KONOCTI POST

Structures of Utility

2011-12-16T22:45:00.001-08:00

Neighbors down the road, Keith and Denise, told me they found a duck in their fireplace. I knew that tree-nesting ducks, desperately short of available nesting cavities would sometimes resort to inter species brooding within the same cavity. Wood ducks sometimes shared with common mergansers, sitting side by side while incubating their respective egg clutches. But desperation must be acute when a duck seeking a suitable nesting place will enter a house chimney. Keith opened his front door and the glass doors on his fireplace allowing the merganser to fly, trailing a plume of ash, back toward the creek, a good quarter mile distant.
Time to erect some duck boxes. The first is a common merganser box 20' high on a valley oak and about 50 yards from the creek. The common merganser is a relatively large bird requiring a box substantially bigger than that of the wood duck.

A wood duck house 20' up on an adjacent valley oak.

Two of our dozen bluebird boxes are utilized by bluebirds. The rest are tenanted by tree swallows.

The barn owl box has produced two broods, but in most years is used simply as a sheltered roost by the owls.

The bat house in inhabited by roughly 60 bats. They appear mostly to be little brown bats, but because of the difficulty of identifying them we may be overlooking other species.

The bunk house is a basic structure architecturally rivaling a bird house, and evoking American classic structures like Thoreau's cabin, Lincoln's birthplace, Pollack's barn and Kasinsky's hermitage.

Riparian Zone

2011-11-13T09:47:00.001-08:00

The other morning I jumped the puddles at the ranch gate to walk across the road to the creek. The first rains of the season had begun to recharge the Kelsey Creek aquifer. The water flow had still not saturated the deep gravel of the creek bed this far down stream.

Dew-spangled mullein have colonized the gravel bars.

As always, the creek bed tells a tale of ongoing abuse.

Flowing water has reached the Renfro Crossing, where a bulldozer has recently pushed aside the road crossing gravel and opened the channel to the creek flow.

The riparian community of willow and cottonwood, currant, coyote brush, and valley oak provide nesting and roosting cover for coveys of California quail. These sinuous strips of woods and brush serve as reservoirs and corridors for wildlife amidst the monocrop orchards and vineyards of Big Valley.

Uprooted walnut stumps block off-road vehicles from one section of the habitat. Prince Charles calls his pile of stumps a stumpery, reminding me of the Victorian term for a cozy room - snuggery.

The moment of fruition of the acorn crop on this valley oak was attended by scores of jays and acorn woodpeckers.

In the Uplands

2011-11-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

We journeyed into the hills above the Jerusalem Grade in the southern part of the county. Our objective: to see the 160 acre property being put up for sale by Bay Area journalist/editor couple Lyle and Matt. This upland ranch is a serene place of grassy swales rising into blue oak savannah and chaparral. A pair of bluebirds hawked for insects. A covey of California quail, airborne, glided across a sunken meadow. The elevation, soil and topography of the land make for a striking contrast from the relatively lush and deep-soiled floor of Big Valley. Here the plant communities are in a climax state of equilibrium, undisturbed, except by wild fire, for human generations. This is not an area which promised much to settler farmers. Instead it served as range for cattle and sheep. We saw coyote, gray fox and possibly bobcat scat on the trails. It is the sort of relatively undisturbed Coast Range landscape in which most of the pieces of the native mosaic are still present.

Where a bulldozer had scraped a fire break through the chaparral, Lake County "diamonds" lay exposed on the eroded red dirt.
A product, like obsidian, of the region's vulcan upheavals, the diamonds are actually crystal quartz.

Back in Big Valley it is a bumper year for walnuts and acorns. Last year there were none in either category. Elaine lent her drying screen.

The valley oaks were backlit by late afternoon sunlight.

Sweet gum, slash pile, and Mount Konocti. Golden-crowned and white-crowned sparrows, having just arrived from the north, shelter in the caverns of the slash pile.

It is a time of year when unexpected species come to the fountain, in this case a red-bellied sapsucker. The first group of migrating yellow-rumped warblers also arrived.

Ed has been busy stocking the cellar with the abundance of the harvest.

Eames chairs in the studio.

Last Drops

2011-10-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sunflowers

The last hollyhock.

Cherry tomatoes from the garden.

The spiral as seen in a sunflower head.

To walk among oaks.

Buddleja, or butterfly bush attracts migrating monarchs at this time of year.

Season of the Crows

2011-09-12T22:16:00.001-07:00

Hundreds of crows wheeled about the oak canopy, the source for my large format watercolor.

After late spring rains and a relatively cool summer, the pear harvest is four weeks late this year, culminating on labor day, September 5.

The Benson name is an old and storied one hereabouts, figuring in both settler and native history.

A pair of barn owls has been roosting in the ranch owl box for the past couple of years without producing young. I set up a motion-detecting camera to catch their discrete nocturnal comings and goings. When fledglings are present there is much raucous rasping from the owls. This year the owls are silent.

Lesser goldfinch female.

Depredation statistics compiled by the Mountain Lion Foundation show the large number of lions killed by government agents in a several county-wide area including Lake County over a recent 35-year period. When lions were fair game and hunted with impunity as noxious predators, government trackers were rarely called upon. When state legislation protected lions starting in 1990 from twenty to sixty lions a year were killed by government-sanctioned agencies. These statistics amaze a hiker and camper who has logged innumerable miles, days and nights in California wilderness areas without ever laying eyes on a single cat.

This mountain lion was killed by a federal tracker in 2005 after it was suspected of killing four lambs in a barn in Bachelor Valley near Upper Lake. The back country above Bachelor Valley is reputed to harbor some of the densest numbers of cougars in the world.

On the Mountain

2011-09-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

I drove up the dusty road on the chaparral-clad Western face of Mount Konocti. A parking lot is being bulldozed high up for the newly established pubic-access tract.

Below, to the West and North lay Big Valley and the lake.

Chaparral begins to give way to more pine and fir on the Northern flank of the mountain over Soda Bay. Spared some of the solar blast, the mountain maintains just enough moisture to support a micro climate.

The steepest part of the North face supports the Black Forest, which is dominated by Douglas fir and bay laurel. The forest has its own charismatic denizens not seen on other parts of the mountain: Stellars jays and pileated woodpeckers.

Black Forest is under the protection of the Lake County Land Trust.

Summer Birds

2011-08-29T22:04:00.001-07:00

The squeaking of a little brown bat alerted me to its presence on the lawn. It appeared weak, perhaps dying, one of the mysteries of the day. It latched onto a twig, which I proffered.

Ed and I took the bass boat across the lake, stopping at Ciago Lago Winery and exploring Rodman Slough.
At Ciago a variety of breeds of sheep flowed fitfully out of a creche, and clotted and clustered in an apparently stupid manner.

An arbor hung with greenness at Ciago vineyard.

Tule beds, essential to life in Clear Lake, strained in the afternoon winds on the Northeast shore.

Rodman Slough, marinating in the warmth of the day, incubates birds and fish.

Western grebes, which breed in the tule marshes of Clear Lake are distinguished from the very similar Clark's grebes in that their black facial feathers encompass their eyes. In Clark's grebes the black feathers start above the eyes.

American goldfinch and lesser goldfinches back at Two Bucks Ranch.

Bullock's oriole juvenile two weeks short of migration to Western Mexico.

Black-headed grossbeak male. Hopefully he won't end up as a cage bird in Michoacan, as did another of his kind in the patio
of the mother of Ed's sister-in-law.

Domestic geese adventured over from the neighboring ranch seeking new cuisines.

Seen From A Bike in Big Valley

2011-06-23T21:59:00.001-07:00

Kelseyville Justice Court.

Hellbend School, Big Valley Road.

Barn, Park Road.

Pear ladders, Renfrew Road.

New vineyard, Gaddy Road.

Sign, Park Road.

Kelsey Creek from Soda Bay Road bridge.

Tule marsh on Clear Lake.

Looking North across the lake.

My transportation.

Three denizens of the ranch: Pacific treefrog. Little brown bat. Female black-headed grossbeak.

Once Upon A Time There Was A Little Town

2011-06-20T21:30:00.001-07:00

Kelseyville, until a couple of years ago, was a small town with a healthily tenanted Main Street. Very modest and compact, with a certain charm and cohesiveness, it was an old-fashioned Main Street of small, independently owned businesses. It was equipped with typical examples of American small town architecture. The look of the buildings told of their function. The bank edifice on a corner resembled bank buildings across the nation and there was no mistaking its identity. The same could be said of the Odd Fellows Hall, and the saloon. Simple false-fronted buildings, so typical of the American West gave a varied yet harmonious impression. One of these housed Kelseyville Lumber, which, as Kelseyville's most active business, served as a anchor for Main Street much as a Macy's or a Nordstrom might serve to anchor a suburban shopping mall. Kelseyville Lumber brought many customers to Main Street, which had a spill-over effect on the neighboring small businesses. Main Street was busy. It felt like a real town.

Main Street was laid out sensibly on a near perfect axis from its Western gateway, the old bridge across Kelsey Creek, to the summit of Mount Konocti at its Eastern end. These natural features of the land reinforced a sense of the rightness of Main Street's location. Kelseyville had a definable quality of place. It was the small commercial hub of the farming community of Big Valley.

