Water Season

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

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

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.