Finding Bones with Riekes

Native Eyes was off this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm again posting a Story of the Day from the Riekes Nature Awareness group that I lead in Huddart Park. Once again, no photos for this one.

This Friday we scouted the woods near our Super Secret Hideout.

We started the day with games and work on our primitive shelter, and then welcomed the afternoon hours with scout sit spots. We went quietly and stealthily to our sit spots, to find out what cool things were around and bring news of them back to the group. After sitting, we gathered up in our primitive shelter for a repotback from each scout location. One of our number had found some beautifully articulating animal leg bones at her sit spot that hadn't been there last week, so we decided to check out that location further.

On the way, we found and followed animal runs that had been worn-in to the forest floor so well that there wasn't a crumb of leaf litter left on the packed, almost shiny earth. Following the run, we accidentally uncovered a Pacific Giant Salamander hiding in a damp gully, and everyone went utterly hyper on Pacific Giant Salamander energy. Yelling, dancing, silly faces and general tomfoolery ensued.

After many, many minutes of loud and gleeful celebration of the salamander find, the raucous atmosphere began wearing thin and people started yelling at eachother rather than with eachother. We broke that feedback loop with a spontaneous game of camouflage, put the salamander back where we found it, and continued on the trail of the bones.

We finally arrived at the small clearing where the bones lay. Everyone's energy was still scattered and loud. We circled around the bones on our knees and brought the energy down to Earth with a sense meditation.

Everyone in the circle placed a finger on the bones. Using guided visualization, we consciously checked in with our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and finally sight.

In our meditation we related our senses to that of the animal, a deer, that had passed and left it's bones for us to find. We recognized that this animal had sensed the world much like we now do, had eaten, breathed, and had a family. We considered the animal that had eaten the deer, where it could be in the woods at present, how it had felt when it ate the deer, and the energy that was added to it's life from the deer's own life. Everyone was quiet, still, and focused on the present moment.

"How do you feel when you think about this deer?" I finally asked.

"Sad," came the reply.

"How do you feel when you think about the animal that ate the deer?" I
next asked.

"Happy! ... Um, that's confusing," was the unanimous conclusion.

"Isn't it?" I said.

Ghosting Trails

After our morning bird sit this week, we gathered in the yurt at Commonweal to debrief and pull out the stories from our morning sit. Before we even considered our markings on the maps, we got into a discussion about a deer seen near the bird sit meadow, and it's interesting behavior. It had pronked away from a downslope observer and stopped at a fence. Out of sight of it's first observer, though unknowingly observed by another person upslope, the deer crouched low and proceeded to trot with a gliding motion, keeping it's body low and even with the ground, along the fence line until it came to a low point, leapt over the fence, and glided away up a ravine. This behavior in the deer ("ghosting") dominated our conversation for two hours straight. We talked about deer gaits, beta-to-delta brain states, predation and hunting, blind spots and ruts in awareness, the wisdom of very old animals, and much more besides. Through it all the bird maps lay unused on the floor. We were all engrossed in our deer trailing conversation.

After our intensive ghosting dowload in the yurt, we got the chance to go out on the land again, in small hunting parties of Essentials, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentoring students. My group began by following the morning's ghosting deer up it's ravine runs.



We followed easy and open trails until they became choked with brambles and poison oak, and then we crawled through on hands and knees. We found a cavern of willow, blackberry, and juncus that held fresh deer beds, buck rubs from this season, and a large woodrat nest. Which of those creatures left the above marks on the willow limb?



A short belly-crawl later, we found this deer-sized hidey hole under a coyotebrush, the surrounding juncus formed into a perfect deer body mold. Through the backdoor of the hidey hole, we squeezed and inched on our bellies through a tunnel of poison oak and up the steep slope. I wondered for a split second if we were in fact following mountain goats, not deer. But deer pellets and dainty, pointed tracks led the way through the dry coyotebrush and broom-clothed cliff.

The view from halfway up the deer trail was spectacular. We inched on, and as the path began to level out, I heard a rhythmic crashing in the brush ahead. I froze, and the crashing subsided into the distance, one burst at a time. A pronking deer?

Belly-crawling through the broom toward the origin of the sounds, I began to make out a small clearing inthe brush ahead. On my feet now at the edge of the clearing, pushing the brush back, my hand came back wet. I inspected the wet branch and found freshly nipped ends. Was the wetness saliva? Or plant sap? The browse was about two and a half feet off the ground. Could it be deer browse? Or what about rabbit, or mouse? Mice could climb the broom, and we've seen rodents browsing stranger things. I was excited by the possibility that it could be fresh browse from the deer I'd just pushed off of it's daybed.



