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.

inspiration |ˌinspəˈrāSHən|

noun

1 the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative

2 the drawing in of breath; inhalation.

I am lucky to have come into the world surrounded by inspiring people, organizations, and landscapes. I have often found myself in exciting situations in which I felt driven by a force outside of myself to create something new or work towards a collective goal, to experience the pleasure of being a part of something bigger than myself with a positive impact on the planet. Perhaps it is inherent for humans to seek this type of community out but often I wonder—the times of non-stimulation, of the lack of inspiration, are the hardest to pull yourself out of sometimes—is this inspiration what drives the world? Where would we be without it? Is the lack of inspiration what is leading so many people and communities to stray from our rootedness in the earth, to deny our very relation to it?

I find that taking a deep breath brings my focus back to my body. Inspiration. It leads me to my roots: my cellular biology, the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide within my lungs, my heart beating. Inspiration. Will external inspiration bring us back to our roots like breath? Will it help us find the awareness, the compassion, and the movement we need to change the state of our home, the earth, which we have so obliviously degraded?

I ask each of you to take a deep breath, inspire. With this breath, think about what inspires you. Exhale.

With your next deep inspiration, think about how you can inspire others to reconnect with the earth, with the soil, with the sunlight, with the birds, with the animals, with the plants, whose web of life we are very much interlaced with, whose existence we could not live without.

If we each inspire one another to deepen our knowledge of and connection to the earth, we can build a livable future one breath at a time.

This is the future of Natural History for humans.

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).

Bloomin' Spring

It definitely feels like springtime here in the Mono Basin—the days are warming up and the cloudless sky is electric blue; the birds are starting to croon their overtures, preparing for their unabridged performances; the trees are bursting with minute glittering gems of new leaves that dance ecstatically in the breeze; and the blooming Desert Peach is glazing the hillsides pink. When I breathe in, I feel the spring absorbing into my lungs; my skin, my nerves, my blood are rich with it. It is nice to be reminded each spring that regeneration is cyclical, so that we always have something to look forward to even when the winter trees seem lifeless without leaves or if the air is pregnant with silence, lacking birdsong.

Brand new Aspen leaves.

Due to this unusually dry winter and warm spring, the Quaking Aspen groves, Populus tremuloides, in the Basin are already dazzling patches of brilliant green among the more subdued grey-green of sagebrush hillsides. Last year, the winter season extended into the first few weeks of June, and the leaves weren’t out until then in most high groves. Leaf out is a full month earlier this year and it feels a little bizarre. The aspen exploding into green is matched wonderfully with the blooming Desert Peach and Bitterbrush, which add soft blushing pink and mellow buttery yellow to the landscape. Apple trees all over town are bursting with white blossoms as well. It is quite a sight to behold.

Desert Peach with Bitterbrush in the background.

Desert Peach, Prunus andersonii, has smooth shiny silver branches with inch-long woody spines at each cluster of flower buds. The leaves unfurl in April or early May, depending on the year, and the pink flowers follow shortly after. Once bloomed, the two-meter high shrubs are impossible not to notice on the roadsides and hillsides. Their flowers range from deep rosy pink to almost white (and sometimes, though rare, all white). I have found freshly uncurled petals that have a darker magenta pink perimeter that bleed to baby pink. The flower usually has five-petals and has a firework-like cluster of bright yellow stamens bursting out of the center. Desert Peach blooming coincides with the hatching of no-see-ums, miniscule poppy seed-sized biting midges that inflict a nasty welt, so stopping to look at the flowers for too long can be an exciting endeavor filled with lots of swatting. I think it’s worth it. In a few weeks, after the flowers have withered and dropped off, the shrubs will grow small fuzzy dime-sized fruits reminiscent of tiny peaches. Sadly, the pit makes up most of the size and there is only a thin, inedible layer of actual fruit flesh. Apparently the native Pauite boiled just the leaves and twigs to make a tea used to cure rheumatism and common colds (Mozingo 168).

An uncommon six-petaled flower

Perhaps the most widespread shrub in the Basin is Bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata. It fills the sagebrush steppe with stiff dense woody bushes with small three-toothed leaves (hence the latin name tri-, or three, -dentata, or toothed) sprouting from the shreddy older bark. This shrub is another early spring bloomer which has pale yellow-green flowers with robust lemon yellow stamens. In full bloom, the flowers cover the entire bush, hiding the grey-green leaves under a blanket of soft yellow. The plants live long but typically stay between one and two meters high, although three-meter high plants have been found. In the 1950s, an ecologist named Eamor C. Nord found the oldest known individual here in the Mono Basin at Panum Crater during a succession study—is was at least 162 years old (Mozingo 177)! I wonder if it is still alive today.

Buttery Bitterbrush hillside.

Thick with flowers.

The birding is getting quite good as well with spring migration well underway. Hammond’s and Gray Flycatchers are streaming through, and Black-headed Grosbeaks and Bullock’s Orioles are here for the summer. A House Wren is building a nest in a box in the Siberian Elm outside my kitchen window and he sings his bubbly bell-like song from the top of the small aspen by my front porch. I've been running most mornings on a dirt road that winds through the sagebrush above Lee Vining while the sun rises; up until ten days ago, I had heard the zipper-zip-zip calls of Brewer’s Sparrows flying between bushes but it wasn't until the 4th, in the cold blinding sunrise haze that you know signifies it will be a hot day, that I heard them belt out their car alarm ballad in full force. Their trilly, metallic, buzzy song switches octaves and jumps notes repetitively in the most beautiful way. They are a relatively non-descript little brown and tan bird but their simple beauty and complex song makes me respect them in a way I can’t fully articulate. Oh to be a bird who’s song would say it all.

Work Cited

Mozingo, Hugh Nelson. Shrubs of the Great Basin: a natural history. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1987. Print.

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.

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!