Giving Thanks

 

I am a highly emotional person. There, I said it. Why is that hard to say? You see, culturally, many humans seem hesitant to celebrate this quality in a person—maybe they have been raised to see emotionality as a sign of weakness or fragility, of being “crazy” or easily affected by the more trivial events in the world. Maybe they feel like they have to tip-toe around someone they see as overly emotional or spend extra energy supporting them. The way I see it, emotional sensitivity can be defined or displayed in many different ways, but when it comes down to it, “emotional” people may feel elements of the world that slip by the notice of others and recognize the beauty encapsulated in that moment or fragment of life. Something I find myself combating is the notion that the emotional response of sensitive people is centered around sadness, that if someone is overly emotional it means they struggle with happiness and they are sensitive to all the negative things in the world. This is not true. My strong and “sensitive” emotional responses often stem from a tiny moment of intense happiness, light-heartedness, and exhilaration, of utter bliss. Simply seeing a downy feather floating on the breeze, hearing the familiar rustle of a bird foraging in the bushes near me, tasting the salt in the air as I crest the hill that separates me from the ocean, feeling the warmth from the sun glance off the water and bathe me in a little extra Vitamin D, or smelling the freshness of a small valley after a long-awaited rain can inflate my heart with uncomplicated happiness and love. These moments are not as visible or interpretable as the sad or difficult moments that friends and loved ones offer their support for.

What does this have to do with the Island Scrub Jay? Not all that much, except that they evoke a strong emotional response in me, the happy kind. I find peace in their existence. I feel the intensity of the blue light scattered from their feathers, from their chocolate brown eye as it investigates me. Not always, not every jay I see. Part of being an emotional person is that, thankfully, certain sensitivities are not always turned on or engaged, and they can be unpredictable. Sometimes a jay is just a jay, but other times a jay is a messenger of joy and love, a catalyst of deep self-reflection and connection to the earth. A glimpse of color flashing in the sun can send my emotions hurtling skyward for a moment, a sweet moment where I appreciate exactly where I am right then.

 The photos above are both Island Scrub Jay tail feathers above and below, also called rectrices (singular rectrix).

So, today, tomorrow, and everyday, I am thankful that I feel emotions strongly. I am thankful that my heart is beating. I am thankful for the people in my life whose hearts beat with mine. I am thankful for the birds surrounding me, thankful for their wing beats and heartbeats. I am thankful for dirt, and salt, and grime, for sticks and leaves, and dried up fall flowers. I’m thankful for breath, lungs to take it in, and the release I feel when I exhale. I am thankful for language to express my thoughts and feelings, and I am thankful for non-verbal language too, for body-language (however confusing it may be sometimes), for eye-language, smile-language, bird-language. I am thankful for my ancestors, my current kin, and the thought that there will be more down the line. I am thankful for my friends and co-workers, for helping me explore this world we all live in together, however different our experiences may be. And lastly, I am thankful that this earth exists and that I get to be a part of it: wind, sun, soil, rain, and love. Lots and lots of love.

Thankful for Forrest and Morgan's recent visit to the island. So happy!

Sunset over Santa Rosa Island, San Miguel even further behind to the right.

Birdless

There are no songbirds here. Correction: there are three individual songbirds here. Three. There are more people on the island than songbirds. I spend my days wandering around the island, searching every nook and cranny for invisible birds, and being swarmed by flies (more news on the flies soon). We were socked in with fog for a week, but the last few days have been sunny with a breeze. Neither are conducive to migrants landing on the island. It's gonna pick-up soon, I know it! 

I haven't been taking many pictures lately, and a lot of them were washed out in the fog, so I messed around with the contrast and colors on a few. Enjoy!

Great Blue Heron perched regally on the tippy-top of Saddle Rock.

Ruddy Turnstone with extra color saturated legs.

Sunset behind Maintop. There haven't been many clear enough evenings for sunsets, so this was great.

The California Sea Lions don't mind the flies as much as we do.

A Least Flycatcher I banded. Sweet bird.

