Summer Thunder at Mono Lake

There is nothing like a summer thunderstorm to slow your afternoon down and remind you to take the time to just breathe and feel the air change and charge around you. The sky growls purple and the clouds build until they heavily drop bottom-first to the heat swollen earth. The rain rarely makes it to the desert soil, though you can see it coming down in sheets. The wind surges, pushing the storm quickly over your head and away to light someone else's afternoon with clashes of exciting lightning, and the sky returns to crystal blue and gilded sunlight.

I'm back in the Eastern Sierra after a whirlwind three weeks (has it been that long?) of post-island life. I departed Santa Cruz Island in good spirits after jumping off the pier with my crew, and saw Humpback Whales, Common Dolphins, and thousands of Sooty Shearwaters feeding with them on the ride back. Upon arriving at the mainland, still salty and damp from the ocean, I hopped in my truck and drove three and a half hours to Fossil Falls, a crazy beautiful volcanic rock formation south of Lone Pine, CA. It was quite late and quite warm when I set up my camp in the deserted BLM campground and the wind was beginning to pick up with incredibly forceful gusts. It felt amazing to be alone yet content on that balmy desert night, just me, basalt, a cinder cone, the wind, and the sky.

Fossil Falls in 2008. Solid basalt smoothed and carved by water and wind.

I made it home to Lee Vining the next day, where the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua was soon to begin. Summertime on the Eastside was in full swing. I lead two fantastic field trips for the birding festival and reunited with my Eastside gang around the campfire.

INTERRUPTIVE NOTE: It just started pouring! The thunder is directly above me. Epic! I am outside, safely huddled under a big (wooden) umbrella at the Latte Da coffee shop.

After the festival, I drove home to Marin for my cousin Robin's wedding to the lovely Shelton and her awesome son Shiloh. It was a beautiful ceremony and a fun village event with many of Robin's friends playing live music until the summer sun was long gone. Next up was my friend Bailey's wedding in Walla Walla, WA, so I drove up with a two day pit-stop in Ashland, OR to pick pie cherries off the neighbor's tree and play board games with my dear friends Morgan and Forrest. Walla Walla was a joyous reunion of my dorm-mates from my freshman year of college and a sweet celebration of Bailey and his bride Kaity's love.

UPDATE: It is now a monumental downpour. Lightning just struck literally 100 feet from where I am sitting (now inside) and the thunderclap shook the building. I love this.

This sure doesn't do the rain justice.

So, now I am back in Lee Vining, camping (my bed must be soaked right now, despite the tarp) for the week, then out to the Mono Lake islets to band California Gull chicks. The rest of my summer consists of playing (aka birding and hiking) around here as well as in Oregon, harmonizing with Ooolation! Singers in the aspens above Lee Vining, and enjoying funemployment while I can.

Mid-August will bring me back to Southeast Farallon Island for 5-6 weeks, and then back to Santa Cruz Island I go! I'll try to blog about some fun summer natural history tidbits in between. Until then, get out and enjoy wherever you are, I know I am!

Tufa Kayak Sunrise Bliss

At 2 AM on July 6th, I tossed and turned in the back of my pickup truck, despite how comfortable my bed back there is. The waning moon shone bright through the windows of my camper shell. I'm not sure why I couldn't sleep, but I felt the imminent time of my beeping watch alarm looming nearer...still not asleep! Just after 5 AM, I crawled out of my warm cocoon into the cool pre-dawn air. I could hear the dense salty water lapping on the shore of Mono Lake. The air smelled fresh; a new day. I pulled on a waterproof jacket and packed my camera into a dry bag. I stashed my water bottle in the back of my borrowed kayak, clipped myself into a yellow PFD, and slung my binoculars over my shoulder. As I launched the kayak into the thick brine-shrimp filled water, everything else in the world melted away and I slipped into the simple bliss that is Mono Lake at sunrise.

After a half hour paddle across open water, I began to weave into the Tufa grove as the sun's rays burst above Paoha Island, glancing of the smattering of clouds, gilding them with peachy gold. The Tufa towers stood tall, silently sillhouetted against the gaudy colors of the morning sky. Tufa is not a word you hear every day. In fact, most of you are probably thinking "Tufa? What the heck is that?" Tufa towers are limestone columns that form under water in Mono Lake. Freshwater underground streams trickle down from the Sierra and bubble up under the lake; on the journey down, they pick up trace amounts of minerals from the earth they traveled through to arrive at Mono; one prevalent mineral is calcium, which reacts with the carbonate-rich lake water and precipitates out to form CaCO3 (Calcium Carbonate), also called limestone. The freshwater is less dense than the twice-as-salty-as-the-ocean lake water, so it rises to the surface of the lake, creating the towering forms of tufa. When the lake drops (like it did drastically after L.A. started diverting water, see "Part 1: "Seagulls" and Politics), the tufa towers are exposed and simply beckon to be photographed.

