Friendship Park on the hill overlooking San Pedro had to have been the best spot to watch the space shuttle Endeavour arrive in Southern California on its last air voyage. We arrived in the blazing midday sun hoping to catch a glimpse of history and we got a lot more than we expected.

Find more photos like this on San Pedro News Pilot

Endeavour is the…

The saga of the mysterious late summer gray whale continues. The carcass of the unlucky animal has come ashore on the rocks below Ocean Trails in Rancho Palos Verdes near the San Pedro border. This spot is likely to become its final resting place.

We know some of the events that brought this whale here.

Gray whales migrate past…

As soon as I got back to my car after getting off the Voyager from Friday afternoon’s whale watching trip, I called Diane with a full report. Great trip. We started out with a pod of Risso’s dolphins, then found the first blue whale less than a mile from the harbor entrance. In all we saw four different blue whales, including one that made a close approach coming closer and closer to the boat until it dove just fifty yards away.…

“It was bigger than this ship,” yelled five-year-old Nicholas Carrozza. “It was bigger than this ship! Oh my God!”

Nicholas was a fellow passenger on the “Voyager” on Saturday morning, September 10, 20111, and we had just been surprised by a blue whale that surfaced from a…

The blue whale is the largest animal to ever live on this planet. And for a long time what that meant to humans was that it yielded great mass of meat and blubber. Whalers pursued the blue whale without mercy and the slaughter only ended when their numbers where so low that it became unprofitable to hunt them. There was a time when hundreds of thousands of these giants roamed the oceans of the…

I had an unusual encounter while conducting my weekly Cabrillo Beach bird survey for the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium on Thursday (June 9, 2011); there was a single dolphin inside the harbor, near the fishing pier. That is kind of unusual but not unheard of. Dolphins are quite easily seen off our coast, on any given day if you scan the water long enough you have an excellent chance of seeing dolphins of one of several different…

There was a Northern elephant seal on Cabrillo Beach on Wednesday. On the inner beach, not far from the fishing pier. It was just laying there in the sun. Every now and then it shifted into a more comfortable position and sometimes it shoveled sand on its back with one of its front flippers.

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One of our crows fledged today.  

A couple of months ago we noticed that every now and again a crow would fly into the tall palm tree in our back yard. Crows are very secretive about their nests, and are very quiet and surreptitious when coming and going. We realized what was happening when the crows began swiftly and determinedly escorting…

Los Angeles County Lifeguard Captain Mike Inscore pumped his left fist triumphantly in the air, signaling that the humpback whale carcass had finally come loose from the rocks at White’s Point in San Pedro on Thursday, May 12. High tide was drawing near and the mass of flesh, blubber and bones had given no indication that it was willing to budge, despite the insistent tugs from a powerful Baywatch Cabrillo rescue boat. But now it was floating free from the jagged rocks for the first…

There is now a little less of the beached humpback whale on the rocks at White’s Point in San Pedro. The dead animal has been featured in multiple media accounts, but now it is also destined to star in a show on the National Geographic Channel. Or at least put in a cameo appearance. As shark bait.

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I didn’t hear the phone ring Sunday morning, but I slowly started to let go of my dreams as I heard fragments of a conversation that ended in “…we’ll be right there. Thanks for reporting it.” My eyes weren’t open yet when Diane said; “that was Matt (Christopherson); a Cabrillo Marine Aquarium volunter reported a dead marine mammal at White’s Point; larger than a sea lion but he can’t tell what it is.”

As we…

As soon as we got to the ocean from scenic Alamitos Bay we found a pod of long-beaked common dolphins on last year’s See the Sea, Si? trip aboard the 118-foot RV “Challenger.” Soon we were surrounded by dozens of leaping dolphins.

As fun and exciting as a dolphin encounter is, the experience was not difficult to top during the remainder of the three-hour trip. We pulled up many different species of very…

I saw seven gray whales on Sunday.

It is widely believed that the gray whale migration in our area ends in late March or early April, but the truth is that grays pass by our shores through May and occasionally into June. Most local whale watching ceases after the first week of April because usually the numbers of migrating whales drop off, but also…