Lions & Trackers & Boars

Oh my! This was an awesomely epic Native Eyes class.

Here, before I launch into my account, is a beautiful example of a deer lay. Can you see the two forelegs in the front, and the arch of the back behind them? Scroll down to the end of this post to have a look at my interpretation of this sign.


On this first week back from winter break, we met down south at Venture. We gathered, built our fire, heard stories of the break, received our assignment for the next day, and ate good food.

We rose early the next morning for a tracking day at Cloverdale Ranch, and piled into cars and vans. Finally we gathered in our clans near the reservoir at Cloverdale, ready to fulfill our Native Eyes assignment of looking for and encouraging curiosity about scat!

Let me take a minute to explain the clan system. The clans are the Tule Elk, the Grizzlies, and the Bald Eagles. These clans include students from each of our school’s three main programs: the RDNA fundamentals program, the Cultural Mentoring program, and the Native Eyes program. Each clan is also made up of representatives from each of our school’s eight directional societies, starting with the East Society and continuing sunwise around the compass to the Northeast Society. (Native Eyes, appropriately enough, is also the school’s Northeast Society, responsible for encouraging full sensory awareness, the questioning process, and thankfulness among other things.) We use these various groupings (program, clan, and society) to organize ourselves in various activities. The three programs each have different learning focuses, and the eight societies each have different jobs and roles in our larger groups. When we have school-wide activities, such as our epic wandering tracking day in Cloverdale, we usually organize into Clans in order to have people from each program and each society working together in one group throughout the activity.

Yes it sounds complicated, and yes it was originally very confusing, but now we’ve all lived this organizational system long enough to work with it fairly smoothly. Regardless of the coherence (or lack thereof) of my explanation, we spent the day in our Clans.

My group, the Bald Eagles, couldn’t decide where to go. After much finagling and negotiation, we finally agreed to drive out to the second gate and explore some of the southern part of the reserve.

We climbed up to the ridge and the first thing we noticed were numerous spots covered with little furry scats, sometimes including little bones or bone shards, each less than an inch in diameter and probably an average of six or seven inches long in total, shaped like slightly larger versions of the contents of a well-used cat litter box. They were all dense and many were weathered to a chalky white. The entire landscape was littered with these scat piles, bespeaking the incredible density of the bobcat population in these coastal prairie lands.

Over the ridge crest on the bank of a vernal pool, we found a wide churned-up and soupy section of mud. Preserved in the muck were these (and many other) impressively-sized marks. I've adjusted the levels and contrast on these photos so that fine details pop out better.



From round rear to cloven toe, the hair-imprinted smoosh was a little less than three feet long. A series of blunt, dewclawed trotter tracks led away from the body print in a short-striding trail. The trail was crossed by deer tracks, which you can also see in the photo and which serve as size comparison. The sharpness of the tracks and fine detail of hair and hoof texture melted away as we watched, flowing back into the pond under the days’ steady drizzle.









We discussed and argued the story of this spot for a long time before moving on. When we were ready we continued along the ridgetop, walking game trails at the edges of brushy ravines. Up on the plateu, near a worn-in deer run, I nearly stepped on our second major find of the day.



A clump of fur lay in the grass. I bent down and looked closer, and the clump resolved into a 1.5-inch diameter log, composed almost entirely of coarse hollow-shafted dark-and-light ticked hairs. In all the scat was more than 7 inches long, and probably closer to 9. The shape was blocky and clumpy overall, and very dense, though it was old enough to have a green bloom of algae on some edges.



After logging the big scat in Cybertracker, we continued on the game trail. We found a series of large piles of dead grass near another thick furry scat. One of the piles still reeked of cat urine. We also found miniature variations on the furry-scat-near-dead-grass-pile theme, possibly territorial markings by bobcats. The big piles and scats were so much larger than these smaller, commoner examples, that we were fairly convinced that the culprit had to be a much larger cat.



I’d started the day with a personal wish to find and learn about boar and cougar sign. These are two large and important animals of California wildlands that I’ve never before had the opportunity to track. We finished the day wet and tired from the long rainy walk, but though my limbs felt leaden I returned to camp energized.

And here again is that deer lay:

Hypericum

Last Native Eyes we arrived at Venture early, ostensibly to meet others for a pregame hike, but no one else was there. We took the opportunity to start a fire early.

It had rained the night before. The firepit was a mud puddle, all the available wood was damp, and the kindling twigs I found on the brush pile were positively sodden. Still, we collected the driest materials we could. We gathered dry redwood needles from a sheltered redwood circle to line the bottom of the firepit. My classmate started to build a kindling tipi while I went to a dryer spot to spin up a coal on my bow drill.

I was most of the way through burning a new well into my hearthboard when my classmate walked by, sucking his finger. “Do you have a band-aid?” he asked. I told him where to find them in my pack and continued work on a coal.

Before I knew it, smoke was billowing from my kit and there sat a fat ember in the notch. I dropped it into my tinder bundle and walked it over to the fire circle. I found the circle empty except for the redwood needles we’d already put down. No tipi. Wet kindling. Damp wood. Hmm.

