Fog of Winter

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

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

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

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

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

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.