Southern California Day-Trippin: June 2017

OWLS OF HUNTINGTON CENTRAL PARK

I used to work at the Huntington Beach Central Library. I worked there as a clerk of sorts, adding information about individual items, such as barcodes, into the catalog, and occasionally serving on the Circulation Desk, checking items out to patrons, and on the Reference Desk, assisting patrons when they couldn't find a book or resources on their topics of research. That was, 1999 to 2005.

I got my Masters in Library Science while I was working there, but they didn't need a Reference Librarian when I was ready with my degree, so I migrated to Chapman University to exercise my degree in the law library. That was fun, until it wasn't. After 9 years, people I knew left and new ones arrived, until eventually a new director had it in her power to change job descriptions enough to let the lot of we librarians go and hand-pick her own.

So I migrated again. This time to Palos Verdes Library District. Boy, if you haven't been to the libraries in this district, and you are a fan of libraries, you should visit them. Each has it's own unique charm, and all have lovely people both serving the community, and in the community. And the AREA is so pretty! And since I was part time, and was in want of more income, when the chance to work part-time at West Los Angeles College arrived, I snatched that up too.

Still thinking I might like more income, when a position for part-time Reference Desk work became available at the Huntington Beach Public Library, I was pleased when they hired me, and got to reconnect with all of my old friends. It wasn't long though, before I was also working at Los Angeles Harbor College, and the hours at Huntington Beach got in the way of my ability to accept hours at any of those three more lucrative locations. So, I left Huntington . . . again . . . but not before discovering that owls had taken to annually nesting in the eucalyptus trees outside the windows of the Children's department. (The library perches on a hill, so the treetops are an even line of sight.)

Perhaps, the owls were doing that before I left the first time, and no-one thought to tell me it was a regular thing, but I didn't know about it until this second time around and once I knew about it, I was hooked.

It was a habit for most of us working in Children's (and probably still is, for those still there) to see if we could peer deeply enough into the trees through the huge plate glass windows and find the baby owls, before we sat down to our shifts.

Walking in the Huntington Central Park behind the Huntington Beach Public Library was always a pleasant way to spend a lunch break, but since those owls started nesting there, I enjoyed visiting even though it was no longer just a step out a back door to get there.

So these pictures that I posted to Flickr in 2017 say June in my Flickr posts . . . I'm not sure if that is when I actually took them, or when I posted them, but here are a few from my Flickr stream of the beautiful juvenile horned owls of Huntington Central Park.

On this date there was a mother owl and three juveniles.