I truly love the little things in life that remind us that though we may not know exactly why we are here, it is miraculous that we are here at all and that we get to experience the immense beauty the earth has to offer.

June is the Busiest Birdiest Month

The month of June in the Mono Basin brings flocks of birds and birders alike. In the first few weeks, vagrants (birds that have strayed from their normal migrating route) popped into the Warbler Thicket and in random copses of aspens and willows around the Basin. On June 2, a prominent Mono Basin birder found a Prothonotary Warbler along the highway. I have only ever seen one individual in a swampy creek in Western North Carolina, and I wished I had been able to find this particular individual but I struck out. There was an Indigo Bunting in the Warbler Thicket (a particularly magnetic stand of aspens, cottonwoods, willows, and wood rose that stuck around for the first week of June. There was also a Hooded Oriole by Tioga Lodge and a Hooded Warbler up a remote creek (lots of Hoods in the east, but not normally in the west!).

Sadly, I did not see a single one of these birds because, as I said, June is the busiest month and I was working almost every morning and most of my days off I used for exciting things like doing a Breeding Bird Survey in the Deep Springs Valley (well, really up Wyman Canyon Rd from Deep Springs Valley to White Mountain Road and the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest), attending a family birthday event in Marin, and leading field trips for the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua! The days rolled on by, quicker than imaginable.

On June 14 we had a massive fallout event: Birders descended on Lee Vining in a cloud of binoculars, wide-brimmed hats, and quick-dry pants. Birds, not so much. June 15-17 was the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua, an annual birding festival hosted by the Mono Lake Committee. I have been a trip leader for two years now and it has been wonderful. Birding festivals are a great way to meet other birders, network within the birding community, and have an all out grand time watching birds in a new place or with someone knowledgeable about the area.

The week after the Chautauqua, it was back to work! Unfortunately, it was also really windy, so I didn't get much work in. I also lead a fantastic 2-day private birding trip for some great folks from Santa Barbara who I've known for some years now. Now I am half-way through my last week of bird work for the summer. Speaking of being busy in this busiest month, I've got to run off and finish up some data! I promise a more natural history related post soon.

I also just found out that I will be spending 8 weeks on Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI) starting October 6 as a volunteer intern for PRBO. More about that soon!

Part 2: Chaos of the Senses

I stink of night sweat and gull shit, of salt and Tempera paint. My hair is matted with wind and crusty gull filth. My feet and hands are stained with peacock colored paint—green, teal, blue, purple—and speckled with blisters, caked with Mono. I am happy. The clouds are surreal. I am listening to the incessant cacophony of gull sex and the illusion of crickets. I just counted California Gull nests all day, everyday for three days. I was shit on, dive-bombed, smacked in the head by angry dads, and screamed at by protective parents. The stimulation of counting nests is monumental. Gulls screaming in our ears, eyes scanning for nests that blend in perfectly with the white and grey rocks, paint caking on our hands as it leaks from the squirt bottle, the strong stench of shit and salt—the smell is sometimes so bad we can taste it. All five senses slammed for a few hours and then—peace. Up on Krakatoa—the field station, home base—the breeze chills us, the rocks warm us, the Violet-green Swallows gracefully swoop around, chirping while they scrabble over floating gull feathers that they then snap up in their tiny bills and fly into a crevice in the jagged jumble of volcanic rocks. By night we are pirates, drinking whiskey and warm beer beneath a tattered skull and crossbones flag. We listen to the moonlit night, still thick with the unending but oddly comforting gull noise. We see no city lights, no artificial sights, only the silhouette of the ever-silent Sierra. When the earth revolves to morning once more, I awake to the ghostly song of the Rock Wren. Lonely, he sings and sings and sings to attract a mate but no return call can be heard. He is on an island, a vacant pile of volcanic rock, in the middle of a salty desert sea. No one will hear him but us.

