Finals

Up in Bolinas this week, we had our Native Eyes final exam.

We started with the standard cooking fire. I began thinking about making a fire at around 4:15, and worked on it slowly and rather lazily. I gathered dead twigs from the alders near the creek, found bigger sticks of standing dead wood on the trees and cut wood in the brush piles, and then broke out the hand drills. We had a communal coal very soon, from a mugwort stalk and buckeye board, and our cooking fire was blazing by 5:30. I think the hot weather and long daylight helps hugely. I'm still working on my hand drill calluses, but right now I’ve just got blisters.

Our assignment the next day was to find elk cows, new calves, and cougar sign on the land. We divided up the landscape, each of us taking a patch, and we set out solo for the day, harvesting stories for the RDNA village.



I saw many things out there, but the most striking was the elk.

I started by getting tangled up in a coyote brush maze, and then I found a coyote trail at the edge, on the ridgetop, and followed it down the ridge to the bay. From the ridgetop I could see a lone bull elk, nubby antlers still in velvet, and I wondered how close I could get to him.



As I followed the coyote trail (also a well-used elk trail) I found California mugwort plants trampled by elk hooves. I took the broken tops and rubbed them all over me, masking my scent. I continued down the coyote trail, which was marked with twisty furry ropes of old coyote scat. The trail dipped over the lip of the southern drainage and ambled down to the bottomland.





The wind took my scent east by southeast. I was walking with my back to the wind, but the elk browsed southwest of me, well out of range of my scent. I walked softly and carefully and the elk never paused in his browsing. Arriving at the edge of the elk’s willow thicket, I looked at the short wind-flagged trees and the giant deer. I remembered my mission to find elk calves, not bother lone bulls, and wondered if I could make my way around the elk without alerting him. I sat down to consider my route.

(I don't have any better photo than this. I wish I'd been focusing on the elk, and not the grass.)

As I sat, the elk raised his head and focused southeast, across the drainage. Something there alarmed him, and he began walking quickly upslope, zigzagging more or less toward me! I realized that I’d sat down right on his trail. He closed in to thirty feet, and noticed me sitting there, a nondescript lump in the trail that had never been there before. He stopped and sniffed but couldn’t catch my scent. He lowered his head and nodded up and down, trying to find a better view of me. Acting intrigued rather than alarmed, he walked closer, head low and nodding. And he sped up. Finally hundreds of pounds of bull elk was trotting straight toward me, antler nubs lowered, soft dark eyes fixed on me. At fifteen feet I realized he wasn’t stopping, and I stood up to give him his space.

When he saw me stand and recognized me as human, he turned tail and ran. Though my spine and palms tingled with adrenaline and my knees trembled, I wished I’d let him get closer.

I found lots of other cool stuff that day:


the bull elk's bed which was worn in to the dirt and full of elk hair and shaped like a deer bed but huge,


wildflowers of all colors,


cicadas like intricate bronze jewelry,

a spotted towhee nest with one egg and one new-hatched chick, an osprey with a fish in it’s talons,and many more elk. But I never found a cow with a calf, and the sheltered zone I walked in was well devoid of cougar sign.

Battle at Starling Hollow Cypress

Last week we tried to udate the base map of the field at Commonweal. We divided up the area and spent a large portion of the day on solo walks drawing out the runs and other track and sign on our areas.

When we came back together, we noticed a bunch of sticks poking out of a hollow in a cypress tree. Half our group clambered precipitously into the tree under the pretext of getting a closer look at the (possible) bird's nest, though really as an excuse to climb a tree. The other half of our group, logically, used the climbers' rear ends for target practice as they were climbing, thus sparking off the most epic battle of Starling Hollow Cypress (just down the hill from Double Skull Cypress) ever witnessed. Though the tree fort's defenders were deadly marksmen, it was only a matter of time before thir supply of cypress cone ammo ran out. Two hemlock spears and a dramatic death scene later, we were on our way back to our fire circle.

In the afternoon we worked further on the base map, discussed how awesome Native Eyes is going to be next year (it will, of course, be totally awesome), and gathered wild radish and nodding onion for our potluck dish. Wild radish is a bit fuzzy, but the young leaves are tender enough and very flavorful. With the onion, it made a delicious contribution to the meal.

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.