Aranyak Yatra
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day here in the US, when all the stores offer huge discounts to kick-start the Christmas shopping season. If they are lucky, they will avoid making a loss for the year, and stay in the black - hence the name. To maximize their chances, many stores often open their doors at 5 or 6 AM - and people queue up even at that ungodly hour after the previous night’s Thanksgiving dinner, and shopping malls are chaotic places all day.
So naturally, we headed away from all that to Merced National Wildlife Refuge, which is but an hour away from Fresno. Some people drove hours that day to catch some special deal in a distant shopping mall. We drove likewise to enjoy a lovely picnic followed by a tranquil afternoon of birdwatching around one of the remaining lovely marshes of California’s central valley, which has otherwise been flattened and ploughed under for some of the most productive agriculture in the world. Many local residents, including many of our students at CSU-Fresno, have never heard of these wetlands, and are completely unaware that such natural beauty and wildlife (including some endangered species) can be found amid the vast stretches of agriculture interrupted by freeways and small towns. Follow the link from the picture above to get a glimpse of what you miss if you simply drive through the valley as a transportation corridor (which is how most people see Fresno, for example!). Pause a bit to get off the highway (on Sandy Mush Road off HWY 99 in this particular case, is how we got to Merced NWR) and you might appreciate how much longer this valley has served as a transportation corridor - for migratory waterfowl and a lot of other birds! Happy trails...
An American Coot, one among the thousands of birds we saw at Merced NWR on the day after Thanksgiving 2006.
Click on image to see the gallery for yourself!
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Merced National Wildlife Refuge (late post on a Nov 06 trip)
