Mast Year

We have an enormous Valley Oak (Quercus lobata) in our driveway garden. It’s in a very inconvenient place, right on the edge of the driveway, and because of that you’d think its growth would be compromised. Fully half of its root system is compacted by concrete and parked cars. This isn’t good for any tree, and definitely not for Valley Oaks, which usually grow in grasslands and oak woodlands. But this tree was planted many years ago by a squirrel and the previous owners of this house never pulled it out, so it’s grown into the space and is extremely healthy. Valley Oaks can also take some irrigation (they like wet crevices and canyons in the wild) and this one gets that, being surrounded by chosen landscaping. Every year I have my tree guy come out and look at it, and usually it just gets a trim every couple of years. This year, the tree guy was worried about its split trunk (this compromises the strength of the canopy), and so we will be installing cables to decrease the chances of a total split. But anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about today. No, I wanted to write about the acorns.

We are having a mast year. A mast year is marked by a lot, and I mean a LOT, of acorns. All oaks mast, and in fact many plants mast, which just means they produce a lot of seed in any particular year. Sometimes ithis masting happens every year, sometimes every other year, sometimes two years in a row and then not again for 20 years, there is really no way to tell if it’s going to be a mast year. In the case of this particular Valley Oak, our last mast was three years ago, and frankly, I didn’t expect another one so soon. What makes it an especially interesting natural process is that no one really knows why masting happens.

This is how it looks every single morning - a new carpet every day.

Masting is a great mystery, but an even greater mystery is that all the trees of the species, within a very large geographical area, all mast at the same time. Thinking about that will really twist your noodle. How do they all know to do it at once? And why do they mast in the first place?

Well, there’s lots of theories, and they all make sense. One theory is that mast seeding is for predator satiation. When a population of plants produces seeds in unusual amounts, their predators will never be able to eat them all, leaving some to germinate and produce the next generation of plants. Another theory is about pollen coupling. This is a concern in the timing of flowering in pollinating species - the flowers need to sync with one another in order to cross pollinate. If all individuals in a population flower at the same time, more flowers will be pollinated, leading to increased seed production. But it’s expensive to make a lot of flowers, and plants have to have enough resources to do that. This explains why trees might mast following wet years - more water means more resources, means more flowers, means more seed. But some folks think that trees mast following drought years, as a ‘last gasp’ effort to produce offspring. Resource budgeting is another possible explanation. Plants need energy to produce seed, and they also need energy just for growing. Which do they concentrate on in any given year? In theory, if all plants in a large population are experiencing a similar amount of resources, they will either grow or flower similarly. Or maybe it’s about resource storage, and the trees are ‘saving’ resources for many years until they are ready to produce a great amount of seed. Environmental cues also result in hormonal responses in plants, so masting may have nothing to do with resources or pollination at all. Of course we also can’t leave out the possibility that the trees are ‘talking’ to each other, communicating through underground fungal networks. Other species have been shown to do this, so it’s no great leap to imagine that oaks do this too.

Whatever the reason (and maybe some things will just never be explained, and how lovely is that? that we can still be mystified by nature), what it means for me personally is lots of sweeping and shoveling into the green bin. During our last mast year, I left a lot of the acorns where they lay, and I’m still pulling out oak seedlings. One big Valley Oak is enough, thank you, so I’m collecting as many as I can this year.

Meanwhile, many times every evening, sitting on the couch watching TV, Tom and I jump when a particularly hefty acorn lands on the roof of the chicken coop, producing a loud BANG. I wonder if the chickens are sleeping at all.

Bio Blitz

Yesterday, I participated in a Bio Blitz.

Have you ever done this? My first was years ago, with my insect class at Merritt, and we looked primarily for insects in a particular garden; I think my teacher hosted that one. The Bio Blitz I joined yesterday was through the Save Mount Diablo foundation, in tandem with the California Native Plant Society, and it was specific to a certain area within the Diablo Range. Two years ago, in August of 2020, a lightning strike started an enormous fire called the SCU complex. It burned through nearly 400,000 acres during the 44 days the fire was active, and spanned five counties.

