Battle at Starling Hollow Cypress

Last week we tried to udate the base map of the field at Commonweal. We divided up the area and spent a large portion of the day on solo walks drawing out the runs and other track and sign on our areas.

When we came back together, we noticed a bunch of sticks poking out of a hollow in a cypress tree. Half our group clambered precipitously into the tree under the pretext of getting a closer look at the (possible) bird's nest, though really as an excuse to climb a tree. The other half of our group, logically, used the climbers' rear ends for target practice as they were climbing, thus sparking off the most epic battle of Starling Hollow Cypress (just down the hill from Double Skull Cypress) ever witnessed. Though the tree fort's defenders were deadly marksmen, it was only a matter of time before thir supply of cypress cone ammo ran out. Two hemlock spears and a dramatic death scene later, we were on our way back to our fire circle.

In the afternoon we worked further on the base map, discussed how awesome Native Eyes is going to be next year (it will, of course, be totally awesome), and gathered wild radish and nodding onion for our potluck dish. Wild radish is a bit fuzzy, but the young leaves are tender enough and very flavorful. With the onion, it made a delicious contribution to the meal.

Carrying Coals

We started the day by constructing experimental “long matches,” containers in which one can, in theory at least, keep a coal smoldering indefinitely. We hollowed out big oak galls, drilled additional holes for airflow, lined them with redwood bark to keep the gall container from scorching, filled them with tight-packed tinder, dropped in a coal, and packed more tinder on top. The goal was to carry coals with us for our whole day of tracking out on the land. Most folks had far too much airflow, and their coals flared and died quickly. Only myself and one other person made long matches that sustained coals for a larger amount of time.


Our first stop was a deer kill. A ranger had tipped off one of our instructors that a cougar had gotten a deer on the side of Cloverdale road. We piled into cars to check out the kill site.


My first thought was, “Cougar kill on the side of the road? What kind of cat eats it’s kill in public like that?” Roadside munching doesn’t sound like a very feline trait to me. When we got there, the site spoke its stories eloquently and brought us further mysteries. There were tree primary foci of activity, and tracks in blood crisscrossing the road.




The deer, a big buck, had died on the side of the road, a place marked by a black pool of dried blood in the rough shape of a deer body, with gut contents at one end of it.

At some point vultures arrived on the scene, leaving telltale whitewash and downy feathers stuck in the blood. The vulture sign centered on the site of the deer’s death, the first small blood pool.

It had been dragged a short distance from the site of it’s death and eviscerated, the place marked by a large swath of dried red blood, gut contents, internal organs off to one side, pushed-down and trampled vegetation on the bank by the road, and many tracks in the blood. The tracks were oval, symmetrical, longer than wide, with four large toes and a smallish triangular heel pad, plus sometimes some claw marks showing. They were roughly two inches wide and two and three quarters inches long, if my memory serves. The tracks crossed the road and continued into a neighboring field along well-worn game trails.


The deer had then been dragged even further down the road and finished off, some of it’s limbs disarticulated and carried off, ribs and bone ends chewed down, and all of the meat eaten. The pelvis, spinal column and head were still intact, connected, and laid out as straight as in life.

This is a string of snapshots I pieced together in Photoshop, showing the kill site, feeding site (where the carcass was opened) and the carcass itself. Click on the image below to see the larger version.


I pieced together the story, while periodically packing more tinder (I used a blend of cattail down, dry California mugwort leaves, and dry bracken fern that I’d gathered ahead of time) and blowing into one of the holes of my long match. It was still sending out little wisps of smoke as we finished up at the deer kill site, piled into cars again, and continued on to our main attraction of the day.

We stopped on Old Woman Road to explore a site of intensive cougar activity that Caitlin and Josh had found earlier. On the way we encountered many more tracks, and a higher variety of them, than we had on our previous visit.

