of Point Reyes National Seashore.
Ranching? Yes, there is ranching in this unit of the national park system. The ranchers were all bought out by the Park Service between 1962 and 1978 and, to ease the move out of the Seashore, the Park Service gave them reservations of use and occupancy for 20 years. The last ones should have been out by 1998, but thanks to politics, they are still there and paying a rent for grazing and living there of often less than 10% of fair market value. The Park Service is required by law to collect fair market for any lands or buildings it leases.
Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
I photographed this coyote yesterday just before the sun set I spotted it about fifteen or twenty minutes before sunset and stayed with it until the sun actually set. It’s my favorite time to photograph wildlife, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. I assume the light is just ad good at sunrise, but it’s a heck of a lot harder spotting anything to photograph in the dark.
Male Bobcat, Point Reyes National Seashore
Me? Gopher Tartare, of course.
I was out at Point Reyes yesterday. Saw three bobcats. This is the only one I got some decent shots of. Saw a couple of coyotes as well and they also were not in a cooperative mood. Some smaller, less competitive bull elephant seals are again hanging out at Drakes Beach as they started doing a few years back. Didn’t see many fenced-in elk at Tomales Point which is consistent with NPS’s policy of letting them die during drought years rather than providing them with food. 244 elk died at Tomales Point in the past two years under NPS’s “let nature take its course” policy animal enclosure policy. Thank God the rest of the zoos in the world give food and water to the animals they have locked up.
Coyote in a Field of Silage; Point Reyes National Seashore
Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
I saw this coyote walking through this silage field a few weeks ago. Silage consists of any of a number of plants that are mowed in the spring when still green for feeding cattle. I have written about it in the past. One problem with it is that when it is mowed in the spring it results in the deaths of any number of ground or near-ground nesting birds and their offspring. It also kills small mammals that live in the tall, protective vegetation and larger mammals like deer fawns, who are wired to stay still even when a noisy mower is approaching. They stay still because they aren’t very fast on their “feet” during that first week. Same applies to the rest of the deer family (elk and moose) and to pronghorns. Not bison calves though. Those bison calves, aka “red dogs,” can run with their moms from birth.
Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
Coyote Standing in New, Green Grass
I was out at Point Reyes yesterday. It was a fairly good day wildlife photography-wise. I was able to photograph this coyote, a badger, a bobcat, some elk and some hawks. The coyotes look good right now with their new winter fur.
I prefer the winter and spring for photography at Point Reyes because the grass is green. Unfortunately, cattle ranching has converted the grasses from the native, perennial grasses that stayed green throughout the year to non-native, annual grasses that die each year when the winter/spring rains end and we go into our dry Mediterranean summer and fall when the place looks like a waste land.