This blitz was held to determine if certain species were recovering, as well as to discover evidence of new species appearing - those that only bloom after a fire. We were given a span of two weeks in which to hike in the affected area and record our observations. Since the area is not easy to get to, I decided to give myself one full morning to ramble about in a specific corner. I went to Round Valley Regional Preserve (on the East side of Mount Diablo; the mountain is at the far north end of the Diablo range), and hiked out into Round Valley itself between Morgan Territory and the Los Vaqueros Reservoir.

I walked about 8 miles through mostly Oak savannah and grassland plant communities; this area is ranched and highly grazed, which means that invasive, non-native plants are dominant. However, I did see some interesting things…

… like Digger bees building their nests. I found a sort of ‘seep’ - amazing in itself, as we’ve been in drought now for months - and this seep was within two embankments about 2-3 feet tall. I sat and watched dozens of these bees get water from the muddy seep, then go back to the embankment and wet it with the water they had collected, in a focused spot. Then they started to dig a tunnel into the softened dirt. There were holes all over the embankment and bees flying in and out. I just sat there and experienced it. The bees were busy and didn’t pay me the least mind.

I also saw…

… a lovely long Pacific gopher snake. These snakes can grow up to 7 feet long, although this one was closer to 4, and it was likely a male out looking for a mate. It was in a sort of shady spot and so it surprised me and I nearly stepped on it. Isn’t he a beauty?

Later, I allowed myself to sit for a while by a large patch of mustard (invasive and non-native, yes, but also a great source of nectar and pollen for insects) and saw all kinds of interesting creatures, but was particularly enamored with …

… this California Hairstreak butterfly. These creatures breed and lay eggs in trees, mating in the tops of them, and gluing clusters of eggs in the bark. They like species of oak and willow, both of which were near this patch of mustard which was near a dry creek bed. This whole area was filled with both blue oak (my favorite) and valley oak trees. I’ve since learned that the population of CA Central Valley hairstreaks is endangered, since the valley oaks themselves are endangered (loss of habitat due to continuing water issues and the constant expansion of farming). It made me happy that I had gotten to see one here, a little farther north.

Near the end of my ramble, I came upon a slope leading up to the higher peaks above the valley. These slopes were nearly devoid of vegetation, and quite rocky. I started turning over rocks to search for scorpions. I found dozens of Sawfinger scorpions; shy creatures who stay out of the sun during the day and hunt at night. These are quite small, not even the size of my thumb, and so skittish that it was hard to get pictures of anything but their tails. They reminded me of children who believe, during games of hide and seek, that if they can’t see you, you can’t see them. But the scorpions’ tails showed me where they were hiding.

A little later, I flipped over a log to search for beetles, and I found…

… this little Sawfinger scorpion, who gave me a great photo op before scurrying away.

I had a truly wonderful hike and a great time documenting everything I saw (by uploading it into iNaturalist). I realized that it isn’t often that I allow myself a good chunk of time just to experience nature. I mean, I hike and walk every day, often a similar distance, but I tend to do it at a much faster pace. I do stop and take occasional pictures (Tom would say it’s more than occasional!) but I’m also out to get it done, and done fast - a good workout with a good heart rate elevation in a short period of time, and then I’m able to get on to the next thing. It’s been a long while since I gave myself permission to saunter and stop and really look at things, or even truly wait for something interesting to happen. I was passed by the occasional trail runner and instantly felt a sense of guilt, or maybe more accurately shame, that I was being passed - I pride myself on walking so fast that no one can pass me unless they’re on a bike. But this time I realized how misplaced that feeling was. There’s absolutely zero shame in taking some time to simply ‘be’ in nature.

And this reminded me of my favorite Mary Oliver poem, which I’ve shared here before, but it bears reprinting because it is simply so great:

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

— 'The Summer Day' by Mary Oliver

This last photo just doesn’t translate well - there’s no way it can replicate the sheer beauty of this spot upon which I happened near the end of my hike - consisting of a valley oak tree, the slope beneath it literally carpeted by hundreds of blooming Ithuriel’s Spear bulbs, each one a varied shade of blue or purple, singly majestic but even more breathtaking en masse. Beauty like this deserves our full attention. And so I stopped, once again, and just breathed it in.

