Creeks and coyotes

The sun sported a halo on Tuesday as we started tracking on the beach. One group stayed by the trailhead to map the copious coyote trails there, and my group journeyed north, hoping to find another coyote hot spot.


Past the center of coyote action, not even a lone canid trail traveled the beach. Another critter was out, though, traveling oddly like a coyote in a straight line across the sand. The critter seemed to be moving in an overstep two-by-two pace.


For a while, the most prevalent tracks were tiny, three-toed blips in the sand. This little dude flew in and paced around at about the same cadence as the tracks, bobbing his head and scouting for invertebrate prey.


When he flew on to find more food, we found these tracks in his wake. The same tracks!


Just south of Gazos Creek we went inland toward Gazos Grill, checking for trails toward the grill's dumpster. A wide, low trail cut through the poison oak and was covered with little five-fingered handprints -- a raccoon's run. On the beach side of the road, the only larder we could find was a wild rose decked with fruit. A few coyote trails crisscrossed, but we found no scent marking or interaction.


The only scent post we found was this old bobcat latrine.


We crossed Gazos Creek flowing fast and cold over the beach sand, and found a raven party on the flat expanse.


Following the ravens, we found logs with interesting little burrows beneath them, full of little caches of sea rocket seed pods.


We continued for a long way up the beach. The high tide had wiped away all tracks.


As we moved further north, the cliffs to the east began dripping, dribbling and leaking water down to the sand. We wondered if that water would be safe to drink.



We began to notice coyote trails traveling north or south just under the high tide mark.


We found a bird kill and then another, with coyote trails veering through the scattered feathers but not pausing in their cadence.


The bird below had a fascinating bill.


Finally we came to another creek flowing from a low place in the cliffs and disappearing into the beach sand. Coyote trails upon coyote trails converged from the washed-out surf zone up toward and along the creek.



We followed up the creek, clambering over driftwood and mini waterfalls on a carpet of watercress.


Around a corner in the waterway, there was a shelf of mudstone. On the shelf were the remains of a seabird, the feathers gnawed and sheared at the base.



With some measurements of the coyote trails and a general mental map of the area, we returned south to meet up with our companions.



We spent the evening mapping our wander, building a fire, cooking and debriefing the day with Jon.

A Visit to Running Pig Ravine, and Other Tracking Stories

This week Native Eyes visited Venture, Gazos Beach, and our new stomping grounds just west of Cloverdale. We practiced observing and sketching animals at the retreat center, and learned more about reading the stories in the sand at Gazos. At the land west of Cloverdale, we discovered Running Pig Ravine.

We found many cool tracks in the beach sand at Gazos. Ravens in numbers were evident by their tracks, but conspicuously absent in person. Their short trails described their society of thieves and luminaries in sometimes baffling sentences. Raven phrases were punctuated by hard two-footed landings and wing impressions in the sand. At one point we found a surf-rounded rock that had been partly dug out of the sand, the surrounding beach positively boiling with raven tracks. Another look at the rock revealed that many pointed bills had dug out the sand around it -- or perhaps just one very determined bill. Why?

Coyotes also wrote their crisscrossings in the sand. Some of our instructors have been visiting Gazos regularly, and have been keeping tabs on "Lopsy," the coyote with lop-sided feet. Most canids seem to have pretty symmetrical feet, but Lopsy shows strikingly asymmetrical tracks with the heel pad squooshed to one side and the toes almost as asymmetrical as a cat's. Lopsy had been one of the more recent canid visitors to the beach, and we spent much time journaling the tracks. I also found these nifty bird tracks crossing one of Lopsy's trails. I love the arrangement of toes.

We also received a visit from one of last year's instructors, Will Scott. He's much missed this year, because he's taken his nature connection know-how on the road with a project called Beyond Boundaries. The Beyond Boundaries blog chronicles their journey. While he was back in the Bay Area, Will took some time to sit with us and listen to bird language, track the beach, and take a tour of the land west of Cloverdale.



When we arrived at the land west of Cloverdale, we broke up into hunting parties to search for pig sign. We started by considering wild pigs and their habits, and profiling the type of habitat that we were most likely to find pig sign. We divided those spots on the landscape up between our three parties, and were off.

Another woman and I first set off together, deciding to have an all-female group. One other man from a group of four ran after us, wanting to join up. "Alright, you're an honorary woman for the day," we shouted back as he ran to catch up.

We set off over the bunchgrassed mesa, walking over land uneven as a cobbled river bottom. Vole runways, bobcat latrines, bird kills, and badger digs abounded, and we did our best to stay focused on our porcine quarry. Our first find was still in sight of the driveway: a huge turd, easily two inches in diameter, composed of mostly brown shells and some grass seeds. We grinned at eachother. Our first pig sign?



We tried to beeline for an irrigation pond that we knew to be at the bottom of a big ravine. Beelining is never really possible in land cut repeatedly by east-west gullies, full of tangled coyotebrush and poison oak. We finally reached our ravine and began testing the edge of the tangled chaparral that guarded the way down.


We were about to give up finding a way, when we heard a snort and the snap of a thick branch. We sent one of our party down through the tangle, while the rest circled the lip and looked for a way further downstream. As our scout scrambled down, we heard the whip and snap of brush up the other bank, and long pampas grass waved at the passage of something large. The animal charged uphill and revealed itself on the opposite lip of the ravine: a massive, round-rumped swine. She (I think it was female, because it wasn't as large in the forequarters as the boars I know) was much larger, rounder, and generally fatter than the pigs pictured here. I pulled these photos from Wikipedia to illustrate the general look of wild pigs: big triangular ears, shovel-shaped head, and burly build. She ran so fast, and so far, that I could not get a serviceable photograph.



We eventually did find our way down to the pond, and what should be waiting for us, but a skull? It was big, shovel-shaped, and burly. We were stoked.



The skull lay under a tree by the pond, in a bed of dead pampas grass curls. We searched for a while to find the tusks, but were unsuccessful.





We clambered over the tule fringe of the pond, through blackberry vine tunnels, and over a raccoon-latrine log to finally make our way into the willows uphill of the pond. Once inside, the willows opened up into rooms full of deer sign and raptor whitewash. Where were the pig wallows? We'd found scat, a live animal, and a skull, but we'd been tasked with finding wallows as well. And we wanted at least one clear track.

Our party divided up in the willows, each pursuing their own curiosity. A rustling in the brush, and one of our members called, "Hey where are you all?" We each answered. "You're not where I thought you were! I just heard something over there. I saw something black move behind the willows there." The image of a wild boar in the thicket flashed across my mind's eye, and the world snapped into crystal clarity around me. For that moment I thought, in a sub-verbal part of my brain, that a boar was still present and could charge us. My senses took control of my awareness and I froze, scented the air, and listened. The gold-tinted willow leaves rustled in the breeze.

After that frozen moment we converged to check out the siting, and found something putrid.



A tunnel ran through the blackberry, its walls and floor exuding a stench of urine and musk. We poked around a bit, but the smell was so bad that none of us wanted to stay. We snapped a photo of our honorary member, though, wearing a wig (thus showing more femininity) and expressing the putrescence of the tunnel.



Backtracking out of the willow, poison oak and coyotebrush tangle uphill of the pond, we paralleled the water and found many now-dry mudholes. This one was full of deer tracks, but the next held some incomplete pig tracks and lots of bristles.



We headed back to Venture with our day's trophy and lots of stories to tell.

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: