Birds of Prey in The Valley

While normally associated with shopping malls and suburban sprawl, The Valley outside L.A. also has some nice wildlife habitat. Earlier this month we went in search of birds at the Sepulvida Basin Wildlife Reserve. We saw ducks with bright blue beaks, coot chicks, cormorants, and all other kinds of stuff. The real highlight was this bird, calmly observing the scene. We came back a half hour later and it was still there. We think it might be an American kestrel in an uncommon ghostly white and gray plumage. But it looked a little bigger than kestrels are supposed to, and I don't see any vertical bars under the eyes, so another guess would be Northern Harrier. What do you think?

Stuff We Saw

I've been a little backlogged, but better late than never. Here are a few pictures to give you an idea of the most impressive sights we took in during our trip to Mex. The main attraction in the O.C. area is the ruins at Monte Alb-n. This was a Zapot-c city that was developed on a flattened area formed by literally cutting off the top of a mountain. The site is pretty immense:

Kind of like you imagine the Egyptian pyramids, it is awesome to go here and marvel at the labor that must have gone into creating something like this.

I am told that I have a reputation for being at times excessively "competitive." Well, Zapot-c culture apparently took competitiveness to a whole other extreme. This is the ball court at Monte Alb-n. The players would throw the ball around in a way that mirrored the order of the universe, with the aim to get the ball on the spot in the center of the court. The winner would get honor and glory, the loser would be killed in sacrifice to the gods (apparently there is no evidence that this practice occured at Monte Alban, but it was common elsewhere).

This was taken from the ruins at Mitla, another village outside of O.C. The cool thing about this is that it is made from thousands of bricks arranged at weird angles -- and that's it. No mortar or anything holding it together other than gravity.