Highway 1 Wildlife Viewing Map Reveals Nature Around Every Turn
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The Wildlife Viewing Map along the Highway 1 Discovery Route is a unique resource among travel guides, especially during the Season of Coastal Discovery. What is the Season of Coastal Discovery? It's the prime time to view the abundent wildlife on Highway 1 every winter. There’s no shortage of interactive checkpoints for vacationers, whether you’re looking for a dinner destination, bountiful boutiques, or a brewery bonanza. Maps that lead to wildlife locales are much rarer, and for good reason: few places offer so rich an assortment of habitats and species that they require specialized cartography. But the Central California Coast is such a place. How so? You can observe everything from monarch butterflies weighing 0.5 grams to 5,000-pound male elephant seals. Add in frequent blue whale (155,000 tons!) sightings and it’s easy to understand why seeing wildlife deserves an interactive map.
Pismo Monarch Grove
Whale Watching on Highway 1
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Whether you supplement wine tasting with whale watching or add some of the 489 local bird species to your checklist, the Highway 1 Wildlife Viewing Map provides essential intel to your touring plans. And there’s no off-season on the Central California Coast. Monarch butterflies overwinter at several locations on the map, as do elephant seals and sea otter pups, while summer sees the return of the rare piping plover that nests on the open dunes, and fall offers a cornucopia of migratory birds (20,000 shorebirds at one time alone!), as well as resident zebras, plentiful tide pools, and CA’s highest concentration of Whale Trail locations.
The abundance of great viewing locations, including the 10-stop Whale Trail and numerous public parks and beaches, allows for more study than traditional check-off-and-go experiences. Families can spend entire days among the tide pools, where they can spot a rainbow of sea stars exposed at low tide and follow purple shore crabs as they sidestep about, before or after visiting the Central Coast Aquarium to fill in the details of this fascinating ecosystem. Watching a black oystercatcher rat-a-tat-tat on a shell with its clownish orange bill or a flock of brown pelicans rise and fall in unison above the waves may lead a child to a lifetime of nature pursuits.
The Highway 1 Wildlife Viewing Map also offers information about how to protect these cherished habitats, including the award-winning Stewardship Travel for Good program, and more than 50 activities that educate users and benefit the local environment. There is also viewing advice, including tips for counting monarchs in the Butterfly Grove, scanning for whale spouts, and finding pups at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery. No matter what you most like to see in nature, the interactive Highway 1 Wildlife Viewing Map will take you there during the Season of Coastal Discovery.