Climate Change Made Me Do It

A sapsucker stretches after its winter arrival at the Dipper Ranch orchard.
This one looks like a cross between the red-naped sapsucker and the red-breasted sapsucker.  

Me in October:

Hardly any walnuts have fallen on the ground at the Dipper Ranch and they're all pecked open by birds. There will be no walnut harvest party this year.  It must be the four-year drought. The walnut trees leafed out in June this year - two months late. It must be climate change.

 The Dipper Ranch walnut trees in December:

Here's a few thousand walnuts on the ground for you. Sorry, dropped them in their husks this year. And it's going to rain soon so you better pick them up before they mold. Isn't climate always changing?

Denning

Wet, cold and dark induce dreamy illusions as a storm envelopes Long Ridge.

Denning - a personal definition - reluctance to leave the lair; the time of year when wet, dark and cold conditions cause a shift towards low metabolic activities:  reading, writing, searching for thermal underwear and down comforter, mending, walnut-cracking while watching movies, sleeping, thinking about but not actually waterproofing boots, dreaming of a functional woodstove, baking, and more reading this time with a cat sitting in lap.


The season of glorious clouds has been superseded by the wet season with increasing periods of cold and darkness.  Morningside, I argue with myself in the hot shower, "See you are waterproof.  Get going!"  Instead, I find lion faces in the fake marble patterns of the cheap shower walls and the daylight just gets shorter.

Waiting for the Storm

Valley oaks on the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve greet
storm clouds blowing down the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Storms threaten, dust the ridge tops with a bit of snow, and then skirt around us to dump on the middle of the continent.

Snowy oak in the upper Dipper Ranch pasture.

Snowy California buckeyes in foreground,
trail in Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve in background.

Just enough snow to highlight the branching patterns of different types of trees and then drip down the stems.

Coyote watches the newly arrived cattle drag hooves in the snow.

We started the storm season in a serious mood of preparation - anchoring down the flyables, cleaning out culverts, and moving equipment out of the big field where it might get stuck in the mud.

Western toad waiting seven inches down a burrow for the coming storm.

Three or four storms later, I now come home in the dark and think, "The yard looks like my bedroom when I was a teenager except I don't remember having so many orange socks."

Redwinged blackbirds moving restlessly
in the skies above Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

How do animals sense the advent of a storm? Pretty much the same way weather forecasters do - by tracking the change in air pressure and watching the sky.

Blackbirds waiting for the storm.

Except the animals don't stand in line at the grocery store and complain about rain.

Hundreds of blackbirds settle into an oak tree for a few minutes.

Something about that grocery store line, makes you forgot that we require water and food and air and solid ground to live.

In breaks before storms, the animals come out to sun.

A big bobcat claims a sunny meadow far down a hill in Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve.

Approached by a smaller bobcat, they spar for a few seconds,
the smaller bobcat goes belly up,
and the big bobcat reclaims his basking territory.

The coyotes bask on a sunny hilltop in the morning.

They reluctantly move on
when I get out of the car to open the gate.

And the clouds come and go with more rain. Tomorrow, we will try to find a special population of newts moving through Stevens Canyon with the newest storm.

Morning moisture rising out of Stevens Canyon.

The Dusty Cusp of Summer

First rain Sunday night. September and maybe October will still have hot, dry days of Indian summer, at least our western version where the seasons are more about wet/dry periods than hot/cold temperatures. There have been subtle signs of the end of summer, but as with most changes, we don't recognize them until they are well underway. Some evenings are cool and the bare skies have occasional cloud visitors.



Most of these preliminary signs are plants throwing in the towel after a 4-month stretch of dry weather. In rocky and sunny places, the poison oak leaves are turning bright red and dropping. In shadier spots, they take on soft pinks and yellows. Soon, the canyons will sport deep red gashes where poison oak grows in its bush form. Be ever careful around poison oak. Even without the leaves-of-three, the urushiol oil is still present on the stems and can give you a rash if you brush up against them, particularly if you break a stem and the milky sap touches your skin. Identify leafless poison oak plants by the short stubby side branches that are arranged opposite of each other. Also, by the evil glow that always surrounds it.



The oaks are starting to drop their acorns, and the deer gather under the productive trees even in the daytime to snack. This first drop is of the punky acorns - infested with bugs or otherwise undersized. The trees throw them off while they pour their summer juice into the good acorns still fattening on the branches.

--- Dot 1 and Dot 2 - their coats are fading in step with the annual grasses. ---

The deer have a restlessness and are shifting their daily patterns, whether from the start of hunting season or the upcoming rut. This year's fawns are losing their spots and the shyness that previously sent them springing away at any new sound.

