Tracking Day

We’ve been on a three-week break, during which I’ve been, if anything, busier than while class is in session. So it’s taken me this long to blog our last class. But here, at long last, it is!

We met at Venture this week. After romping with Mojo the dog and playing a morning round of T-Rex Frisbee (which is the most awesome game in the Universe) we set off for the lagoon near Pescadero.



We ambled down to the beach to check out the morning’s stories. These marks were all over the sand, crisscrossing each other in little trails and sometimes funneling into a big communal run. I love sand tracking.






We continued on, tried to stick our heads into an old beaver den but found it blocked by a botanical guard. Though many of us are nonreactive to poison oak, we still didn’t push our luck. We consoled ourselves by investigating this interesting mark and fairly fresh scat near the den area.



When we stopped for lunch we found these beautiful prints in the mud of the channel bank, still fairly close to the den area.



As we moved on, we kept on the look out for beavers or beaver sign. They continued to prove elusive, despite the fact that I’d brought my beaver-cut walking stick with me that day. We did get close to a wary, plain-looking turtle. He looked like he was enjoying the sun so we did our best to go quiet and slow and respect his space.



Finally we found our way up the hill to an open area full of grasses and wildflowers. The ground there was peppered with big holes and massive throw mounds. We spread out, looking for the freshest mounds.

On the way, I encountered this butterfly. I’ve never seen this type near my home, or in any other urban area.



Finally we found a fresh looking mound that lolled from the mouth of a very big (perhaps 9 inches across) hole. The mound showed deep lumbering tracks across its length. I took these photos while standing uphill from the hole, with the hole in the lower left corner and the mound extending up the photo, downhill from me.






These tracks raise a lot of questions: Are all of these from the same animal? How was the animal moving, to leave such a jumbled pattern? When was the animal last here? Was this a one-time or repeat use? Why was the animal in the area? Is it still here?

We still had further investigations to carry on elsewhere, so we dragged ourselves away from the tracks and the wildflowers, and moved on to the hypericum zone further south on the coast.

Once at the hypericum area, we all took Cybertrackers and dove in. Our last many attempts have been aborted for one reason or another, and as of this afternoon we hadn’t yet placed any hyperucum data points on our map. Our mission for the last hour or two of the afternoon was to catalogue whatever biodiversity we could. For reference, this is what the interior of the hypericum growth looks like:



Not very diverse. The hypericum is especially strange because one will push through and through the unending monotony of hypericum stalks, and then find, engulfed in the center, the skeleton of a long-dead tree or shrub, shaded out under the thick canopy. After such a find the hypericum seed capsule rattling that follows all of one’s movements often takes on an eerie sound.

But we did find some interesting things. I followed the edge and found a stand of poison hemlock, a plant that I’ve never seen wildlife use very extensively. In the middle of the stand were clipped stalks of hemlock, smoothly cut at an angle very much like a rodent’s or rabbit’s work.



I continued on into the hypericum, and found a woodrat nest uphill from a dead elderberry tree. The net was constructed almost entirely or elderberry sticks, with little hyperucum material. I wondered if the woodrat had such an aversion to hypericum that it would try to use hemlock in the absence of good elderberry or other more commonly used material. When I heard the rat skittering and rattling through the hemlock stand, it sounded to me like he moved with energy and health. But my ears are not well trained in woodrat skitters, so I could be wrong.

We returned, our cybertrackers finally full of good data for our maps.

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.

Voleopolis

We became voles in Native Eyes this week.

We drove down to Pescadero, had a challenging time with the bow drill on Tuesday night (the later and darker it gets, the harder firestarting seems), ate delicious fish provided by our fisherman, and crashed out. One of the Cultural Mentoring people helped me greatly with my bow drill technique, and then I joined the rest of the Native Eyes crew
sleeping around our fire circle. It was a frosty night, and even with my borrowed 15 degree bag I had cold spots and major trouble sleeping. I need a good sleeping bag.





The next morning we went out to Cloverdale Ranch to explore for voles. Out in the meadowy valley bottom, we got on our hands and knees and began rustling through grass and bull thistle (ouch!) in search of vole sign. Immediately apparent was a network of trails about one to two inches wide of packed-down dry grass, concealed under the layer of thatch: the characteristic grass tunnel systems of California voles. We followed the trails for hours, finding underground tunnels, middens, latrines, caches, chambers, nests, and what must have been miles of vole grass
trails. We mapped Vole City, played a tag game of voles and predators,
saw, stalked and chased real voles, and even got nibbled by voles in
their tunnels.





In the evening we traveled further South to log some more data points on our Cybertracker units and visited the Hypericum infestation there. Perhaps we’ll have more time to investigate the Hypericum next week.

Feast of the Ancestors

For this class we journeyed down south to Tunitas Creek Ranch. I was sick with a cold, gummed up sinuses and the sore throat from Hell, but I came along anyway – this would be our celebration of the Feast of the Ancestors (an Odawa or Ottawa tradition whose real name I can’t pronounce, much less spell, brought to us by Peacemaker Paul Raphael from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians), and I didn’t want to miss it. The Feast of the Ancestors had never really been explained, just mentioned briefly, along with the phrase “I ate soooooo much” and similar comments. We arrived, as always, in the evening, just ahead of the oncoming fog.

