Finals

Up in Bolinas this week, we had our Native Eyes final exam.

We started with the standard cooking fire. I began thinking about making a fire at around 4:15, and worked on it slowly and rather lazily. I gathered dead twigs from the alders near the creek, found bigger sticks of standing dead wood on the trees and cut wood in the brush piles, and then broke out the hand drills. We had a communal coal very soon, from a mugwort stalk and buckeye board, and our cooking fire was blazing by 5:30. I think the hot weather and long daylight helps hugely. I'm still working on my hand drill calluses, but right now I’ve just got blisters.

Our assignment the next day was to find elk cows, new calves, and cougar sign on the land. We divided up the landscape, each of us taking a patch, and we set out solo for the day, harvesting stories for the RDNA village.



I saw many things out there, but the most striking was the elk.

I started by getting tangled up in a coyote brush maze, and then I found a coyote trail at the edge, on the ridgetop, and followed it down the ridge to the bay. From the ridgetop I could see a lone bull elk, nubby antlers still in velvet, and I wondered how close I could get to him.



As I followed the coyote trail (also a well-used elk trail) I found California mugwort plants trampled by elk hooves. I took the broken tops and rubbed them all over me, masking my scent. I continued down the coyote trail, which was marked with twisty furry ropes of old coyote scat. The trail dipped over the lip of the southern drainage and ambled down to the bottomland.





The wind took my scent east by southeast. I was walking with my back to the wind, but the elk browsed southwest of me, well out of range of my scent. I walked softly and carefully and the elk never paused in his browsing. Arriving at the edge of the elk’s willow thicket, I looked at the short wind-flagged trees and the giant deer. I remembered my mission to find elk calves, not bother lone bulls, and wondered if I could make my way around the elk without alerting him. I sat down to consider my route.

(I don't have any better photo than this. I wish I'd been focusing on the elk, and not the grass.)

As I sat, the elk raised his head and focused southeast, across the drainage. Something there alarmed him, and he began walking quickly upslope, zigzagging more or less toward me! I realized that I’d sat down right on his trail. He closed in to thirty feet, and noticed me sitting there, a nondescript lump in the trail that had never been there before. He stopped and sniffed but couldn’t catch my scent. He lowered his head and nodded up and down, trying to find a better view of me. Acting intrigued rather than alarmed, he walked closer, head low and nodding. And he sped up. Finally hundreds of pounds of bull elk was trotting straight toward me, antler nubs lowered, soft dark eyes fixed on me. At fifteen feet I realized he wasn’t stopping, and I stood up to give him his space.

When he saw me stand and recognized me as human, he turned tail and ran. Though my spine and palms tingled with adrenaline and my knees trembled, I wished I’d let him get closer.

I found lots of other cool stuff that day:


the bull elk's bed which was worn in to the dirt and full of elk hair and shaped like a deer bed but huge,


wildflowers of all colors,


cicadas like intricate bronze jewelry,

a spotted towhee nest with one egg and one new-hatched chick, an osprey with a fish in it’s talons,and many more elk. But I never found a cow with a calf, and the sheltered zone I walked in was well devoid of cougar sign.

Bird Language Intensive

The Bird Language Intensive was held over the week of April 21 to May 2, and yes I know I'm two weeks late in blogging it. I'm actually later than that since this isn't a Bird Language Intensive blog, but an excuse.

Since it was a solid week long, I didn't have my usual evening or weekend moment to write and post. So I haven't written anything yet. I will, but for now it's all I can do to keep up with regular class posts. So look for a Bird Language Intensive post after the end of Native Eyes. Hey, that's only two weeks away...