I nearly stepped on a beautiful example of a Pseudacris frog, one of our natives. I felt compelled to take as many photos as I could, so I could share her amazing coloration and fascinating anatomy with everyone. I loved her bright yellow-green skin and the contrast of her chocolate brown mask, wrist, and knee stripes. Her white throat shone beautifully, too, when she let it. The athleticism and robust construction of these little guys always amazes me. They can catapult themselves many feet through the air and land on hard rock without injury. Imagine if a human were thrown an equivalent distance -- ick.






Finally, we entered the cougar area. A trail led up through the grassy clearing. It was soft and wide to my eyes that are used to following sharp, narrow deer trails, more like a trail made by bare human feet. The predominant trees were pines, which covered the ground with soft, muffling pine duff. Big old snags, fallen punky branches, and rotted stumps dotted the clearing, interspersed with small, young trees. Larger pines sheltered the edges of the area.




This little rise in the landscape, covered with pines and dotted with punky stumps, held countless cougar scrapes and scats. We spread out through the clearing, moving over the grass and between pines quietly as we poked at the massive scats and took photographs, listening all the while for bird language. We communicated mostly with whistles and hand signs, once in a while speaking in just-above-a-whisper, but generally keeping quiet out of respect for the cougar’s privacy. We were all extremely aware that this was the mountain lion’s personal space, an important area much used and valued by the big cat, and we were (probably unwanted) visitors.





While we poked around, we continuously heard a junco calling alarm in the middle distance. It stayed put in the brush just out of sight, beyond the edge of the clearing, chipping urgently all the while.

At one point a series of alarms moved from northeast to southwest across the ridge, again just out of sight in the brush. The alarms seemed to come from fairly high up as well, possibly ten or more feet off the ground.

On the way back down to the road we noticed an overhung, sheltered area. Would this be useful as a bed for an animal? I would have liked to go closer and take a look, but we had other activities to get to for the day, and people to meet up with.

We headed back to Venture with more questions than when we started. My long match still exhaled its white wisps of smoke, hours after we began the coal-carrying project. When it finally died that evening (just a few minutes before we needed to make a fire) it was like the death of a small pet. I felt real sorrow when it went cold in my hands. I’ll pay better attention next time.

Mighty Trackers Catch a Frog

We went looking for more cougar sign this week. As before, after identifying the spots on the map where we’d found cougar sign previously, we tried to find other spots, using a topo map and Google Earth, that display similar characteristics. There was much back-and-forth, discussion, and little agreement. It was well into the morning by the time we agreed on a game plan.

Our first stop was along Gazos Creek Road. The landscape was spongy, moist and lush, cut through with waterfalls and rivulets. We found no cougar sign here, but this plant was pretty neat. The three-parted flower looks like something from Venus and smells like a fishmonger’s gut pile. Weird! I wonder what uses it might have for human beings, besides being fascinatingly bizarre.



Finding only a rank splat scat, very similar to the splatty nastiness in this video, we concluded that we weren’t really able to find and log definite cougar sign here. We piled into the car again and set off for Cloverdale Ranch Gate 2.

We found many deer and a number of other cool things at Cloverdale, but nothing that I would identify as cougar sign. We spent most of our time making jokes and laughing at each other.



This golden-crowned sparrow was lying in the grass as we approached. It was dead, but the eyes were still bright and a tick still fed from it. How long ago did he die? What did he die from? We couldn’t tell, but had many speculations. The bird was frozen in a crouching position though we found him on his back, possibly having toppled over at the point of death. We propped him back up and the little body stood easily, braced on wide-spread feet and drooping wingtips. He looked very much like a distressed but still living bird. Creepy.




As we continued up the hill we noticed a small creature hopping rapidly away from the nearby pond. One of our group shouted “Red Legged Frog!” and pounced on it.



We followed it for a while, snapping pictures through the grass.



I finally picked it up and examined it.



It doesn’t look like a bullfrog or an African clawed frog, so that leaves one of our three (possibly) local native frogs: Rana boylii, Foothill Yellow-legged Frog; Rana draytonii, California Red-legged Frog; or Pseudacris (=Hyla) regilla, Pacific Treefrog.