Flaming Flowers and Lizard Liquids

After leaving Santa Cruz Island, I spent three days at Midland School, the small rural boarding school I attended for high school in south-central California that emphasizes self-reliance, simplicity, lifelong learning, and responsibility to community, the outdoors, and to your own needs. As many of you know, it is very near and dear to my heart. As the years pass since I graduated, familiar faces start to fade away and new faces appear, which creates an air of awkwardness that is both comfortable and strange. I still feel like a part of the community but in a distanced way. I still consider the teachers there my mentors but I also get to call them my friends. I still see students who are just like me when I was there, but they are not a part of my Midland story, nor am I much a part of theirs other than as an occasional friendly face wandering the campus nostalgically. I have found myself returning to Midland frequently throughout the years (and heard the comment “it’s like you’ve never left!” far too often) and each time I go back I feel farther removed from the social community but more deeply engrained in the land. This spring, the vibrancy of the emerald fields, yellow mustard flowers, harlequin Coast Live Oaks, golden-orange poppies, lupine-colored lupine, olive-y jade serpentine outcrops, and the buttery rage of the sun made for a whole lifetime full of sensory memories.

Grass Mountain from the Midland School Organic Garden. Photo courtesy of Dewey Livingston.

I camped on an oak speckled mesa with my good friend Amelia. We spent the days catching up on each others lives, hiking in the dry heat, drawing the smells into our long-deprived nostrils, and soaking up the many bird songs, rustlings of branches and grasses, the hoots and hollers of lacrosse games, and the joyful reunions of old friends. On our last day we hiked Grass Mountain, the school’s solid, solemn yet soothing idol. On our long, hot, arduously steep, but completely satisfying hike we encountered a few expected and familiar “faces” like wildflowers and fence lizards but we were surprised when we startled a perfectly camouflaged Coast Horned Lizard in the crumbly shale trail.

Coast Horned Lizards, Phrynosoma coronatum, live in grasslands like the open slope of Grass Mountain, as well as warm, dry habitats where woody shrubs dominate, and in open forests, both coniferous and broad-leaf. They primarily eat ants but consume other small insects as well. They are covered in little spiky scales that are colored very much like the environments they live in: sandy tan, dusty brown, irony red, and charcoal gray. In fact, sometimes they blend in so well and keep so still when you are near, you might not see them until they skitter away from the shadow of your boot! 

Coast Horned Lizard, Phrynosoma coronatum.

Once you do see one, though, you wont be able to take your eyes off it. Their squat appearance has earned them the nickname “Horny Toads” even though they are reptiles, not amphibians. Like many reptiles, they have a few interesting defense mechanisms to scare off predators: they will swallow air to inflate their abdomens to make themselves look better so when they jab at the attacker with their horns they seem like more of a threat, and they also can squirt blood out of their eyes (Stebbins 138)! Apparently multiple Phrynosoma species have a large (relative to their head, that is) cavity behind their eye (called a sinus, just like ours), and the blood is squeezed through a pore on the eyelid and can spurt quite far. According to an article entitled “The Blood-squirting Variability of Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma)” in Copeia, a quarterly journal published by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the blood-squirting response is largely exhibited during interactions with animals in the canine family like foxes and coyotes, but has also occurred during aggressive incidents with humans (Sherbrooke et al. 1114). Had we known this beforehand, we probably wouldn’t have picked this little creature up so not to stress it out. This particular herp, only about 2.75 inches long (towards the smaller end of their average length of 2.5 to 4 inches, possibly indicating a younger lizard), was relatively calm in Amelia’s hand, and when it opened its mouth as if to gulp air, I quickly snapped a photo and we released it. It scuttled away only to disappear before our eyes within feet of us. We knew it was there, but it was so well blended in to the trail, it was difficult to keep track of!

It's amazing how well it blends in!

By the time we reached the top of the mountain it was just before one p.m. and it was hot. The large sprawling oak on the northern edge of the triangular peak blocked the breeze so the midday sun beat down with no relief. Despite the stifling heat, we sat at the top amongst the California Poppies and the Silver Bush Lupine to enjoy the view. If you’ve ever sat next to a blooming poppy, you’ve probably felt the golden glow of their vivid orange petals reflecting the sunlight back towards the sky or onto your skin. Perhaps you didn’t notice. Next time, on a hot sunny day, try to feel it. It’s like butter—real fresh-churned farm butter—but in the form of butterfly kisses on your arm or cheek. Sounds goofy, I know, but just you wait—you’ll feel it. 

