habitat ~ 09/29/13 ~ Rocky Creek

Rocky Creek

September 27, 28, and 29, 2013

There was only a core group of 10 of us with 4 small dogs that camped this time.  The girlfriend invited her recently engaged friends, and I invited a fellow local blogger, Bread on the Water, and her husband down for a visit.  We had a bit less revelry than in the past, with no cocktail hour visitors and an evening honoring 2 of our friends who died recently.  Rocky Creek is a special place filled with fond memories.

The pond was engineered by one of the family members who's a hydrologist.  The overflow goes right back into Rocky Creek.   There are several decent sized fish that jump around on occasion. 

I'm always amazed at the power of the wind to mold redwood trees into sculptural shapes.  And, yes, there always seems to be something in bloom, such as this silver bush lupine.

Here's what happens to tanbark oaks when Sudden Oak Death hits them.  SOD first started appearing in this canyon maybe about 10 years ago (?).  

And last, here's a view of Rocky Creek Bridge from the lower property road.  Caltrans is still working on repairing and upgrading a section of Hwy 1 just south of the Bridge that slid into the ocean 2 years ago.  BigSurKate has excellent updates on road closures there.

ps 10/22/13 - For a blog post about a recently released paper on SOD and redwoods, check out BigSurKate.

rubber boa ~ 09/29/13 ~ Rocky Creek

northern rubber boa

Charina bottae

more information

I first saw this snake as I was walking up the road to greet a fellow blogger whom I had invited for a Rocky Creek tour.  I figured it might be the same kind of snake that I saw last year during our now annual excursion.  All I remembered was last year's snake belly was orange, similar to this one.  My blogging visitor jokingly expressed disappointment that I didn't know the name off the top of my head.  Hey, I tend not to remember everything from Nature ID, but at least I can easily track past information. That's kind of the point of this blog.  Of course, when I got home I looked up my blog entry from last year.  Ring-necked snake?  Definitely not. This one has an unusual rubbery appearance to it with lots of bite marks down the length of its body.  Apparently, body scars are common in rubber boas.  During the course of the visit, I passed it 4 times total.  It couldn't have been entirely dead, because it changed positions each time, but it was still on the road.  Neat!  Here's a new-to-me snake that I never knew existed around here.

white sheet lighting ~ 09/28/13 ~ Rocky Creek

white sheet lighting

Not wanting to miss out on socializing in order to check for insects, I moved the sheet set-up closer to the edge of our evening hangout.  Our camp clearing is at least 50 ft around at the base of a hill and within 15 ft of Rocky Creek. It wasn't ideal considering our camping lanterns competed with light output, but the access for our fellow campers was great.  I experimented a little by placing the light a foot away from the sheet and resting it against the sheet.  It really didn't seem to make much difference.  I got a little more variety of moths and opiliones in this location, but there still wasn't very much activity. I suspect if there were a lot, my fellow campers may have freaked out.  All in all it was casual fun, and I think I might do it again.

moths ~ 09/28/13 ~ Rocky Creek

 

Here are all the moths from night 2 of white sheet lighting.  Again, I'll add the moth IDs at a later time.  I welcome anyone who wants to help me ID these coastal moths in the comments.

I'm surprised at how sentimental I became while sorting through these moth photos.  The feeling reminds me of "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.  My only published papers were 6 checklists of moths with Sonja Teraguchi.  I googled to see if it's out there on the internet, since the pubication predates Y2K.  Hey, it's on eBay.  Cool.  I think?  It's also referenced in a paper by Roy Rings in The Great Lakes Entomologist.  Very cool.

white sheet lighting ~ 09/27/13 ~ Rocky Creek

white sheet lighting

The first evening of our camping trip, I set up the sheet and battery-operated UV light under a thick cover of alder trees about 100 feet from Rocky Creek.  Remember, I borrowed this equipment from UC Berkeley's Essig Museum of Entomology last week.  I was intending to lure moths, but I primarily lured a handful of other interesting insects, like beetles, wasps, and crickets.  Specific IDs will be forthcoming as soon as I do a little research.

moths ~ 09/27/13 ~ Rocky Creek

 

I'll add the moth IDs at a later time.  Thanks to Pete at Essig, I borrowed Moths of Western North America by Jerry Powell and Paul Opler.  It's a spendy tome at $100 a pop, so I wanted to take a good look before I purchased.  I haven't had the patience to sit down with the hefty book, yet.  If anyone would like to help get the ID ball rolling, please comment.

camel cricket ~ 09/27/13 ~ Rocky Creek

female camel cricket

likely Ceuthophilus or Pristoceuthophilus sp.

