When packing for my trip to the redwoods, I went back and forth on whether I should bring my big telephoto lens. It’s so large and heavy that I wasn’t planning on hiking with it and didn’t expect to have much use for it among the big trees in any event. But with the hope of seeing harbor seals on the coast, I packed it alongside the rest of my camera gear.

A fortuitous decision but not because of harbor seals — I did see seals but not in good light. No, it was the meadows in the southern half of Redwood National Park that caught my fancy with the big glass, several families of black-tailed deer grazed one meadow and a herd of elk another.

Near sunset on my first full day in the park, a family of blacktails browsed on the blackberry vines that grew sporadically amongst the tall grasses of the meadow. I pointed the big lens at one fawn and was particularly delighted to see who was staring back at me: Sam the Snowman, the narrator from the Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer Christmas special I watched many times as a child.