Quickly, all this changed. The first blow to the integrity of our town occurred when another, bigger bridge was built across Kelsey Creek a half mile to the North, a sort of "bridge to nowhere" a characterless structure bearing a strong resemblance to a freeway ramp. The effect of the new bridge, which replaced a seasonal, country-style ford of the creek, was to undercut the importance of the venerable old bridge, which had until then so beautifully served as the entrance to town.

Actually, to dignify the new structure with the word "bridge" is a bit misleading. The thing is so engineered as to completely
eschew any quality of "bridgeness". It is simply a level stretch of freeway, which leaves one, on driving across, with no sense whatever of having crossed a body of water or anything else. Unlike the old bridge, the new bridge is a non-experience at best and more than a little depressing at worst.

In short order, after the completion of the new bridge, a beautiful stretch of adjacent open farmland, which had provided a natural perimeter to the downtown district, was bulldozed as the new location of Kelseyville Lumber. Soon the lumber yard had abandoned Main Street and relocated to a vastly over-sized tilt-up building surrounded by many acres of paved parking.
Suddenly Kelseyville's downtown boundary was blurred. The sense of a town situated within an agricultural valley was compromised. There was a new feeling that we could be just about anywhere in the new suburban America.

Citizens all across North America have fought tooth and nail against the invasion of Big Box Stores, usually owned by corporations such as WalMart. Sometimes these citizens have prevailed against this juggernaut and managed to save the quality of life in their downtowns. More often than not the Big Boxes have over-ridden the protests of local people. Town after town after town across the continent have been hollowed out and virtually destroyed in the process. Kelseyville Lumber, unlike WalMart, is a locally-owned, family-run business. But it is still a Big Box which turns its back on the sidewalks and foot traffic of Main Street and replaces it with vast stretches of pavement for parking. At the same time, it disregards the town's footprint and sprawls out over former open space, which gave context to the town.

One in four storefronts and commercial spaces on Main Street are now vacant and for rent.

As more small-scale pear growers tear out their orchards because of the tough economics of competition with large-scale corporate growers and international imports, the land is left vulnerable to thoughtless development. After the trees are removed, small pear saplings appear among the grasses. For sale signs go up.

One of many egregious examples of the destruction of our sight lines and sense of open space is the overblown new hacienda sitting pretentiously on its high mound of bulldozed earth and dominating the view for miles. Little by little, our open space is
being taken. There is no getting it back.

Birds Landing

2011-06-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

By the beginning of May our two species of nesting orioles, Bullock's and Hooded, had returned to the oak grove after a migration which probably began in the dry deciduous jungles of Mexico's Pacific coast. Pictured here are male Bullock's orioles on our sugar water feeder.

Bluebirds, busy feeding their nestlings, enjoyed easy pickings after I disked the orchard exposing worms, spiders and insects.

A tree swallow in its nest box..

A tiger swallowtail butterfly.

A fence lizard.

The ranch drive is a gravel-filled former slough, an arm of Kelsey Creek; hence the presence of the groundwater forest of Valley Oaks.

California poppies.

Roses peak in May.

Eggs from Shady Rock Ranch come in many tints.

Selective Mowing

2011-05-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

The whole sense of space on the landscape changes at this time of year as new grass subdues the land and softens transitions, and small leaves grow, filling out the trees with renewed density. The return of the orioles at the end of April coincides with this renewal of cover and the food sources which accompany it. Along with the leafing out, all sorts of mass insect hatchings are taking place - midges, wasps, May flies, mosquitos.

The character of the ranch has changed over the years as we have phased out discing the land, allowing meadows to become established and sod to build. We mow selectively, favoring the new growth of California poppies, young valley oaks, and coyote brush. Quail, towhees, jays and thrashers prefer mowed territory to tall grassland, the better to forage and to spot predators.

I find some hummingbird species difficult to identify. I've assumed these locals to be Anna's, but could they be calliopes or Allen's?

On one of the first warm days, a bluebird panted from its nest box. Each year, bluebirds choose the same box, leaving most of the others to the tree swallows. Last year, exceptionally, they colonized two boxes.

A cultural artifact of California agriculture is the ubiquitous grafted walnut trunk. In the photograph above, two species of walnut leaf out from the same trunk. On the lower left are the new leaves of the native black walnut, which furnishes the root stock which has evolved to be compatible with native subterranean fungal mycelium. The leaves and flower tassels on the upper right belong to the commercially viable Poe walnut imported from the Eastern hemisphere and grafted onto the native black walnut stock.

Riotous blooms of Luma apiculata (myrtaceae), a Chilean species, bring pollinators who fall over themselves in their frantic rush to suckle at every flower.

Young bucks littered the roadsides of the county. Roadkill provides an edifying ongoing survey of local species. A Lake County casualty list, ranked in order of frequency, might go as follows: Western grey squirrel, black-tailed jackrabbit, opossum, raccoon, striped skunk, gopher snake, California ground squirrel, black-tailed deer, barn owl, sharp-shinned hawk, turkey vulture, Pacific rattlesnake, grey fox, coyote, spotted skunk, mountain lion. This list is compiled from personal observation over the past eight years. Smaller birds, mammals and reptiles are very frequent victims, but don't appear on this list because they are usually too hard to identify from a moving vehicle.

Spring On the Land

2011-04-24T15:29:00.001-07:00

The forest surrounding Boggs Lake is a mix typified by black oak, ponderosa pine, manzanita and madrone. Many on the trees and shrubs, like this manzanita, host splendid growths of lichen and moss. (manzanita, arctostaphylos) (Spanish moss, tillandsia usneoides).

Downed trees perforated with the granaries of generations of acorn woodpeckers litter the ground.

Boggs Lake, a very big vernal pool, is bigger now than in most Spring times.

The shockingly blue, and disturbing lithe tail of a skink made my stomach flutter with adrenalin in some atavistic impulse of revulsion intended by the reptilian tribe to put off its pursuers.

On the road skirting Boggs Lake, a black cat, like a bad omen, carried what looked like a hank of rope. I managed to rescue what turned out to be not a rope but a garter snake, still stunned in a crooked-neck posture of feigned death. As I held it suspended by its tail, it relaxed and finally glided off into the brush.

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A baby fence lizard had been eating tiny ants on a desiccated log.

Unmistakably familiar from movies and TV commercials, the cries of two bald eagles alerted me to their presence in a lake side black oak. I moved stealthily from behind one tree trunk to another in an attempt to photograph them. This is the best result the skittish birds would permit.

Meanwhile, back in Big Valley, osprey are nesting for a second sequential year atop the gravel elevator on Kelsey Creek.
Another nest on a nearby orchard fan tower, occupied at least since we moved to the ranch in 2003, blew down in one of this winter's storms. It is not being rebuilt this season.

A sharp-shinned hawk frequented the Kelsey Creek cottonwoods.

Tree swallows by the dozen are twitteringly occupying the nest boxes.

Scrub jays have filled the niches left vacant by that generation wiped out by the West Nile virus in 2005.

California's tamest species of bird, and perhaps its most drab in both appearance and vocalization, is the California towhee.
Still, it is an indispensable indicator of a sense of place.

The commune of acorn woodpeckers occupies the avian apex in the ranch grove of Valley Oaks. Their sense of self assured aplomb goes uncontested even by the jays. The male has a white forehead and red cap, while the female has a white forehead, black head band and red cap.

Spring is on the land out over the blossoming pear orchards.

Native shooting stars bloom in the woods. (dodecatheon hendersonii).

Native trillium in both maroon and white are at the peak of their bloom.

Native Western redbud is emblematic of the creek beds and roadsides of the county. (cercis occidentalis).

Flowering quince hums with hummers and buzzes with buzzers.

Native Oregon grapeholly blooms most luxuriously in the guano beneath the bat house. (mahonia aquifolium).

Valley Oak, Quercus Lobata, in flower.

Gingko in bud.

Native fuscia-flowering goose berry.

Native red currant.

Native yellow currant.

One of dozens of strains of native ceonothus, the Ray Hartman cultivar.

Violets.

Pear blossoms are at their peak.

Ed on the land.

After the Rain and Snow

2011-04-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

It was a winter of more than usual cold and wet. I spent a good part of the time in my studio working on my watercolor series, Birds of California and Other Places. Snow fell on the floor of Big Valley a couple of times in the past months, bringing to mind an 1868 photograph of Kelseyville. The general feeling and scale of Main Street doesn't appear to have changed all that much in a century and a half.

Another piece of relatively recent history is the Bloody Island Massacre conducted by the U.S. Army against the men, women and children of the Lake Pomo. 1850 wasn't so long ago. The phantoms of that event haunt my watercolor, in which an American White Pelican retrieves a skull from the bottom of Rodman Slough at the north end of Clear Lake, while a Pomo village burns.

If one omits the modern artifacts found on today's squalid Rancherias, the disintegrating trailers, pre-fabricated tract housing, tilt-up recreation centers and stucco-sprayed casinos, it's hard to detect traces of the local version of the indigenous people's long civilization. The face of nature is indifferent. Yet the landscape itself reveals the story of the tribes in the very persistence of it's rhythms and relationships. To read the landscape is to read the subtext of the Indians. It requires the imagination to see this history in the habits and habitats of the remaining original species of the area. The oaks remain, as do the crows, woodpeckers, pelicans, coyotes, tules and hitch. These companion species, along with the lake and the land, formed the matrix of Pomo life. The patterns persist, which gave rise to the Pomo civilization.

The crow clans gather annually after the fledging of their young in late August and throughout September, wheeling restlessly from grove to grove of Valley Oaks.

