Just got back from a short trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. We stayed at the Doubletree near the Berkeley Marina, a dog-friendly hotel where we could walk along the waterfront. I have a new little Nikon Coolpix S6800 and the resident California ground squirrels were just the subjects I needed to try it out for wildife. It did pretty well. Lots of noise at full zoom, but definitely enough shutter speed to catch the little critters in good focus. Do they ever have a room with a view…

That’s the Golden Gate in the center on the horizon. San Francisco is to the left and Marin County to the right.

There were often three or more up on the rocks hanging around.

One doesn’t usually associate squirrels with large bodies of water, but the rocky edge along the bay creates perfect habitat. There’s an adjacent large park with an off-leash dog area where the squirrels can sit in the trees (even though they are “ground” squirrels) and blow raspberries at the canines.

This is the closest I could zoom without the photo getting really noisy, but it’s plenty close enough.

Otherwise, we had a lovely time visiting with family and doing some shopping. I cut my annual swath through the Dick Blick store for art supplies and picked up a few things at REI. We went to Rangoon Superstars for Burmese food one night, Party Sushi for Japanese the next night and finished up with Nepalese/Indian at Taste of the Himalayas. A stock-up stop at Trader Joe’s and we were ready to wend our way back up to Behind the Redwood Curtain. Where today it is raining for the first time since December. And now there are flood warnings through Friday night…