California Gulls, Larus californicus, some sitting on nests, some standing at attention.

The result of many angry gulls. Hot, sour shit grenades. Very, very smelly.

Female Violet-green Swallow, Tachycineta thassalina, (whose scientific name means swift mover of the sea). Females have a smoky face and less vibrant colors than the males.

Male Violet-green Swallow. Crisp white face and vibrant green and violet, quite fitting.

Close-up of the under-wing.

Two eggs and a...rock? Often we will find rocks in nests, which presumably helps keep the gull balanced while incubating. Males and females share incubation of the nests, in shifts.

The beginning of gull copulation. The male stands on the female's back and wiggles is tail end around while grunting until she becomes receptive and he then maneuvers himself to a position where he can reach beneath her tail and touch his cloaca to her cloaca, a "cloacal kiss". He then hops off (or she starts to walk away while he's still trying) and they stand beside each other a little awkwardly (or she ignores him completely).

Sunrise from my sleeping bag.

Krakatoa, the name of both the islet and the fake volcano atop it.

Krakatoa was built in the early 1950s as a movie set for the 1952 movie A Fair Wind to Java. It is made out of 2x4's, nails, chicken wire, and asbestos-y papier-mâché. The field researchers fixed it up and have used it as a field station since the 80s. It has a kitchen, a livingroom/dining area, multiple sleeping areas, a storage shed (loving nicknamed the "Hanta Hut"), a basement, a "crow's nest", and down in the rocks below the volcano is the "honey pot"--a bucket toilet with the best view you'll ever have sitting on the john.

Part 1: “Seagulls” and Politics

I write today to dispel the myth of the “seagull”, whose brethren have been dubbed the “rats of the skies” and whose reputation for stealing hotdogs from the sandy hands of mustard-crusted sunburned children has deeply overshadowed its simple beauty and charm.

Behold, a California Gull, Larus californicus. 2012.

When envisioning a “seagull”, most people think of a swarm of big gray-and-white birds mobbing a snack bar at a crowded ocean beach or pillaging the dumpster in the beach’s parking lot. What many people fail to realize is that the mob of seemingly identical birds usually consists of multiple species of birds. Calling them all “seagulls” strips them of their individuality, lumps them into a mass of sameness, and perpetuates ignorance (no offense to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who is a genuine badass). There are over a hundred species of gulls worldwide and each of them is different. You wouldn’t casually say, “Hey mom, there are some dogs in the yard” and leave it at that when there are wolves, jackals, and domestic dogs on the lawn, would you? All three of those animals share a genus. The diversity of gulls expands beyond just the genus Larus, so when you call a Sabine’s Gull, Xema sabini, a “seagull”, it is like saying a Chimpanzee is just another human (who are in the same family, Hominidae, but not the same genus). Some folks would be pretty pissed about that. Needless to say, it is best to drop the “sea” and just go with “gull”; at least bird nerds will like you a lot better if you do.

A beautiful and unique Heerman's Gull, Larus heermanni, in a parking lot in San Francisco. Red bill and black feet!

Some gulls like civilization because we leave so much edible waste around and many gulls have become accustomed to the easy snag of a PB&J left on a picnic table or a recently dumped rack of ribs that may have hit the floor in the kitchen and couldn’t be served to the waiting customer. Gulls are adaptable. Their opportunistic behavior is often portrayed as lazy or greedy, but really it is just intelligent. Without our handouts or garbage dumps, these birds would survive just fine. They would forage like any other species of bird. Not all gulls live around or near the sea. They also live near freshwater swamps, estuaries, open tundra, lakes, and bays, among other places. Since we call them “seagulls” based on where they live, wouldn’t we call a gull that lived near Tomales Bay a bagel (baygull)? Sorry, bad joke.

For the past four summers, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to participate in a long-term study of the California Gull, Larus californicus, at Mono Lake. Learning about this particular species of gull in their natural habitat has opened my eyes to the remarkable and chaotic life of colony-nesting species. This particular colony of California Gulls has a rich history that intertwines with the human political history of this region. The story starts in Los Angeles, over three hundred miles south of Mono Lake.

Gulls on Pancake Islet, 2009.

