Mono Lake

Mono Lake lies on the east side of Yosemite National Park, and it's worth a visit all on its own. It's an American, albeit smaller, version of Israel's Dead Sea. Three quarters of a million years old, it lies in a desert-like area and has no outlet into any other body of water. As a result, all of the minerals and salts brought into it stay in it, making it extremely alkaline. And in turn, the salty waters form huge and weird limestone formations called tufas, found almost nowhere else in the world.

Another reason to visit it is its bird life. It is incredible even to a non-birder. To start with, most of California Gulls you see on California coast are born there, in huge nesting colonies on the lake's islands. That's 65,000+ birds. To top that, every few months the lake hosts a gathering of some type or another of migrating bird - usually in numbers that are in order of magnitude larger, many times topping 1.5 million! Just try to imagine that!

We visited during the slow time. The spring migration was done, the colonies not yet fully formed. Everything was quiet and peaceful:





These are the famous tufas:






California Gulls were there, in hundreds if not thousands:






An enterprising pair of Ospreys made a nest on one of the tufa towers, and were hanging around the lake when we visited:






On the other side of the lake, the tufa towers were even more impressive:






Not that Mono Lake is without other wildlife. I saw my first meadowlark there:


And some curious lizards:




And a few other birds:


Savannah Sparrow:


Violet-Green Swallow: