Getting Permission

Native Eyes met at Commonweal this time, and we were greeted by constellations of fox scat. The little canids accented every firepit, larder, crossroads, and just about everything else with their spoor. After giving our greetings and thanksgiving to the land and eachother, we requested permission from the foxes to track and photograph them. Then we divided into hunting parties to get the lay of the land and find likely places to set our new camera traps.


My hunting party went up the dry, goat-nibbled ridge. Along the trail we found a chain of these latrines, all with both the big and small scats. We don't know when the scats were left, and we suspect the small came after the big. We think the big is bobcat and the small is fox. What does this say about the predators in the area? What are they saying to each other?

Others were more successful than we in finding likely bottleneck spots to photograph foxes. We laid our traps and left to make our fire.

That evening, we met the RDNA crew. There are a lot of them. Everyone, RDNA, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentors got a chance to intro themselves around the campfire. I left feeling impressed with the breadth of backgrounds and resources that people bring to the program, and with the strong desire to get to know the other participants better.


The next morning Native Eyes went out early to the bird sit. Dark faded to dawn, the birds gave full throat to the morning, and waves of alarm spread over the land as hawks and other predators moved. Then the rest of RDNA arrived and sat, too.

Mapping with such a big group turned out to be a pleasure, after having only eight sets of eyes on the land. Jon was able to draw out lots of patterns and stories when we debriefed the maps later.


We had checked our camera traps before the debrief, and so were able to present evidence to the group of predators in our midst. One of the possible causes of alarm sequences:



That evening a gray fox came through the fence again at the camera site, walked to our Native Eyes fire ring right in front of one of the NE participants, and laid a scat. We had asked, received permission, and now we might have been told "you're welcome."

Native Creativity

We began this week with a visit to a pond. We waded the muck and cut cattails again, with a boat crew and the youth contingent all helping out to harvest more than we had the previous week.

We hauled the thatching material back on big garden carts and on our backs, and got about the project of finishing our shelter.


I was having a hard time being social and productive, owing to a perfect storm of challenges in my life. I needed time away from the thoughts of the human world so I took off and went wandering while the construction continued. I trailed renegade deer tracks out of the garden and up Wish Creek, squeezed through a deer-sized hole in the fence (I wanted to avoid the gates where I might encounter other people), and followed the creek up between the ridgelines.


The landscape was a riot of edibility, usefulness, beauty and of course toxicity. In four square feet of stream bank I found something like nine edible and useful species. I remember noticing miner's lettuce (yummy leaves), chickweed (leaves), cleavers (leaves), cow parsnip (stalk), Oxalis (leaves), stinging nettle (leaves), yerba buena (leaves), strawberry (leaves), and bracken fern (young fiddleheads). They were mixed liberally with highly medicinal and poisonous species such as hedge nettle, figwort, wild cucumber, and poison oak. Nearby the milkmaids and pink flowering currant were in full bloom and Anna's hummingbirds sang at each other across their flower patches. I was interested in the edibles since I brought no vegetables with me for dinner, but I walked on.


Following the creek I came to a fern-draped ravine. When I was 13 I dreamed of a ravine almost exactly like this one. In that dream I became a buck deer and followed a red fox into the creek canyon. In that dream, which I still remember with perfect clarity, I became lost and transformed in the maze of caves behind the watercourse. In this canyon I found my feet on a deer trail, and there in the churned earth was evidence of the trickster that had passed here before me.



I followed deer trails up and around ridgelines, along steep banks that threatened to crumble and avalanche from under me, and after a time began searching for tinder and food for the evening's fire and meal. I continued upward toward the pink-fringed, darkening sky. I carried no timepiece but something internal told me that my friends at camp had finished and would now be starting both fire and food for the evening.



Now with purpose behind my wandering, I crawled from the oak woods, through a blackberry patch that fringed a clearing, and into the light of the setting sun atop the west ridge. I was greeted by an old friend, Yerba Santa, waving in the evening breeze. All around me were dead bracken fern fronds, crisp with the day's sun. And under the cover of last years dieback, sprouting from the live rhizome, were fiddleheads. I had both my tinder and my dinner.

The photo to the left shows the three-part structure of bracken. It does show a fiddlehead, but one that has unfurled to a point at which I question it's edibility. The photo below is of a fiddlehead in it's most delectable stage. I collected a modest amount. I eat them sparingly, and only once or twice a year, since consumption of large quantities has been correlated with certain cancers. I have not yet found a report that identifies any constituent of the fern as carcinogenic, however, and they are a prized edible in many cultures.


The rest of Native Eyes had completed our shelter while I was away. I brought the small bounty of my wander back to camp, helped to light the fire, and shared the new taste of spring ferns with everyone.


I found deep satisfaction at returning from my solo time and bringing home what resources I found. I was satisfied in spinning up a coal from sticks harvested by my own hand and blowing into flame the tinder I carried from the ridgetop. And I was satisfied in sheltering under grass and the soft lines of tree limbs that may, in life, have served as a nursery to the hawks that circle over this valley.




The next morning, after a rainy and predator-oppressed bird sit, Ane Carla Rovetta joined us for art and taxonomy.


We started with a look at taxonomic divisions: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (if you're an animal). Following the Chordata phylum, we made simple sketches of frogs and discussed the changes that occurred in chordate evolution from aquatic to terrestrial forms. We sketched an egg and discussed the revolution of "enclosing the pond." And finally we sketched a bird.

As we began drawing the main units of bird motion, I heard an urgent squawk from outside. A scrub jay swooped in and said, with phrases in Jay-speak I haven't heard before but an unmistakable tone of voice, "something really intense just happened!" The jay kept squawking. Ane Carla kept sketching and talking about birds. Everyone else kept chalk to paper and sketched away, trying to keep up with Ane Carla's presentation. But with the jay's voice louder in my mind than Ane Carla's, I simply couldn't pay attention. I got up and snuck out the door to see what the fuss was all about.