Update 9/12/2009:
The Bird Language Intensive was just that: intense. A solid week of bird sits, debrief, and lecture on bird language. I learned many new things about birds and tracking the landscape through the eyes of the birds, and I relearned more. If you have never heard of bird language, this is a good intensive to take. If you have heard of it and would like to know more, this is a great instensive to take. If you have been studying bird language for a year, have listended to the Advanced Bird Language CDs repeatedly, and do regular bird sits on your own (like the Native Eyes crew does, for example), then I found this intensive to be an essential part of that education. Community and group cooperation opens up so many more possibilities for tracking and learning.

Cat Trails

This was the last class of the year that we visited the south location, and we arrived to drama. A cougar had killed a calf, the rancher received a depredation permit, and the rancher killed a cougar. The cat was a large male, very much like the one we’d been tracking at Old Woman Creek.

So one of our goals was to visit the cougar scrape area on Old Woman Creek and look for fresh sign, in the hope that the killed cat was not the big male resident of Old Woman Creek. Another goal for the morning was to determine what route the cougars were taking to get from Butano park to Cloverdale.

We split into three groups: Old Woman Creek investigators, ridgewalkers, and creekwalkers. The Old Woman Creek group took a trail camera and headed for the well-known cougar zone. The ridgewalkers took a high route from the road at Cloverdale’s Gate 2 up toward the ridgetops of Butano. And the creekwalkers, consisting of myself and one other Native Eyeser, Will, looked for a low route through the riparian zone up to the Butano ridgetops.

The creek we found to be impenetrable right off the road, so we paralleled it up the grassy hillside. We walked through hip-high wild oats, pressed down everywhere with deer lays, thick with deer scat and ticks. Along the way we passed the old schoolhouse, now sunk into the earth. We saw many snakes and birds, and countless signs of deer, but nothing catlike.



We tried repeatedly to push into the riparian zone but were blocked everywhere by poison oak and walls of brambles. The sounds of sharp footfalls in the brush, the odd snapped twigs, and intermittent breathy snorts moved up the creek a little ahead: the sounds of deer watching our progress. They, evidently, had a way through.

Finally we came to an open area, a light green willow cavern by the creek. The ground was entirely covered in short blackberry vines. Deer droppings and tracks were scattered everywhere. The peace of the place, a feeling of a shelter and haven, crept from the earth into our bones and we paused silent for a while, letting ourselves settle into the space. Will commented that he would like to make this place his sit spot, and I agreed. Then I said, “No cat energy here.” “None whatsoever,” he agreed. We continued up the hillside looking for the cougar’s path.





Over the sun-beaten ridge, through coyotebrush and wildflowers, and we came to the edge of a stand of Douglas fir trees. There was a low passage through the brambles and poison oak, and we could see clear duff and tree trunks on the other side. We ditched our stuff and dove through.



On the other side, the world was dark, still and cool. I crouched under the low branches and took a minute to let my eyes adjust. This space was entirely different from the deer haven. As I sat and stared into the twilit understory, I felt a tense crackle of energy up my spine. This place definitely had cat energy. And when we moved past the edge, we immediately found a large and old scrape in the duff. And another. And another.





We were briefly distracted by a rubber boa, lying fat and docile over the duff.



We moved upslope to more mature trees, and found more sign. This area allowed for more air movement, and for us to walk upright, but it was still dark and surrounded by shadows.





We continued along the edge of mature trees and soon found a subtle, soft trail. The trail looked different from any deer trail I’ve seen – deer used it from time to time, but I don’t think they were it’s primary creators. The trail seemed to be the result of years of soft, round, padded feed pacing along it. As we set foot on the trail, the hairs on my neck stood up. I felt the presence of a predator, even if only in the trail he left behind.






The further we went on the trail, the more scrapes we found. Many had scats in them, smallish furry lacquered looking tubes, less than 3/4 inch in diameter. We followed the trail through the young trees again, stooping low and winding through the thick shadow. I kept wondering if a soft-padded carnivore was watching us from the shadows beyond our vision.







We finally popped out of the young firs and into the grasses again, dazzled by the sun and immediately parched by the heat. We were thirty minutes late, and had to race back to our meeting point.