Creatures around Furnace Creek

Wednesday 25^th March, we are up early to join the 6:30 am bird walk with a ranger. It’s cool but not cold, and we see the sunrise on the distant mountains long before it reaches us. 

You’ll be thinking that the pond and green area could be a golf course. Well, it is; Furnace Creek uses groundwater to support a golf course. The immediate vicinity is a wonderful habitat for all sorts of wildlife. You can’t see them in the photo but there’s a pack of coyotes in the gap between the trees. We were able to snap one later at much closer quarters when it quickly trotted past us having emerged from the undergrowth.

The ranger said the coyotes have learned to catch the ducks on the lake in the golf course.

We saw several, but not many, unusual birds. Nothing posed for the camera. This one’s just about ok, of a bird called a verdin making a nest. 100 Tesco points for spotting the bird in the photo.

There were many common birds around during our week’s stay, like grackles, ravens, vultures and sparrows.

Plenty of lizards everywhere. This one has a blue tail.

Dragonflies too, near any still water. This an orange one.

Many desert creatures are nocturnal, like the kangaroo rat that can go for months without drinking. Snakes and scorpions lurk, and while we didn’t see any snakes, a ranger turned up a scorpion for us on a night hunt.  

A topic of discussion everywhere in California right now is water conservation. The State is officially a drought area due to climate change. The Governor declared a 25% water reduction target across the board only a few days ago. One aspect of the debate is water usage to maintain ornamental grass areas, parks and golf courses. The golf course here in Death Valley must take massive amounts of water to survive: it gets 2 inches of rain and evaporates at the rate of 150 inches per year. It looks especially beautiful and lush being here in the desert and it does, of  course, support a wildlife habitat, as well as provide recreation. Difficult priorities to determine, but at least no one is proposing to restrict water to the brewing industry!