Deer Days of Autumn

We began at the beach with measurement exercises, meant to calibrate our measurement techniques. Then, the wind and sun too fierce for tracking the flats, we wandered the dunes in search of stories in the sand. One group got within eight or so feet of some bedded deer before jumping them up.


We changed locations, hoping to find the remains of cougar-killed deer in some known cache spots in Cloverdale. One car parked at the gate, the others at a pullout down the road. We wandered the willows, finding scat and urine of a local bobcat, but not a trace of deer kills.


As we all gathered in a tarweed stand to pick hand drills, someone noticed a sketchy-looking character up at the car by the gate. Binocs up, we watched as the guy crouched by the car, then the car alarm went off. The would-be thief took off running and we took off too, toward him. By the time we reached the car he was long gone. We drove to the other cars and some of us took the van to go looking for the guy. I looked at my car, and found that I had two flat tires.

As I dealt with the flats using a borrowed bike pump, the trio in the van had found the thief pedaling down the street. Our eldest, gruffest character stopped the thief and watched him until the cops arrived. Then the sheriff rolled up to my car to ask us to join the whole group to give statements.

"So you're naturists, huh?" he said.

"Naturists are the naked people," I replied. "We're naturalists."

Another time, the cops asked, "So how long did it take you to get your clothes back on before you pursued the suspect?" Everyone laughed, except the guy locked in the back of the police car.

Everyone's stories matched up, and the police began loading the thief's bike into their car. He'd probably go to prison for a month, they said. I couldn't help but feel bad for the guy. Prison won't solve the problems that he was trying to fix by burgling my car. I wish him health and happiness.


The next day after a big communal bird sit, we went out on the land. RDNA Essentials, Cultural Mentoring, and Native Eyes broke into clans each with at least one representative of each program. Our mission was to track the deer activity on the land. We could then track the habits of cougars by noting the absence of deer.


My group was charged with tracking Eagle Hill and we quickly fractured further to better cover the large area. One group rambled over the open hills and gullies, finding a clan of does and bucks and following them for a bit. Another group stuck to the edge between meadow and wooded slope. My group dove into the deer trails that spiderwebbed through the woods and into the edge of the meadow. We found fresh beds and lots of browse. No cougar sign.

As usual, Native Eyes took our leave from the main group that evening. As my companion and I got into the car I pasted a piece of paper of the car's clock. We didn't want to know how late it was. As we drove I felt relieved, ignorance of the time allowing me the space to be in the moment, driving, rather than concerned about getting a good night's sleep. We zoomed past a large lump by the road, and both of us shouted "That was a deer!" We pulled over and checked it out.


He was beautiful, huge, very clean, and still warm. We put him in the back of the car and tried to call anyone who might want a deer. No one picked up.

"Want to come over to my house and help gut this guy tonight?" I asked my companion. He said sure.

After we'd gone a way, I realized that some thanksgiving might be in order. We pulled off the road again, took some tobacco, and I opened the hatchback to let the deer be in the night air. I told the deer we were taking his body from his land to my home, thanked him for the gift of his meat and hide and bones, and offered tobacco to the land in thanks.

Just as I returned to the car and closed the hatchback, hiding the deer again, a sheriff stopped and shone a light toward us. "Everything OK?"

"Yep, just a pee break," I said. The sheriff laughed and drove off. We pulled onto the road again and another sheriff's car drove past. As we got up to speed, still another sheriff's car zoomed up and passed us on the left. "We've been blessed by the sheriff spirit," my friend joked.

Further down the road, we found another deer. She was a yearling, also still warm but in worse condition. As our hands touched her body, both my companion and I had the same thought -- that she would feed a lot of other critters out here. We gave thanks for her life also, and chucked her in the bushes so the scavengers would not themselves become roadkill.

At home, we hung the buck by his hind legs, took the guts out, and went to sleep.


In the light of morning we found that he had been killed when a small section of his ribs were broken and pierced his heart. Everthing else was whole and in beautiful condition. He must have died very quickly.