All the Trails

We’ve always been a family of hikers and walkers, but since the pandemic began, our daily excursions have become quite sacred to us, whether in our neighborhood (blessed by many regional open spaces with great hilly walks) or in the greater Bay Area. We have been using an app called Gaia in the last year, which records our walks, and also shows us the many trails we have yet to travel (the free version is great). This has allowed us to find trails that we didn’t even know existed, and especially on weekends, we tend to go further afield to find new favorites.

One thing that has become so clear to us is that the Bay Area is littered with extensive trail systems, some maintained by local park systems, and some by state parks or even national parks. These are all non-profit groups, often dependent on volunteers to establish or maintain trails. We are so thankful for all of these organizations, and all the people, who make this kind of recreation possible.

We have long been supporters of East Bay Regional Parks. Many of these parks are free to enter, but supporting them by purchasing an annual pass is great. Individual memberships run $60 for a year (the price of three movies, or 10 fancy coffees). A family membership is $105. The wonderful thing about EBRP is that they have an extensive system which includes urban trails and parks, as well as more suburban parks. This promotes equity in the outdoors and makes these open spaces accessible to everyone, which is something that is really necessary.

EBRP also oversees two of the longer, linked trail systems we often find ourselves using. The California Riding and Hiking Trail is mainly a Contra Costa County trail system that links Mt. Diablo with Martinez, and will encompass 16 miles of trail. The Martinez-Concord section is already completed and will link to Mt. Diablo State Park in the future. The East Bay Skyline National Trail is part of the 1968 National Trail Systems Act. It begins at the Alvarado staging area in Richmond, and ends at the Proctor Gate station in Anthony Chabot regional park. We’ve hiked most of both of these trails and have found them quite interesting.

Other local trail systems include the scenic San Francisco Bay Trail, which is a planned 500 mile walking and cycling path around the entire bay, going through all nine counties, 47 cities, and seven major bridges. 350 miles are already in place. This project is also restoring wetlands around the Bay. They have a really cool navigational map that shows existing trails (whether paved or dirt) and planned trails. We’ve walked much of this trail system, too, including two bridges, and always enjoy these walks on days when it’s prohibitively hot in our neighborhood and we need the cooling influence of the Bay. The Bay trails are often flat, as well, offering an easier but longer walk, and there is always good wildlife viewing with shorebirds.

The Bay Area Ridge Trail, however, offers a completely different kind of hiking experience, taking walkers over the peaks that ring the Bay. This trail was the vision of William Penn Mott, Jr, who was Director of our National Park Service as well as EBRP and California State Parks. He wanted a 550 mile trail encircling the ridges of the Bay Area. 393 miles of trail have been established and they are all great, challenging miles! They have some neat trail maps and tools which include ‘curated’ trail adventures such as wheelchair accessible loops, or training ridge to bridge trails for those who want a challenge.

There is an interesting state trail system that we are just recently learning more about. This is the Mokelumne Coast-to-Crest Trail, which is planned to go all the way from the Bay to Yosemite. Currently three sections are complete: the East Bay/Contra Costa County section, the Camanche-Pardee Reservoir section, and the Upper Mokelumne River Canyon section. We have been on the Contra Costa section many times, as it winds through and over Mt. Diablo, Black Diamond, and Contra Loma parks. We are hoping to eventually get to the sections east of here and explore those, as well.

There are two interesting interstate trails here, one being (of course!) the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, through California, Oregon, and Washington. We have been on a very short section of this trail when hiking in Yosemite, but other than that, this trail has been beyond our reach, as it runs through the interior mountain ranges and is primarily in wilderness. It has long been a dream of mine to hike this trail, and maybe we’ll have more time in the future to section hike portions of it, at least.