--- This yearling buck creeps out of the willow thicket for a quick drink at dusk and dawn and is probably Button. He no longer associates with his doe, Bump. She may be the single doe who has now taken up residence in the shade of the oak trees above the house. ---

The young fawns will stay with the does, but year-old bucks are now by themselves and in deep hiding. Their small antlers set them apart from their original doe-led family, but are too puny to stand up to the mature bucks.



Even the redwood trees have a special color this time of year. Small clusters of yellow and brown leaves stand out among the green boughs. Evergreen trees have to replace their leaves now and then. This happens gradually throughout the year, but most evergreen species also have a period when many of the older leaves are shed to make room for fresh leaves.



It is also the season of bugs. Crickets take over the night sounds. Huge dragonflies patrol the ponds and nearby grasslands. During the day, small flies annoyingly hover around your eyes and I often first spot a fawn by its constantly flicking tail.



I get wistful at the end of summer. Did I do everything I wanted to do this summer? During the long days of outside work, did I pause often enough to allow the colors, sounds and smells of the breeding season to enter my consciousness? I regret not finding the time to write about wildflowers, raptor flight, and lizards, but I can store those observations away for comparison next year. Will I see another summer? As I turn to face the fall, I look over my shoulder and cast a wish to be a student of summer again.

Snake Weather - Part 1

Please note: my niece who is visiting me in California this July is not allowed to read this blog post. She says she will not visit the Dipper Ranch because she "doesn't do mice and snakes", but I can meet her in San Francisco. This young lady grew up on a farm - what's the deal? I guess I could also forbid my mom and youngest sister and some of my botanical colleagues from reading this post because they too are freaked out about my snake stories.

Dear friends & family - please reconsider. Snakes are very interesting. Did you know that snakes have two lungs like us, but usually, in order to fit inside their unique body shape, the right lung is long while the left lung is shrunk to nothing kinda like our appendix? In any event, before you proceed further, I must warn you that this blog posting includes moments of venomous snakes, rattles, screaming and the death of a baby bunny. Kinda like those TV nature shows.

Snake weather is any pleasantly warm day when it's been cold, any moderately warm day when it's been hot, and any warm night. We had daytime temperatures in the 80s and 90s for several days in coastal California. Quite unusual for April when we usually have either bright warm days or cool fog drifting among the spring-green hills. Last year, it wasn't until May that we had several consecutive hot days and that's when the snakes suddenly showed up. I proclaimed May 12 through 18, 2008 as "Snake Week" because I saw an average of 1 snake per day around the farmyard. I could have also called it "Brown Snake Week" because they were either gopher snakes or rattlesnakes, or "The Barn is a Snake Pit Week", but that was in the early days when I didn't have enough experience to classify the week by subcategories.

In early April this year, my cuddly ranch cat, Cole, brought me baby bunnies. The first one was alive and I released it from his clutches; the second one was dead. Cole and I had a talk. I explained he is allowed to hunt all forms of rodents in the farmyard, especially those that come into the house, as part of the Dipper Ranch snake protection program. That is, by reducing the rodent population, he would be removing the attraction of the house and farmyard to predators and thus protecting us from snakes. I also explained that rabbits are lagomorphs (gnawing, herbivorous mammals including rabbits, hares, and pikas), not rodents, and thus they are not included in his hunting license. I showed him the bell that would otherwise go on his collar. Cole nodded wisely and went back to monitoring the gopher holes.

One week later when I was chopping up enemy #1 - thistles, I noticed Cole happily purring by the kitchen door. When I reached down to ruffle his cheerful fur, I realized there was another baby bunny laying on the ground at his feet. Furious, I dragged the 15-lb feline indoors. After a brief struggle, he was subsequently decorated with a bell on his collar. A jingly Cole followed me outside to the scene of the crime. We were both astonished to discover that the bunny was gone. Apparently, the rabbit was playing dead and escaped during our brief indoor em-bell-ishment.

I was searching the nearby bushes when I noticed Cole zip straight to the barn and slip under a large sliding door. The barn has been vacant for many years, so I had to unchain the door and push against its rusty tracks to get inside. I found Cole crouching under an old wagon. By the looks of the straw tunnels on the floor, I could tell where the rabbits were nesting. While I ran around the wagon unsuccessfully trying to snag Cole, he trotted over to the far corner of the barn. Suddenly, we both heard a "ssss-sssssss-sssss", the distinct rattlesnake rattle. Cole jumped back. I threw him out of the barn and then crept over to see if I could spot the rattlesnake. At some point in the past, someone covered the dirt floor of the barn with loose plywood boards which over the years got covered with straw, manure and miscellaneous discarded farm implements. Lots of places to hide. Kinda creepy. Although I could still hear the rattling, I could not see the rattler and I wasn't willing to investigate any closer. I closed up the barn and put boards in front of the larger cracks under the door so that Cole could not get back inside.