I worked most of the day to quarter him up and save the parts I know how to use, which is most of him. I couldn't save the guts because it was too late at night and I didn't have the fridge space to keep them. I'll tan the hide, save the sinew for bows or bowstrings, make the hide scraps on the legs into glue, use the bones for tools, make soup and musical instruments from the hooves, and I'll use the meat in a Wopila, a thanksgiving feast for my friends and family.

Msafiri Time, Survival Day 2

At dawn I found myself soggy from the steam. I stripped off my warm clothes, laid them where the sun would soon warm them, curled myself by the fire and fell asleep again. We awoke in fits and starts that morning and the sun was high before all of us were on our feet.

I'd had a nauseating and head-splitting migraine in the night. A salt packet in my water and some aspirin from the first aid kit finally cut through the most acute pain, but I still felt sluggish and ill from mild hyponatremia (a good reason to pack salt in your first aid kit on multi-day wilderness trips, especially if fasting is involved). Still, I wanted to find a new campsite for the night.


One of the other participants kept talking about his adventures walking up a similar creek and finding trout in the shadows and backwaters of undercut banks. The day was warm and I wanted to go upstream anyway, so I decided that my willow walking stick would become a fish spear instead. I split the end, sharpened the tines, wedged in two small sticks, and made some dogbane cordage to keep the splits from opening too wide. The whole process took about thirty minutes. And then, with spear in hand and sun warm on my shoulders -- I took a nap on the sandbar. I was exhausted by the work of making a simple fish spear.


As I snoozed others were cracking acorns and grinding them to a coarse, bitter flour. The rhythm of pounding stones and cracking shells drifted me to deeper sleep.


We found that some of the acorns from a particular Valley Oak tree on the Peninsula had exceptionally little tannin and had been dried in a too-hot oven. They turned out to be slow-roasted, sweet, and only very slightly tannic. We roasted them further in the fire to soften them and turn more starches to sugars, and ate them out of hand as we pounded the bitter acorns to flour.

I slept into the afternoon. After drinking small amounts of lightly-salted water all day I at least felt ambulatory, and had some appetite for the roasted acorns. My stomach told me in no uncertain terms, though that only a few of the roasted un-leached acorns would be acceptable.


By afternoon, my eagerness to explore finally outweighed my sluggishness. Another participant was just leaving to set some snares for ground squirrels, and I decided to come along. He had brought some lengths of wire twisted into nooses.

We knew we'd arrived at a good ground squirrel meadow for a number of reasons. The grass was crisscrossed with runs to and from large round holes, some holes dipping diagonally into bare earth mounds and some straight down into the grassy meadow. The squirrels themselves scattered and dropped into these burrows when we approached. And now and then a beeping alarm would sound from an unseen sentry at a burrow.

We scanned the horizon for golden eagles as we worked, wondering if the more distant flicker and squirrel alarms together meant that an eagle was approaching. We set something like eight or ten traps in all, dangling a loop over a run or over a burrow. We staked the wires in the ground, and hoped that the headlong rush of squirrels bolting for their holes would cinch the snares.


I was still so dazed and low energy from fasting that halfway through the snare expedition I forgot where we'd already set the snares. I had trouble pounding in stakes. I started to get angry at the world for letting me get so hungry, tired and ill. I wanted to just stop and lie in the grass until someone took care of me.

Then I remembered something one of my mentors liked to say about the "sacred order of survival." Everyone has a different order to these four necessities, depending on season and environment: shelter, water, fire, food. Sometimes, as in our case, fire can be your shelter. Or it can be your source of clean water. Sometimes a debris hut will save your life. But in all cases, my mentor listed a fifth necessity for survival: attitude. The will to what you need to do, to survive or thrive. And my mentor put this requirement before all else.

Before this trip I thought that fifth, really first, requirement, was a no-brainer. What living being could be so out of the flow of life that it lacks the will to live? It turned out that I might. I wanted to give up all efforts to find firewood, filter water, find food, and make camp. I wanted to lie on the ground until someone else took care of me, made me warm, fed me good hot food.