We lit a sacred fire, made and tended by the men only, and made a circle for the celebrants around it. The Cultural Mentors had set a special section for “moon women,” women who are menstruating, to stay out of the circle but still participate. I’ve heard that the theory behind such separation in other ceremonies is that menstruating women’s energy is too powerful, and will drive away the spirits that the ceremony is intended to propitiate. I don’t know the significance of separation here, but I suspect it has to do, at the very least, with respect for the Odawa origins of the ceremony and their traditions. Men tend the sacred fire for a similar reason.

Tonight it was the staff’s turn to feast us, the students. They had all come with their ancestor’s favorite foods, and greeted us and feasted us like family. As the tradition goes, any one of the guests may truly be the host’s ancestor, returned to feast with the family for the night, so all who come are welcomed as relatives. By the end of the night everyone’s sides were aching with laughter. Coyote yips and wails echoed the human revelry longer into the night – they probably smelled all our good food. Or perhaps our teachers really are part Coyote, and their ancestors had returned to join the feasting.

The next morning, we rose before the sun for a bird sit. As we found our spots, Robins and Flickers called continuously in mild alarm, high in the trees and mostly toward the North and East. Flocks of small birds moved West, or South, but never toward the Flickers and Robins. Lone birds also moved in a general Southwesterly migration. The birds sang very little – only Black Phoebes, the most agile flyers, and Bushtits, well hidden in their thickets, sang unheeding of the “Tseep!” and “Clear!” of the Robins and Flickers to the Northeast. Partway through the sit, Robins and some Flickers moved further up slope, south, toward us and continued their alarming. In the thicket behind me, Juncos, Golden Crowned Sparrows, Bewick’s Wrens, and Wrentits started up an alarm as well, perhaps 10 or 12 feet high in general, and continued for at least 15 minutes. Then the Robins and Flickers moved on a little ways South, and the smaller birds quieted, giving companion calls or feeding.


After breakfasting and bird-mapping, we set off to do some Cybertracking along the creek. We had no particular objective, but we knew that cougar sign had recently been found in the creek, and were excited to search for more. The first thing we came upon was an unmistakable cat sign – a scratching post. However, it was tiny for cougar, so our major suspects were bobcat or housecat. The slivers of the outer claw sheath that I found embedded in the shredded bark could have been the right size for either. The urine spot near the scratches was equally inconclusive.






Our next find was on a log stretched across the creekbed. It had been scoured clean of bark by the passage of water and animals, and on it’s smooth face, though there was no visible mark to show it, was a smudge of odoriferous deer musk. Apparently Blacktail and Mule bucks have scent glands on the insides of their hind legs that exude musk when the deer is in rut, and at this time of year the smell gets on everything the buck passes. A good sign to look – or scent – for.

We also came upon a very old carcass of a deer, mostly melted away into the creek bank. The skull was gone and the limbs twisted and haphazard, and no hide remained to show the method of the kill or the scavenging. One sign that was still present, though, was the ribcage with one side sheared clean off, like with a giant pair of scissors. Perhaps our cougar sign?

Under an overhanging clay embankment, we also found some unidentified rodent tracks. We discussed the gait, and length of the toes, the straddle and size, and the placement in the landscape. It was a toss-up between Norway rat (for the splay and shape of the toes and footpads) and chipmunk (for the size of the print and straddle, and the gait) What do you think? (Apologies for the blurry photos, it was an awkward spot.)

We continued up the mostly dry creek, until we came to a flock of Juncos fluttering and bathing in a still pool, and decided that instead of disturbing their afternoon bath we would stop for lunch and let the Juncos finish. As I ate, I watched a male dunk himself up to his neck in water and flutter wildly, spraying his flockmates and everything else in a two-foot radius, then hop out, his spiked feathers the envy of punkrockers everywhere, and with rapid wingbeats rise to the canopy to sun himself.

After the Juncos had all gone up to dry their feathers in the sun, and we had finished our lunches, we continued walking up the creek. Our next find was a small diameter tree covered with fairly fresh, long scratches, some on one side more vertical and some on the other side tending toward the horizontal, in sets of four or five that were about two and a half inches wide. Conversation ensued about whether the animal was climbing up or lowering itself down, and why such a large critter had gone up into such a small tree in the first place.

We came to a culvert, and climbed out of the creekbed. We headed upslope, to find the area where the coyotes had been calling the previous night, but got waylaid on the path discussing a track. Some thought it was more likely a cat (with somewhat long toes) some said it was the track of a “long-toed coyote” and others had other ideas. Eventually we found another track in the set, a far more obscure, but obviously five-fingered, left front track exactly next to the right hind track that we’d been discussing. The feint heel impression in the right hind track became clear, showing a five-toed plantigrade print with long fingers and short sharp nails. We also recognized this animal’s signature 2x2 gait, with right-hind foot placed next to left-front foot and left-hind foot placed next to right-front foot, and we had to revise our suspect list. With most of our group convinced finally of the animal’s identity, one still has to wonder… was it actually a long-toed coyote?



Jon was at the fire circle when we returned, ready to debrief our bird sit from that morning.
We discussed the patterns and various predator signatures. From now on, when we hear intense bird language like the junco-sparrow-wren cluster in the thicket that morning, we’ll get to go into thicket and find the creature that the birds were talking about.

Wednesday night was the second night of the Feast of the Ancestors. Each RDNA clan had a separate fire, where they were serving the favorite foods of the ancestors to all visitors. We were invited to join the instructor’s group walking from fire to fire, and were greeted and feasted, again, as family. The food provided was delicious, made most nourishing and flavorful by the family stories that seasoned each dish. By the end I couldn’t eat anything more, but I still went to the last fire to hear my classmates share their roots.