habitat ~ 11/15/14 ~ Fort Ord National Monument - Creekside

Fort Ord National Monument - Creekside entrance

November 15, 2014

It feels like forever since I've been out to Fort Ord, mainly because I've been focusing on my butterfly sites, which leaves me too exhausted to do more hiking elsewhere.  Plus, it's been unbearably dry.  Andy hasn't been trail running out here much this year, either.  We enjoyed the recent rains (last one on Thursday 11/13/14), and we were hoping to see our coastal version of early winter "spring green".  Sure enough, Creekside delivered in the form of freshly sprouted fiesta flower leaves under the oaks.  There's something so soothing and welcoming to see soft green again.  Yep, this is what November looks like here on the central coast of CA, and I'm very glad I'm not still living in the Midwest with their polar vortex. 

Things that caught my attention at Fort Ord...  There are a lot more people on the trails since Fort Ord became a National Monument.  They finished another parking area off Hwy 68, so there's better access.  Before it used to be primarily mountain bikers and retired folks with hiking poles; now there are more youth trail runners and families with little children.  I love their new "Play Nice" campaign, which covers horseback riders, dogs, bikers, and staying on designated trails.  I finally figured out I can use unused trailside-dispensered dog poop bags as trash pickup receptacles - the increased litter was bothering me, so I decided to do something about it.  The BLM replaced the old sign off Reservation Road, and the neighboring farmer switched from strawberry plasticulture to berry vine plasticulture.  The thought occurred to me that those plastic awnings would be the perfect cover to hide crops from DEA agents.  Eh-hem.  And, as always, there are reminders on the trails that this used to be an Army training area.

habitat ~ 10/09/13 ~ Elkhorn Slough - NERR

Elkhorn Slough - National Estuarine Research Reserve entrance

October 9, 2013

We weren't sure if Elkhorn would be open considering the federal government shutdown.  Unlike many people, the only impact that we've noticed for us has been closed parks.  We had hoped to camp at Pinnacles National Park during fall break, but we scrapped those plans with the shutdown.  My backup plan was to go to nearby Kirby Park if the NERR was closed, but it wasn't.  What surprised me was to see folks in CA Dept of Fish and Wildlife (formerly Game) uniforms.  I don't know how I missed that.  Elkhorn Slough confuses me as to which agency does/owns what.  Apparently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is also involved.  After inquiring, come to find out the Nature Center is run by CADFG.  I did not know that. They do a nice job. 

The tide was very high during our visit.  One of the main walkways was almost covered in water.  I don't get too excited about the proliferation of invasive plants here, like poison hemlock, but for some reason I still want to go back to visit the Slough.  I've even come to like the soothing rattling sound of wind-blown dried harding grass.  It looked like they had recently done some extensive mowing.  They have an incredibly work-intensive management plan.  I think I'd feel defeated if I worked there.  It could be coincidental, but it seems like we've seen less and less wildlife (snakes and rabbits) in recent years since they've stepped up their attempts to get rid of invasive plants.

All surrounding the Slough, the farmers are just now covering their lands with a fresh round of plastic (seen in the middle picture above on the surrounding hills) for another planting of strawberries, one of Monterey County's most valuable crops.  This type of plasticulture really bothers me.  The waste generated must be incredible.  I've been wondering if anyone makes biodegradable plastic for strawberry farming.  If I did it, I'd make it so the farmer could till the plastic into the soil as a soil replenisher.  I bet the chemistry wouldn't be too difficult to figure out.  The biggest hurdle would be to invest in an efficient manufacturing process so that it would be cost effective for the farmers.

habitat ~ 09/19/13 ~ Tilden Regional Park

 overlook to San Francisco Bay from Centennial Drive, UC Berkeley

What started out as a passing idea turned into a little adventure for me.  For our upcoming camping trip to Rocky Creek, I thought it'd be a fun activity to white sheet light for moths, so I asked around if anyone had DC (no electrical outlets available) equipment that I could borrow.  Of course, as usual, the only "local" moth person anyone knows of is Jerry Powell at UC Berkeley. Since he plans on using his equipment, he put me in touch with the Collections Manager at the Essig Museum of Entomology. Before I knew it, I was making the 2 hour drive north to Berkeley to pick up a UV light, two 12V batteries, and a charger, all in the name of fun.  Given the cost of gas and the money spent on food, I could have purchased a lighting set for cheaper.  However, I would have missed out on the adventure of visiting UC Berkeley, meeting Pete, touring the Essig, finding Tilden Regional Park, discovering Mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes on Telegraph Avenue, and enjoying Ethiopian cuisine for lunch and Japanese cuisine for dinner.  Yum!

