After the sailing trip to bring the boat home, I stayed with my parents for a week to hang out and recover. While I was there we enjoyed the outdoors and I thought I’d share some of our adventures.
One foggy morning my mom and I, and a friend of my mom’s, went walkabout birding around Los Osos and hit two of the best sites in the area. Check out the Morro Coast Audubon Society page for birding news in the area and directions to these locations. Our first stop was the Audubon 4th Street Overlook. The tide was in and we didn’t see much except for an egret getting uppity with a seagull in response to a rude awakening. I did get a chance to play around with my binoculars and figure out how to take some pictures through them with my phone. I really like this one of marsh grass in the fog!
Walking through the neighborhood was lovely. Parts of Los Osos are eclectic and artsy while others just made me smile.
Our second stop was the Sweet Springs Nature Preserve. It’s a wonderful piece of land spanning the ecotone between chaparral and estuary, and as such, contains a huge diversity of birds. The trails are wonderfully maintained, and many of them are ADA accessible. There are a few viewing platforms for birding and just generally watching the world go by. Some highlights from our trip to Sweet Springs were blue-winged teals, great blue herons, a Townsend warbler, and a copious amount of wading birds like godwits, plovers, and types of sandpipers.
The Townsend warbler was a particular favorite of mine and deserved a drawing in my journal to remember the day.
All-morning birding trips should conclude with lunch somewhere and a thorough recounting of the day’s observations. This might be a rule for my mom and her birding friends, one I certainly agree with. We had lunch at Beerwood, which had great food, great beer, and a wonderful outdoor patio area. The day concluded with a bird tally of 31 different species!
My dad and I, on another day, took a nice hike out at El Chorro Regional Park in our endless quest for sunshine. There’s a campground, golf course, the SLO Botanical Gardens, numerous playgrounds and shelters, and some awesome dog parks there. Where the road ends there’s also some hiking. My dad and I just headed straight up the “sort of paved” “trail” instead of veering off onto the dirt trails in the hills (shorts and poison oak don’t mix well). I wouldn’t recommend the “trail” we did for anyone really looking to hike, but it was a perfectly enjoyable walk that I’d definitely do again!
Halupi 