A few weeks ago I went with my friend Rowshan to the desert.
Here is a little panoramic view of the spot where we put down our tents.

Rowshan, who is also a wildlife photographer, spends much more time than I do exploring all kind of places. So, I was very happy to get his invitation to join him on this desert trip. We drove to the Anza-Borrego desert and hiked in a few spots that Rowshan knew might reward us with some animal sightings.
Here are the best pictures I took the first day. I will publish the ones I took the next day in part 2 next week.

We met with a few interesting creatures. First, we met a zebra-tailed lizard. About that, most of the time, Rowshan would spot the animal before I could. That was a bit of a surprise for me because I usually spot animals before others. I ended up calling him Eagle Eye by the end of the trip.
Anyway, then we went to another trail where he was pretty sure we would see owls. We saw a barn owl but it flew away as soon as it saw us. Then we reached a spot where there was sitting a great horned owl. Rowshan kept pointing it out to me but I couldn’t see it. Can you spot it in the landscape in the gallery? Well eventually I did, and then we were able to get close to it as it hugged a rock-side. And here is a little video:

Then, much later, at night, we went driving around looking for sidewinders. This is a common name also given to the horned rattlesnake because of the way they move. For more info, check out this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewinding
We only found baby sidewinders. Then, to my surprise, even while driving, Rowshan was able to spot a dead desert scorpion. We stopped and he carefully moved it to the side of the road because he wanted to check out something he had read about those: their bodies become fluorescent when exposed to UV light. You can see that in the last picture of the gallery, it’s a pretty good rendition of what we saw. Note that I had to do some color correction because my camera version was looking more blue than green.