At the turn of the century, the city of Los Angeles, looking to grow, wanted more water. They began searching far and wide to find it. Find it they did. They cunningly began to buy up water rights throughout the Owens Valley and up into the Mono Basin (how they went about doing this is a story for another day). In April 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began diverting water from Mono Lake’s tributary streams. Not just some water; almost all of it. Rush Creek dried up below LADWP’s Grant Lake Reservoir. The Mono Lake, already a saline terminal desert lake, began to evaporate. The lake level dropped over 40 feet, which doubled the salinity of the lake, causing the simple ecosystem to spiral to the brink of collapse.

This is where the gulls come in: Mono Lake hosts the second largest California Gull nesting colony known in the world. The largest colony is at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which has upwards of 100,000 nesting California Gulls each summer (see, not all gulls live by the sea!). Mono Lake’s colony fluctuates but has averaged around 47,000 adults in the last 30 years. Historically, the gulls nested on Negit Island, a large rocky volcanic island where greasewood shrubs provided the gulls with shade. When the lake level dropped dramatically as a result of the water diversions, Negit became connected to the mainland, allowing predators like coyotes to saunter out and feast on the nesting gulls and their newborn chicks. Concerned scientists and conservation groups rallied to do something, anything, to prevent this destruction from happening, and in the spring of 1978 the National Guard tried to make a moat in the land bridge with dynamite. The resulting channel was ragged and thin, but it had to do. In the spring of 1979, they tried again, only this time the mud flew up into the air and fell back down exactly where it came from; a complete failure. According to John Hart, who wrote the now out-of-print environmental saga of Mono Lake called Storm Over Mono, “On May 27, researchers starting their annual gull census found coyote tracks, empty nests, and scattered shells…three-quarters of the gulls at Mono failed to nest at all that year” (88). That spring, many of the gulls scattered from Negit Island and found a newly emerged rocky archipelago east of Negit, now called the Negit Islets, and another few islets west of Paoha Island. These islets became the new home of Mono Lake’s California Gull colony.

Negit Island, where the gulls used to nest.

In 1983, the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, now PRBO Conservation Science, started a long-term study of the Mono Lake California Gull colony in conjunction with the Mono Lake Committee. Each year, researchers make three trips to the island during the summer. The first visit, in May, is a colony-wide Nest Count. Four to six researchers and/or volunteers count every nest on every islet in 3-4 days in sweep lines, marking the side of each nest with a dab of water soluble paint to avoid double counting and keeping track of numbers with handheld tally counters, casually called clickers. In July, researchers band a subset of chicks that were born within small chicken wire and PVC pipe plots with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services aluminum bands, each with its own unique 8-digit number, and a plastic color band. In late August or early September, researchers go back out to the now vacated islets and scour the rocky ground for dead banded chicks. This helps figure out how many of the banded chicks fledged and this number can be extrapolated to estimate the overall fledge-rate of the population, also known as the reproductive success of the population.

A researcher (Justin) bands a California Gull chick with a USFWS aluminum band. 2009.

This year is the beginning of the 30^th field season for the PRBO California Gull Project at Mono Lake. This length of a dataset is rare in the science world; many projects only go on for a few seasons, and all are funding dependent, which is becoming increasingly scarce as the government and state budgets are slashed and reprioritized (badly). This ongoing project has been monumental in gathering important ecological data as it pertains to the fluctuations in the lake level, brine shrimp productivity, and weather patterns. This data will be useful for years to come, in both scientific endeavors and political ones—it is, after all, one of the reasons Mono Lake was saved. The gull story is only one part of a long and complex process to help save Mono Lake from water diversions. To make a very long story short, a group of concerned citizens formed a non-profit called the Mono Lake Committee (MLC), who eventually gained enough support and momentum to sue the city of Los Angeles for damaging the lake’s ecosystem. After a 16-year court battle, the MLC won the lawsuit and LADWP was ordered to divert less water to allow the lake to rise just over 20 feet from the historic low. The MLC now focuses on education, restoration, and research to keep the lake ecosystem healthy and cared for.

The next blog post will detail my most recent adventure with the gull project: Nest Count!

Work Cited

Hart, John. Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future. Berkeley: University of California, 1996. Print.