I took stock of myself: almost to the point of tears with anger at not being taken care of, not having my needs met. And I understood that if my friends weren't there, or were not as skilled as they are, that attitude could possibly have me dying of chronic hypothermia in another few days. And others in the group were also relying on me to keep myself together and support them if they were to break down as I just did.

This whole thought process took no more time than a pause in pounding in the stake. I sat up again and kept pounding.


After our afternoon nap, we began the walk back to camp. On the way we found some Blue Dicks flowers, and my companion showed me how to ID the flower (a tight cluster of blue six-petaled tubular flowers at the top of a long stalk with two long narrow leaves, folded acutely along the midrib, attached at the base), dig deep with a digging stick, and follow the long, delicate, subterranean stem of the flower to the corm. The corm turned out to be about half the size of a marble, with little cormlets clinging to the side. We broke off the baby corms and the root crown (a part at the bottom of the corm that resembles the root end of an onion, and breaks easily from the main corm) and replanted them in the turned earth. Then I ate the corm whole and raw.

Important note: If anyone is planning to eat Blue Dicks, please first consult an expert in plant ID and make sure your specimen is flowering. There are deadly bulb- and corm-bearing wildflowers in California. Please also know the laws concerning gathering wild plants in your area.

The little mouthful of living carbohydrate energy transformed my worldview. Where before, maintaining a positive attitude was a Herculean feat, now my energy buoyed up on its own. Though there weren't any more diggable Blue Dicks, I dug nine more thistles for our evening meal, and walked back with more energy and enthusiasm than I'd felt since before the first morning.


Back at camp the acorn-pounders, after submerging the bag of acorn meal in the creek for the night, had become wood gatherers. Team Ground Squirrel lent a hand gathering dead wood, and soon we had a veritable beaver dam of dry wood on our sandbar. After long discussion, we arrived at a plan for the night: four fires, one for every two people, arranged in a square on the sand. Everyone would lie in a radial pattern with feet to the center and fires between pairs of people. Space constraints kept the plan from working quite as it was sketched, so we wound up with five fires for the night. Our intention was to tend each fire individually, with people waking as their fires went cold and adding more wood as needed. We snuggled up to our little blazes and went to sleep.


But almost no one woke up that night. One person, his fire awareness honed by years of solo camping with no sleeping bag, woke up to add wood to his fire. As he reached behind him into the wood pile, a hand came down in front of him, holding the very piece of wood he had reached for, and placed it in the exact spot he intended. Our eldest Native Eyes student had decided to stay up all night and tend all five fires for us as we slept.


We slept sound and warm through that night.

Msafiri time

Survival Trip Day 1:

We gathered the previous evening at the Pie Ranch Barn Dance to feast, celebrate our community, and embark on our survival trip with intention and support. We spent the night under the spreading branches of a Coast Live Oak on the property of one of our Native Eyes fellows, rose in the morning with no food, and set out in two cars to Los Padres National Forest. Eight of us, almost the whole of Native Eyes, had elected to go into survival mode -- or as one of our mentors calls it, sustainability mode -- for three nights. We had discussed at length, in a series of meetings throughout the year, why we wanted to go on a survival trip, what we hoped to get out of it, and what we wanted to bring. Our collective intention was never recorded in writing, but was something akin to, "full immersion of body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit in the natural world, with health, happiness, and safety within reason."

Our initial intention had been to make a toolkit of primitive technology and bring that with us -- to coal-burn containers, craft some figure-four traps, make stone cutting tools, and gather and preserve wild foods. We wanted to try sustaining ourselves as a village, using long-term relationships with the land, living off previous season's bounties and learning to harvest this season's riches. But as our timeline accelerated, we found ourselves without handmade items and wanting containers, knives, and other technologies. Most of us brought water bottles and knives. We packed in water filters, because we knew the water to be unsafe. We all wore warm things. Some of us brought backpacks with warm clothes. One brought a blanket. We made sure to bring a first aid kit with a light for emergency use. And we had gathered acorns, some from the same centuries-old Valley Oaks that populate the low places of Los Padres. So we brought unprocessed acorns in the shell. And nothing else.