Under an erupting Mount Konocti, a California condor mantles a dead pronghorn. This may be a primordial scenario, or it may be one of the future. It is unknown whether pronghorn antelope inhabited the region of the ancient lake. But they certainly were found beyond the inner coast ranges in the Great Valley of California. Condors almost certainly inhabited our area, and may some day be seen here again.

A chinook salmon, one of only a handful, which still makes its way up the Sacramento River system to spawn, is flanked by hungry onlookers in Cache Creek.

Solstice time

2010-12-19T13:45:00.001-08:00

In Big Valley we were blanketed in dense tule fog, while, on the hills above, the sun shone.

Pear trees in the hundreds of thousands would all be pruned by hand over the next couple of months.

With the rains comes a new cycle of life, fungi, mosses and lichens. Large mushrooms formed a semi-circle under the oaks.

The female gingko unveiled her fruit and seemed to model the very idea of Asian aesthetics.

Srub jays are apparently back to their old pre-plague numbers. Five years ago West Nile virus wiped them from the ranch.

Golden crowned sparrows are abundant fall and winter visitors.

Muscovy ducks wandered over from neighboring Shady Rock Ranch to patrol the perimeter of the field.

Shady Rock's dovecot seemed to be bursting at the seams with new dove generations.

Horses too are multiplying at Shady Rock, because Elaine takes them in as former owners can no longer afford the upkeep. Horses are offered free in large numbers these days.

To walk along the shoulder of a freeway, as I did the other day, is to enter a forbidden and harrowing realm. The costs to the land in terms of relentless noise, and collateral damage including an almost unbelievable amount of trash and debris,
and outright killing of animals, is depressing. Alexander Valley, as one speeds along I 101, looks benign. Except for the hateful, atrocious scarring of the ridge lands by the River Rock Casino and its Brutalist multi-story parking garages, the area looks like a scenic postcard of Wine Country. (As my half Ute friend, Al, says, "the Indians have gone over to the Dark Side.") But pull off the highway, turn off the motor, and one is immediately overwhelmed by the tearing noise and velocity of the traffic. One has entered a blast zone hostile to all life. This zone of death and chaos belies every bucolic fantasy that underpins tourism in the wine country and elsewhere, while at the same time making these semi-rural areas easily accessible to the multitudes.

I remember clearly when I 5 was opened up between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That road passes along the foot of the inner Coast Ranges including the Diablo and Temblor Ranges at just the point where farmland gives way to foothill grasslands.
These grasslands are home to remnant populations of some of California's most sensitive species such as the San Joaquin kit fox and the giant kangaroo rat. The corpses of white and tan, moth-like barn owls by the many thousands littered I 5 during the early years of that road. The low-flying birds on their nightly hunting forays from the barns and silos of the Central Valley up to the grasslands were easy targets for traffic moving at over 80 miles per hour. One still sees dead barn owls here and there along I 5, but the amazing numbers of the past will never be seen again.

Twice, friends have seen dead mountain lions on the roads into Lake County. Another species, which I have never seen alive, I have seen slaughtered on the roadside of the Hopland Grade, the spotted skunk.

Getting back to my experience last weekend along I 101 in the Alexander Valley... From my speeding pickup I glimpsed a luxuriant multi-colored tail on a road side corpse. A grey fox? Closer inspection revealed that it was a small coyote with a remarkable beautiful coat. For all its beauty it was dead as dead can be.

Greatest Oaks On Earth

2010-12-18T10:57:00.001-08:00

El Roble Grande, a Valley Oak, Quercus Lobata, the biggest individual specimen oak tree on earth, stood south of Lower Lake until it blew over in a storm in 1952. Lake County still contains many great and venerable oaks. Each oak is a world unto itself, a lynchpin in a complex chain of species interdependencies. If this be heaven, then the Valley Oak is our sacred tree.

Imposing specimens of Quercus Lobata, characterize the bottom lands and riparian areas of the county. In the nineteenth century Big Valley was one vast savanna of Valley Oaks. It's interesting to search google maps of Big Valley to discover where and to what extent the ancient ones survive.

An early photograph of the Santa Clara Valley shows the realm of the Valley Oak now despoiled by suburban sprawl.

Today's Champion Valley Oak, The Greatest Oak On Earth, lives on a ranch in Round Valley, Mendocino County. Measured at a height of 4.5 feet off the ground, the girth of the trunk is 348". The trunk diameter is over 9'. The tree is 163' tall with a crown width of 99'.

By comparison the largest of the 300 to 500-year-old Valley Oaks on our ranch along Kelsey Creek, measures 171" in girth and 5' in diameter. In descending order of magnitude the next three oaks on our place come in at 150" girth (4' diameter), 131" girth (3' diameter), and 129" girth (3' diameter). These are impressive trees. They are remnant specimens of the aboriginal forest, which supported the Pomo tribe, the tule elk and the grizzly bear. To this day they support the latest generations of gall wasps, acorn woodpeckers, quail, jays, nuthatches and squirrels.

Nineteenth century painters of California often focused on the oaks.

Thomas Hill, in his Morning, Clear Lake, makes an environmentalist statement by depicting the stumps.

Granville Redmond's oaks.

William Wendt's oaks.

Birds of California

2010-11-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have begun a series of large watercolors on the subject of the Birds of California. The list includes endemic species or near endemic ones like the California thrasher, oak titmouse, Nuttal's woodpecker, wrentit, California condor and yellow-billed magpie. Audubon, who never traveled to the West, was sent specimens of many California species. He painted most of them in a fairly cursory manner. He omitted others entirely. For that reason I thought it might be a good project to begin to fill in the gaps.

I think of the white pelican, acorn woodpecker, California quail, Western & Clark's grebes, and osprey as some of our flashiest emblematic species in Lake County. Characteristic of this place too are the scrub jay, Western bluebird, yellow-rumped warbler, barn owl, white-crowned and yellow-crowned sparrow, spotted towhee, Anna's hummingbird, Brewer's blackbird, bald eagle,
coot, common merganser, turkey vulture, red tailed and red shouldered hawk, and black shouldered kite.

Yesterday I drove south from Dixon to Rio Vista in the Central Valley just above the California Delta. It was a dispiriting landscape. Barely a single native oak had survived the onslaught of industrial agriculture. Where a tree existed it was invariably a planted eucalyptus - a dark hole in the habitat.

The gentle folds of the formerly wide open Montezuma Hills, which abut the Sacramento River, are now surmounted by a vast forest of towering wind turbines. It is a heart-breaking sight. It has all the charm of the petrochemical skyline of Richmond, California or the heavy industry belt of New Jersey. The design of the turbine blades is inimical to life, specifically bird life. The huge, white, whirling scissor blades are scary to behold. The menace of this weaponry is palpable. One wants to flee.

Only a few years ago it was easy to dream in the Montezuma Hills of the restoration of tule elk and pronghorn throughout that
barely compromised and rare prairie landscape. One could even visualize the extinct California grizzly roaming. One of the Bay Area's very few remaining open areas has become a sacrifice zone.

Citizens and their elected representatives in Lake County must realize that, relatively speaking, our county has thus far been spared large scale incursions of what Peter Beard has called the "galloping rot" of development. The quality of rural refuge that the county still embodies is its selling point, its strength, and its charm. Right now small scale farming and open land provide our sense of place. But the state-wide human population explosion threatens everything in its path. Only enlightened planning can save us from hell.

A map of the Northern California Mega-region graphically shows in red the rural and agricultural habitat going up in flames under the onslaught of full-tilt development over the next twenty years. Except for National Forest lands, most of Lake County is burning. Orchards and farms may soon be covered with the circuit board of housing tracks as happened so recently in valleys such as Santa Clara and San Fernando and which is proceeding apace in the Sacramento San Joaquin. It is apparent already as land supposedly preserved as agricultural sprouts new houses overnight. Open space is quickly closed. Vistas are shuttered. Our eyes are forced to turn away in search of a resting place.

One of the most striking things on this map is the juxtaposition of the broad stretch of green covering north and west Marin County with the adjacent burning red zone of southwest Sonoma County. This difference is the result of intelligent land use policy in Marin, where strong agricultural protections have been put in place. The result is that on any visit to West Marin one's spirit is renewed, especially after emerging from the congestion of surrounding areas.

Another map of the Mega-region shows the areas accessible within a two hour drive of the big cities. This includes southerly parts of Lake County. But, by driving over the speed limit, one can drive a heck of a lot further.

Leaf Management

2010-11-21T21:53:00.000-08:00

Kelsey Creek pulsed with new waters, which cut through the ford at Renfrew Crossing in late October. There were only two months, August and September, this year in which our section of creek was dry. Blackbirds gathered in the hundreds to drink and bathe at the breach.

The new flow contained hitch fry which had been sequestered in permanent water upstream. Mergansers discovered the minute
fish at once. Merganser feathers matted a rock above a pool.

For reasons I have yet to comprehend creek beds in California are invariably used as roads.

Barn owl feathers scattered near the creek.

Puff balls and seedlings emerged from newly moistened earth.

At the ranch it is raking and sweeping season as we are inundated by oak leaves.

Sunflower seeds were harvested by oak titmice.

Ed's canning season is at an end. He has put up tomatoes, cucumber pickles, string beans, peaches, pears, and fig, blackberry, strawberry, and loquat jams.

