Ponderings of the blog

I'll be honest and admit that I have been so busy and having such a great time here in Lee Vining that spending time recounting it all on the computer is difficult because there are so many other things I'd rather be doing! I guess some blogs can only last for so long. Soon I'll be too busy with school, where I hope to be doing an educational bird blog for the college campus, so maintaining two blogs would be even more difficult. My problem is there is just so much about the Mono Basin that I want to share with people out there. Perhaps when I finish my job in two weeks and have a lot more free time I will take the time some evening to sit down and compose a few pieces about the California Gulls and their nesting colony on Mono Lake, the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua that went on here last weekend, what it feels like to find an elusive bird's nest unexpectedly, what the reverse sunset over the lake feels like, how blooming Desert Peach and Bitterbrush feed my soul, why the Mono Basin ecosystem is so important for birds and wildlife and humans, and why oh why I love Rush Creek so much.

Until then, bird on!

Centinela, Willows, Christy - Extracurricular Exploring

My last few weeks on Santa Cruz Island passed by so quickly, I can hardly distinguish when I was where or who I was with. It was a blur flying across my vision, a bird whose form burned a memory into my brain but whom I couldn't quite identify with the memory alone. I will break the weeks down into highlights:

Mama Kerry and Rust, the crew's '77 Land Cruiser, atop the Ridge

My mom came to visit--a wonderful treat for both of us. We hiked to Pelican Bay from Prisoner's Harbor, and I was introduced to a whole other side of the island--an island so diverse it feels like it would take months of exploring, years even, to really get to know all the different micro-climates and unique habitats. Pelican Bay itself looks tropical with aqua waves lapping the black biotite swaths of rock covered with brick-and-spearmint colored lichens. We saw flashes of bright orange under the clear rippling liquid. Giant Goldfish? No, it was a Garibaldi, I found out later, which turns out to be the state fish of California. Once back to the field station, we took off exploring and drove to Centinela, where the relict population of Bishop Pines begins in scatters of lone straggly pines and becomes thicker and thicker until you see off in the distance that it becomes a forest that blankets the steep slopes and canyons.

Bishop Pines, looking West.

My dad also came to visit. I took a day off and we took the Land Cruiser up the ridge road, then down the Willows road until it ended, and hiked down the wash to Willows Beach. It is secluded and breathtakingly beautiful, like a lost cove no one had ventured to before. There are two rocky spires sticking out of the water just 50 meters or so offshore, one of which is called Ship Rock. We walked the soft beach and clamored on the rocky shore beneath cliffs with cool exposed geologic formations. The sea was clear and blue again, but this time we could touch it and it was COLD, so it seemed less tropical than Pelican Bay. It was great to have my dad around.

Willows Beach with Shiprock at left.

 

 

Christy Ranch, the old old house, with cypress trees.

During my last week on the island, we had a field trip day and the whole crew drove out to Christy Beach, on the west side of the island. There is an old ranch there with what could be the oldest building on the island, built by Justinian Caire in the mid-to-late 1800s. The beach was vast and smooth and covered with little tar balls that got all over my feet. The rocks geology was amazing--huge smooth ripples of sandstone with boulders and fossils lodged into them, capturing time. It was windy so we only stayed for an hour or two, but we had a picnic lunch by the old adobe, which is supposedly haunted by a woman who washed ashore on the beach after throwing herself from the ship she was on. It was creepy, but I would've loved to spend the night and see the Green Lady for myself.

Christy Beach, looking north as Sinead walks down the beach.

Small boulder sticking out of sandstone. 

As the days wound down, I said goodbye to my many Jay friends one by one. The Sirius pair in Coches, La Negra and her mate GUY/AP (the Negra Modelo pair) in Portezeula, and the charismatic Kennedys, Hillary Clinton, as well as Dalia and Castro at Field Station. Of course there were many others, but these ones stuck out in my mind as favorites. On my last day, Hillary took a peanut out of my hand. I was thrilled. I got to see Dalia and Castro's brown-headed baby in the creepy bird tree outside the Cabins--it looked almost grown but with a hint of a gape and a head full of brown baby feathers. I named it Fidelito, after Castro's real son, Fidelita if it turns out to be female.

