Wildlife at the Winery and in the Aridus Vineyard

Sometimes we see javelina running across the crushpad; we haven’t seen any yet this year. We are seeing a lot of lizards, on the crushpad and in the winery: primarily it’s Alligator Whip Tail lizards, who looked to be about 6 inches long when we first saw them in March. Today they’re as big as 9 inches. They’re not dangerous but in fact very playful; they’ll often move along next to us as we walk, even running under our shoes sometimes. Only rarely but sometimes we see horny toad lizards. These are rare to see here, so it’s a great moment when we spot one.

About two weeks ago a very pretty jackrabbit zoomed around the crushpad.

And to close out this wildlife report, we all love watching the variety of birds that circle above us, especially the___ (red tail?) hawks.

Out at the vineyard we have owl and bat boxes installed on posts to shelter those birds: in a future report here I’ll tell you more about those.