Regional Parks Botanic Garden

I am so unfamiliar with the East Bay area that I used google maps to find a park not too far from the University campus.  Obviously I didn't zoom out far enough, because once I got to the Botanic Garden, I discovered it's only a small part of a much larger Tilden Regional Park, which itself is only one of a whopping 65 parks in the East Bay Regional Park District.  What an incredible find!  It's an impressive park system.  I spent most of my afternoon walking through the Botanic Garden.  They took much of California's flora and squished it into 10 acres.  I noticed many well-established plants weren't faring so well.  Maybe given the drought we've had the past 2 years?  They had sprinklers going, which I ran through to cool off (always gotta do it... er, only if it doesn't smell like mixed fertilizer).  I'm so looking forward to the upcoming rains.

 incredible stonework by the CCC

There's a distinctive style of stonework frequently found in our National, State, and regional parks and forests.  Whenever I look to see who did it, it's almost always the Civilian Conservation Corps. Those young men certainly left an indelible legacy in only 9 years of work, a much better use of human resources than fighting wars.  As turbulent as the first half of the 20th century was, I'm continually amazed at what came out of those years compared to the seeming counterproductivity of today.

Lake Anza

If I lived in Berkeley (don't think I haven't considered this), I would probably come swimming here regularly.  The beach was crowded by young and old alike.  I also went to a place called "Inspiration Point", which didn't really inspire me.  Maybe in the spring?

Little Farm

It doesn't matter how old I get, I still like seeing farm animals, be it at the county fair or attached to parks.  I was very impressed with the variety of recreational opportunities in Tilden.  All in all, it was a good day, complete with a full belly.

habitat ~ 09/09/13 ~ Wilder Ranch State Park

 Wilder Ranch State Park

September 9, 2013

Well, I made good on my promise to visit Wilder Ranch sooner rather than later.  I met up with a friend I've known since we were 11 years old.  I love that we've been friends for over 30 years.  She said the bluffs at Wilder have been beautiful lately.  She was right.  The sea breeze was minimal, so it was unusually comfortable hiking along the coastline, something I haven't done since my first visit to Wilder.  The coastal geology reminds me of Montaña De Oro State Park, which is 130 miles southeast as the crow flies.  We were chatting quite a bit (yep, I was one of those I usually despise on the trails), so I wasn't paying too much attention to individual items to ID.  Although, we did see a bobcat on the trail!  This is only my 3rd bobcat sighting (1st at Los Padres Dam, 2nd at Palo Corona Park).  My friend didn't believe me and thought it was a house cat. "No way!  Look how big it is!  Wait until it turns to see if it has a tail."  Sure enough, a bobbed tail.   And, yes, it's pumpkin time. Wilder Ranch is the southern boundary for an area along Hwy 1 up to Half Moon Bay that I like to call "Pumpkinville" for the plethora of pumpkin farms.  I am so looking forward to autumn this year.

habitat ~ 07/24/13 ~ Wilder Ranch State Park

 Wilder Ranch State Park
July 24, 2013

After looking at these pictures and reading past habitat posts (03/07/10 and 09/17/11), I realize that I haven't given Wilder Ranch a fair shake.  For a couple years there, Z kept asking me to go hiking with her here.  I always refused.  From a speeding car along Hwy 1, I totally judged this park by its roadside cover.  It looked like the trails were nothing but hot, sunny, dusty paths through dried grasses (eh).  Plus, it was obviously a crowded place, given the number of cars parked on the side of the road for the common practice of avoiding paying the State Park Day Use Fee. It took Andy's encouragement for me to finally check it out.  While Andy went off to do his typical trail run, I strolled around by myself.  This day's visit was wholly pleasant and meditative with few interruptions by other bikers, horseback riders, or hikers.  Waldeinsamkeit.  The Engelsmans Loop trail currently has a zigzag detour towards Peasley Gulch, which I think improves the interest level of the trail.  The diversity of habitats in such a relatively small area really struck me as being special.  Wilder Ranch has grown on me.  I'll have to visit again, sooner rather than later.

Per our usual when we drive the hour it takes to get to the Santa Cruz area across Monterey Bay, we made plans to eat out for lunch.  This time we went to the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers' Market, which is my favorite farmers' market for market variety, funky food vendors, and programs, like composting bins just for the weekly event (wish more markets did this!). While we waited for the market opening at 1:30, we discovered a new to us local coffee shop Verve.  Andy liked their short pull, while I enjoyed a refreshing homemade seasonal soda.  For dessert, we also discovered The Penny Ice Creamery, which has a booth at the market despite being located just down the street.  Both are places we will definitely patronize again.  Sometimes I think I could easily live up there, but then the heavier traffic stops me short.

habitat ~ 12/17/11 ~ Fort Ord - BLM Creekside

Fort Ord Public Lands - Creekside entrance

December 17, 2011

Truth be told, we didn't actually park at the Creekside entrance for this evening hike. We used the old dirt pull-off on Reservation Rd., which we once used regularly before the BLM built a fancy parking lot with pit toilets on Creekside Terrace, shown in the 3rd photo above.

