A Rekindling of Wings

It is time to start this blog up again, and what better place to start it up again than where I first started it last year: Santa Cruz Island. I spent last week volunteering on the Island Scrub-jay project, trekking up and down familiar hills and under familiar oaks looking for jay nests. I got to experience almost the entire spectrum of a spring season on the island: rain, fog, heat, wind, illuminating sunsets, goofy crew members, jeep rides to the beach, quality time with the jays, deep love for the physical space and the people I get to share it with. I find it hard to articulate the feeling of being there, of fitting in, of feeling grounded—happy without even thinking about it. The ocean breeze mixes with essences of lupine, oak pollen, drying grass, and spicy eucalyptus. Spring migrants zip through the trees, singing new/old songs that are tucked into our auditory memories from somewhere else but we can't quite bring up their name out of the context of our last meeting. I both love and feel guilty about ignoring the rest of the world for a while; feeling free in the isolation from consumerism, capitalism, and corporate greed, focusing on the now and here and allowing myself to fully absorb into just being. It's nice, but we can't do it all the time. We have to (and should!) participate in making this world a better place.

A view of Santa Cruz Island's Central Valley looking East from Islay Ridge.

One way that I hope to contribute to at least a small bit of the world is in the field of natural history. It is hard to pin down a definition of “natural history” because the field spans many scientific and social disciplines. It asks the question: which plants, animals, weather patterns, and ecological processes surround us and how do we humans fit in? It is almost less of a field of study and more of a practice—of looking, listening, and feeling, of loving the non-human as well as the human. It connects people to place and to the earth on which we all live, and it gives us a sense of community with the non-human instead of ownership of the non-human. Aldo Leopold said it best in the foreword to A Sand County Almanac, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (Leopold viii). Where then, do we start fostering this feeling of community? On the outskirts of towns and cities, or in the heart of them? How to we teach nature when there is so little left? I recently flew across the country from L.A. to New York (and yes, I feel guilty about airplane travel) and soaked up the expected horrors of urban sprawl. I imagined a time when the Los Angeles area used to be rolling oak savannahs, chaparral, and coastal scrub, with scattered home sites here and there. Now rows and rows of houses and miles and miles of asphalt and glass dominate this landscape. Not even just dominate—it is entirely covered. The air is never clear. The water comes from far away. We all know this is happening, we all know it is speeding up, and I can’t speak for everyone else, but I am terrified. I know I must start small, take baby steps, and perhaps it will feel like I am making a difference.

This blog will be teaching tidbits of natural history as I learn about them or perhaps even long after the fact. I have, after all, lived in these places before and considered myself a naturalist for a while, but I am always learning new things and eager to share them. I will warn you: sometimes the posts will be ecologically scattered, especially if I am jumping around from place to place like this last week, but most of them will be about the Mono Basin, which is home base for now.

Looking down at chaparral habitat from the top of Los Torres ridge

To start though, back to Santa Cruz Island. The island has a wide variety of habitats including grassland, coastal sage scrub, oak woodland, chaparral, riparian, bishop pine forest, and of course the intertidal zones that line the perimeter. I spent most of my time on Santa Cruz in chaparral and oak woodland, as this is where the jays spend most of their nesting energy. Chaparral consists of mainly drought-tolerant woody shrubs and small trees like oaks, Ceanothus, Manzanita, sumac species, buckwheat, and sage. On Santa Cruz, the Island Scrub Oak, Quercus pacifica, is a dominant chaparral species in which Scrub-jays nest. This small, flaky barked tree often looks like a contortionist from cirque du soliel. These twists and turns might make for a difficult time for predators on their way to a jay nest, but sometimes the branch will bend right back down onto the ground. In the more open woodland habitats, jays often nest in larger Coast Live Oak, Quercus agrifolia. Both oak species drop their acorns and birds like Scrub-jays and Acorn Woodpeckers snatch them up to cache them for the fall. Sometimes the Scrub-jays forget where they bury them and a new oak will germinate. The Acorn Woodpeckers stash their booty in “granaries” made from other trees. One tree can have literally thousands of acorns wedged into holes for the woodpeckers to eat later.

Scrub Oak

Lemonade Berry, Rhus integrifolia. Fruits and flowers absent.

One of two sumac species on Santa Cruz Island is Lemonade Berry, Rhus integrifolia. It has thick leathery green leaves with distinct veins that attach to a pinkish petiole (the little stalk that connects the blade of the leaf to the stem, which most people confuse with the stem). The clusters of fuzzy, reddish-whitish-pink berries stick out from the tips of the branches, and when you walk past a fruiting bush, you will most likely get the sticky juice all over your clothes. According to Edward K. Balls, in his book The Early Uses of California Plants, Lemonade Berry got its name from American Indians who made a sour-sweet summery drink when they stirred the ripe berries into water (Balls 43).