Irruption of Migrants

2010-10-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

On October 21 a low pressure area moved in from the Pacific. The moon was 48 hours short of fullness. For a half hour on either side of 3:30 PM these migrating birds bathed at the font:

20 yellow-rumped warblers
8 cedar waxwings
4 western bluebirds
1 bush tit
1 Wilson's warbler
1 hermit thrush
3 golden crowned sparrows
1 white crowned sparrow

This abundance in its comings and goings resembled on a miniaturized scale the activities at a water hole at Etosha Pan, Namibia. Each species appeared to defer to the other as they arrived and departed in shifts. Each animal seemed aware of the ripeness of the unfolding moment. Time itself seemed newly palpable as embodied in this awareness.

In Etosha, a last refuge for megafauna, the animal population visiting water within a half hour might typically be comprised of gemsbok, endemic black-faced impala, greater kudu, zebra, eland, giraffe, springbok, warthog, lion, elephant, banded mongoose, jackal, sand grouse, and ringed doves.

At night serval, caracal, hyena, and black rhino might share the same water hole.

On October 22 a skein of perhaps 200 Canada honkers winged their way south about 2,000 feet above the ranch.

The hedgerow of native plants is well established in its sixth year. It includes toyon, coffee berry, ceanothus, manzanita, coyote brush, redbud, gooseberry, and flannel bush. On what was bare tilled earth there is now food and cover for quail, jackrabbits and others.

The ever growing slash pile is a redoubt for quail, fence lizards, gopher snakes, alligator lizards, sparrows, ground squirrels and hares.

This week I planted more natives - buckwheat, sages, and penstemon, among others.

Settler families with roots in the East may have harbored nostalgia for high-color autumns. Their descendants planted Eastern trees such as sweet gum in the West. Lake County as a whole is still a place dominated by native plants in sharp contrast to counties such as Sonoma and Marin with their large tracts of eucalyptus, along with palms, acacia, and many other aliens.

This year's relatively short growing season for vegetables and fruit is winding down.

Fall in Big Valley

2010-10-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

Signs of the local economy appear from pillar to post in Big Valley.

A walnut processing shed in the Northern California architectural vernacular - corrugated sheet metal. The whirring of the walnut driers can be heard throughout the valley.

Fenton hugged an oak ten times his own age, a tree which was young when Fenton's great great great great great great great great great great grandfather was alive. The tree may predate the voyage of Columbus. Think of that and the events that may have transpired in its shade, the generations of Pomo acorn gatherers, the slough-full of hitch, and the foraging grizzlies.

Fenton brought a bottle of Makers Mark bourbon along, a product of his home state of Kentucky. We toasted to new friends and to the impending backpacking trek at the Lost Coast on which Al, Will and I were about to set out. The Lost Coast, not really all that far North by Northwest of Lake County, proved to have a sort of spooky, ragged quality haunted by Roosevelt elk rather than our local Tule elk and by the shadows of Sasquatch who seems to have supplanted Ishi in the California imagination.

Standing on one of the small pocket beaches locally called dog hole ports by the loggers, one is warned not to turn one's back on the ocean. Its rogue waves are not to be underestimated. Each beach, at the mouth of its own canyon, is separated from the next by a jagged, forested ridge mounted by dauntingly steep trails, which in some cases followed old skid roads and lacked switch backs. Big-leafed maples mixed in with redwoods, tanoaks, bays, and douglas firs on the canyon flanks. Spoor of elk, bear, cougar, fisher, fox and coyote littered the trail. Stellars jays were heard often but remained hidden.

Where the Mayacamas Range meets Big Valley you might notice, in case it slipped your mind, that you are in the Golden State.

Honey bees negotiated breeze-blown sunflowers.

The four-year-old fuji apple tree bears its first crop.

Virginia creeper came West and climbed the tool shed.

Sweet gum from the other end of the continent.

Seeds In The Dust

2010-09-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

Raccoon tracks are etched clearly in the powdery dust.

Fox tails, those grass seeds equipped with daggers and drills, bore implacably into socks and running shoes. Goat heads, those seeds encased in multi-pronged hard casings puncture bike tires. Curse-worthy as they may be, these seeds are, in their design, only trying to propel themselves to new territory where they might establish new kingdoms.

The back field, newly harrowed and dragged, is dry and dusty, but already laden with millions of seeds, which arrived airborne or broadcast by birds and mammals, or ejected a matter of inches from their mother plants. An immense variety of native and foreign grasses, thistles, clover, poppies, morning glory, vetch, alfalfa, miner's lettuce and others is now latent in the dust.
The desiccated earth is riven by cracks, inches wide and deep.

Fig leaves transmitted afternoon light.

Citizens competed to grow squashes, melons and flowers most nearly approaching perfection. The winning produce graced the Lake County Fair.

Sleek champion livestock basked under florescent lights in the big barn at the fair.

Gathering In

2010-08-28T10:34:00.001-07:00

Plums and peaches ripened abundantly in early August, their weight breaking the branches of the young trees.

Chicken wire cylinders cast shadows.

Chaparral on the mountain showed russet in the afternoon light.

It is unusual to see clouds at this time of year.

Kingdom of Plants

2010-08-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

Bud has his old place on the market. It is the southernmost parcel on Lakeport's waterfront. The five acres abut an eighty acre piece outside city limits on which cattle graze. The structures on the place are being overtaken by the riotous growth of grasses.
Otter, mink, deer, turtles, egrets, ospreys and eagles frequent this lush habitat and its tule marshes. Access is via an easement off commercially zoned South Main Street. But once you are into the property, the sounds of commerce fade away. It is as if you are on the lake shore of old. This would be an ideal keystone property for the Lake County Land Trust to protect.

Prairie merges softly with marsh and lake here, obscured by grasses.

A sequoia, cedars, apples, and walnuts grow near the homestead. Willows, valley oaks and cottonwoods grow near the marsh.

July 2nd was a hot day. An ancient valley oak at Finca Castelero smoldered. The great tree had for many decades been hollow. A colony of honey bees had taken up residence. Organic matter, composting within the trunk, heated to the ignition point, a case of spontaneous combustion, which brought the whole tree to its knees. The well-charred inner surfaces were exposed when the trunk and massive limbs smashed to the ground. Larry sawed an escape route for the bee colony.

Pears in Big Valley are swelling. Harvest time is approaching.

The Creek Runs Dry

2010-07-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

Many thousands of hitch fry were stranded in fast-shrinking pools as the creek dried up this week. The mud surrounding some of the pools was densely laced with duck tracks, likely a sign of mergansers seeking the tiny fish.

In a matter of hours the swimming multitudes were lodged in the mud, dead. If the creek is ever restored to its year-round flow, hitch numbers should increase exponentially. Bullfrog tadpoles, too, died in significant numbers. These amphibians, introduced here from East of the Rockies, are not well adapted to creeks which dry up suddenly in mid summer. They require a longer transition period from egg through tadpole to frog. Still, far too many of them do survive in more permanent waters to out-compete native frog species.

The gravel bed of the creek is preferred habitat for dozens of crying killdeers desperate to get away from man. Green herons haunted the last puddles in the shade of alien tamarisk.

There was time enough this year for most of the Western toad and Pacific tree frog tadpoles to mature. Pudgy toadlets dispersed in all directions, many successful at finding congenial habitats, where irrigation regularly moistened earthen edges of planted areas.

Now that this stretch of creek is dry, a road crew bulldozed and graded a ford across the creek renewing Renfro Crossing.
Nearby, ospreys watched disconsolately from their new nest atop the Granite Construction gravel elevator.

In 1922 the Bensons planted a fig tree. Eighty-eight years later this mother fig is comprised of many trunks and an immense canopy, which meets the ground. To be beneath it on a hot day is to be relieved of blinding glare and bathed in green light and pungent smells of fruit and earth.

Yet another cat devoured yet another bird in the shelter of the fig tree.

A noisy frenzy of mobbing starlings alerted me to the ripeness of the season's first figs.

In the field, shaggy now, American goldfinches clambered about on seed heads.

A monarch butterfly sipped the nectar of a buddlea.

Living Things Head For The Shade

2010-07-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of hot days in late June including a day when the thermometer at the ranch reached 100 degrees.
Some cattle retired to the dense shade of a fig tree in the midst of a walnut grove.

The St. John's wort does not bloom for long. It is at its best for St. John's Day, which roughly coincides with the Summer Solstice. Ten years ago on June 24 I arrived unwittingly on the very night of St. John's Day on the island of Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil. Large bonfires blazed in the middle of the narrow roads. Silhouetted and shiny-skinned figures danced, tossed firecrackers and drank beer from liter bottles. Singers and musicians filled the night with Samba. I joined the islanders in celebrating the Festa of Sao Joa, corresponding to their Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.

Hollyhocks reseed themselves returning in slightly different configurations from year to year. They seem to be appropriate companions to the 88-year-old ranch house.

Nineteen friends from the city came up to Two Bucks Ranch for the Fourth of July Weekend. They mostly laid around, talked, read and napped in the shade. Al's brain needed frequent rest from his readings in philosophy. Later he emailed me a link to an article about the fad in Japan for "forest bathing", which is not unlike our weekends in the country in its healthful effect.
It seems that being in close proximity to trees has many measurable health benefits.

During the night the ranch house collects cool air. In the morning we close the windows, doors and curtains to capture the relative coolness as the outside temperature climbs.

Spring Into Summer

2010-06-20T18:02:00.001-07:00

If there is an underlying theme to this blog it is one of pleasure. For me, pleasure is almost entirely about paying attention.