I blew the coal into flame, placed it in the fire circle, and began adding the smallest and driest of the kindling. Nothing would catch. I added more small bits, blew it into flame, then it sputtered and guttered and died. I added more small bits and blew until flames appeared, but now I was running out of small stuff. I tried adding the smallest of the firewood, bigger but dryer than the kindling, and blowing. Embers crept through the redwood needle platform, hollowing out the space under my not-quite-fire and oozing smoke as they went, but flames refused to come. I added the rest of my smallest twigs, and again blew the flames alive. They licked and blackened the log, but refused to stick. I kept blowing and added more midsized twigs, but the sizzle and sputter made it clear that if I stopped blowing, it would stop burning. Finally, out of breath, eyes burning from the smoke and dizzy from hyperventilation, I stopped. And the flames died. I stared at the ready embers, wondering how I could coax this waiting fire into life.

Then I remembered my tinder bag. I had a bagful of cattail fluff, dry mugwort, and dry bracken fern! I grabbed a handful and tucked it under the log, among the wisps of smoke, and blew. This time fire leapt enthusiastically, drying the twigs as it spread, and finally building to a healthy little blaze. Rejoicing in these self-sustained flames, I piled all the wet wood I could around the little fire to dry it before I had to use it. I did not feel like working against the water again. At last I sat back and breathed clean air.

Later I found out that my classmate had cut his finger severely, and had gone into mild shock while looking for my band-aids. Some of our instructors found him lying by his car on the cold, damp ground, sucking his finger. They helped him up, made sure he wasn’t bleeding to death, and got him a butterfly suture for his cut. I’m embarrassed to say that I had no idea he was in trouble until long after I’d finished making the fire.

The next morning we gathered in the main room. After kindling a fire, we spent the morning journaling. This particular method, called “Mind’s Eye journaling” utilizes field guides and personal experience to create a naturalist’s journal entry on a particular organism. Areas of focus include field marks, habitat, range map, dangers, and traditional uses, just to name a few. As an example, my journals at home include entries on Raccoon, Coast Live Oak, Poison Oak, Western Fence Lizard, Steller’s Jay, and other common organisms of my area, each of which includes sketches and text. You can find more information on this method in the Kamana program, which is where I learned the practice initially.

Our process this morning was to wander the grounds and find a tree with which we were unfamiliar. Then we were to memorize as much detail and whole impression as we could, come back to sketch our impressions, and finally find the tree in a field guide and make our journal entries.





I’m still not entirely sure what my tree was. It looks to me like a cypress but it doesn’t entirely fit the description of our local Monterrey Cypress, Cupressus macrocarpa.

After journaling, the Native Eyes crew set off for our local Hypericum patch. With Cybertrackers in hand, our mission was to catalog the signs of wildlife activity at the edges and in the middle of the Hypericum thickets. We dove into the thickets on our hands and knees, brushing past trailing blackberry vines, and weaving through the tall Hypericum stalks over a carpet of Oxalis sprouts. We found some predictable patterns of high edge activity and low thicket use, but some surprising signs as well.

In one area we found what look like chews or rubs on the Hypericum stalks. I’d been looking for this type of sign for a while, since the Hypericum groves look a lot like Scotch and French Broom thickets, both in the way the individual plant grows and it’s formation of monocultural thickets. In the East Bay Hills, broom thickets often harbor large populations of brush rabbits and the rabbits often strip the bark off the broom stalks to eat the inner bark. Bark stripping was, by comparison, markedly absent in the Hypericum, except for in one spot.



I also found an interesting little area of striking diversity in the sameness of the Hypericum sea. Granted the diversity was mostly invasive, but it was still refreshing. Just off the fire road, a clearing held Bull Thistle, Black Mustard, Poison Hemlock, a prickly-leaved yellow-flowered Composite of unknown species, Trailing Blackberry and a Juncus (the only two native plants that I could ID in the lot). I found the heterogeneity inviting after all that Hypericum so I poked further in. And I found something even more interesting.



A worn-in rabbit run caught my eye, so I bent down for a closer look. The Oxalis leaves had been nipped from their stalks all around the run. There was a cluster of soft rabbit pellets pressed flat in the middle of the run, still glistening wet, as if I’d interrupted an instance of lagomorphic coprophagy. Beside the pellets were two even more interesting little piles. One, of neatly-snipped fresh Hypericum leaves, the cut ends sharply angled. The other pile was of Hypericum seed capsules, the stalks again neatly snipped at an angle. The capsules had been opened from the side, and still spilled a few of their tiny seeds onto the ground.



We piled back into the cars as the sun set and headed back to Venture. Once there, I quartered the fox that I’d skinned and cleaned, rubbed the meat with salt and rosemary, and roasted it over the fire. It turned out delicious.



That night we had a potluck (at which I presented the fox meat) and a party. We played ridiculous and hilarious party games. My favorite was as follows:

The players are divided into two groups, one on each side of the room. They are given a time limit to disguise one of their number using any or all of the items of clothing found on their side of the room, while separated from each other by a sheet or other opaque divider. When the time is up, the sheet is dropped, and the disguised individuals face each other. The first team to guess the identity of the other’s disguised person gets a point.





Both teams and onlookers were in stitches by the end. I laughed so hard that my whole head hurt.