Identification in kit form – blog 27

And that Liam O’Brien doesn’t just identify butterflies, he identifies mammals too.

By the way, I am now in King City, not that far from Monterey really, and not that far from Los Banos either.  King City, whose motto should be ‘ King City – fit for a pauper’  as it has several cheap motels and several cheap eateries (all Mexican as far as I can tell).

Anyway, Liam and I were chatting, and I think it was about how difficult it is to get the general public interested in creepy crawlies, except perhaps butterflies, compared with, say, the San Joaquin Kit Fox. ‘The what?’ says I, ‘The San Joaquin Kit Fox’ says Liam.

Only a few days earlier I had seen a small fox at the San Luis NWR early one morning.  I’d been driving on a track and a small fox had got up in front of me and then run, quite slowly, off.  It had been a small fox, and I had immediately thought ‘fox cub’, but it looked wise enough to be grown up and it had big ears.

I almost wrote about it here – but didn’t.  I had tried to look it up and had drawn a blank.  I even tried ‘Kit Fox’ but had decided that though everything seemed to fit, I was out of their range.  But I wasn’t and I see that the Kit Fox does indeed occur on this very site – and I saw one!

Identification in kit form – geddit?

Maybe someone could help me out with this snake that I saw while looking for condors, unsuccessfully, at the Pinnacles NP.  It was on the road, but alive, and was large by UK standards.  I guess, unfolded, it would have been 5ft long.  It was chocolate brown with pale stripes, or maybe you would have said it was pale with chocolate brown stripes. It was pretty.  Any ideas?

 

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