This is my best guess. Until I started looking for this ID, I didn't know there were so many different kinds of camel crickets. Grasshopper and cricket ID is challenging to me, because there are multiple nymphal instars that don't always look like the adults. Lack of wings is never a reliable identifier, because it could simply be young. I really enjoy the winglike patterning on this one's femur (click to enlarge photo).

ichneumonid ~ 09/27/13 ~ Rocky Creek

 female ichneumonid wasp

likely Netelia sp.

Eh, you can tell I studied entomology 20 years ago by the names I still prefer to use. Apparently, it's now fashionable to call these wasps ichneumons, rather than ichneumonids, as you will find on Wikipedia and BugGuide linked in the ID above. Powell and Hogue state there are probably more than 1000 spp. of ichneumonid wasps in CA.  I've always loved the delicate grace of these wasps.  These and braconids were featured heavily in my Economic Entomology class, because they are easy examples of beneficial insects that parasitize other insects in a most spectacular fashion. Unfortunately, see that not-insignificant ovipositor?  Well, that apparently can deliver quite the sting. A look-alike ichneumonid wasp that does not sting is Ophion spp.

black burying beetle ~ 09/27/13 ~ Rocky Creek

black burying beetle carrying Poecilochirus mites

Nicrophorus nigrita carrying Poecilochirus sp.

This sexton beetle, without the typical Halloween markings, was by far my favorite find. I love its bright orange antennal clubs. And, it brought hitchhiking friends to the blacklight party. I played around with the camera flash and a handheld flashlight. I'm pleased with the lighting results. The mites weren't too keen being in the spotlight and would crawl underneath the beetle if lit for too long. Despite the tall tale or two I told while camping, these mites do not feed on the beetle. Finding information online proved to be challenging. The Hilton Pond Center has a nice article on phoretic mites and carrion beetles in general.

ps - Graeme, I'm waiting for a good carrion/carry-on pun.

habitat ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

 Rocky Creek

September 29, 2012

posted 10/10/12 - It's been 3 years and 2 months since a core group of 7 of us camped down here together on private property that has been owned by the same families for almost a century.  We did not stay at the cabin.  We also had 3 dogs, a son and girlfriend, and 3 other visitors from last time. There were 3 additional campers, 6 new visitors, and 4 additional dogs who also joined us.  Phew! What I'll remember most from this excursion are the collective stories of our lives, all that has changed and all that has remained the same.  This passage of time has been bittersweet.

One of our cocktail hour visitors mentioned a celebrity wedding.  I assumed he was talking about another famous wedding that happened in Big Sur this past summer.  It wasn't until I got home that I found out another starlet had gotten married this day, and long lens photos were plastered all over the internet.  It's such a close-knit community down in Big Sur that I just can't imagine a native would sell out.  They guard and respect privacy.  I suspect the wedding planners for both weddings leaked the information and photos.  However, I'm glad to see Big Sur is getting booked after last year's economically devastating period with several road closures.

Blogger bigsurkate has been posting updates on the Rocky Creek hard closures that I believe will be starting this coming Sunday night and going through next year.  The traffic backup for the existing one lane can be seen in the last photo above.  It's something to keep in mind if you plan on visiting Big Sur anytime soon.

As for the habitat aspects, I couldn't get out of my mind a critical comment made by a fellow CNPS member during a trip to nearby Garrapata State Park back on June 3, 2012.  He felt the families were not doing enough to eradicate the cape ivy and jubata grass (shown in the 2nd and 3rd photos above) that is spreading down the coast.  Although, I'm not sure I entirely agree with him about extensive artificial planting of natives, either.  This practice gives a false expectation of what wild truly looks like and takes an extraordinary amount of resources to attempt to sustain.  I found Death of a Million Trees' Conciliation Biology: Revising Conservation Biology and Authenticity: A modern definition of wilderness posts to be fascinating.  I've long held the belief that us humans are arrogant if we think we can fully understand and control nature.  It's like holding a 2x4 against the tidal wave of natural processes that will continue long after we're gone, bonked on the head by that same 2x4.

fence lizard ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

coast range fence lizard

Sceloporus occidentalis bocourtii

I know I have fence lizards well represented on Nature ID, but this one was just so exquisite I had to post her (I think it's a female?) picture.  Click on the image to see it enlarged.  I keep taking photos of lizards with hopes one of them will eventually be a different sp.  Unfortunately, the highly variable and numerous fence lizards seem to be the most amenable to my paparazzi-like stalking. I've seen a handful of alligator lizards around, but they're a bit more camera shy.  The only other lizard spp. I've seen around these parts somewhat infrequently is the coast horned lizard and CA whiptail.

CA poppy ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

California poppy

Eschscholzia californica

Papaveraceae

In all of my previous posts of CA poppies, I either talk about or show the characteristic red ring that distinguishes this poppy from other Eschscholzia spp. found in California.  The red ring is particularly noticeable once the flower has gone to seed.  I got the "red ring" terminology from Vern Yadon's collaborative Wildflowers of Monterey County.  Until researching for this post, I didn't know any other name for this distinctive flower structure.