Saying bye to the crew was just as hard. I feel privileged to have known these four humans in the three months on the Island. It is always sad to leave a group, sadder when you know your lives are taking you far away from each other, but happy because you know that you became close enough to visit and continue the friendship. It is really just "see ya later!". I had a great time learning everyone's quirks, habits, thoughts, and sometimes dreams, and I hope they felt the same about me.

Until next time, Santa Cruz Island, whenever that may be!

The Sirius female, YGO/AY, sitting on her nest.

Hillary Clinton, taking a peanut from the Cabin railing.

See more of my Santa Cruz Island photos at picasaweb.google.com/oreothlypiscelata

Back to the Mainland

My adventure on Santa Cruz Island has come to a close. I am back on the mainland, visiting with family and friends at Midland before heading to Lee Vining for another summer of bird surveys. Things are hectic so I will hopefully be able to write about the last few days on the island once things are settled down in a few days and I am in one place. I will continue this blog through the summer, as there are many birdy adventures to be had in the Eastern Sierra.

On another note, due to the millions of dollar budget cuts in California, the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) released a list of 70 parks around the state that will be permanently closed and the Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve is on that list. This is a serious mistake on the part of the DPR, and we need to fight it. Go to the Monologue at www.monolake.org to check out why closing Mono Lake is a bad idea and stay tuned for action alerts. Send a letter to your representative supporting the parks and opposing the closures at www.calparks.org. We all need to help to keep these parks open!

Springing into Summer

 
Sorry about the dearth of posts in the past 10 days--the internet was down and I was free from checking email and checking up on the world. During this time I got a cold and was out of the field for three days. Exciting, exciting, I know, but I got to read a lot. Novels! I haven't been able to do that for a while, and now I've read four.

The Lee (as in General) female incubating eggs on her nest.

A quick update on Lagunitas - their 2nd nest has failed and they are struggling to hold on to their territory. We've seen them roaming into other pairs' territory and it is not boding well for their situation. It's getting late to nest again. Most birds stop re-nesting in mid-May, so if they don't build soon and their nest isn't successful, it could be a fledgeless year for the Lagunitas pair. 

Michelle Obama peeking out from behind a branch.

We have a few nests beginning to fledge these days. Fledging is when the young finally hop ship and learn to fly. Their feathers are not entirely grown in and their tail is about an inch long, so they are pretty defenseless against predators and they depend on their parents to feed them for weeks. The Oprah and Steadman nest fledged in Portezuela. To my happy surprise, Negra Modelo also fledged! Four days ago they were 18 days old, a very young age to hop the nest, so they must have been force-fledged by a predator. At least two of them are still alive though, because I saw La Negra and GUY/AP feeding in two separate spots yesterday. McCain, Kennedy, and Rasputin have all fledged in the Field Station plot, and possibly Nader as well. Once they leave the nest it is hard to tell if they got eaten or are still making it, unless you see the parents feeding, but so far so good on these nests.

Island Fox angry at me for disrupting its harassment of the Kennedy fledglings.

The days are getting hotter and yellower as the spring progresses. The grasses are drying out and bouncing golden light into my peripheral vision, making it necessary to squint all day. Thankfully we have Cascada, a swimming hole West of the Cabins with a waterfall and a deep cold pool with smooth walls carved by years of swirling stream water. It is fun to scale the walls above the pool with no fear of falling because you will only be rewarded with the refreshing safety net below. There is a Black Phoebe nest above the pool, which as of two days ago has two extremely large and almost fully-grown babies still jammed in the nest. If they fledge too early they will most certainly drown. I’m amazed that they have the instinct to stay in the nest much longer than other birds of their species—that they somehow know that leaving before they are ready to make the flight across the blue-green glittering ground is dangerous. Most birds leave the nest well before their tail is grown in, and they fall and flit about to learn how to fly. These Phoebes’ tails are full length and the two nestlings hardly fit in the nest at all, yet they stay. Birds are amazing.

Babies, Babies, Everywhere!

