These San Diego-area beaches among best for spotting wildlife in US: report
LA JOLLA, Calif. — Some beaches are made for sunbathing while others remain a sanctuary for wildlife in all of nature’s glory.
For those looking to get a glimpse at sea creatures, coastal birds and other life forms lurking along the sand, there’s two San Diego-area beaches that are considered among the best in the U.S. for spotting wildlife.
That’s according to HawaiianIslands.com (a resource for finding restaurants, attractions and vacation rentals), which analyzed crowdsourced data to find out what beaches across the country offer the widest animal life in the sand, sea and sky.
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This report excludes coastal or island national wildlife refugees.
While using Tripadvisor data, researchers at HawaiianIslands.com curated a list of 100 of the most popular tourist beaches in the U.S.
From there, they used iNaturalist.org (an online community database of wildlife observations) to count the animal species observed over the past four years in and around each beach’s coastal area.
Then, they ranked the beaches for the total number of unique species, species per 10 acres and separately for the categories of bird, reptile and marine animal species.
La Jolla Cove was ranked No. 1 for the most species spotted per 10 acres with their data showing 143.7 animal species sighted. This was the densest variety of animal life at any U.S. beach, according to this study.
La Jolla Shores was ranked No. 1 in best beaches for spotting marine life. Visitors to this San Diego-area beach reported sightings of leopards sharks, stingrays, seals and over 170 other marine species, based on the findings in this study.
In the category of highest number of animal species spotted, La Jolla Shores was ranked No. 14 in the U.S. This considered sightings of amphibians, birds, insects, molluscs, arachnids, fish, mammals and reptiles.
The full results of the study can be found here.
For San Diegans looking to marvel at beach wildlife, getting a peek at sea creatures and sand dwellers is a just a short drive to La Jolla.
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