 

 

As a backstory, I've been growing poppies at home this summer, along with baby blue eyes and a small lupine, from a wildflower seed packet handed to me by the Monterey City forestry folks at a local farmers' market. The packet mixture listed non-native wildflowers, like corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas), which did not come up.  The lupine went to seed over a month ago, which mirrors what I've seen out in the wild.  I suspected the poppies and baby blue eyes, two flowers I generally associate as spring bloomers, were only in bloom this late in the year because I was watering them.  So, I was chuffed to find these poppies blooming out in the wild down the coast.

What caught my attention about my garden "wildflower" poppies is that they have a small ring, but they're not red.  With this in mind, once I found the poppies shown here down at Rocky Creek, I proceeded to check for rings.  It was interesting because there were gradient areas where the red rings were prominent, then intergrade with partially red rings, then rings with no red.  I was actually hoping what I was growing at home and what I found with non-red rings were tufted poppy (Eschscholzia caespitosa).  Nope.

I did an internet search for Eschscholzia californica with "red ring" and only came up with my own blog posts.  Jepson eFlora mentions "receptacle rim" and "spreading rim".  The USDA Plant Guide PDF talks about "torus rim" and "collar-like pedestal".  Neither mentions the color of the rim.  After some more searching, including checking all of Jepson eFlora's 12 Eschscholzia spp. and ssp. descriptions and Calflora's 17 records with its linked CalPhotos, I've come to the conclusion that only CA poppies have rings, aka rims, regardless of the color.  If anyone knows differently, I'd love to hear from you.  I did find references to a non-Jepson recognized Eschscholzia mexicana (aka Eschscholzia californica ssp. mexicana) having small rims, but its natural wild areas are in southeast CA to other states (as a side note, it's funny that Lee Dittmann is the photographer in my small rims AZ link, because his name was brought up in e-mail conversation with a retired Coe Park ranger regarding 30 years of erroneously reported elegant piperia that I caught).  I'm left wondering if the promulgation of wildflower seed packets has introduced a genetic mix, such that native versus non-native can no longer be separated.

Genetics is fascinating.  Red rings, non-red rings, white petals, red petals, two-toned petals, etc.  How about three petals?

 

At the end of the day, I revert back to my ol' classic line, "Oooh, pretty flower!"

shamrock orb weaver ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

shamrock orb weaver

Araneus trifolium

Spiders and snakes, oh my!  It's that time of year - the month of Halloween.  Spiders have been around all summer (and in most cases, all year round), but it seems the orb weavers are often noticed in the autumn when the females are huge and about ready to lay eggs.  Close to this one, we also found a very large dark grey orb weaver that I think might have been Araneus andrewsi, but I didn't get a clear picture of it.

It's unfortunate that spiders are so misunderstood and misidentified.  To accurately identify most spiders, one would need to microscopically look at the genitalia. Depending on the age, the sex, and possible other factors, different individuals of a single spider sp. can look vastly different from each other.  A look-alike spider to the one I have above is the cross orb weaver (Araneus diadematus). The difference to me is the shamrock has a more spotty look, whereas the cross orb weaver has a definite elongated flower-petal cross on the abdomen, with a prominent "petal" closest to the cephalothorax. Clare at Curbstone Valley Farm has a great new post on cross orb weavers, which are quite common garden spiders.

I'm still looking for a decent spider ID site.  Steve Lew, associated with U.C. Berkeley, had a fabulous spider site, but his research page has been abandoned.  Maybe he finished his PhD and moved on?  Speaking of U.C. Berkeley, they do have two quick reference guides for common CA big spiders and small spiders.  BugGuide (linked in the scientific names above) is okay, but you have to already have a good idea of what you have or wade through thousands of pictures to find a match.  I still use my old handy-dandy A Golden Guide Spiders and Their Kin, originally published by Western Publishing Company, Inc., to get in the ballpark of which spider I have.  I guess St. Martin's Press is now printing the books, but I haven't checked out the new books, yet.  I'm keeping my eye on Spiders.us as a developing and potentially great spider site. I just hope they don't go the way of InsectIdentification.org and place adverts in prime content areas.  U.C. Irvine has a nice page of arachnids of Orange County, but they don't include any of the spiders I've mentioned here.  Perhaps, they're too far south?  I'm going to continue looking for additional spider links, but the first couple dozen sites I found had so many errors that I didn't want to include them.

ring-necked snake ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

Monterey ring-necked snake

Diadophis punctatus vandenburghi (alt. vandenburgii and vandenburghii)