Being in and looking at the landscape is a sensual experience. But senses can easily be abused when confronted with surroundings which have, themselves, been abused.

As American naturalist, John Burroughs wrote, "(A man's) own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself;
he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers."

There is evidence on the land of ethical and unethical practices with regard to it. The unethical, exploitative attitude, which results in vast despoiling, numbs our senses as we try to flee our own pain in witnessing it. But when we are in an unspoiled landscape we are uplifted and opened up. Good feelings also come out of landscape which has been enhanced ethically by humans.

In my unending openness to pleasure, I sought out, last weekend, Middletown's Dry Creek Cutoff. Passing beneath the embowering colonnade of Valley Oaks, which lines this stretch of road is to experience a deep satisfaction. Here humans, for once, worked in tandem with nature to create a sublime work of art. These trees were planted here as saplings by people with the imagination to see beyond their own time. We have the foresighted early ranchers to thank for planting and encouraging this gift that keeps on giving.

Intentions may have been good when someone decided to plant redwoods along the the 101 freeway in Sonoma County, but something was left out of the thought process. The result of this incomplete thought is the ongoing unsatisfactory experience
while driving on 101 in the agricultural and suburban valley bottoms of Sonoma County. I ask myself why Caltrans landscape consultants planted redwoods in sunburnt ranks along the freeway. OK, the road is called the Redwood Highway, but it rarely, if ever, passes through natural redwood habitat until well north into Mendocino County. Valley oaks would have been infinitely more suitable, would have better thrived, and would, by now, a half century after the construction of the freeway, be providing the beginnings of a stately canopy. Most importantly, the oaks would have been habitat appropriate. We would "feel" the rightness of those oaks just as we are aware of the wrongness of the redwoods.

Another gift of pleasure to our local landscape and economy is the restoration of some of the county's most historic buildings on Main Street in Upper Lake. Bernie and Lynn Butcher, in undertaking the Tallman Hotel and the Blue Wing Cafe project have jump started the revival of the town. What they have done with old, abandoned and collapsing buildings is akin to efforts in the ecological arena, such as habitat, landscape and wildlife restoration. It does nothing less than restore a sense of place in a world in which "place" is increasingly difficult to decipher.

Other examples of architecture in the local vernacular include the modest barracks on a former migrant labor camp in Big Valley.

Ground squirrels practice an architecture of subtraction rather than that of accretion.

The season of first mowing.

Cabbage roses scented Hulka's and Bill's guest rooms at the ranch.

A cloud clung to Konocti at sunset.

A sign seen by many.

Nesting Season

2010-06-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

Boggs Lake, the biggest vernal pool in Lake County, still holds an Everglades-like sheet of water increasingly obscured by grasses and tules. Mallards and great blue herons where seen on Saturday. Coots were heard. Otter droppings showed evidence of a frog-based diet.

May showers kept grass green and creeks flowing.

Mount Konocti, from the chaparral cloaked hills of the Mayacamas range, still looks pretty much like its old self. It is only at closer range that the outrages against her are more apparent. The worst scars are the tracts of suburban sprawl on its steep Eastern and Northern flanks. The construction of houses on ridge lines is an ever increasing blight on human consciousness.
Apart from a few such glaringly inappropriate edifices, the Western elevation of the mountain is most seriously disfigured by
large mangy patches where the chaparral has been clear cut to plant commercial walnut orchards.

Two elk trotted down through a patch of grassland toward the road between the Clear Lake landfill and the flea market before thinking better of it and turning tail.

On Saturday, May 29, the waters of Kelsey Creek were backed up behind the closed gates of the retention dam. A labyrinth
of willow islands and cotton coated channels provided hiding places for at least two large broods of common mergansers. One mother merganser kept her ducklings immobile under the creek bank until our canoe had passed them by twenty feet before delivering the evacuation alarm. There was a frenzied retreat upstream.

Several tractors powered pumps taking water directly from the creek. One wonders how many of the pin-sized fry of hitch end up meeting their end in these pumps.

The gourd-like mud nests of cliff swallows clung to the retention structure as the birds swooped and chattered in alarm.

Roses thrive in the unusually cool, cloudy month of May.

The cool weather tempts snakes, newly emerged from their winter torpor, to soak in the radiant warmth of paved roads with often fatal results. A 53 inch gopher snake actively patrolled the ranch on May's first warm day. It was killed by a truck on May's second warm day.

The tractor unearthed a brood of tiny sharp-tailed snakes with their faint red lateral stripes.

Cotton In The Air

2010-05-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

The cottonwoods let loose flurries of down enclosing tiny seeds. Seedlings may establish themselves in irrigated spots or along the creek. Much down drifts into windrows or clogs window screens.

Spring rains have brought forth a luxuriant growth of grass, which is soon matted down by more rain.

A spider caught flies within the yellow chamber of a California poppy.

A variety of tiny native bees and flies pollinated native and non native blooms.

The pear orchards were blasted with another dose of pesticides.

Tree swallows are nesting in a dozen boxes on the ranch. They coined the word "twitter".

The African morning sound of ring neck doves issues from the dovecot at Shady Rock Ranch. It differs from the "mourning"
sound of our native doves.

The prophets say the creek will flow into summer this year.

A male Western tanager bathed in the font on May 16. You'll have to take my word for it.

People of the Lake

2010-03-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

Mount Konocti and ridges northeast of the lake as seen from from the ranch.

The sacred mountain by the sacred lake with coots and mallards as seen from Lakeport. The Lakeport mallards are, in some cases, hybrids with domestic pekin ducks. But nobody interbreeds with a coot.

The beds of tule reeds that form the margin between Clear Lake and Big Valley are the nursery zone for fish and birds including Western Grebes. Vastly reduced in acreage, this critical habitat sustains the Clear Lake sports fishery. It is easily
compromised by the rollicking wakes of speed boats, which swamp grebe nests. Flashy and strident, yellow-headed black birds also breed here. They are more commonly associated with such Southerly areas as Lake Chapala in Mexico and with inland marshes.

The Lake Pomo people had an intimate connection with the tules, using them to make, among other essentials, their shelters, clothing, and canoes.

Western Culture

2010-03-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

The present moment appears vividly in light and color. Rain clouds, rainbows and solar rays streak the sky.

But, for dwellers in Lake County, just offstage of this spectacle of land and sky are barely suppressed memories. Some of
the evidence, removed from the scenes of the crimes, is now housed at the Lake County Museum in Lakeport. There, in
display cases, are relics barely a hundred years old of a highly evolved artistic culture. There are photographs of the final days of life in that Pomo world. And there are photographs of the orgy of plundering, which followed.

The photographer of Indian cultures, Edward Curtis, made the image of the Pomo canoeist. That picture and others
give off an almost mystical feeling. After looking deeply at the photographs of the people, the masterful baskets, traps for woodpeckers and fish, arrowheads and other artifacts, I walked into an adjoining room at the museum. Here were the artifacts, utterly lacking in soul, and just plain ungainly, of the mechanized industrial age brought into the landscape by European-American usurpers.

But it was the photographs of the destroyers of the animals that gave off a charnel house grimness, which reminded me strongly of photographs of white Americans gathered beneath the branch of a tree from which dangled the body of a black or Mexican or Indian man they had just lynched.

The paradise that was this continent was free for the taking. And taken it was, in very short order. These Lake County photographs are so banal and so ubiquitous in every community across the land, that they arouse almost no response other than curiosity at their quaintness. But they are a record of human rapaciousness coupled with a human inability to see beyond the present moment.

The museum displays the final remains of the very last elk slaughtered in the county. That was just a hundred years ago. Now, thanks to restoration and reintroduction, the once nearly extinct tule elk roams the county again. The Grizzly bear and the wolf
were wiped out within a very few years of the arrival of the Americans.

Somehow the mountain lion persists and often shows up in the local paper. Maybe the sentiment of the editors is not so different from that of the men who chose to be photographed as witnesses to all that killing. There is a sense of wanting to be recorded at the awesome and rare moment in which one's existence comes into contact with the uncanny reality of a great animal... even if that moment marks the end of the animal.

Water Season

2010-02-28T19:41:00.001-08:00

After February storms Kelsey Creek was in spate this week. The first of the migrating hitch had been reported in the lower reaches. I pushed off in the canoe downstream from Kelseyville into the labyrinthine channels divided by willow and cottonwood islands. Pairs of mallards, canada geese, wood ducks, and great blue herons flushed. Ospreys, great egrets, and common mergansers were also present. Otters like the family of three my bother, Brian, photographed a couple of months ago at Las Gallinas ponds in Marin County are likely pursuing the hitch up the creek.

The gates of the water retention structure are closed. Water is spilling powerfully over the top. Hitch have no chance of mounting it. The structure was built in answer to the loss of the creek's natural ability to recharge the aquifer annually through its deep bed of gravel. When gravel mining operations over decades stripped out this natural sponge down to the relatively impervious layer of underlying clay the aquifer suffered. Water surged quickly down the length of the creek to the lake.
The structure is designed to allow water to linger in place long enough to begin to work its way into the aquifer. It is a clear illustration of the way one unthinking abuse of a natural system has unanticipated ongoing negative consequences, in this case the severe diminishment of our native spawning runs of fish as well as the destruction of the creek's innate recharging qualities.

Winter light in Lake County as seen in the orchards can make one wish to be a plein air painter.

Luis took a moving shot at the sky from his car, with results resembling those of Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt.