The Early Morning Job

It is still very dark when I throw my covers off and slip into my field pants, already alert and ready to start my day at 4:40am. I flip the electric kettle on, that loud obnoxious electric “CH-CH-ch-ch-chrrrrr” that always starts out my day, and choose this mornings’ tea flavor: Lemon Zinger, yum. Surprisingly, I have survived the first week of Point Counts with just herbal tea in the mornings, no caffeine (the one day I did make caffeinated tea, I drove away with my travel mug on top of the Jeep. Oops). I stand in the kitchen, humming a song that is already stuck in my head while I decide what to eat for breakfast. PB&J? That’s boring. Oatmeal? No time to scrub the pot. Leftover enchiladas? That’s quick, and delicious. Enchiladas it is. I devour my cold meal, burn my tongue on my still-too-hot tea, grab my daypack and binoculars, and I’m out the door. I hop into PRBO’s field vehicle, a cherry red Jeep Cherokee that is older than me, turn my iPod up loud on a pair of wallet-sized RadioShack portable speakers because the Jeep’s tape deck won’t turn on, and start the day singing at the top of my lungs, driving down Highway 395—alert and elated. The pre-dawn light in the eastern sky over Mono Lake never fails to blow me away; colors that no camera can capture, whose descriptions only come to me in the form of emotions, not words that I can say out loud. My heart is singing as loud as my voice is. I can’t believe how fortunate I am to live in a place like this.

5:05 AM

Mono Lake pre-dawn. Colors close to reality, but nowhere near as visceral.

I am working as a Field Biologist for PRBO Conservation Science this summer, as I have for the past two summers here in the Eastern Sierra. Our projects change from year to year depending on funding, so this season I am doing Point Counts for the Sierra Nevada Management Indicator Species (MIS) Project, which monitors the presence of thirteen indicator species within the National Forests of the Sierra Nevada in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). Indicator species (selected species that demonstrate sensitivity to ecosystem changes and disturbance) are often used to make management decisions within the National Forest to help maintain or create critical habitat for the selected species while also allowing the Forest Service to harvest timber and extract other resources from the forest. My surveys are specifically to detect the presence of the five species of birds being used as MIS in the USFS-selected habitats (chaparral, coniferous forest in an intermediate stage of succession, snags in unlogged forest, and riparian). Point Count surveys are a way to estimate population density, biodiversity, and monitor population trends over time, among other things. Often the survey is a series of designated points (in this case GPS coordinates) spaced evenly along a transect line through the desired study habitat. The points for this MIS project are in two clusters of 5 points each, with a point at each of the cardinal directions and one in the center. Each point is 354 meters from the other points with the exception of the central point, which is 250 meters from the other points. 

Point Counting in the Pines and Firs at Deadman Creek.

Yesterday, my Points were at Deadman Creek, a few miles north of Mammoth Lakes. The habitat is dominated by Jeffrey Pines and Fir trees (either Red or White, not quite sure which) and smells like Christmas. I arrived a few minutes early but I still had a quick 90 meter jaunt to my first point, so I strapped on my range finder and GPS, slung my clipboard and binoculars around my neck, and headed south through the trees, dodging gangly bare aspen arms and downed Jeffrey branch trip-wires. I start the first point of every day fifteen minutes after sunrise; yesterday it rose at 5:41, my count-down timer started at 5:56 exactly. Each count lasts for five minutes. As the seconds go by I must identify not only who is singing, calling, or moving, but also where they are singing, calling, or moving—I record a distance (in meters) for each individual detection. I find Point Counts to be meditative, a way to focus all of my energy on now. I forget that anything else exists and I only hear the Juncos singing and the Cassin’s Finches calling and the distant Woodpecker drumming. Five minutes of refreshing concentration, of cerebral muscle memory that declares “Western Tanager, Pygmy Nuthatch, Williamson’s Sapsucker, Mountain Chickadee, Yellow-rumped Warbler” as the reverberations of song bounce into my ears; five minutes of now. My watch beeps to signify the end of the count and the spell is broken. Meditation over. It’s time for a nice walk to the next point. I repeat this process five times per transect, ten times total in a day. At the center point of each transect, I also conduct a call-playback survey to detect the presence of the indicator species that may not have been detected in a passive point count (in conifer forests, we call for Hairy Woodpecker, Mountain Quail, and Black-backed Woodpecker). We use game callers (like people use for hunting) with the calls of each MIS programmed in. If the species is present, it will respond to the call or fly in to investigate. So far I have had a few Hairy Woodpeckers bomb in squeaking, but today I got quite a fright when a Mountain Quail responded to my call from 20 meters away. Their call is a loud and jarring high-pitched “WOK”. He then came fluttering out from behind a tree clucking and strutting and making a scene. I laughed out loud. What a funny bird. 

Slightly blurry MIS photo, Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides villosus).