A California Poppy, Eschsholzia californica, in the shale at the top of Grass Mountain

The California Poppy, Eschsholzia californica, is native to the western states, ranging from the southern coast of Washington all the way down to the very southernmost tip of Baja California (Clark). Apparently, when Spanish explorers first encountered what is now California, they sailed in at the peak of Poppy bloom and it seemed to them that the land was on fire. This may be a highly romanticized version of the truth, but I imagine the sense of wonder and amazement anyone must feel seeing a flower so radiant blanketing the green hills, reflecting the setting sun: the illusion of hills ablaze. E. californica also has medicinal properties: California Indians like the Ohlone people used a concoction made of poppy petals to get rid of lice (Smith), and it can also be used in tincture form or as a tea infusion as an anti-spasmodic to help children with colic sleep, or can be applied topically as a mild painkiller ("California Poppy Herbal Information and California Poppy Uses."). Now that you know this, don’t go out and harvest a bunch of poppies to make tinctures out of: E. californica is the California State Flower, so it is illegal to pick! 

The other wildflower whose glory we basked in, Lupine (Lupinus sp.), added perfect purple compliments to the green and orange flaming poppies (I’ve been told that purple and orange are most definitely not complimentary colors, though I personally think they go together quite well). I wasn’t able to identify the exact species of the small Lupines that were intermingling with the poppies (see here for all the Lupinus species in California) but further down the trail we found Silver Bush Lupine, Lupinus albifrons, which grows as a round shrub with large flower stalks sticking up above the green leaves below.

The unidentified Lupine, Lupinus sp.

Silver Bush Lupine, Lupinus albifrons.

On our trip down the mountain (which took only 1/6^th of the time it took us to hike up the mountain), we counted the number of Western Fence Lizards we saw. I think we counted upwards of nine individuals, but the interesting thing about these lizards is not how many there are on Grass Mountain’s narrow trail; it is what these lizards’ blood does (this is really the week of learning about reptiles and blood, I guess!). In 1998, Scientists from UC Berkeley discovered that the Western Fence Lizard, Sceloporus occidentalis, has a particular protein in its blood that kills the Lyme Disease bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, that is found in Western Black-legged Ticks, Ixodes scapularis. When the poppy seed-sized tick nymphs feed on the blood of the lizard (sometimes 30-40 nymphs will feed simultaneously on the same lizard), their gut is cleansed of the disease causing bacteria, thereby decreasing the rate of Lyme Disease in the western states! Read the SF Gate article to learn more about the chemistry behind it.

I left Midland on Monday morning amongst an early-morning coastal mist that threatened to smother the valley in a colorless cloak of water molecules, but the glowing colors of the mustard-filled pastures, though muted, desperately fighting the fog, couldn’t be washed-out.

The view from the top of Grass Mountain

Sunset over the Santa Ynez Valley from Figueroa Mountain Road.

Works Cited

 "California Poppy Herbal Information and California Poppy Uses." Bulk Herbs, Bulk Spices and Herbal Teas - Monterey Bay Spice Company. Monterey Bay Spice Company, n.d. Web. 5 May 2012. http://www.herbco.com/p-364-california-poppy-plant-cs-organic.aspx

Clark, Curtis. "Eschscholzia californica." The Genus Eschscholzia. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 4 July 2000. Web. 5 May 2012. <http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/poppy/cal.html>.

Russell, Sabin. "Lizards Slow Lyme Disease in West." San Francisco Chronicle, 17 Apr. 1998.

Sherbrooke, Wade C., George A. Middendorf III, and C. Guyer. "Blood-Squirting Variability in Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma)." Copeia 2001.4 (2001): 1114-1122. Print.

Smith, Chuck. "Ohlone Medicine." Cabrillo College. Cabrillo College, n.d. Web. 5 May 2012. <http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/OhloneMed.html>.

Stebbins, Robert C. A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians: field marks of all species in western North America, including Baja California. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Print.

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.