Here are some photos from a field trip that I took back in April to the Fairfield-Osborn Preserve in Rohnert Park, a nature preserve that is owned and maintained by SSU. It was a field trip for my Diversity, Structure and Function class, a class which gave a systematic overview of the whole range of life on Earth, from bacteria through plants and animals. I love this class! 🙂

For our field trip, we just went out to the preserve and tried to identify as many different organisms as we could, armed with all the knowledge we’d (hopefully) gained during the course of the semester. Here are a few of my favorite things that we saw that day:

Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis)

A scorpion (maybe the California Forest Scorpion, Uroctonus mordax?). OMG SO COOL! I didn’t know until fairly recently that we had scorpions up here. But we just turned over rocks until we found this little guy. Adorable!

Pacific Chorus Frog (Pseudacris regilla). Also incredibly adorable:

A California Slender Salamander (Batrachoseps attenuatus). It’s amazing the cool creatures that can be found under rocks!