White-crowned and song sparrows popcorned around the garden veggies, alarming consistently. The jay perched on a spindly shoot from a pear tree and stared down at a spot among the brassica patch, silent now, and intent. On the slope just feet from the garden, a remarkable sound: every wrentit alarming at once, the brush on the hillside seeming to purr and click with their agitation. A Bewick's wren added his alarm from higher up the slope, and a spotted towhee as well. Above us two redtailed hawks circled, one with a forked stick in it's talons. Could they be causing such a disturbance? But that didn't make sense. These redtails were over this valley all the time, and I have never seen them take birds. I have never seen the birds respond to the redtails this way, either. I waited. The jay got bored and flew off, and the sparrows calmed and dispersed like rubberneckers deprived of street drama. I was about to give up and go back to sketching when the sound of wings burst out of the brassicas. A tiny hawk no bigger than a robin, clutching round, brown feathery prey in it's talons, flew up and away to the shelter of a pine.

I went back inside and sketched a sharp shinned hawk.


We finished out the day with natural inks, paints, and chalks with Ane Carla. We cut our own turkey quills (dyed festive colors by Michael's Craft Supply) and made pens, sketched with acorn and iron, black tea, and black walnut. We ground pigment, made plant-based paintbrushes, and mixed paints with vegetable gum, or egg yolk, or milk binders. Finally we took the excess earth pigments, added a dribble of soap and water, and rolled them into sticks of pastel chalk. We rounded out the colorful, crafty, art-filled evening with stories told and performed by our own RDNA-ers.

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.

Redheads Are Made for Camouflage

We arrived at Commonweal Garden to news of a mystery predator in the creekbed, heralded by a low bird alarm. We couldn’t find fresh sign of any predator, but wandering the creekbed we found broad claw marks in groups of four, some very old and some fairly recent, that extend high into a trio of alders. Sign like this is a fairly rare find, and exciting (or disturbing, depending on your state of mind) so close to our campsite.




Making a fire was somewhat challenging. I started with my homemade kit, but a broken bowstring forced a stop and a quest for a new bow. Having found a new bow, I returned and began spinning a coal, only to find that my spindle was rapidly shortening into uselessness. I made new spindle and tried to fit it to the existing well in my hearthboard, only to have my board snap in two across the well. I finally spun up a coal with a new well, and transferred it to my tinder bundle, only to find that my bundle was a bit damp and too small. I added dry grass to the outside of my California mugwort, thistledown and grass bundle. The whole comedy of errors took less than an hour, and we had a fine little cookfire for our evening meal.

The next morning we had a bird sit and a debrief with Jon. We mapped out the bird activity, and found that we (RDNA, Native Eyes and Cultural Mentors together) were creating such a disturbance that we were calling in the accipiters and falcons, and then watching the resulting oppression for the duration of the sit. To see more bird language and behavior, we’ll have to step up our use of the routine of invisibility, and refrain from tempting the Cooper’s Hawk, Sharpie and Kestrel with disturbed birds.





For the afternoon we went hunting. The object was to stalk up on an animal as close as possible, photograph it, and stalk away without being noticed by either animals or people. The stalk went beautifully for my group. We utilized wind direction and terrain well, stalked quiet and slow, and finally came up within camera range of a group of four very large animals. Crouched just leeward of a clump of coyotebrush, we all seemed to realize at the same time that one of the animals was enough to take out all three of us, and here we were in easy charging range of four of them. Never mind that they’re herbivores, they’re still enormous. We took our photos and backed out slowly, spending what felt like hours frozen still, crouched, bent double, or crawling to keep from advertising our presence to the four ruminating behemoths. Finally they moved on, with a shuffle of grass and soft chip and flutter of the birds in their path the only clue to their movement. We put shoes and jackets back on and meandered back to the cars, tired and grinning.

Before returning to camp, we stopped at a vole meadow to watch the Harrier and Barn Owl switchover. When we arrived a coyote was there to greet us. The coyotes serenaded the sunset as we watched harriers return to their roosts and barn owls emerge from the wooded edge, silent except for the “SHHHH!” calls punctuating their flight.

Another student and I spent the night at the house of a classmate, with the idea of investigating his mystery critter. This animal spends much time in a storage shed, rearranging objects in patterns and lines over the floor. It never leaves scat or fur or any other sign, and has never before left prints. This night, we scattered flour on the floor in hopes of gaining some clues about the poultergeist’s identity. When we returned, we indeed had tracks.





We caught a ride back to San Francisco with our classmate, and on the way found a beautiful grey fox, freshly and cleanly roadkilled. We picked her up with the intention of skinning her and tanning the hide. I even thought about eating the meat.





Foxes are an important animal for me. I tracked a grey fox at my sit spot in the hills every week last winter, and became familiar with his habits. I watched him sitting in a sunbeam, fur haloed in the slanted winter light, just being a fox, and was brought to tears by his beauty. I learned so much from that fox, about the birds and the land and about being quiet and invisible. Having had those experiences with a living fox who shared his space with me in the hills, it felt odd to skin this healthy young female. I now have much more intimate knowledge of foxes, their smell and the ways they can move, their textures and size and heft.

Throughout the whole process, though, I felt distinct grief that her life was cut short, mourning her departure as I admired her beauty and learned about her from the remains she had left. I had initially intended to eat the meat as well as tan the hide, and I have her skin and carcass still in my freezer. I had strange dreams that night though, and woke up with the thought that I really didn’t want to eat her meat. I’ll return at least part of the carcass to the woods where I found her.