Another interstate trail which I have just recently discovered is the Juan Bautista de Anza trail, which is part of the National Park System and is a National Historic Trail. It runs through Arizona and California, following Juan Bautista de Anza’s route in 1775 as he established (colonized?) a settlement in San Francisco bay. I don’t know how much we should be celebrating the takeover of land from California Native Americans, but while we don’t need to honor questionable historic activity, we should certainly learn about it and face the truth of it, and what better way to do that then to walk those same paths?

The final trail that I want to bring to your attention is the American Discovery Trail, which runs from the West Coast to the East Coast, 6800+ miles of continuous multi-use track. It does run on some roads, but the organization is working to make the trail completely off-road in the future. It is not a wilderness trail, like the Pacific Crest Trail. It passes through cities, towns, farmland, and wild areas. It is meant to be a voyage of discovery of our country as a whole. On the website, you can find the trails in your state (if it passes through your state); the California portion starts in Pt. Reyes National Seashore, and goes right over Mt. Diablo, over to Lake Tahoe, so we’ve found ourselves on this trail many times.

We are lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place that celebrates outdoor living year-round. That doesn’t mean the conditions are always idyllic (see my previous post), but it does mean that we are provided with a lot of opportunity to get out into nature, and explore. We have come to realize that this is extremely important to us, and it will dictate how we move forward into retirement (which isn’t happening anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean we don’t think about it). We don’t necessarily see ourselves living in California forever, but we do want to live in a place that offers a lot of outdoor recreation, no matter the season. That might mean that we need to get good at snowshoeing! But that’s years in the future, anyway. Right now, we are just happy to have plenty of adventures located right outside our front door.

PS: If you like to hike and get outdoors, and you’re looking for a new adventure, let me know - Tom and I have plenty of suggestions for great walks all over the Bay Area!

Waking Up

I was a fanciful child, always reading and imagining. I remember that in my childhood home, I had two favorite places.

The first was my bedroom closet, which was enormous, or at least it seemed so at the time. It had a sort of metal door inside at floor level (housing a duct of some kind?) that had a screw at each corner. I used to imagine that there was another world behind the metal plate, and if I just could find my way in, I’d have all sorts of adventures.

The second place was outdoors on the grass underneath the Japanese cherry tree. I’d lie down and stare up through the pink blossoms and watch the sun through the leaves, which would make a gold outline on the edge of every single leaf. Both places magical. Both equally alive in my imagination.

Every day that I can, I go outside. Sometimes I’m there for an hour, sometimes more if I’m lucky. And right now it is just magical out there. California gets a bad rap for a lot of things, and rightfully so, but one thing California does right is early spring. God, it’s glorious. We’ve had a little rain, the hills are still green, and the native wildflowers are all popping up. I hear birds I’ve never heard before, and see animal tracks and scat I don’t recognize. Everything is waking up.

Out walking through a canyon today, I couldn’t help but imagine myself in Narnia. Were there dryads in the oak trees I passed? Would they speak to me? I felt I could hear them when the wind passed through their branches.

“Lucy’s eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the old days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a sliver birch; it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing.”

“She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! - she would be the best of all. She would be a precious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.”

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

I just want to encourage you: If you can get out right now, do it. Don’t miss the poppies and the fiddlenecks and the red maids and the blue dicks and the milkmaids and the buttercups. Don’t miss the buckeyes unfurling their vernal green leaves or the pink of the wild plums. Don’t miss the nesting falcons, the foraging bluebirds, the shy flickers. Don’t miss the tiny rills, the deep gullies, the ephemeral streams. Don’t miss spring. Get out there and see everything waking up.

Bat Talk and Walk

Last night, we had the most incredible experience: We traveled to a local wetland area to learn about bats and see their nightly exit from their 'cave.' The area where we went is part of the Yolo Basin Foundation, an organization based in the Yolo Bypass Area, which is very interesting in its own right. In between Davis and Sacramento, there is a long overpass built over a 17,000 acre wetland area. This area is designed to flood in the winter months when we get all of our rain. In the summer, it dries up, but there are pockets of wetness and bogs, and there are many farmers who grow rice in those places. There are also natural wetlands that attract many species of migrating and native birds. Any time you drive highway 80 from San Francisco to Sacramento, you go over this area. There are always interesting things to look at, from sunflower fields to rice fields, to herons and egrets. 

