Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve

Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve is a treasure for its Northern Elephant Seals and its hiking trails. I’ve had Dave Miller’s exquisite Bay Area Outdoors blog in my RSS feed for several months, and I love his well-written descriptions of his Bay Area travels. But I’m absolutely crazy for the many, many exquisite photos he includes with each post.

He recently chronicled a visit to Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve which made me feel I was right there with him.

Año Nuevo is not your typical coastal state park. Although there are hiking trails and nice beaches, the main feature of this park is that it is the breeding grounds for a large colony of Northern Elephant Seals. Every winter hundereds of elephant seals come to the beaches of Año Nuevo Point to molt, give birth and mate.
The best times to come to the park are from late December to early February. That is when the animals will be at their most active. It is not uncommon to see the Bull seals battle for a harem or watching a seal being born. On our visit we saw some bulls jockeying for position, but no real fights.

And the pics! He kindly let me use a couple of them. Let’s start with my favorite:

Elephant Seal at Ano Nuevo. (Photo by Dave Miller)

Now this next shot is not technically a great one, but it’s one you can get with a monster telephoto lens when you are long ways away from the subject. In this case, the subject is the gnarliest coyote I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of coyotes in my life. This old-timer was chowing down on some yummy dead-seal meat.

Coyote at Ano Neuvo. (Photo by Dave Miller)