Mighty Trackers Catch a Frog

We went looking for more cougar sign this week. As before, after identifying the spots on the map where we’d found cougar sign previously, we tried to find other spots, using a topo map and Google Earth, that display similar characteristics. There was much back-and-forth, discussion, and little agreement. It was well into the morning by the time we agreed on a game plan.

Our first stop was along Gazos Creek Road. The landscape was spongy, moist and lush, cut through with waterfalls and rivulets. We found no cougar sign here, but this plant was pretty neat. The three-parted flower looks like something from Venus and smells like a fishmonger’s gut pile. Weird! I wonder what uses it might have for human beings, besides being fascinatingly bizarre.



Finding only a rank splat scat, very similar to the splatty nastiness in this video, we concluded that we weren’t really able to find and log definite cougar sign here. We piled into the car again and set off for Cloverdale Ranch Gate 2.

We found many deer and a number of other cool things at Cloverdale, but nothing that I would identify as cougar sign. We spent most of our time making jokes and laughing at each other.



This golden-crowned sparrow was lying in the grass as we approached. It was dead, but the eyes were still bright and a tick still fed from it. How long ago did he die? What did he die from? We couldn’t tell, but had many speculations. The bird was frozen in a crouching position though we found him on his back, possibly having toppled over at the point of death. We propped him back up and the little body stood easily, braced on wide-spread feet and drooping wingtips. He looked very much like a distressed but still living bird. Creepy.




As we continued up the hill we noticed a small creature hopping rapidly away from the nearby pond. One of our group shouted “Red Legged Frog!” and pounced on it.



We followed it for a while, snapping pictures through the grass.



I finally picked it up and examined it.



It doesn’t look like a bullfrog or an African clawed frog, so that leaves one of our three (possibly) local native frogs: Rana boylii, Foothill Yellow-legged Frog; Rana draytonii, California Red-legged Frog; or Pseudacris (=Hyla) regilla, Pacific Treefrog.

R. boylii seems to like shallow, slow-flowing water, of which there was none around. Also, there was no yellow on this frog’s legs.

R. draytonii seems to also like flowing water, but I’ve found it in still pools before, too. And this frog did have red legs, as well as dark stripes over the thigh and calf and a dark streak over the eyes. R. draytonii also has two distinct ridges running from behind the tympanum down it’s back, and well-webbed hind feet with no toe pads. Also, the dark streak on the face seems to rarely if ever continue past the frog’s eyes toward the nostrils.

P. regilla, on the other hand, seems to be confusingly variable in coloration, with some being strikingly similar to R. boylii and R. draytonii. Most, though, seem to have that dark mask over the eyes, and distinct toe pads on all four feet, as well as an absence of lateral ridges. The adults are also much smaller than adults of either Rana species.

I’m still not entirely sure what this frog was, but I have a better idea now that I’ve done some research.

On our way back, we saw a group of deer feeding on a ridge upwind of us. We decided to test our stalking skills. When we came over one ridge, there was the largest deer silhouetted against the sky, radar-dish ears pointing right at us. I guess we weren’t quiet enough.

On the way toward the deer, I passed this little inch-and-a-half-wide hole. I liked the occupant's little south-facing porch. Who made it?



I followed the deer downslope and skirted the edge of a big gully, hoping to find cougar scrapes along the drainage. I trailed the deer as I went.



This track is less than ten minutes old. I know it’s age because I found the deer at the end of their trail, not because I’m that good at aging tracks. But I did select my path according to the freshest tracks, and confirmed they were the freshest when I saw the trail leading to the animal’s hooves.



The deer led me past an interesting little cave in the vegetation, sheltered by young pines on the northwest side and coyotebrush surrounding the other edges. In the little clearing was an old buck kill, nubs of antlers shoved into the earth, spine twisted, and ribs chewed off. Most of the bones were still in the vicinity of the kill but well-gnawed. Was this cougar sign? And if so, when was the cat last feeding off of the kill? Some scraps of skin, still flexible and a little slimy, clung to the bones, but all other flesh was gone. Some of the bones had gone green with algal growth.

After the Cloverdale shenanigans, we decided to try one last place. The south side of the Candelabra trail in Butano Park has brought us to cougar sign before. We decided to go up the north side of the trail in an effort to connect the dots of previously-seen cougar sign in Butano and Cloverdale.





Once again, we found no cat sign that we could positively identify. We returned to Blue House farm to end our day with a bird sit.