Lake County has some spectacular vernal pools, the biggest of which is Boggs Lake not far from Bottle Rock Road at Harrington Flat. For most of the year Boggs Lake is a tule marsh with limited areas of surface water. But in winter it resembles an ocular lens reflecting the skies. It mirrors the surrounding hillside forests of Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, black oak and madrone.
Although within the town limits of Kelseyville, Boggs Lake is in the mountains at 3,000' as opposed to Big Valley's 1,400' elevation. The difference in elevation makes for a radically different vegetation from that of the valley floor.

Like many once pristine parts of our county, Boggs Lake was slated to become yet another trailer park. Citizens mobilized and got the Nature Conservancy interested in protecting this incredible place. Now the Lake County Land Trust is involved in a
transition to take over management of the Boggs Lake Preserve.

For three weeks every November the sky at dusk over the tule marshes of Boggs Lake is the arena for spectacular displays. Hundreds of thousands of starlings swarm and gyrate in maneuvers designed to elude predation by hawks. The concentration of life force amplified by the sound of a million beating wings is a thrill to experience. After massing, splitting off and reconstituting itself in every imaginable shape, the flock finally settles down to roost for the night in the relatively secure tules.
My friend, Andrew, who lives in a log cabin overlooking Boggs Lake, took these shots of the starlings and a pursuing hawk or falcon.

Now, in the season of abundant water, many thousands of Western toads and Pacific tree frogs make an equally impressive racket as they clamor for mates. Andrew loves to demonstrate an amphibian phenomenon he discovered. Andrew has a few strategically placed spotlights on his wooded property aimed to illuminate tree trunks. When, well into the night, the frog chorus is at its most tumultuous, Andrew simply flips off the light switch and marvels as the entire frog army of Boggs Lake goes almost completely silent before gradually starting up again.

Sights in Winter

2010-02-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

On January 1 the stock tank was dry. On February 13 it held 22 inches of recent rain water. The creek is flowing strongly past the ranch in two channels.

By mid-February Big Valley is already in vernal mode. The calls of the first restless toads can be heard. The ospreys are back from Mexico and on their nest. Tree swallows cavort boisterously while bluebirds cavort with shy decorum. The horses still wear their winter coats

A vulture was evidently hit by a car in front of the ranch fence. It was likely one of our resident group of five.

The damp allows fungi and mosses to thrive on fallen oak limbs. Signs of disintegration and regeneration are everywhere.

As a pellet from a barn owl dissolved in the rains a rodent skull was revealed.

The narcissus bloom is at its peak.

Fog of Winter

2010-01-01T17:25:00.001-08:00

The year ended with dense fog. I was on the roof of the ranch house clearing off leaves and gazing over the shrouded pear orchards. The fog was heavy with bird sound as hundreds of robins congregated to feed on the unharvested vineyards.

Squirrel nests built during the past seasons were now visible in uppermost oak branches.

At mid day the fog suddenly burned off, unveiling the mountain.

A young red-tailed hawk collided with a fence. Our five neighborhood vultures congregated at a the remnants of a roadside burrito. These scenes of winter were not unexpected. The fabric of Big Valley is made of such threads at the nadir of the year.

The beef cattle at JB and Brian's ranch seemed to feel they would exist eternally in their sylvan pasture.

The Rains Return

2009-12-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

A male acorn woodpecker was killed by a car on New Long Valley Road. The bird will be memorialized not just on this blog, but in a watercolor rendition by Brian Long. The bird species most intimately connected with California's diverse oak savanna, the communal acorn woodpecker's cries are as iconic as its appearance. The male's forehead is banded by white feathers; its crown is crimson. The female's forehead has both a black band and a white band of feathers preceding its crimson crown.

This iconic bird surprises and gratifies newcomers to the West. It is one of the species, whose presence, like that of sea lion, brown pelican, Western scrub jay, California quail, mountain lion, redwood, Joshua tree, and live oak, gives California it's sense of place.

Along Cache Creek, near gravel mining operations, a bull tule elk guarded his harem of thirteen females. They are part of the second largest herd of these animals in the state reestablished decades ago by the Fish and Game Department. It is easy to see why the species was very nearly hunted to extinction a hundred years ago. In addition to their liking for low elevation, fairly open habitat, they seem reluctant to get out of the way of oncoming trouble. Maybe their formidable size gives them a sense of over confidence. The moose shares this trait and is as easy a mark as a heifer in a pasture. Yet, the habits of the Rocky Mountain elk differ from those of the tule elk. That high country denizen can be an elusive quarry, slipping in groups in and out of dense cover and stealthily rounding mountain shoulders in avoidance of its predators. A big herd of them eluded my fellow back packers and me in just this way in the aspen forests of Table Mountain in the Monitor Ranger of Nevada.

Only fifteen percent of Clear Lake's tule marshes remain after decades of lakeside dredging and channelizing to build God-awful housing tracks. Those surviving acres are now a concern of the Lake County Land Trust, which would like to see them preserved. As tule elk habitat, those marshes and adjoining lands would be ideal.

Quercus Lobata (Valley Oaks) in Big Valley seem a bit late this year in dropping their leaves.

A star in lights on a barn reminds me to look up at night. In Lake County we can still see the Milky Way.

Month of Flocking Crows

2009-09-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

The beer and the ice cream are out looking for customers lately. People are avoiding the lake. Staggering under an overload of nitrates from agricultural fertilizers, the lake is hosting its biggest algae bloom in years. The stuff is piling up in coves, where it rots, giving off a smell of sewage.

Summer comes to fruition as pears, figs, plums, peaches and tomatoes ripen.

The pear harvest is winding down.

Clouds occurred in August, a month that was cooler than usual. The dry year is stressing the walnuts and loquats.

Then there were three guinea fowl. The fourth was run over. Its spotted feathers are still drifting along the road.

High Summer

2009-08-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

There are still vantage points on the lake, which may be described as reassuring. These are views in which it is possible to imagine the lake in centuries past, as the Indians must have seen it, before its shoreline was largely despoiled by the Americans.

One such setting is the mouth of Rodman Slough looking south across the lake to Mount Konocti. Nearby, if the photographer edits carefully, there are other views of the essential place.

The nineteenth century American landscape painters, who tried to imbue their subject with a sense of the divine,
might still find material in Lake County. Asher B. Durand, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, among others, painted a sublime nature in which the spirit of the young nation seemed to be embodied. A politics of identity through a sense of place developed.

But another strain in the American sensibility is one of contempt for unfettered nature. The Euro-American notion
of modifying and subduing landscapes to serve practical ends almost universally omits a sense of harmony. One highly apparent lesson of the lakeshore is the ethic in Capitalist America of "every man for himself". The result is a piecemeal
shabbiness of development which is an appalling abuse of the commons. Every man wants a slice of paradise, and in so doing destroys his own object of desire.

At the cost of creeks that run dry by early summer, we have bountiful, well-watered crops of pears, wine grapes and walnuts
in Big Valley. Even in its water-starved state, Kelsey Creek still serves as a nice place to walk.

A pre-dawn chorus of clanging aluminum ladders issues in the auspicious day of August 11, the beginning of the pear harvest.

August is the month of flocking crows. Their numbers are down this year, perhaps the result of West Nile virus. Hundreds still wheel about, landing for a few minutes in the valley oak canopy before taking off in waves toward the lake. Each crow has its own distinct voice, presumably easily recognized by other flock members. One may be a baritone, another a tenor, one given to using its bill as a castinet, another raspy-throated.

Other conglomerations in recent days have been the ever-increasing wild turkeys, introduced to California not many years ago, and a vociferous coyote pack, which sings with as much variety and nuance as does the flock of crows. Coyote song peaks at 11 P.M. sometimes splitting into two factions at far flung points in the orchards, at other times coalescing at close quarters near the chicken coop at Shady Rock Ranch.

Acorn woodpeckers have perforated splendid totem poles.

The Reptiles Are Restless

2009-06-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass - Emily Dickinson

It was a good day for snakes. A baby king snake, banded in black and white, nosed its way through the grass. Its temperament seemed wilder than that of the gopher snake tribe we're more used to seeing around here. Later, during the course of the day in four different locales, I saw what might have been four different gopher snakes, each about two feet long. More likely I saw the same snake four different times at various spots on the property. A black bird, sighting the serpent in the open, drove it into cover in a bed of Saint John's wort. Gopher snakes are creatures of methodical habit, patrolling their rounds near the ranch buildings.

A few days later, my attention drawn by the flaring and hopping about of a California thrasher, I saw that it was alarmed by a coiled gopher snake.This snake was a new one, bigger, and missing the last couple of inches of tail. This specimen will be readily identifiable if it shows up again. Its name will henceforth be "Stumpy".

A lone quail egg sat unmolested and under mysterious circumstances on the ground among oak saplings.

A group of 4H girls paraded their livestock down the road on their way to the scales at the pear sheds. The girls will display their fine animals in August at the county fair.

High Spring

2009-05-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Life in Big Valley is so abundantly beautiful right now, it seems appropriate to show pictures while limiting the commentary.
What does one do with beauty but bask in it? The flowers and birds of the place are at their peak of productivity. Color, fragrance, light and birdsong fill the days. The nights are star-spangled and frogsong-filled.

The sun and heat are not yet so harsh in May as they will shortly be. Roses and poppies, orioles and tree swallows seize the moment. The moisture in the soil has not yet been blasted by summer heat. Some of the meadow grasses are still coming up green.

