Secret Walks: Climate Action Fair

On Saturday, 23 April 2022, my wife and I walked to the Seymour Center to see what the Climate Action Fair was like.  We decided to take a different route there than returning, taking advantage of what we had learned from the Long-Antonelli Loop.

Click for high-resolution map. We went down King to the end (red), then over to Swift down to the rail-trail, down Natural Bridges to Delaware, Delaware to the trailer park, and around the pond to the bridge (yellow), then over to UCSC’s coastal campus and to the Seymour Center parking lot (green) where the Fair was held. Our return route went on the paths through the coastal campus, crossing the tracks at Shaffer Road, Mission to Western Drive, then Grandview to Escalona to Anthony to Bay to King and home (blue). The whole walk was about 5.6 miles.

I got a few decent bird and flower photos on the walk:

These blossoms on a tree on King Street were unfamiliar to us. After searching with Google Lens (using this and another photo of the tree), I think is is either an ash or a pistachio tree.

There are plenty of lupines blooming around town, but I can’t tell the different species and cultivars apart.

I was trying to take a picture of the fortnight lily—the hoverfly was an unexpected bonus.

Now that the trees and shrubs have leafed out, we only get peeks at Antonelli Pond from Delaware Ave.

In the park by the pond in the trailer park, California poppies are blooming.

So are the water lilies in the pond.

We did not recognize this yellow flower, but Google Lens identified it as silverweed.

In the overflow from the pond down to the beach, we saw a dark-eyed junco bathing. I had a hard time photographing it, because it moved around a lot, dunking itself and shaking the water off.

Here is a view of the pocket beach from the Peter Sunzeri Memorial Bridge over the pond.

One of the mobile homes has these cheerful porpoises decorating the end wall.

From Horizon Drive, there is a very good view of Natural Bridges State Beach and the tidepools. The tide seemed unusually low to us.

I can’t resist taking pictures of these agave whenever I pass them.

The mast of the wrecked ship La Feliz is still on display on the edge of the cliff, but I don’t know much longer it will be there—it looks like a good storm could either break the mast or erode the cliff beneath it.

We saw this song sparrow, but could not identify what sort of sparrow it was until I got the zoomed-in pictures off my camera.

Here is another view of the song sparrow.

At the Climate Action Fair, the best table was for the Marine Mammal Center, who had some lovely casts of skulls of marine mammals (and a few real skulls, though not in this photo).

More of the cast skulls, plus a couple of real skulls in front—the white one with a crest is the skull of a male sea lion .

There looked like there were other interesting tables and activities at the Climate Action Fair, but the awful music was way too loud and unrelenting. I’m going deaf and I found the music uncomfortably loud—my wife could not stand to be closer than about a quarter mile from it. Going into the Seymour Center only made the noise worse. Talking to people at the tables was nearly impossible, so we just got arepas from the Pana food truck and went home. If I knew who was responsible for organizing the fair, and if I knew they were planning to do such a fair again, I would tell them to throw away the amplifiers—have acoustic music or no music, so that the other activities had a chance.

We were unable to identify this yellow flower—we think it is probably a California native planted as part of the restoration of the wetlands, but my photo was not distinctive enough to identify it.

This yellow flower seems to be a gumweed, though I’m not sure which one.

We consider our walks well-formed if we see an egret—and here was a great egret hunting in the grasslands that (in a normal rain year) would be wetlands.

The great egret was successful in its hunt—we think it caught a gopher, but at max zoom I could not hold the camera steady enough (even with the monopod) to get a clear photo of the prey.

We saw a Little Free Library in the middle of the Homeless Garden, but I only took a photo of it from the road—we did not wish to take books away from the homeless people that the library was clearly intended for.

This grand pink flower stalk is from a Bechorneria. (The leaves are green—those red leaves in front are a different plant.)

The bees really love the echium flowers. I think that this was a different echium than Pride of Madeira, but I could be wrong.

As we crossed Highway 1 at Western Drive, we saw a shaved-ice truck parked in the shade, but we did not stop to get anything, as we had the walk light to cross the other way.

The leucospermums are still blooming all over town.

We had not seen this Little Free Library before, but there was nothing in it that we fancied.

This weird blue and purple flower seems to be a Cerinthe major (also known as honey wort).