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.

Ever Felt Like an Alien?

On Wednesday the Native Eyes crew went along with the 1st year RDNA-ers and the Cultural Mentoring crew out to Bass Lake for an Alien Test. An alien test consists of a series of stations distributed in a natural area, each with a station master (or station slave, whichever term you prefer) who asks a particular, set question or three about something in the immediate area. The station questions can range from simple to complex, on topics ranging from I.D. of a common trailside plant to reading animal sign to understanding the history of the landscape from what you can see, hear, smell, etc. in the immediate environment.

The Native Eyes crew each took stations, as did the Cultural Mentoring people. We each ran a station, but also got to hear questions from the other Station Slaves as we cycled through, so we all took the test as well as gave it. What follows is my attempt at reproducing a bit of the test for you all. I didn’t have my camera, so I’m pulling photos from other Internet sources to illustrate the questions. In the future, I’ll remember to bring my camera to Native Eyes.

A caveat before we begin: I hope no one feels badly about any inability to answer these questions. I've done my best to describe what I saw and noticed, but words on a screen are no replacement for the actual experience. I've taken my observations out of context, and can't possibly replace the whole context without writing a whole series of novels about this Alien Test. Therefore, this is intended as just a fun exercise and a bit of a report on my own experience, rather than a gauge of your understanding of nature.

First we found a mark in the path at the trailhead. First question: What is this?

Next a plant was pointed out beside the trail. Make three observations about the plant.

We passed an area by the side of the trail with these and other plants growing in it. What do these plants say about the landscape?Name at least three uses of this plant.

We entered a grove of Eucalyptus trees. The largest all had a similar growth pattern to this tree: all grew up big and thick in a single trunk from the ground, then split off, all at the same height into many smaller trunks branching out at different angles. Some much smaller straight trees grew intermixed, all with similar trunk thicknesses. Some even smaller saplings of similar height grew around as well. And under the trees was an equally complex litter layer. The first layer of leaves and dropped bark strips was splotched in places with broad washes of chalky white stuff, applied in a wide splatter pattern. Under the leaf and bark drop was a layer of rough woodchips. Also on the path were a couple of very large charcoal gray feathers.

The large trees grew in a pattern similar to this one:
The feathers looked kind of like this one, except that they were somewhat more curved, less bedraggled, and had a tuft of white downy fluff near the quill end:
The questions:
Who left the feathers?
What else have they left here?
Why do they like it here?
What do the trees tell you about the history of this landscape?

Then we came across some stuff in the trail. It was dark, shiny, small, pelleted, and had some trail sand sticking to it. One end of some of the pellets was kind of pointy. It looked a lot like this:The question was, what is this, and when was it left here?

Up the trail was a beautiful silvery-fuzzy bush, about chest high, with lush leaflets that looked like open fingers on a hand (but with a thin stalk instad of a palm), and bean-shaped pods. One bud-end of the bush, at the top trailside edge, looked a bit like these twig-ends:The question: What happened here?

Another question: how many birds did you hear while you were answering the previous two questions? (yes, you can answer this from home. I bet there was at least one bird sound within earshot of you. If there wasn't one while you were answering these, can you hear one now?)

Near the bush was a hole at the base of a medium-sized oak tree, very round and rather shallow (in other words, not a tunnel), about eight or more inches across. It had some papery stuff in it that some people thought looked like Turkey Tail mushrooms (look ‘em up if you don’t know ‘em). It looked sort of like this hole here:The question: who lived here, and where did they go?

We came out of the ukes, and encountered a small stand of young trees, all of which grew to one side, sort of like this:It was getting toward noon, and the sun was almost directly behind us as we were looking at the trees. The trees tapered off toward the right (the opposite direction that the pictured tree tapers toward), and a little forward, of where we were standing.

Question: From what direction are the prevailing winds?

For the final question from the series that I’ll pose here, you’ll have to close your eyes. Read these first, then go outside for the answers.

Find a comfortable spot with a view. Sit on the ground with your eyes closed. Pick up a handful of earth, and feel it in your fingers. Feel the sun (if it’s out) on your skin. Face toward the wind, and feel it curling around your ears. Take in its scents. Listen to the sounds around you.

What is the quietest sound you can hear?
Where is the sun in the sky right now?
What are you most curious about right now?

Open your eyes and use wide-angle vision/Owl Eyes. When you are ready, get up and walk in silence for a few minutes.

The last question: What did you learn from this series of questions?