Asteraceae
This cheery yellow flower is easily in my top 5 most despised plants in the state of CA, which gained a foothold here sometime before 1869 and hails from southern Europe and western Eurasia. It's super pokey and stops me in my tracks while out hiking. I realized recently that I may have been mistaking another star-thistle tocalote for this yellow star-thistle, so I made a point to find it on the road outside the west entrance to Pinnacles National Park to take a closer look and these pictures. If only it weren't such a great reported butterfly nectar source...
6 comments:
Whoa! That's super spikey. A botanist might need body armour :o(
The spikes remind me of the ones on a golden barrel cactus. Ouch!
Pinnacles wildlife biologist Paul was trying to convince me to wear their Kevlar snake gators when I go out. I wonder if they'd work against yellow star-thistle, too?
The answer to your question is yes. I wear gators when weeding grasslands for YST and other prickly weeds (and the gators also help prevent ticks and chiggers). And while it might be a fine nectar source for some Leps, and its seeds are even occasionally collected by some mice and ground squirrels and like, if YST wasn't in the fields there would be other native plants there instead that would better fulfill those needs, while not creating evil, impassable spiky, thatchy, monocultures that most animals completely avoid. Next time you're walking through it and get a poke, think about a bobcat or badger trying to walk through it. Or quail. Or a horned lizard. They don't. So it pretty much becomes worthless land (except the Euro honey bees do love it).
In Edgewood, in the grasslands where we've almost fully removed it, you now find nice masses of hayfield tarweed, madia, yampah, button celery, spanish lotus, trefoil, doveweed, and nude & wickerstem buckwheat. And the Leps seem quite happy about it. ;)
Hey, Ken!
The stiff gators Paul tried to get me to wear went way up over my knees (they seem to have designed them for taller people than me), which would have made it very difficult for me to hike in. Maybe they come in different sizes?
Oh, we have chiggers in CA!?! I hated them in OH.
I'm glad you pointed out that animals avoid the yellow star-thistle. The thought occurred to me that yellow star-thistle has the potential to dramatically alter the landscape of furry animal territories, because I noted animal paths through the grass completely go around even the less-pokey tocalote. Although, I've found juvenile fence lizards underneath the tocalote, which would seem to be a protective benefit to the lizard. Would a horned lizard really avoid the ground underneath the pokier yellow star-thistle?
I have to note, the yellow star-thistle was the ONLY blooming plant in some areas for about 2 weeks, i.e. the ONLY nectar source. The hot hot weather vinegar weed finished up the week before, and the long-stemmed buckwheat is just starting to show a few buds. Milkweeds are continually blooming elsewhere. Are the plants you mention blooming up at the comparatively less-dry Edgewood right now?
Yes, gators come in diff sizes and types. Mine aren't solid/stiff, for example.
Some small animals will go under YST, but often the silica-heavy stalks of past year's plants plus the grasses build up into a thatch that is quite dense, and tough for small, short legged animals to move through without easily being predated.
As for "ONLY" plant blooming - be careful! If the YST wasn't there, and it was a healthy, natural, native ecosystem, don't ya think there might be other flowering plants in that space? I doubt it would be dead ground… ;) And even if there weren't any flowers with nectar, seems to me the local Lep fauna would be adapted to that...
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