Thanks to showers early in the month, the creek is still flowing and ringing at night with the chorus of Western toads and Pacific treefrogs. The valley oaks and cottonwoods are in full leaf.

The free ranging guinea fowl and ducks make their continous rounds, eating all the way.

Among the many productions of the ranch are acorns, figs, loquats, pears, tomatoes, grapes, and walnuts. Then there are the many broods of barn owls, swallows, bluebirds, quail, woodpeckers, gophers, lizards, snakes, bats, squirrels and jack rabbits. But the crops of oak galls, bird feathers, and obsidian fragments are also impressively abundant.

A Glass Doorknob

2009-04-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

One day in January of this year a box arrived at the post office from Dave and Wanda Benson. The box contained a cut glass doorknob, a wayward relic of their former home, the old Benson ranch house. Gazing into the sunlit facets of the humble yet dazzling gift, it was easy to imagine a time, eighty-seven years ago, when the doorknob was part of the then newly-built bungalow, which we now inhabit. I imagined the Bensons coming upon it among their unpacked goods in Idaho with the realization that the right place for it was back on the old ranch.

My eye, gazing into the clear glass eye of the doorknob, looks inward and back in time.

The record of settlement by the Anglo-Americans, only 160 years old, is written in the orchards, roads, structures and modified creek beds. But it is the old land itself, the primordial lake, the ancient oaks, and the extinct volcano that summon thoughts of the Indians.

In the peripheral sight of the mind's eye, trace elements of the Pomo Indians are just discernable in Big Valley. The hints show up in the spawning runs of hitch, in the acorn mast of the valley oaks. The wide open eye sees disintegrating trailer homes on the rancheria. There is a casino. There are new Indian tract houses and a recreation center. Several miles north, a marker denotes the "Bloody Island" massacre not far from another casino. There are Pomo names on the landscape, Konocti for one.

Family names of Anglo-American pioneers are printed on metal road signs, cast in bronze plaques, and printed on U.S. Geologic Survey maps. Sitting on a bicycle, I looked up at the green road sign with white letters spelling Benson Road against the distant backdrop of the high undulation of chaparral-covered Benson Ridge. The name of Benson is found too in the Pioneer Cemetery among periwinkle, poison oak, and blue-eyed grass.

Kelseys are also seen in the pioneer cemetery. The creek and the very town are named for them. The big white K branded onto the face of the mountain denotes not Konocti, but Kelseyville. The obsidian-studded monument to Andy Kelsey stands above his remains, and also marks the site of his adobe house, the first house erected in the region. Among the obsidian chunks, locally called bottle rock, is one piece at top and center of the monument, fashioned into the shape of an oversized arrowhead. It's as if the arrow of retribution is still falling toward the earth where Kelsey lies. His wife, Nancy, was the first Anglo-American female to cross the North American continent into California for good or ill. The Pomo, enslaved by Kelsey to build his house, killed their master in the Fall of 1849, and were, in turn, killed with their women and children by the U.S. Cavalry at their village near the upper end of the lake.

The shoreline of Clear Lake is heavily built up in many areas, but, from a boat, it is apparent the Lake remains a vital refuge for grebes, pelicans, ducks, gulls, ospreys, cormorants, herons, eagles, turtles, otters, and fish large and small.

The flocks of white pelicans, 3,000 strong, seen last fall are down to a small fraction of that size as most have dispersed to breeding lakes in the inter-mountain West.

I got some freshly laid eggs at Shady Rock Ranch, where the poultry seem well contented with their domestic arrangements.
Brewer's blackbirds frequent the peafowl pen for grain. When frightened, they cling to the chickenwire awaiting their chance to settle down to their pilfering ways with no intention of flying away until they are sated.

This week, the valley oaks' tiny chains of green flowers are in full force.

Pear Blossom Time

2009-04-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

By April 11 in the orchard, blossoms had begun giving way to leaves. Frosty nights still lay ahead, but days were warm.

Two types of hummingbird, Rufous and Anna's, along with bumble bees and honey bees, hurried among the coral-red quince blooms as if knowing the feast would be short-lived. The five-year-old tree peonies flowered for the first time.

In counterpoint to the burst of renewed life, a solitary rooster, following the tradition of old Cape Buffalo bulls and elderly Hindu men, graduated from being a householder to wandering the world as a sadhu. He rested for hours at a time on a bed of dry oak leaves among oak saplings or basked in the reflected heat coming off the corrogated metal bunkhouse. He picked at some spilled seed beneath a bird feeder in a disinterested way as if half remembering a former appetite. He was
not yet past the need to occasionally check in with his old rivals on the neighboring ranch. But he wouldn't bother anymore to
visit them. Staying put, he let loose a series of hoarse cock-a-doodle-dos, loud, but not so powerful as they had been in previous seasons. He seemed gratifed that he still elicited a faintly heard response from roosters in the distance. His increasing detatchment had a kind of dignity of foreknowledge.

Bluebirds managed to establish a nest in one of the boxes in spite of fierce competition from tree swallows, which colonized several boxes. Bluebirds construct tidy nests of straw, while tree swallows utilize poultry feathers in abundance. While bluebirds keep their nests clean, swallows soon foul theirs with guano. On the ranch, the swooping, twittering swallows are one of the most anticipated sights of Spring.

The columns of perforations left by the pair of red-bellied sapsuckers last Fall does not seem to have compromised the vigor of the young valley oak. The trunk was almost girdled by the birds, but leafout is happening, albeit later than that of most of the other oaks. But this particular tree has always been late to green up.

Rainy Aprils in past years have brought as many as thirty common mergansers to our section of the creek. This season I saw six. A pair is staying close to the woodduck box.

Since I ended the epoch of field tilling, the harrow has been languishing in meadow grasses.

Spawning of the Hitch

2009-03-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

In this dry year the gates of the retention structure on Kelsey Creek were closed earlier than usual. The gates captured the flow from February rains as water backed up into the upstream riparian zone and helped recharge the local water table. But with the coming of the hitch migration in early March, the gates were opened allowing for the passage of thousands of the fish. It was easy to see them paired off or in gangs thrashing in the riffles. Many had passed through the gates headed upcurrent for points south. Continuous numbers were visible as they moved up from the lake and beneath the Soda Bay Road bridge. Some schools leisurely swam downstream, their spawning presumably completed.

A neighbor, remembering the heavy rains of an El Nino year in the 1980s, told me of the night when the flooded pear orchards were alive with splashing hitch under the light of a full moon. When the flood waters dropped, vast numbers were stranded, just as had been documented in old photographs a hundred years earlier.

The herring spawning runs that occur every Spring in New England are a local cultural touchstone, a promise of the coming end of harsh weather, and a tourist attraction. Called herring in some watersheds, such as on Cape Cod, "buckies" in others, particularly in Rhode Island, the species arriving in the brooks from the Atlantic is actually the alewife.

The hitch strongly resemble the menhaden or herring. Silvery, scaly and bony, they are an impressive ten-inch minnow found only in the tributaries of San Francisco Bay, Monterey Bay, and Clear Lake. Predators attend the spawning including ospreys, black-crowned night herons, great blue herons, and raccoons.

The creek as an artery of life coursing through Big Valley's monocultures of pears, grapes and walnuts, often offers surprises.
Beyond the hitch spectacle, there was a Western pond turtle, which somehow made a living in the creek, which is dry for half the year. There were also deer tracks, a rarity so far from the wooded hills surrounding the valley. Turkey feathers, too, were unexpected, until I remembered it was the first day of the Spring turkey hunt. Maybe the birds, like the deer, were seeking refuge far from where the hunters stalked. A camouflaged turkey hunter I spoke with earlier in the day at the Cache Creek wildlife area lamented the elusiveness of his quarry. I pitilessly told him about the flock of three hundred I had seen on private land.

After watching the massing hitch at the Soda Bay Road bridge I turned to look at Mount Konocti above the vinyards.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a peach tree bloomed.

Winter Into Spring

2009-03-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

By March 7 the pruning of the pear orchard was about complete, the ospreys were back on their nest atop the old tower and the tree swallows had returned from points South.

The winter was mild and relatively dry with little of the carnage of other winters. A dead pit bull was an exception, attracting five vultures near the Renfrew Crossing.

Depending on the timing of the rains, the vagaries of temperature and other mysterious factors, the whole character of our
surrounding fields changes from Spring to Spring. One year is dominated by miner's lettuce, while vetch or grasses may hold sway in other years. This time mustard did well under the native black walnuts at Shady Rock Ranch.

In the bunkhouse I found a couple of old ranch manuals, which reminded me of the constant effort of imagination it takes to wring a living from the land.

Remnant groves of Valley Oaks (quercus lobata) have miraculously survived into the present century in Big Valley. They call to mind the idyllic 19th Century paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. A grove along Gaddy Lane thrives on the margins of a vernal pool. The pool was not in evidence on March 7 this year, but in other years it can persist well into April.

The manzanitas I planted at the ranch were in full bloom in early March, as were the heirloom daffodils.

Barn owlets have hatched by this time of year. The species seems common in Big Valley. Various ranch and vinyard owners have erected owl nesting boxes, which supplement the old buildings traditionally favored as nest sites.

The Creek Comes Through

2008-12-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

Rain and snow in the uplands finally brought Kelsey Creek back to life.