Speaking of the 3rd photo and 4th photo, that's not the pretty shimmer of water in the distance; it's the extensive plastic that farmers use to cultivate strawberries. Strawberries have been Monterey County's most valuable crop for the past 3 years. I had a friend who recently worked at a small organic farm. Even though they didn't use methyl bromide or methyl iodide, they used several hundred pounds of plastic every year. It was a huge expense for them to dump the plastic at the local waste management, but it was "better" than burning all those plastic chemicals to be released into the atmosphere, which according to my organic farmer friend so many other farmers choose to do to save on costs of dumping plastic. There seems to be something inherently wrong with plasticulture. Needless to say, I've long ago not purchased strawberries, be it cheap supermarket, on the side of the road, or expensive organic farmers' market. I believe the environmental costs are too great for such a small fruit. However, I will eat them if they're offered to me. Hmm, maybe I'll try growing strawberries in my mini-balcony greenhouse... which, guess what, is covered in reused greenhouse plastic?

habitat ~ 09/02/10 ~ Harkins Slough

Harkins Slough

September 2, 2010

Unless I suddenly decide I don't mind hauling around cumbersome equipment (heavy cameras, big phallic lenses, tripods, etc...), I doubt I'll ever get a decent picture of the American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhyncho). Yep, those white blobs in the first two pics are white pelicans mixed in with a bevy of gulls. My friend I was visiting had a massive scope, which I declined since I wasn't sure where or how we were getting around the farm during my visit.

Oh, the organic farm sits right alongside Harkins Slough, hence this habitat location label. It looks like the slough area has changed since the main road (as evidenced by the submerged power poles) is now covered and many shrubs have died from the flood of water. Apparently the birds like it.

As a side note and in line with my other comments about seasonal birds in the area, I'm a little curious why a couple reputable online bird sites (Cornell and WhatBird.com) and the ever present Wikipedia state white pelicans only overwinter along coastal CA. Considering the last time I saw white pelicans was in May and my friend says she's seen them around the farm all summer, this seems to be a glaring trivial error. Stan Tekiela's Birds of California seems to get it right in saying white pelicans are a non-migrator in most of CA and includes the only correct map of seasonal presence I've found. This, my blog readers, is the reason why I'm so persnickety about backdating all my post to the dates of my photos and why I try to keep my blog posts writing to what I experienced first-hand, versus paraphrasing and promulgating potentially incorrect information.

St. Catherine's lace covered with honey bees
Eriogonum giganteum var. giganteum covered with Apis mellifera
Polygonaceae

I couldn't believe how big this buckwheat is. The fence post in the second picture is about as tall as I am. Thanks to the organic farm's native plant restoration lady, I have a positive ID. Goodness knows I'm not good at identifying buckwheats since there are so many in CA... 269 species & varieties of Eriogonum to be exact, all native to CA with many of them limited, rare, or endangered, including St. Catherine's lace.

Calflora doesn't show this plant as being native to Santa Cruz County, but Harkins Slough is only a couple miles from the Monterey County border. However, like many other buckwheats, I suspect this one was purposely planted outside of its native range. Simply based on recent CA blog posts, the red buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) seems to be very popular in gardens along the western, central to northern area of CA, yet its native range is mostly southerly Santa Barbara County and is a CNPS 1B.2 rare plant.

So, this got me asking a series of questions (as a caveat, I am not a gardener and plead ignorance)... 1) What exactly constitutes "native" in terms of gardens and nurseries? County borders? State borders? Stolen from the woods and fields nearby? 2) Where do the nurseries obtain their initial stock? 3) Like orchid collecting from the early 1900's, could the current "native garden" trendiness actually be depleting our regional, natural populations? 4) What are the long-term environmental impacts of introducing a non-regional, yet "native", plant to areas where it doesn't naturally occur? Are we inadvertently creating hybrids? Is that something we want? Is it "good" for nature? 5) How is a "native" plant planted in a garden hundreds of miles away from where it occurs naturally be somehow better and preferable than say planting something from South Africa with similar climate? Just asking.

Btw, Apis mellifera is not native to North America; I'm not sure how many people know this. Really, they're the insect version of cows, sheep, cats, and dogs. It makes me wonder how much we anthropomorphize the plight of the non-native honey bee.

