Ask Permission

We started the week out on the beach, following coyote trails as they came together, dug, scented, and parted. We examined their patterns at length and wondered why their gaits, trajectories, and points of interest varied so widely. With few answers, we headed back to our sit meadow for more tracking of the landscape.


At the meadow, we dove past the poison oak periphery and into the wooded ravine. we found a wide trail, fluffed up like a freshly used deer trail but not cut into the earth, with very large compressions. Human boot prints? Wild pig?


That evening around the fire we told the stories of the beach and the ravine, and received a challenge. Could we see the coyotes that cavorted on the beach? We decided to rise at 3:00 AM and find out. Toting sleeping bags, blankets, coffee and binocs, we paused at the trailhead down to the beach to admire the moon on the water, to give thanks for the coming day and the animals we were tracking, and to become present to our senses and to the moment. We settled into our spots and waited.


When the sun crested the Coast Ranges and spilled light onto the sand, we still had not seen another mammalian visitor on the beach. We climbed out of dune and bluff to investigate the trails anyway. We only found one coyote trail that morning, it's patterns very different from the cavorting we'd seen the day before. Was he nervously looking over his shoulder? What kept stopping him in his crisp direct register trot and drawing his gaze away from the direction of travel?

This coyote trail had already been laid down when we arrived. The tracks lead down to the beach, where they're washed away near the high tide mark. Our arrival was considerably later than high tide.



But up the beach, the cavorting had continued. They simply avoided our stakeout, and kept up their digging and romping further north. When we related the story to Jon Young, he laughed and said simply "You got served! Did you remember to ask permission?" We had not remembered.

The Amazing Shape-changing Slitherer

We encountered a mystery this week on the beach. While two groups trailed animals and eachother, a third group found a truly strange trail in the sand. The limb-imprints were large, and showed what we thought to be fingerbones. We couldn't tell the whole shape and size of the feet, though, because the central drag mark obliterated most of the tracks. The above photo is of the clearest track in the trail. It's much clearer in the photo, thanks to Photoshop, than it was in the sand.

When we came up on the trail, one of our first ideas was, "turtle." As we trailed it up the bluffs, looping around and crossing itself back down and charging more or less straight over the flat sand to the dunes, our mental images of the animal ranged through sea lion, seal, sea otter, large escaped lizard, or cormorant with too big a fish. None of those stories explained its trail fully, though, or why it had moved so far up and down the beach. We trailed this thing all the way to the north end of the beach, where we found it (or one like it) coming out of the creek onto the beach sand. Along the original trail, we intersected more trails of the same type -- some coming out of the dunes, some paralleling the beach, some coming out of the creek. Lots of other trails, all similar.


After morning hours filled with brain-stretching trailing exercises, we headed inland. We chilled out and made cordage, cut firewood for the night, and gathered nettles for fiber. We also set ash traps, little piles of fine ash placed strategically in trails or near beds, in our sit meadow. Our goal was to catch deer and other animals in their habitual patterns, or to catch them quartering away from us when we next entered our meadow.



The next day we returned to the beach with hopes of finding the slithering shape-shifter again. We did, and the marks were a little bit more eloquent about his identity. The drag mark was absent. The mysteries remain: what was dragging yesterday, and not today? Why did this creature, and more like it, walk up and down the whole beach, into and out of the bluffs, partway into the dunes and back to the flat sand, and along and into the creek? This new trail also has marks next to it where some part of the left side of the creature's body pressed into the sand next to each right-foot track. What was pressed into the sand?


We also returned to our ash traps. An advance party went and pronounced them all empty, as far as they could tell. When my group got there, the trails by the traps had been disturbed, and it took us a while to puzzle out what had happened. The surface of the ash was actually roughed up, though it held no clear mark.



Then we noticed prints leading away from the bottleneck of blackberry and willow near the creek where we'd laid the traps -- little ashy prints. Altogether we could pick out about two sets of more-or-less deer shaped prints. We'd successfully predicted the deer's pattern after all! Following the tracks, we came out of the bottleneck at an intensively-browsed section of meadow. Why were the deer hanging so close to the little creek corridor and mowing everything there, including less-valuable foods like poison oak?

New Crew

Our Native Eyes journey has begun for another year. We're starting off separate from the RDNA village, so we gathered with just our Native Eyes group on the coast for intros and stories from Jon. Then we headed to last year's bird sit meadow for an introductory wander.


Our evening cookfire finally blazed to life after we cranked out three coals, using some of the above kits and tinder. Everything was damp and drippy in the redwoods. The unexpected chill of soaked-through sleeping bags and soggy sweatshirts set us a little on edge. Soon Jon Young, Paul Raphael, and Gerry Brady joined our fire and brightened up the evening with stories, jokes and songs.

The next morning we had our first bird sit. With camp so soggy, we decided to drive to a new location to debrief the sit under the shelter of some thick-canopied cypress trees. Some of our group saw an accipiter in the distance as we got out of the car, but didn't mention the sighting. The landscape, mostly Hypericum and stands of old Cypress, was quiet except for a few sparrow chips in the shrubs and Northern Flicker calls. We headed toward the same stand of woods that the accipiter was working, thinking more of dry ground than of birds.

As we finished our debrief, a Cooper's Hawk flew in under the canopy of trees to perch on a limb above us in the shadows, her dark back blending with the dark under the canopy. We watched in silence until she flew again. "Who heard her concentric rings?" someone asked when the hawk had gone. We talked about the Northern Flicker's "Clear!" call of alarm that still rang out, and the overall silence and distinct lack of song. With a flurry of wings, the Flicker that had been calling lit in the treetop above us, sunlight picking out the red in his feathers. A few calls of "Clear!" and he fluttered away, too, in the opposite direction as the hawk.


After lunch Molly and Greg led us in a trailing exercise. Two participants trailed Molly over the beach and dunes, and two others trailed Greg. We followed the trails into the ocean and out again. One group stayed together and took turns leading, while the other group divided and tracked separately. Only one group found their missing person in the allotted time.


Molly and Greg's trail led right by a tantalizing mystery. Three clumps of feathers lay near each other in the sand, and near them, the former owner of the feathers.





We puzzled over the pockmarks in the sand that accompany each clump of feathers, looked for tracks, found raven prints but nothing else discernible. We noticed that each clump was composed of a different type of feather. We discussed and came up with stories to narrate the sequence. But the question remains: Who killed this gull?