R. boylii seems to like shallow, slow-flowing water, of which there was none around. Also, there was no yellow on this frog’s legs.

R. draytonii seems to also like flowing water, but I’ve found it in still pools before, too. And this frog did have red legs, as well as dark stripes over the thigh and calf and a dark streak over the eyes. R. draytonii also has two distinct ridges running from behind the tympanum down it’s back, and well-webbed hind feet with no toe pads. Also, the dark streak on the face seems to rarely if ever continue past the frog’s eyes toward the nostrils.

P. regilla, on the other hand, seems to be confusingly variable in coloration, with some being strikingly similar to R. boylii and R. draytonii. Most, though, seem to have that dark mask over the eyes, and distinct toe pads on all four feet, as well as an absence of lateral ridges. The adults are also much smaller than adults of either Rana species.

I’m still not entirely sure what this frog was, but I have a better idea now that I’ve done some research.

On our way back, we saw a group of deer feeding on a ridge upwind of us. We decided to test our stalking skills. When we came over one ridge, there was the largest deer silhouetted against the sky, radar-dish ears pointing right at us. I guess we weren’t quiet enough.

On the way toward the deer, I passed this little inch-and-a-half-wide hole. I liked the occupant's little south-facing porch. Who made it?



I followed the deer downslope and skirted the edge of a big gully, hoping to find cougar scrapes along the drainage. I trailed the deer as I went.



This track is less than ten minutes old. I know it’s age because I found the deer at the end of their trail, not because I’m that good at aging tracks. But I did select my path according to the freshest tracks, and confirmed they were the freshest when I saw the trail leading to the animal’s hooves.



The deer led me past an interesting little cave in the vegetation, sheltered by young pines on the northwest side and coyotebrush surrounding the other edges. In the little clearing was an old buck kill, nubs of antlers shoved into the earth, spine twisted, and ribs chewed off. Most of the bones were still in the vicinity of the kill but well-gnawed. Was this cougar sign? And if so, when was the cat last feeding off of the kill? Some scraps of skin, still flexible and a little slimy, clung to the bones, but all other flesh was gone. Some of the bones had gone green with algal growth.

After the Cloverdale shenanigans, we decided to try one last place. The south side of the Candelabra trail in Butano Park has brought us to cougar sign before. We decided to go up the north side of the trail in an effort to connect the dots of previously-seen cougar sign in Butano and Cloverdale.





Once again, we found no cat sign that we could positively identify. We returned to Blue House farm to end our day with a bird sit.

Meet WAS

This week Wilderness Awareness School (WAS), our sister school up in Washington, came to visit. They outnumbered us 2 to 1, and were quite a scent to behold fresh from a weeklong plus van expedition all over California. They had some strange customs, such as tying shoes while hanging their butts over benches, but we practice many of the same cultural points in our programs and in general we felt a solid kinship between our two groups.

We greeted each other with songs in the evening. We sang WAS into the garden, and greeted them with hugs befitting old friends.

We began the day with a wander in the morning. I took my burden basket, the one I’d made in one of the early NE classes, because I intended to gather firewood for a solo fire meditation later that evening. We found lots of cool things on the wander.



What is this plant?



Check out this wasp!






Whose hole is this? It was approximately 9 or 10 inches wide and 7 or 8 inches tall at maximum. The throw mound was huge. (Now with knee prints! A WAS-er had stuck his head in just before I got there.) The tunnel curved back to the right a short way, opening up into a round chamber. I wonder if it’s occupied, and where the digger is now.



These digs were just west of the big one, approximately 6 feet near. They were also large.



I returned to camp early, laden with firewood that I’d gathered on the way.



A nifty trick: if you need short sticks but all you have is long ones and no tools, wedge them in the crotch of a tree and push. A little sweat, and they snap quite nicely. Remember to thank the tree.



That afternoon, Native Eyes worked hard to prepare for our fires. We set up tarps, split wood, gathered kindling and tinder, and worked communally on lighting our central fire.

Finally, as dusk faded to dark, we separated to our individual fires, to spend the evening in personal meditation.