We've driven over this area hundreds of times but never driven off of it to explore the wilderness area, which is open dawn to dusk each day. We finally saw it last night when we went to the Foundation to learn about and view bats.

The bats we saw were mainly Mexican Free-tailed bats, though we also learned about Pallid bats and Big Brown bats, which also live under the overpass. Mexican Free-tailed bats are tiny, like 3-4 inches long in body, and eat lots of agricultural pests, which makes them quite a boon to the Central Valley. The farmer who grows rice in these fields, who allowed us to venture on to his property, reports that he uses zero insecticides on his crops, even though rice is a crop notoriously predated upon. The bats do all the work for him.

terrible picture, but she just wouldn't cooperate. 

The speaker, a naturalist who works with bats, had examples of each of these bats with her and showed them to us under a camera that projected the image onto a large screen. These bats were brought in for rehabilitation (for instance, the one above had her wing damaged by a cat) and are not able to be released into the wild. They don't permanently live in these display cases, this was just for our benefit. It was so interesting to see these bats up close and discover the beauty and delicacy of their wings, their downright adorable faces, and the large ears. Our naturalist had a special machine that could 'hear' the echolocation the bats were making, which is beyond the range of our own hearing. It was so cool to hear those clicks! We were all riveted. The naturalist explained what the bats eat, how they live, and why they live under this overpass, which is basically because it so perfectly mimics cave environments. Which, by the way, are in short supply - habitat is disappearing for many bats, because of human interference and loss of insect life. Pesticides affect the creatures that eat insects, of course, and that includes both birds and bats.

After our talk, we drove out to a super-secret place under the overpass, through the farmer's rice fields. He was growing domestic rice, which is short and chartreuse-y green, and also wild rice, which is tall and has a huge inflorescence tinged with red from the pollen. It's a gorgeous crop.

After driving about a half hour on the twisty-est roads imaginable around bogs and ponds and groupings of reeds and rice, we came to our spot.

There were about 30 of us in our group, and we went to this spot because for some reason, the bats have chosen that tree in the distance as their exit point. About 250, 000 bats live under this overpass, and there are three exits, but this one seems to be the one most of them choose and we were told to expect three 'ribbons' or waves of bats. The naturalist said they exit at a similar time each night but that it wasn't exact and so we would just wait until something happened, and it didn't take long before we noticed, all along the underside of the overpass, a great rushing of wings. The bats fly for awhile under the overpass until exiting at this tree. So suddenly you notice an enormous shadow of wings rushing down the channels of the overpass, like some great hoard of locusts, and then they burst out into the air.

And then they start to fly in this curve, going out over the fields, and eventually they rise up into the sky and disperse in groups.

The line of bats went on and on, and then there was a break, and a second ribbon appeared, and then a third. We saw hawks sitting in trees nearby, waiting to snatch a bird from the ground if it fell. We watched the clouds of bats grow higher and further away (they can hunt up to 50 miles away from their cave). Meanwhile huge dragonflies were hovering around our heads and formations of geese skimmed the overpass. Suddenly we noticed more 'rushing' and out came a fourth ribbon, very rare, and then later another ribbon, the 5th, which caused our naturalist to text her husband in disbelief.

We just stood and stared. It was like a miracle. I've seen bats on the wing at night in various places (and I hope desperately that we have them at home), but I've never seen something like this. It was incredible.

The way the bats flew made me think of sine curves, and it reminded me that sine curves happen all around in nature, in the ocean waves, in sounds that we hear, the sunrise/sunset pattern, our heartbeat. It made me think about the great Creator of our universe who makes even daily things look like poetry. Sometimes you just have to stop for minute and experience the Divine, which is so easily found in nature.

These talks and walks go on all summer, before migration in the autumn takes the bats to who-knows-where (none are tagged, so no one knows). They are sold out for the season except for Sept 21, and you can get your tickets HERE. If you can't go this year, put in on your calendar for next year; you don't want to miss this experience.