Mylitta crescent ~ 09/02/10 ~ Harkins Slough

female Mylitta crescent
female Phyciodes mylitta mylitta

As I visited a friend where she works at an organic farm, I was extremely pleased to see numerous butterflies next to the fields. The farm owner does not use Btk. I once killed an entire stock of cabbage whites (don't ask why I was raising these butterflies) by feeding them washed, organic cabbage from the grocer after depleting my home-grown supply. Many people don't realize "organic" may still mean pesticides are used. Btk is a very popular biological pesticide. To read more of my rambling thoughts on this, check out this other post.

I find crescent butterflies very difficult to distinguish between species, because the wing patterns are highly variable within species. I was tempted to call this the montana subspecies of the field crescent (P. campestris aka P. pulchella - again, why is there a need to rename species already described?). However, besides the obvious elevation difference, Glassberg notes field crescents have dark brown or black antennal tips, which is not the case with my specimen above.

sentimental about seasons

my dad's John Deere (September 1988)

I grew up in the Central Valley of California on a small, family farm (cows, sheep, goats, geese, chickens, cotton, wheat, corn, almonds, apricots, and boysenberries) where it felt like it was either 104 degrees of dry, extreme heat in the summer or soupy-thick fog in the winter. Everything had to be irrigated and anything that popped out of the ground that wasn't purposely planted was considered a weed. I didn't experience true four-seasons-a-year changes for the first 23 years of my life. I would read about seasons in school readers or in National Geographic Society's 1970's World magazine and would wonder if there really were spring and summer wildflowers, or leaves that honestly turned bright orange and red in autumn. In a weird twist of fate, I ended up working for an educational publisher that was purchased by NGSP.

Sigh... it's yet another cool grey, high-fog, coastal summer morning here, which is very typical of Pacific Grove...

And I find myself fondly remembering the warm, fertile fields, forests, bogs, and fens that I was lucky enough to experience in Ohio for 9 years. I adored the steady color procession of summer wildflowers and butterflies; the crisp air of the fall, marked with heady scents of apple cider and the sounds and sights of crunchy, colorful leaves; and the excitement of spotting the first bright yellow forsythias and daffodils of the spring... However, I detested the very cold, long, bitter winters where early, lake-effect snow would refreeze several times to become massive, dirty, ice obstacles on the roads. The best thing about winter in Ohio was that I could jest that I walked on water, thanks to a frozen Lake Erie. On the other extreme, there was the regular, high humidity, sticky heat of Cleveland during the summers. Often 90 degrees in the Midwest somehow felt so much hotter than the dry 104 degrees of the Central Valley of California... and neither suited me.

Thus, I have purposely chosen to live on the coast for its mild winters and cool summers. As much as I sought out a moderate climate, I still miss the cycle of "traditional" seasons. Admittedly, it took me a couple of years after returning to California to really get interested in the local nature, because, in my mind, it couldn't compare to the bounty of an Ohio summer. Too often I've hiked locally and noticed fantastic flowers and such and dismissed them by shrugging, "Oh, that's a pretty flower." or "That's an interesting bug." to be quickly forgotten. I was starting to feel too pedestrian and somewhat ignorant.

So, this year I invested in a couple local guide books and created Nature ID the first week of May 2009 (older posts are predated). My first post to Nature ID is here. Google states I've had this identity since 2008, but that was because I set up a couple other basic blogs as favors for friends who don't have computers.

Thanks to Nature ID, I'm appreciating the local diversity and uniqueness like never before... after all, there is an ocean of life within a stone's throw of where I live and if I really wanted a little warmth, all I have to do is hop in the car for a 20 minute drive inland. I love spring which lasts ostensibly from mid-January to mid-May. My favorite series of blog posts are my wildflower pics from a hike at Fort Ord on March 14, 2009.

I've looked repeatedly for another nature blog in the local area and have yet to find one that resonates with me in that peculiar, romantic love of nature like the ones from the Midwest and the UK. Here's a partial list of those that feed my soul and fantasies of living somewhere else:
Nature Remains
Tricia's Tales
The Ohio Nature Blog
Orchids and Nature

A HUGE thank you to all the nature bloggers out there for sharing your local bounty, whatever the season!

ps 07/29/09 - I started this entry on Friday and it's remained cool and foggy through to this morning. An unfortunate use of pointy "carrots" deleted most of my original post and since then I've edited this post repeatedly, because I was still figuring out what I wanted to say. I usually try to refrain from posting too many random musings on Nature ID, since that's not my goal for this blog... but these past several mornings, I felt the need to work out my thoughts in writing.

pss 04/21/10 - Lately, I've been absolutely wowed by pictures on other blogs... which got me thinking about my own pictures and what kind of camera I want next. I took the photo above for a photography elective my senior year of high school. I don't remember much from the class except struggling with an awkward black cloth box to unload the film from the cassette. I even developed the film, too. I am so used to digital now that I almost forgot what it used to be like to take a picture. Anyone remember those square, disposable flash bulbs?