Last year, I learned to make early morning rounds of the farmyard on a daily basis. Most evenings before dark, I repeated the rounds, and on weekends, I checked more frequently. This gave me a chance to watch the weather, monitor the thistles warfare, and detect wildlife patterns. I became familiar with the locations where snakes most frequently sunbathed on warm days: the southwest corner of the barn by the back door in the midmorning, and the east side of the barn by the hose in the late afternoon. When the sunning snakes happened to be rattlesnakes, usually small buggers, I captured and moved them far away from the farmyard. I figure it is better to monitor, catch and move a rattlesnake than ignore it and later be unpleasantly surprised.

A few days later, I noticed the sun shining on the back of the barn and figured it was good sun-bathing weather.

First, I saw this:

Then I saw this:

With about six inches of its body laying outside the barn , I could tell this was a northern Pacific rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis oreganus) by the triangular shape of its head and the vertical slit of its pupils. I couldn't tell its overall length or see the rattles, but the span of the head and girth of the body looked larger than most rattlesnakes that I had seen around the barn. It was draped behind a pipe with its body arranged between sun and shade to soak up heat without overexposing itself. I guessed this was cautious behavior of a snake recently coming out of hibernation. I slipped over to the garage to grab my gloves, net, snake tongs and courage. My technique is to slowly place the net in front of the snake - they usually don't move - and then with the tongs snag the snake midbody and toss it into the net. With the pipe in the way, I didn't get a good grip on this rattler on the first try. With much indignant rattling, the snake slipped back into the barn.

I ran around to the other side of the barn, slid open the heavy door and peeked in. It was still rattling furiously and its head and 8 inches of its body were sticking out of a lumber pile at a stiff 45 degree angle. It was watching me watching it. As I approached the lumber pile, it retreated between the boards. I tried to wedge the snake tongs into the gaps between the boards but was unable to get any purchase as I saw coil after coil slip back into the pile. Once again, I closed up the barn and warned the cat to stay away.

Then the April mini-heatwave arrived. On a warm Saturday, I noticed the backside of the barn was bathed in sunlight and I cautiously checked the southwest corner. This time I found the rattler with its entire body just outside the back barn door. I went through my gotta-catch-a-rattler routine: put the curious kids and pets inside, put on heavy leather gloves and boots, gather net and tongs, and take a deep breath.

I successfully captured the rattler although it was tricky for a few seconds because I had to maneuver its body around the pipe to drop it into the net. It was mad and rattling fast and faster. With the snake safely restrained in the deep net, I took a few moments to scream off the tension in the backyard - nice thing about the country, you don't have to worry about nearby neighbors wondering what the heck you are doing.

To get a photo without getting too close, I propped the net over a garbage can and climbed a ladder to shoot from above. The snake was too frisky to relocate on that day, so I dropped it into a pillowcase, tied off the top, and stored it in a locking-top trashcan in a cool part of the garage. Snakes eat infrequently and rarely drink water, so they keep well in a dark, cool place for several days. Just make sure you let your housemates know the plan.

The release of the rattler - coming soon as Snake Weather - Part 2.

The Beautiful Colors of Thirst

I took some friends for a walk on the Dipper Ranch on the day after Christmas. As we headed back to the ranch house for a spaghetti dinner, the sunset colored the sky. We were in awe. The photo above was taken at 5:17 pm and the photo below was taken 3 minutes later. We rarely get such colors for either sunrise or sunset in this part of California. Mostly it is either blank blue sky or fog.

On December 28, the sunset clouds were back but with hanging bases (photo below). This was probably virga - raindrops or ice falling from a cloud but evaporating before they reach the ground. It indicates a layer of dry air beneath the cloud. Sometimes the evaporation associated with virga increases the water vapor in the dry layer until there is enough humidity that rainfall can make it all the way to the ground. Not this day. Just beautiful colors, no rainfall.


Coastal California has a Mediterranean climate. Summers are dry and winters are wet with relatively mild temperatures year round. In our area, there is virtually no rain from June through September; most annual rainfall occurs from November through April.

But not this water year. Weeks later, it's still warm and dry and no rain or fog in sight. We could be entering our third year of drought. So far in January 2009, San Francisco has received 0.24 inches of rain. The last time it was so low in January was 0.26 inches in 1920.

My lips and fingers are cracking and the start of the pollen season has us sneezing. Meanwhile, the winter animals are trying to find water. My bathroom window looks out at a cattle trough. These days all kinds of animals are visiting it and a trip to the bathroom is like looking out a blind on an African safari. A flock of over one hundred band-tailed pigeons visits the trough every morning. Even Cole the grey ranch cat makes a morning pilgrimage.



















This last one I call the Buzzard Bar.