Into The Burn Zone

August and September, 2012, have been smoke-filled months in Lake County. Hundreds of thousands of wildland acres burned on the East, West and North sides of the lake. The fires burned right through the canopies of mountainside Blue Oak forests and even Valley Oak groves in the creek bottoms. The aftermath reveals a simple skeletal calligraphy of ghost woodlands.

Firefighters bulldozed many new firebreaks through the hills.

Ancient petrified lava flows were unmasked from beneath the covering forests.

There came a day when smoke blended with incoming clouds resulting in an afternoon sky which grew increasingly to resemble paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

As many as twenty Lesser Goldfinches clung to the thistle seed sock.

                           A mantid deity manifested on a south-facing barn wall in Upper Lake.

                                                        In the shade of The Great Oaks.

                               California quail in two coveys of twenty frequented the ranch.

                                           Clear Lake at the mouth of the Rodman Slough.

As the sky filled with tinted mammiferous clouds, three White-tailed Kites seemed to revel in the splendor as they sailed before the rainbow. 

Moving Downstream in the Watershed

I wandered downstream in the watershed starting at the headwaters of Kelsey Creek on Cobb Mountain. Here the stream's banks are crowded with alders. The creek flows down from the mountains where cougars drink, crosses Big Valley, where wood ducks and mergansers nest in its riverine trees, and discharges its water into Clear Lake. The lake finds its outlet at its southern extremity in the Anderson marsh, where Cache Creek cuts its way through the Inner Coast Range and eventually joins the Sacramento River on its way to the sprawling estuary of the California Delta, Suisun Bay, San Pablo Bay, San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. Along the way there are bald eagles, river otters, canoeists, tule elk, pear orchards, vineyards, black bears, snow geese, American white pelicans, cities, oil refineries, bridges, brown pelicans, California sea lions, oil tankers, freighters, tugs, sailboats, harbor porpoises and leopard sharks.



A mossy matriarch oak near the headwaters.



A car killed a mourning dove.





Columbian black tail deer on both sides of a "deer-proof" fence.



A vineyard near Clear Lake's outlet.



Anderson Marsh at the south end of the lake.



Tule elk cows in the Cache Creek Canyon. Thanks to one sensitive rancher the species was saved from extinction in the early 20th Century. Conserved and relocated herds generated from a bare handful of survivors of the great 19th Century slaughter are now found it scattered locations.





Surrounded by industrial agriculture, a few fresh water marshes have been saved along the Sacramento Valley in a series of State, Federal and private refuges. These are the loci of immense flocks of winter migrant waterfowl from Canada and Alaska, particularly snow geese, pintails, gadwalls, teal, shovelers, mallards, wigeon, white fronted geese, tundra swans, and sand hill cranes. Colusa County is just downstream from Lake County. Here the waters can spread out some in the rainy season. We stopped at Grey Lodge Wildlife Refuge, lying North of the Sutter Buttes. Standing under a honking multitude of snow geese, I felt the rare pleasure of immersion in natural abundance. California's millions of humans seemed very far away. This pocket is an almost intact fragment of the Valley of Old. Seven raptor species were visible, waiting for opportunities.





White face ibis forage in a flooded rice field.



Sunset over Walker Ridge, the divide between Lake and Colusa Counties, seen from the Sacramento Valley.

Structures of Utility

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.