Good morning and welcome to wildlife Monday. Some of you may have seen the story in our local paper a few weeks ago that a 70 pound endangered African spurred tortoise had slipped through an open gate and made its way to downtown Santa Cruz before a local musician scooped him up and delivered him to animal rescue group. Well, for those of you who aren’t local or who missed this story and are wondering what a tortoise like this looks like, check out the first photo. When interviewed afterwards the tortoise said he was heading for to Costco because he likes their prices and the opportunity to buy in bulk.

Back in June I attended a party at a gorgeous house just about a mile from my home. Des’ house is an incredible place to behold and is host to a menagerie of animals including this tortoise, a goat, a horse, baby angus calves, a koi pond and a nest in the eucalyptus trees that houses a family of red tailed hawks. I was up there last week at the calves feeding time and to marvel at the thousands of light brown apples moths that had invaded her trees.

But let’s get back to the tortoise. I went to visit him at his bachelor pad and all of a sudden he started coming after me. For a large tortoise he was moving pretty quickly-kind of like Gale Sayers in the open field. Turns out he was excited because he thought I was going to feed him. After he realized that I hadn’t brought along an assortment of cold cuts he decided to settle for a piece of watermelon that you can see in shot #2. Sulcatas are voracious eaters. Anything that is brightly colored will attract their attention and they will attempt to eat it. You should see what they do to a large bag of M & M’s.

Sulcata tortoises are the third largest species of tortoises in the world and are native to the region just south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. reach approximately 18 inches in shell diameter and 70 to 100 pounds in weight. Sulcatas have an extremely long life span and will live for 100 years or longer which means their owners need to make plans about where the tortoise will go and who will take care of them after you’ve passed on. This is why so many tortoises go into estate planning.

The third shot is a pot bellied Vietnamese pig named Diesel that my daughter and I ran into along West Cliff Drive. The fourth shot is a juvenile elephant seal that crawled up onto Its Beach this past spring. The fifth picture is a barking sea lion that I shot on the wharf and the final photo is my golden retriever Summer down at her favorite beach. She’s a really interesting color for a golden and has a mane that gives her a Tommy Two Tone look. She’s loves going down to Its Beach, which is rumored to be closing for dogs as of November 17th when the beach is turned over from the city to the state. Hopefully I’m wrong. If not, Summer, who is a Rin Tin Tin fanatic, is going to be as depressed as Lassie was when her series was canceled.

So that’s it for today. Since we’re talking animals let’s finish with a joke. A police officer saw a man driving a pickup truck full of penguins. He pulled the guy over and said: “You can’t drive around with penguins in this town. Take them to the zoo.” The next day he saw the same man driving around with the penguins and this time he was wearing sunglasses. The cop said: “I thought I told you to take these penguins to the zoo yesterday.” The man replied: “I did. Today I’m taking them to the beach.”

By the way, when you read the blog and see a key word missing that is blogger.com doing its own censoring. I would mention the words that they have excluded but it wouldn’t make it to this page. So enjoy our version of “Animal House” and we’ll catch you for the midweek experience. “Toga, Toga, Toga.”

We like to start off the new month with a bang and November 2007 will be no exception. Back in the fall of 2006 there was one truly epic sunrise down at Lighthouse Point. We are featuring it today on screen one. Photographing spectacular mornings like this is what Sunrise Santa Cruz is all about. It’s capturing incredible moments of beauty and then blasting them out into cyberspace to people all across the world and New Jersey.

I hope it was a good Halloween for everyone. To see the look of almond joy on my dalmatian costumed daughter’s face as she hurried from house to house hauling around a 20 pound bag of candy was a real treat and help put this holiday into perspective. Sure, she may have had some fun carving pumpkins and then setting them outside our house to let kids know to stop by, but it’s all about the sugar. If she ate one piece of candy (and we’re talking mini Hershey bars, Milky Ways, Kit Kat bars etc.) every hour for the next three months, she would still have enough left to feed a large village in the South Pacific. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. Make it a small village that’s missing an idiot.

Since some of us are still reveling in the joy of the chocolate onslaught that comes with this holiday, I thought we’d check out one of the more bizarre yet fascinating stories concerning haunted houses in the U.S. I’m talking about the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Over the years I have never visited this unusual remodel but have seen enough bumper stickers on cars to know that something wild and crazy had gone on over the hill from Santa Cruz. So here’s the story.

Sarah Winchester of New Haven, Connecticut was deeply saddened by the loss of her daughter and her husband. This tiny 4’10″ widow, who inherited more than $20 million and a 49% stake in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company from her husband, consulted a medium on the advice of a friend. The medium, who has become known as the “Boston Medium”, (as compared to the “Boston Extra Large”) told Winchester there was a curse upon the Winchester family because the rifles from her husband’s company had taken so many lives. She told Winchester that “thousands of persons have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance.” Hindsight being 20/20, she might have been better off with a tarot card reading.

This soothsayer told Sarah W. that she must go west and “build a home for yourself and for the spirits that have fallen from this terrible weapon. You can never stop building this house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die.” The continuous construction was to supposedly confuse and confound the allegedly vengeful spirits, along with carpenters, general contractors and termite inspectors.

Sarah moved to San Jose in 1884 and under her guidance, construction on the house continued for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 38 years until her demise in 1922 . It is estimated that 600 rooms were built and then torn down. There was no rhyme or reason as the entire house seems to have randomly assembled, disassembled and reassembled numerous times with no master plan or design. Reminds me of my last meeting with my college guidance counselor. Stairs led to nowhere, doors would open into solid walls and floors would have doors and windows in them. All this due to the inexplicable obsession of Sarah Winchester to keep building continuously.

Every night at midnight the bell in the bell tower was rung to summon the spirits. Sarah would then go into the seance room and receive messages from the spirits telling her what she should build. At 2am, the bell was rung again as to signal for the spirits to depart. This may be a stretch, but she sounds as loony as a holiday fruitcake.

What started out as a six bedroom house turned into a eerie mansion with 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 47 fireplaces, 1,257 windows and 160 rooms overall. A cleaning lady came in once a week for a couple of hours just to dust things off in 300 or so rooms. When she died in 1922, the word spread throughout the house and there are still spots visible where the workers stopped hammering the nails halfway in. I believe these were the original Teamsters. It took eight weeks and six truckloads a day to remove the furniture that had been auctioned off. The mansion was later restored and opened to the public.

So that’s our story for a Friday. I hope you learned something during this magical mystery tour. Enjoy the sunrise, have a great weekend and we’ll catch you on the rebound.