Antelope Valley, about an hour and a half drive northeast of Los Angeles, is known as one of the best places in the country to view spring wildflowers. In particular, the California poppies. I arrived about a week or so late for the peak bloom, so decided to focus on individual flowers, rather than landscapes, to see what might be creeping around. I was photographing a beetle when I looked over and saw this caterpillar emerging from the bottom of one of the poppies.

I know… nothing exotic about a raccoon, but I’m an equal opportunity wildlife appreciator. At least this guy is keeping it real and isn’t a garbage raccoon like the ones most of you probably have in your backyards. He/she was searching for food (crabs, perhaps) in the swampy marsh areas around Merritt Island in Florida.

This is a greater roadrunner (not really sure what the Looney Tunes guys were looking at when they created the cartoon). Roadrunners can fly, but usually don’t, preferring to run across the ground at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour. They got there name due to their habit of emerging from the underbrush along roadsides and running parallel to cars before darting back to safety. I ended up with a chest full of cactus spines after chasing this guy around for about 20 minutes, continually dropping to the ground for eye level shots.

Here’s another one from last weekend in the desert. A couple of bugs attempting to make a few more bugs.

I got up early Sunday morning with a few hours left before I had to drive back to LAX for my flight back to New York. I was too far from any wildlife locations that I knew about so I just decided to check out the closest green area on the map to see what I could find . This brought me to Box Springs Canyon State Park and the Moreno Valley. The last thing I expected were hillsides full of wild burros. Apparently the Moreno Valley is the only place in the US where burros roam free on anything other than federal land. It’s believed that they were brought to the area from Death Valley by a cowboy some 50 years ago. The hills also happened to be covered in yellow flowers creating a nice foreground to shoot across.

Nothing like a desert in full bloom. This was taken last weekend in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California. The cactus were flowering and many of the other wildflowers were still going strong. The blooms on certain species of cactus, like the prickly pear, will only last for a day.

This here is a black-tailed jackrabbit, also known as a desert hare. Something about these guys fascinates me. Maybe it’s just those ears. Or the fact that they’re the inspiration for the jackalope myth that more than one person I know believes in. Seeing them leap through the desert in Anza-Borrego State Park in California they do, in fact, seem a bit antelope like. More photos to come in an upcoming post.

Another from Venice Rookery in Florida. Egrets, herons, ibis and anhingas (like this one here) build nests on a small island in the middle of a small lake.

This one is from Mount Evans in Colorado, a quick drive from Denver. A herd of mountain goats were below the lip of the ridge and I would have driven right past without noticing if I hadn’t seen this guy poking his head above the rocks.

This is a black skimmer that I photographed on Merritt Island in Florida. When feeding, they fly just above the water, using their lower beak to skim the surface for food.