Like with quick birds, I often only photograph snakes after they've died.  This one was difficult to miss, because we found it belly-up with bright orange in the middle of the dirt road.  It was roughly 16 inches long.  Ants had already started meticulously carrying little bits away.  I wish I had more patience to have taken better photographs, I mean it was dead after all and wasn't going anywhere. The color differences between the two photographs above of the dirt and the orange was exactly what my camera picked up; I did not do any color correction in the computer.  I had a challenging time finding information on ring-necked snakes that wasn't overly generalized, especially with the alternate ssp. spellings.  This snake definitely does not have any black speckling typical of the Monterey ssp.  It looks more like the coral-bellied ring-neck snake (Diadophis punctatus pulchellus) found inland in the Sierra Nevadas, but according to some taxonomic notes these subspecies could be lumped together as a coastal CA lineage.

elegant piperia ~ 09/29/12 ~ Rocky Creek

elegant rein orchid
Piperia elegans ssp. elegans
Orchidaceae

It's funny how once you notice something, you start seeing it all over the place.  We weren't expecting to see any orchids this late in the year, then I found a small cluster of five of these elegant rein orchids.  On our return hike back down a 3.4 mile road, we ended up seeing them in numerous places, all on north-facing slopes.  The one dated record I could quickly find for the region, linked from Jepson eFlora, was made by Ivar Tidestrom on October 11, 1893 at Point Lobos. 1893!?!  Very cool.  I love how records are increasingly available online.

ps 10/02/12 - I stopped by Skyline Forest Drive this evening to see if any elegants were blooming. When we were on a Yadon's piperia hunt back in the summer of 2010, I checked the progress of a small area of elegants here on July 25, August 4, August 9, and August 27.  Today there was nothing, zip, nada.  The only herbaceous greenery I found were one bunch of sedges near a storm drain and pockets of heavily browsed and browning Asteraceae.  I couldn't even find evidence of any seed pods for elegant or Yadon's.  I wonder if the extremely dry year kept them from coming up.

pss 10/06/12 - I'm always amazed at the e-mail conversations I get into when I start searching for information. While looking for links to other pictures for this post, I came across an outlier on CalPhotos.  I e-mailed the photographer to query him about the accuracy of his ID.  Come to find out he's a retired ranger for Henry Coe State Park.  In his 30 years of experience there and knowing other botanists who ID'd piperias at Coe Park spanning the same amount of time, he agreed with me that the reported and photographed elegant piperia is actually Piperia elongata. I don't consider myself a botanist in any regard, so I take a breath before questioning 30 years of reported information. I do think access to online records makes double-checking IDs that much easier.

redwood ~ 08/02/09 ~ Rocky Creek

gnome in coast redwood
Sequoia sempervirens
Cupressaceae

This is simply a place-holder post to remind me to add some other pics (plus, it makes me laugh). Over the weekend we were camping down near Bixby Bridge towards Big Sur off of the old Hwy 1 on an 800+ acre private property heaven. A group of us were attempting to blaze a trail to the beach by following the creek. Even with a machete in the lead, we didn't have much success and gave up within an hour to enjoy some cool, canned refreshment. Great fun was had by all! The gnome was a surprise find, sitting peacefully in a burnt-out redwood. No one knew how long it had been sitting there or who had hiked in far enough to place this woodsy watcher.

habitat ~ 04/24/09 ~ Rocky Creek

Rocky Creek
April 24, 2009

posted 07/26/11 - The day started out foggy as is typical here on the coast. That's my friend looking for soap plant off the upper road close to the cabin in the second picture. The sign was to keep people away from a calf carcass that was tethered on the hill. If I remember correctly, the Ventana Wildlife Society had asked various land owners if they could set out calf carcasses to lure condors to the coast, like a twisted breadcrumb trail on a large scale. The tether was apparently tied to rebar to keep the coyotes from moving the carcass. And, we guessed they were using stillborn calves, because they were easy to obtain and carry into remote places. It all sounded silly to me. By the time we searched for soap plant, headed down the lower road to the camp area, ate lunch, watched butterflies, and headed out, the sun had burned through for gorgeous views on our drive back to town.

Fremont's star-lily ~ 04/24/09 ~ Rocky Creek

Fremont's star-lily
Toxicoscordion fremontii (formerly Zigadenus fremontii)
Melanthiaceae (formerly Liliaceae)

posted 07/26/11 - This is my best guess for ID. There is a possibility that it could be meadow death camas (T. venenosum), but that has been found further down the coast and inland at higher elevations.

What prompted me to look up this older photo was a recent post on soap plant. I recalled a friend who wanted to check on soap plants that she saw past their bloom the previous year at Rocky Creek, but she couldn't remember when that was. I had no idea what to look for and she described the flower stalks as being very tall and thin. While we found wavy leaves sprouting from the ground, we also found these seed pods. At the time, we had no idea what they were and wondered how long it would take for the soap plant to mature. I should tell her to check for soap plant flowers from June-July.