Spring On the Land

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

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

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

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

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.