Today's walk report: A butterfly and a bird

 Another fabulous drive and park nearby a local college campus to walk mostly around its arboretum and botanical garden. I only take the car slightly over a half mile that I could add to the walk each way if I decided to skip the drive but for a couple of reasons it's better to go for a spin. For one, I hardly drive anywhere and the car needs to get out once in a while and get some exercise. Most significantly for battery charging and conditioning and fluid circulation. I extend the drive home a little for this purpose. Also, the walk to that campus is pretty dull so it's better for me to decide to extend walks inside the campus since it's generally more peaceful and there's more to see than what goes on via surface street sidewalks. 

The campus entrance is 1/4 mile from where I usually park the car and the closest path in the arboretum is only 125 yards from the front gate. There has been a lot of work done inside the arboretum over the past few years. Before that, at least for a couple of years, it was fenced off. The story is some dude had decided it was his place to plant trees and the powers that be decided, let's just keep everyone out. This is not the only portion of the campus that has succumbed to restricted access. The campus is 426 acres. This makes it larger than many university campuses, including that of UCLA. For the most part the landscaping is nice and there are over over 2,200 trees. Outside of this is typical Los Angles County rather overcrowded suburbs and quite a bit of smelly stuff. 

Most of what went on for me today was talking with Docken over the phone (thank you, Docken). Once again not much jumped out on the picture taking front. Exiting the arboretum there is an abundance of narrow leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) which is a native plant to Southern California. This particular male monarch butterfly remained flying next to or in front of me for about 80 yards. There was milkweed all along the way.

 Onto the botanical garden (a little over a 1/4 mile from the arboretum). I went sort of garden central, sat on a bench and chatted over the phone. Rather suddenly what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk flew just in front of my face. It was too startling to catch my bearings with my camera. I told Docken where I was exactly so she could visualize (we've spent a lot of time together in this garden) and she said, Wow! I measured this on Google Earth when I got home. Sitting on the bench my eye level is about 4 feet above ground. The hawk was flying at an altitude of about 8 feet and was approximately 9 feet in front of the bench. This is a very large bird. I'm pretty sure that was as close as I've ever gotten to a red-tailed. It flew into the olive trees just 10 yards west of me and I couldn't find it, then suddenly, it flew out into a pine tree about 45 yards southeast of my bench. I followed.

By my estimations this is a young bird but I'm gonna throw out a wingspan of about 50". It's a big freaking bird. 

 That's all I've got. Thanks for taking a look.