Sometimes, trying to identify a plant is like a treasure hunt. You have clues (your memory, a photograph, etc.) and resources like a field guide but you have to put them together to make sense but sometimes they don’t make sense even then! One of the Island Scrub-jay Project crewmembers had a photo of a jay nest in a mystery plant and a very basic description: shaggy bark, white flowers, with green-toothed leaves. We searched through the island flora field guide (A Flora of Santa Cruz Island by Steve Junak) but the descriptions were so scientific and convoluted that we needed to look at the glossary every five words to figure out what each one meant. At first, we flipped through the book to look for drawings of similar leaves. Then we tried to narrow it down by relating it to other plants or eliminating plants that we knew it wasn’t. Then we searched our memories for bits and pieces of conversations we’d had about plants with other biologists on the island or the knowledgeable island caretaker. Maybe it was something rare with only a few individuals on the island? Maybe we found something new! We finally settled on Summer Holly, Comarostaphylis diversifolia. It was an “aha!” moment. The flowers matched, the leaves matched, the bark matched, and the book said it was only found in a few places on the island, in coastal chaparral. One of the clues that helped was the similarity of Summer Holly’s flowers to Manzanita, which is closely related. Both are in the heath family. Manzanita covers a good portion of a few of the study plots, so the crewmembers and I were quite familiar with their characteristics (flowers, leaves, bark) which helped us eliminate actual Manzanita and find the plant's true species name.

Last but not least, there is the natural history of the humans. Santa Cruz Island used to be home to multiple Chumash villages. They called this land Limu (Kroeber 554), and many of the mainland tribes considered it the place where you go while you are waiting to be taken to the next life or to the heavens, a sort of limbo. The Limu Chumash traded with tribes on the other islands and with the mainland via long dugout canoes called tomols (Kroeber 558). *In the 1500s, the European expeditions began to “discover” the island, but it was not until 1769 that a Spanish explorer claimed the land for the King of Spain. The Chumash population dwindled due to European-spread disease and forced relocation to the missions on the mainland, and by 1814 most of them were gone. Mexico gained independence from Spain and the island was granted to a private owner who turned it into an esteemed sheep ranch. One hundred years after Spain had claimed the island, it was sold to a group of men who formed the Santa Cruz Island Company (SCIC) and sought to develop the sheep ranch. Of the ten shareholders, a Frenchman named Justinian Caire took control of the future of the ranch and designed “a great variety of agricultural and ranching endeavors suitable to the island's climate and terrain” ("History of Santa Cruz Island"). They continued to raise sheep for wool, meat, tallow, and hide, but also grew olives, almonds, alfalfa, figs, apples, oranges, avocados, and other vegetables, as well as a variety of wine grapes for the Santa Cruz Winery. Caire died in 1897, and the island was divided between his wife, children, and the SCIC. In 1937, Edwin Stanton bought the SCIC portion of the island and began ranching again, this time with cattle. Ownership of the ranch and land (some 9/10ths of the island) passed to his son Dr. Carey Stanton in 1963. Dr. Stanton ran the ranch until his death in 1987. Having no children of his own to inherit the ranch, he decided to pass the island on to The Nature Conservancy to protect this place that he so dearly loved. In 1997, the remaining 10^th of the island became part of the Channel Islands National Park . Currently, caretakers of the ranch and research station inhabit the island year-round, and scientists and school groups spend a significant amount of time visiting to do field work. On the National Park side of the island, many visitors from all over can hike or camp on the bluffs and explore the beaches to their heart’s content.

The Scrub-jay and Eagle Crew jumping in front of the sunset

It is a unique experience to be a field biologist on an isolated island like Santa Cruz. The Scrub-jay crew is a solid 5-person crew living in close quarters for 4 months in rustic cabins perched atop a hill overlooking a mostly dry creek bed meandering between two steep ridges. They buy food on the mainland once a month and have to make it last. They entertain themselves with games and laughter and conversation, with music and literature and adventures to beaches to toss a Frisbee around. Once in awhile they will venture over to other parts of the island to visit the Bald Eagle Crew for dinner or meet up with the student groups at the Field Station for a BBQ. It’s quite a life, that of a field biologist. In a few weeks time, this Scrub-jay field crew will disperse onto the mainland to different corners (and also to the middle) of the continent to start new adventures in a new season. Hopefully, all of our paths will cross again and we can reminisce about that amazing place that we once shared: Santa Cruz Island.

Works Cited:

Balls, Edward K.. Early uses of California plants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Print.

"History of Santa Cruz Island." Santa Cruz Island Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2012. <http://www.scifoundation.org/sanhhisto.html>.

Kroeber, A. L.. Handbook of the Indians of California. New York: Dover Publications, 1976. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County almanac, and sketches here and there. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Print.

*The information about the human history of Santa Cruz Island from the 1500s until the present was derived from "History of Santa Cruz Island" from the Santa Cruz Island Foundation website.