The riparian corridor wends its way through the pear orchards and vinyards of Big Valley providing the last best wildlife habitat for miles. The banks of silt are written over with the tracks of quail, raccoon, weasle, jackrabbit, cat, and canine.

The town was founded by pragmatists on the banks of the creek because of the wealth of water, fish, oak trees, soil depth and fertility. Early photographs show acres carpeted with millions of fish (the edemic hitch), the result of sudden, man-made fluctuations in water level. There may well have been aesthetic reasons for siting the town here as well, because the place resembled picture books of Eden. The spot marks the transition where the mountain creek changes character as it meets the
flat bed of the ancient lake. The lake had long since retreated to its present boundaries leaving Big Valley in its wake as oak studded savanna.

Kelsey Creek, as with nearby Adobe Creek, has served as the working plumbing of the valley. It has been worked hard.
It has been heavily exploited for water, fish, timber and gravel, yet it remains a zone of beauty.

If you are anywhere near the creek most days lately, the whine and roar of off-road vehicles shreds the air. If you walk or ride your horse along the creek, as my neighbors and I do, you might well be spooked by the sudden skidding of tires and the spray of gravel. You might be amazed at the extent of the ORV-caused erosion of the banks and the destruction of the creekside forest. You might ask yourself, "To what purpose is this happening?" You might wonder, "Are the citizens of this town and county unaware of what is happening to their creek, their land, their valley, their country?"

A piece of broken mirror in the creekbed sent an inquiring eye to the sky.

Some guys got their pick up bogged down in the creek.

A Walk to Town

2008-12-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

A cold front came from the North bearing rain and snow and a pair of red breasted sapsuckers. The sapsuckers perforated
the circumference of a young oak, releasing sugary sap, on which massed small black ants.

The oaks are shedding their leaves more slowly this fall drawing out our leaf management regime.

The pear and walnut sheds, monuments to Big Valley's agricultural civilization look more iconic at this quiet time of year.
Their surroundings are uncluttered by the comings and goings of people and trucks.

The creek has been yoked to the water needs of the farmers for a hundred years and now runs dry for five or six months each year. People over fifty years of age who grew up in the valley remember a year-round creek of summer swimming holes and big spring spawning runs of the edemic fish, the herring-like hitch. Decades of gravel mining have lowered this section of creek bed by as much as twenty feet. In spite of theses insults and the burden of near-continuous off-road vehicle abuse, the creek bed supports a young forest of cottonwood and willow. Quail coveys roost in this riparian swath. Jackrabbits shelter. Western toads and Pacific tree frogs breed. Flycatchers, woodducks and mergansers nest.

The creek is seen as a no-man's land. It's hard to find unfenced or uncultivated land in the valley. So the creek zone serves as a catch-all for refuse, for restless energies, for outlaw impulses.

For as long as anyone could remember the Merritt Road crossing of the creek was a ford, perfectly adequate, and notable if not for its beauty at least for its utilitarian charm. That changed this year with the construction of a bridge which possesses all the soul and scale of a freeway ramp. The thing is a brute urban rudeness at odds with the modesty of the "friendly country town."

A pair of cliff swallows made its nest under the new structure. In the previous season hundreds of pairs had nested in the
steel girders of a creekside, high-roofed shed now removed. Occupying that site is a new self-storage facility. This form of low-slung enterprise has recently become the characteristic and most visible architecture of Lake County.

A cottonwood festooned with mistletoe issued in the holiday trappings of Main Street.

I came unexpectedly upon a sacred space.

The town has its share of landmarks.

On the way back to the ranch I ran into Phil the screenwriter/producer and his horse, Chico.

It got colder Saturday night. Sunday it snowed on the Hopland Grade.

Flocking Together

2008-11-24T09:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the light on the sweet gum leaves was sensational, never mind that the tree looked like the alien species that it is in the grove of valley oaks. I tend to be a purist about native plants on the ranch, but it is hard to quibble with the renowned botanist who grew up on this place and brought in the exotics two generations ago. There are ginkgos, crepe myrtle, loquats, figs, Virginia creeper, St. John's wort, mountain ash and oleander. It was, after all, a pear operation in the last century. The valley floor's ancient lakebed soil, together with a local elevation of slightly over 1300 feet, was suited to pears. But it's still easy to imagine the valley oak groves which were displaced. I've brought in nine young valley oaks to keep company with the monarchs also numbering nine. We've planted manzanita, ceanothus, coyote brush, toyon, coffee berry and native fuschia, sage, currants and madrone.

The front line of advancing creek waters attracts mobs of red winged and Brewer's blackbirds.
With the return of water and winter, the black bird cacophony will feature large around here.

The ganging up in flocks is characteristic of this time of year. On the lake the coots have formed very tight rafts as have the comorants, diving ducks and white pelicans. Their defensiveness appears based on some shared dread of a menace embodied by the shortened days. We saw one good reason for their skittishness yesterday from our boat. A pair of bald eagles scouted
the multitudes for an easy mark. The waterfowl seemed at their wits' end. As we rounded a tule bed we flushed a flock of more than 3,000 white pelicans, which flapped up into diverging gyres.

We were one boat among perhaps a half dozen on all the sublime expanse of the northwest part of the lake. Inshore,
immense shoals of fry riddled and riffled the surface. The outlying waters of the open lake were dynamic with breeze-driven waves, fast flying ducks, big flocks of California gulls, and Western grebes watching us with one eye, their heads half averted.

A floating corpse turned out on closer inspection to be a grebe drowned by hook and filiment.

As we headed into shore I was so appreciative of the view of largely unspoiled tracts of land and marsh abutting the lake at Big Valley. The boat on its trailer, we were back in the pick up. We stopped to look at the marshy pastures near the county park. The scene looked heartbreakingly vulnerable to the future.

End of Dry Season

2008-11-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

The hinge of the year has swung, opening the door on the season of rains. The garden has been done in by the first frosts. We are two miles from the lake so its moderating temperature at this time of year is of no help here. In visiting the gardens at Ceago Lago, I saw tomatoes and squash still thriving.

The creek bed here is still dry, but the slowly advancing waters have pooled less than a mile uipstream. The next heavy rain will recharge this part of the channel. Meanwhile it's a good place for a stroll.

Big Valley is home to various ungulates, mostly horses and cows. The deer and tule elk tend to keep to the hills. I'd love to see the Lake County Land Trust grow influential enough to aquire large lakefront parcels near the county park for the reintroduction of tule elk. The marshy land there with its extensive groves of valley oaks is now used for cattle, but is so unchanged from its original self that the elk would thrive.

The Land Trust already has protected a couple of hundred acres along the Rodman Slough, which with the addition of more
land, could be a great place for elk. Meanwhile, it's a pleasure to encounter the horses, cows and lesser beasts, each individual a personality unto itself.

The gopher snakes have retired for the season. Speaking of personality, they have a tolerant nature. They don't flee at my approach the way garter snakes would. Instead they'll accompany me while I move boards from a pile, all the while nosing around for meadow voles.

Kelseyville, in November, is slowing down after the pear and grape harvests. But there is still plenty of activity at the walnut sheds.

Kelseyville has a little gem of a Main Street. I wonder how the relocation of Kelseyville Lumber will affect its business and foot traffic. Agricultural land has been converted to residential and commercial uses at a shocking rate lately. The vistas of and from Big Valley are getting increasingly cluttered.

After The Harvest

2008-11-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

The weather this past weekend in Lake County, California was cool, bright and dynamic. In the forenoon on Saturday a full, fat and low arched rainbow met us as we crossed into the county on the Hopland Grade. A promised land seemed spread out below, the gold and green valley meeting the blue lake.

From Two Buck Ranch that afternoon, the chapparal seemed gilded on the slopes of cloud-topped Mount Konocti.

The scene on the ranch looked, smelled and sounded pretty much like paradise. Anna's hummingbirds and lesser goldfinches visited the feeders. A covey of more than thirty quail scuttled in and out of cover. Crows clacked their beaks. Squirrels chased each other around and around the trunks of the ancient valley oaks.

The shrieking whine of dirt bikes soon pierced the air. I walked down to the creek bottom in an attempt to intercept the two boys on their machines. They zoomed down the dry, gravel-covered channel out of my reach. A deputy sheriff arrived, in pursuit of the trespassing bikers. She and I discussed the county ordinance which specifies that off-roaders show written permission from the landowner.

Because of the drought, the walnut harvest was meager this year. The giant fig tree, however, was bountiful. The tomatoes, squash, pears and acorns were abundant. If our edemic fresh water fish, known as hitch, was as plentiful as in former times, you could almost imagine living off the land at the ranch. Hitch have been increasingly scarce since large mouth bass and channel catfish were introduced to Clear Lake.

I've logged sixty seven bird species at the ranch so far. The characteristic species year round are California quail, acorn woodpeckers, California thrashers, California towhees, spotted towhees, house finches, lesser and American goldfinches, Anna's hummingbirds, barn owls, turkey vultures, Western bluebirds and Western scrub jays. They are joined in Spring by nesting tree swallows, Northern orioles, black headed grossbeaks and ospreys. Huge flocks of crows wheel about the oak canopy in August. Fall is the time for yellow rumped warblers and hermit thrushes. Winter is for white crowned and golden crowned sparrows down from British Columbia and the mountains. Red winged and Brewer's blackbirds also congregate in winter while sharp shinned hawks stalk the flocks.

The vultures prefer to roost on the dead limbs of the northernmost oak in the grove, a tree formerly stressed by surrounding concrete, which I have since torn out.