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.

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.

Scats like Golden Eagles

The morning after our fire adventure began our first day of scouting for RDNA, looking for cougar kills at Cloverdale Ranch.



First we scoured the willow thickets, thinking that those may be good places for cougars to drag their kills for privacy. Each thicket sported a number of buck rubs, but no cougar sign that we could find. The grassland surrounding the thickets was dry and brittle, crackling loudly with each step, and we speculated that a hunting cougar might avoid such noisy conditions.

We continued west along the main trail with some of our number fanned out on the landscape to the left and right. Brown, bounding shapes caught our eyes, and solidified into one large and two smaller deer, running west along the southern side of the valley. They held their heads and tails high and moved with a springy gait that covered the open ground quickly. They reached the edge of the grasses and slowed to a trot, looking over their shoulders toward our group, then disappeared into the thick brush on the north-facing slope. One of our scouts came out of the brush to the South and ran up to us on the trail, breathless. “I just saw a huge buck! Did you see him? Four points on a really tall rack. He had two does with him.” Perhaps he was the buck responsible for the rubs on the willows?

Further west, we came to a dry creek bordered with more willow. A culvert passed under the path, and the willows shaded it well, offering an inviting rest area to confer about our finds and strategize on finding cougar sign. As we began discussing, we also began noticing the sign around us. The trail was full of scats, large dense tubes in a segmented shape, some of which appeared lacquered and smooth. One was astonishingly moist and black, emitting a strong odor of rotten meat. Cougar scat? Bobcat? Another carnivore? The size was just on the edge between the two feline suspects.

One of us spoke up, “You know, cougars have scats like Golden Eagles.” The group met this statement with uncomprehending looks. “Every time I see a bird and think it might be a Golden Eagle but I’m unsure, I have to assume it’s not. When I’ve seen a Golden Eagle it’s so obviously a Golden Gagle, that if I have to ask it’s probably not. The same with cougar scat. When I've seen confirmed cougar sign, it's so obviously cougar and nothing else. So cougars take poops like Golden Eagles.” Hm. This was not a very Golden Eagle scat.

Also along the trail were bird pellets at least three and a half inches long and white splats of bird scat. The pellets were large enough to indicate a very large predatory bird, but the willows offered very little in the way of attractive roosts. Following our curiosity, we poked a little further in under the willows, looking for more concentrations of whitewash. When we brushed aside the leaf litter at the base of a large old willow, we found something far more interesting than bird scat.

Tucked under the tree was the half-covered carcass of a canine, empty flesh tented up on sharp bones, unmolested by scavengers and still curled nose-to-tail as if in sleep. The teeth were long and sharp and white and the large ears lay at a relaxed angle. The hide still held a thin covering of dusty-tawny fur, hairs ticked with dark and light like a deer’s coat. We admired our find in silence for a time. Later, another student took measurements of the skull: 8.5 inches.



When our questions about the area had piled up to frustrating levels, we left and spread out over the landscape on a wander. I walked out along the trail to the reservoir in the company of a fellow scout. We passed coyotebush, and scrubby oaks, tall bunchgrasses, and dusty patches of path rich with animal tracks. As we passed through another willow patch, something happened in my companion’s body language, a change small enough to be indescribable but still perceptible. I felt something shift in my posture, too, and looked at my companion, asking “what does your body radar say about this place?” He looked back with big eyes and a grin, “Yeah! Something just changed. A transition spot?”

We stopped and looked more thoroughly around us. Bucks had savagely – and recently— shredded the willows just off trail. Then we noticed that another trail of deer tracks crossed this spot at an angle, cutting across the trail of tracks we had been following along the path. Not necessarily a transition spot, but a meeting of two routes and a signpost. A fun find, but still not cougar sign.

We rounded a bend in the path and came face-to-face with a buck. He stood with his neck outstretched, his body up and forward on his forefeet, and leaned sideways at an almost comical angle to get a better view of us around the bend. Or rather, his pose would have been comical if not for his attitude. His radar dish ears focused unwaveringly on us. We stood frozen but he had been well aware of us long before we walked up on him. Huge dark eyes glared at us, and he shifted on his feet to give an indignant stomp. Then another of our scouts came around the bend behind him, and with a snort he bounded up the slope to the East.

The day was winding down into afternoon, and though we had a collection of stories and questions to show for it, none of them featured a cougar. We were trudging back toward the gate discussing our options for tracking stations, when someone pointed toward the south-facing slope. “What’s that? Is that a kill?”

We clambered up the slope to find a desiccated and dismembered deer carcass. The limbs were detached and strewn about, and all of the soft tissue was gone. Even some of the bones had been eaten – the vertebrae all had their spinous processes raggedly chewed off and the ribs were considerably shorter than natural, chewed off in a consistent line cutting across the ribcage. The neck was twisted in a tight corkscrew shape and the velvet-covered spike antlers had dry grass tangled and twisted around them. We circled the area for a bit, trying to piece together the sequence of events.



We moved on to sit and listen to the birds while we waited for the rest of the class to arrive. After searching all day and finding no trace of our goal, we’d finally found it out in the open right next to the path that we’d walked in on, just as we were preparing to leave. Typical.