We followed the trail in the direction of the pronking deer, but quickly lost our fresh trail. We came to a stand of live oaks. There my group was thoroughly distracted by the oaks' climbability.
















We spent the rest of the day tracking the other groups over the landscape by the patterns of bird alarms around them, and trying to stay unnoticed ourselves. We tracked four seperate groups by their concentric rings, and got visual confirmation of three of them. We ended the day by racing down the hill at high speed, following deer trails into the backdoor of Commonweal Garden.

Tracks & Trails

We began this week with a wander for deer sign, with a focus on holding eight approaches to tracking all at once. We broke up into two groups of four and each person took a directional axis. One person in each group held East-West, another Southeast-Northwest, and the others South-North and Southwest-Northeast. Then we reviewed the tracking questions that our 8-shields model associates with those directions.

East held the question "who," considering the identity of each deer around commonweal, its sex, age, and other identifying features. Paired with that was West, the community-ecology questions about why the deer came to particular places on the landscape. Southeast brought the learnings that come from experiential, body-based immitation of the deer, acting out their gaits and behaviors. And paired with Southeast, Northwest tracked ancestral patterns in the deer. Our Northwest questions helped us notice the worn-in spots from generations of deer patterns across the land and sought to understand the inborn deer energy that channels all deer through those patterns. South was concerned with trailing the deer, finding the freshest trails and following them. Together with South, North asked, "where are the deer now" and sought not only to track the living trail straight to the deer's hooves, but to be able to predict the deer's location in the present moment. Southwest asked, "what are the deer eating," and challenged us to find deer saliva still wet on fresh browse. Paired with Southwest, Northeast asked, "with what energy are the deer moving on the land?" Northeast questioning sought the bird language signatures that would speak of the intensity or mildness of the deer's personal presence, attitude, or state of mind, asking "how does it feel to be this deer, right now?".

Armed with these questions, we began our hunt.


We circumambulated Commonweal using the deer trails, finding tree graveyards, mushroom gardens, deer bones, scats, browses, raccoon and fox latrines, woodrat homes, mysterious burrows, a live yearling doe (with her saliva still on her freshest browse, according to one of the Native Eyes kids), and much more. We were also searching for entry points on the fence, hoping to be of service to the garden as well as to our own education. We found an interesting spot just above some check dams in a gully, next to the deer fence. A scuffed, smooshed patch of ground, holding oddly scraped-looking hoof tracks and deer, raccoon, and other belly fur stuck in the mud. We surmised that this might be an entry point.


Of course, we had to see for ourselves if it was possible to squeeze under the fence here.


Back at camp, we started our fire with help from the Native Eyes kids. We would need heat for our next project: Pitch sticks!


We had pitch from stone pine and gray pine, collected old, dry rabbit, deer, and goat scat, and saved some charcoal from the fire. We selected out the cleanest looking, white pitch for another purpose. The rest we popped in a pot and melted down, combining it with roughly equal parts (just looking for the right consistency, not a prescribed ratio) of powdered herbivore scat and charcoal. Then we took green willow sticks (though any stick would do) and dipped them in our bubbling black brew. We rolled the dollops of tarry goo over cool rocks to mold the goo to the ends of the sticks, and built up good chunks of the stuff on our sticks. It cooled to a very hard glassy consistency. We now have pitch to use as sealant, glue, fuel, or modeling compound when we need it!


The nicer raw pitch we melted down with equal parts beeswax and honey to make chewing gum. The Native Eyes kids couldn't get enough of the tooth-sticking mixture.

We also used chunks of pitch, set aflame, to turn a polypore fungus and forked stick into a torch. The kids enjoyed that one too.



The next day we had our morning bird sit with just Native Eyes, sitting through periods of intense alarm, tension, and oppression. We never saw a Coopers Hawk, and the Kestrel, though on the wing, kept silent. But the general sense was of a bird killer stalking the sky, causing anxiety in the birds who had to speculate on their potential killer's whereabouts. It seems like last year's pattern of oppression, particularly surrounding the Wednesday morning garbage truck on the nearby road, has continued. Were we too raucous in our wake-ups, and called in the Cooper's? Does the hawk now follow the garbage truck to exploit engine-roar-addled songbirds? Or is there something else to this pattern?

With the bird sit over and mapped, we mobilized to Abbott's Lagoon for a day of tracking the "wet weasel."


After some speculation and prediction about otter habits and habitats, we headed to the lagoon. At the edge between the freshwater and brackish pools we found fresh fluffed up sand, a sinuous, furry drag mark, and lots of tracks.




Among the frenetic confusion of tracks there was also a blob. It was slightly bigger than a quarter, shiny and wet, and emanated an odor of rancid fish. It jiggled when poked. We found other sites of rolls in the sand, and many had similar rancid blobs to one side.



We also found nice tracks of another creature, impressed in the algae at the little rocky waterfall between fresh and brackish pools.



We spent some time questing for the owner of the other tracks among the cattails and mud of the freshwater bank. We were called back too soon, but upon returning, we were sent on yet another errand. Our instructors showed us a set of cute little tracks, travelling over the sand in a consistent lope. We were told to follow it.



It tangled among the tracks and stories of many other species.



It went it's own way as often as not.







To aid in our trailing, we gave our subject a name, "Diggy Iggy Zig Zag," for obvious reasons.



We ran alongside the trail while the sun was on it and the sand was clear and fine. The trail began climbing the dunes, dipping in and out of shadow, weaving between grass clumps and brush. Where before we ran, now we crawled. As the sun dipped low, we could barely see the tracks even at a crawl. If we wanted to find the animal itself, we would have to move faster than it was moving, and it was still at it's consistent lope.

We switched to prediction, looking at the landscape and the general direction of travel, considering the temperament and prefferences of our animal, and guessed where the trail would go. We set a marker (a cattail stalk) in the sand at the last certain track, and forayed out on possible routes that Mr. Zig Zag could have gone. We sometimes took routes that held tracks of many animals, but sometimes these routes felt lacking. On closer inspection, the tracks resolved into a jackrabbit or a cluster of mouse prints, not Mr. Zig Zag, and we would return to our marker and ask again for a likely route. The next one we tried would hold a surprise of clear Diggy Iggy tracks in a wind-protected hollow, following more or less Diggy Iggy's direction and habits of travel. This way, following gut feeling and prediction, we wound our way all the way to the ocean and our final clear straight trail of Diggy Iggy Zig Zag prints.

As we charged down to follow them, a small stone came flying at us from behind a dune. We had been stalked by our fellow students, and had been too focused on the trail to notice.

We returned as the sun settled into the western ocean, the trail still dancing in our bodies and our mind's eyes.

Moving the Tracks

We started the day at Venture, gathering scat. We collected as many examples of animal (not domestic or human) scat as we could find and brought them back to the group, assembling them together into a Poo-seum. We shared field guides and got down to the task of journaling the scats. We listed all the information we knew about the scat, sketched it with measurements, and listed possible species. Then for each possible species, we listed three reasons why is could be that animal, and three reasons why not. Here's an example:


Our Poo-seum was the center of much bustle and activity.


We had to end our scat study earlier than anyone wanted, because we were going out on the land again, this time to journal tracks. We piled into cars and drove to the nearby lagoon. Its outlet to the ocean had been blocked by sand, and it was filling up with fast with fresh water. Most of our favorite spots were unerwater, but the dunes still held beautiful soft sand, and the sun was slanting at the perfect angle.




Here's an attempt at reproducing these tracks in a life-sized sketch of the track itself and the gait pattern:



The next day we moved out early to Gazos Beach for a morning of tracking stations. Groups of 2-3, with some Native Eyes people and some staff, chose spots on the landscape to focus on. The Cultural Mentors and Essentials people would break up into groups, too, and rotate through each of our stations. Every station had a different story to tell, but many told them in similar ways. The rhythm of bobcat paws rang from the dunes as people tapped in time to the trails. People transformed into coyotes and raccoons as we tracked. We ran along on all fours and imitated the patterns in the sand.


This was a new trail to me. It was about two feet wide, to the west (oceanside) of the dunes. No people had been over there making strange tracks, so what was it?

One group followed a long, consistent canid trail, letting the rhythm of the trail move in their bodies, bouncing along the line like a pack of coyotes in step. But the rhythm broke and lead coyote-person stopped, crouched down, and studied the ground. Everyone clustered around, finding their consistent trail all tangled up in a cluster of tracks. Someone said they saw a stop there, with all four of the canid's feet on the ground. Others wondered where the animal had gone, as the long orderly trail simply seemed to disappear. Then we noticed a chunk of stuff, framed by two of the canid's forepaws:


This Mystery Chunk consisted of short plant fibers, all packed tightly together. It weathered to orange-brown, but inside it was still green, and smelled of aromatic herbs. There was a clump of soft grey rabbitty looking fur stuck to the outside, and when we picked up the chunk, some round rabbit scat pellets rolled out. What was it? Why had the canid changed its pattern so sharply near it? Where had the canid gone afterward?



After our tracking morning, we ended the day at the nearby tidepools, catching crabs, poking sea anemones, tasting seaweed, and gathering mussels for dinner. We ended the day bone-tired and well nourished.