The Island Scrub-jay Crew has found just over 90 nests in two months. Of these nests, only about a third of them are currently active. The birds here (and birds in general) have it rough. They spend time and energy weaving sticks and grass and rootlets into a nest the size of a basketball (only cut in half, of course). The females sit on their eggs diligently and the males busily forage in order to feed themselves and their lady. The eggs hatch and all of a sudden the pair has four mouths to feed in addition to themselves! In the beginning nestling phase, the females often lose a good amount of their body weight as they are focusing all their energy on their newly hatched young. Forget personal hygiene—these birds get ragged and dirty because they need to prioritize how their energy is spent and preening is not high on the list, apparently. The parents then have to feed frequently and continue to incubate the nestlings because they can’t thermo regulate until they are a little older. At any point in this entire process from nest building to fledging, the nest can get depredated and all that energy spent is for naught. The birds immediately start building another nest. Talk about resilience.

Island Scrub-jays have a variety of predators: Ravens, Island Foxes, raptors, snakes (there are two species on the Island—the Santa Cruz Island Gopher Snake, and the Western Yellow-bellied Racer), as well as other jays. Ravens seem to be the biggest egg munchers and they are very smart. We have to be careful when we nest search because both Ravens and Foxes will follow us to the nest.

Capricorn nestlings in our fake nest

A few of our nests have made it this far, and have now hatched. Thus we begin a new afternoon activity: banding! We band nestlings on Day 11. Hatch day is considered Day 0, so we monitor the nest visually to make sure it is active until Day 11 and then we go in. The first nest I banded was Capricorn, in Coches. They had four nestlings that we took out of the nest and put in an artificial nest made out of Michelle’s hat and shirt. Usually we have a soft insulated lunchbox with cloth in there, but we forgot it. The parents freak out. They scream and fly at you and it is a stressful scene, but as soon as you get far enough away from the nest they quiet down and watch.

Dipper nestling (a day or two younger then Capricorn)

The birds are squishy and alien-like with bulging translucent bellies and funky yellow gaping mouths. Their feathers are still in their plastic sheaths, called pins, and they are covered in bird dandruff. Still, they’re pretty cute. First we put the color band and the aluminum band on the left leg. Then we measure the tarsus (looks like the lower leg of the bird, but really it is equivalent to our foot) with calipers. Then we draw blood from a wing vein near their left “elbow” using a hollow beveled needle and a capillary tube. We put the blood (50-100 microliters) into a small centrifuge tube with buffer in it. We weigh the bird and put it back in its fake nest until we have banded all the nestlings. Back in the nest they go and their parents rest easy!

Capricorn nestlings

We band the nestlings with the Aluminum band on the left leg instead of the right (like the current adults) so we know the bird was banded as a nestling in one of the nests we monitor. The project will follow these birds in the future and will know they are the successful offspring of our current territories. We bleed the birds for two reasons: to test for West Nile Virus and to get DNA for analysis. Michelle will be looking at all of the DNA analysis to determine whether there is Extra-Pair Paternity (EPP)—males sneaking copulations with females other than their mate. This would diversify the gene pool and increase the effective population size of the species. Perhaps I will have Michelle write a guest post, as she can explain this all much better than I can.

Adorably weird

We will be doing a lot more banding in the days to come. A lot of the nests hatched within a few days of each other, so we will be banding at least one nest every day for the next week. Sadly, the nests have a high chance of being munched in the nestling stage, possibly because the parents are more conspicuous as they both fill their crops with food and fly to the nest every 20 minutes, so none of our banded nests have fledged yet. I try not to think about our role in these late failures (for instance, a fox came upon Michelle and I banding Capricorn’s babies and the nest was eaten 6 days later…). It sucks to say it is “for the good of science and knowledge” because you feel rotten anyway, but it is true. We have no way to prove that our presence creates more predation, and if we didn’t do what we do, we wouldn’t know anything about the Jays, and possibly couldn’t protect them from human-caused devastation like invasion of non-native species and the subsequent trophic cascade or habitat loss due to climate change.

What are men compared to rocks and mountains?

 The shape of Santa Cruz Island is reminiscent of a wingless goose flying east with its tail pointing west and its fat body thinning into a gracefully curved neck topped with a bird head looking up. The island is approximately 26 miles from goose tail to beak and 6 miles wide at the fattest part of the goose’s belly, which totals around 96 square miles. This land mass was possibly once attached to the mainland way back when in the San Diego area. The Island has since “broken away” and rotated clockwise to its goose-flying-east position.  The geology of the island is, like all geology, complex. Now, I used to be a geology major at Whitman but it has been three years since then and geology can be like a foreign language sometimes, so I will try to break it down for you (and for my own sake, as well…I really need to brush up).

wikipedia.org

The Santa Cruz Island Fault trends east-west right through the middle of the island, causing the geology on the north side to be vastly different from the south side. The northern portion is comprised of “Miocene volcanic rocks overlain by the Monterey Formation” (Gordon et al. 2001). This means there are layers of marine sediments like shale and chert deposited on top of volcanic rocks that are between 23 and 5.3 million years old. They have been folded, warped, and pushed around for many millions on years since. The southern portion of the island mainly consists of schist—very old metamorphic rock—overlain by sandstone and other marine sediments and intruded by granitic plutons (magma that cooled underground into one big solid swath of rock that is then pushed up from below when faults move. A well-known example of an exposed pluton is Half-Dome in Yosemite). The granite on the Island is exposed in small chunks—every now and then you will stumble over a car-sized moss- or lichen-covered granite lump, or find a cool granite cave or waterfall.

One of my favorite geologic landmarks on the island is what we call the “Red-White Divide” (that has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?). On the drive to Coches, the dirt road is reddish-orange—volcanic. At one point, the color of the road turns white. Now you are driving on ocean sediments, mostly shale and calcareous rocks. It is literally a line that divides the two, as if a child actually followed a color-by-number drawing (that never really happens, right?). The road exposes a perfect fault, where the two different geologic formations have been pushing against or along side each other for centuries.

The Red-White Divide

It’s been awhile since I took a Geology class. I was registered to take Geology of the Southern Appalachians at Warren Wilson this spring, but then I was offered this job…I’ll have to learn about North Carolina geology another time, or in bits and pieces as I hike around in the upcoming fall. I like being able to look out over a landscape and have an inkling of an idea of what could have formed it millions of years ago. 

Note: I need to cite my source above, but the document is up and the cabins, so I will try to edit the post later with that in it.

Coches

Coches Prietos Canyon, known as just Coches, is our plot on the south side of the Island and the furthest plot from the cabins. Usually, Coches is a 10-15 minute truck ride up and over the south ridge but since the big rain on the 20th we've had to hike it. It is intensely steep and strenuous, but exhilarating at the same time. Thirty-five minutes of hiking straight uphill to the top, then thirty minutes back down to the bottom of the canyon, and then you begin to nest search. I used my GPS to determine how far I hiked four days ago: approximately 12.6 kilometers, which equates to about 7.5 miles. The GPS track also plots the elevation on a graph and I wish I could have posted a picture of that on here. It zigzagged up and down like a polygraph printout. Coches is by far the most topographically challenging plot. There are many steep drainages, and ridges upon ridges to scramble over. My favorite part about Coches is that I can see the glittering blue Pacific (if I am high enough up). It instantly reminds me that I am living on an island and I have the coolest job ever.

From Los Torres, looking North over the Coches plot. The little windy white road in the center of the photo is the road we hike up. See if you can follow it to the top (it turns red). That is where we hike to get back to the Cabins after a long day of hiking to find nests. Thankfully, we do not have to hike over the ridge in the far background...that is on the North side of the Central Valley of the island, where the Cabins are.

One day at Coches, I hiked to the top of Los Torres, a rocky ridge south of the canyon, to take some photos. It looks like a Dr. Seuss book up there: weird rocky teeth and an assortment of odd succulents and Giant Coreopsis. The top gave a great view down over Coches to the north and of the ocean to the south. It felt amazing to be so high up and to not see a single man made thing around me other than a barge in the shimmering distance, which I pretended was a whale sunning itself on the warm ocean surface.

Looking up at Los Torres

The road to Coches has only recently dried, so on Saturday we will get to drive the windy, steep road instead of hike it. It is a relief but I also enjoyed the hike, and the fact that my body was fit enough to propel itself up with little argument. In other news, the Lagunitas pair's first nest did in fact fail, but I found them building a new nest today in a Scrub Oak some 50 meters from their old nest. Hopefully, they will have better luck with this nest.