Even before reaching a parking lot, we had pulled over and grabbed some buckeye wood. There was also a vivacious patch of miner's lettuce under the buckeye. With no other food yet that day, we tore into the greens ravenously.

We reached the parking lot, left the cars, and started walking. We simply walked away from the cars, along a trail that many other hikers probably took -- we didn't have any destination in mind to walk toward. Sometimes we passed Grey Pines and one or a lot of us would stop, pick up some fallen cones, and start bashing them with rocks in search of pine seeds. Not finding any, the foragers would soon catch up with the rest. In the end we found four pine seeds. Shared among eight people, none of whom had eaten anything but miner's lettuce, they were still a delight. We also dug thistles for later, tucking the spiny burdens here and there in our clothes.


We came to a creek. Along the edges, tall willow-like canes grew from the sand, with a few flowers and bark that looked oddly familiar. Coyotebrush? We started cutting dead sticks as soon as we recognized it: Baccaris salicifolia! Mulefat! As good as a Bic lighter, some say. And right alongside, an opposite-leaved herb remeniscent of milkweed. We gathered this, too. Dogbane is a rare treat in the Bay Area primitive technologist's toolkit.


We decided to cross the creek. We never discussed it, but I think we all thought it would be a good idea, though I'm not sure why. We rock-hopped and then waded, one by one, with our shoes and warm clothes fastidiously held away from the water. Then on the last crossing, someone slipped. Into the icy water went the warm clothes and shoes.

We laid the clothes out in the sun, which was by now past it's zenith and into afternoon. We sat down on the sandbar and got to work on mulefat-on-buckeye hand drills. Everyone spun and sweated. I got a blister. We even tried to use the sunglasses we'd found by the creek as a fetish to bring fire. None of it worked. The buckeye that we'd been so happy for this morning turned out to be weathered grey and spongy, and the mulefat had, though dead and sun-baked, still been rooted by the creek. With the sun lowering steadily, I set off to find a handhold for a bow drill.

I wound up following a deer trail on a whim. It went into some soft, sandy ground, and as I ducked around the poison oak that grew so enthusiastically by the run, I looked down. In front of me, on top of all the deer tracks, was a round print as big as my palm. Asymmetrical, big heel pad. But not totally clear. I trailed it for a while, wondering if it could in fact be the dog I'd seen earlier. But the characteristics were consistent. I returned to camp.



Back at camp they were still working away at the hand drills. Most were, anyway. Into the hubbub, I said, "Hey, I think I may have found cougar tracks. Do you guys want to go trail a cougar?" With the sun low, perhaps two hours away from setting, clothes still damp, no shelter and an expected 34 degree night coming on, what else could we do? Everyone jumped up (well, more like staggered, as we were all quite hungry by this time) and went to see the cat sign.



We followed until the trail went to packed earth, and kept following the worn-in deer trail. At the next muddy spot, there the tracks were again, fresher than all the deer tracks. We guessed it was a male, possibly a large one.


Then we found, further along the trail, a big scrape in the earth made by the cat's two hind paws. We sniffed the mound. Half of it smelled sharply of cat pee and the other half absolutely reeked of fresh, meaty cougar scat. We did not dig through the mound, but left it for others in our party to see. If he was pooping meaty scats, it might mean that there was a kill nearby. Now we had another reason to follow: we hoped to steal the cougar's meat.


As soon as we decided that we wanted his meat, we lost the cat's trail. But our search brought us into a wet meadow, bordered by a kind of tree we hadn't seen since driving in: buckeyes. Woodrats in the the buckeyes had stripped some limbs, and the wood seasoned well up off the ground in the dappled shade. When we cut into the limbs, the wood was a smooth, buttery yellow-white. With offerings to the tree and big grins, we selected our pieces and set off back to camp. We had good wood for our fire kit.

On the way back I stopped to rest by another sandy wash. Slanting light picked out skunk tracks, and ground squirrel, deer, lizard, beetle and grey fox tracks. My own tracks trailed among these, larger but really no different. All passing through the sand in search of a living, all leaving our traces. All lit gold in the sun of the afternoon.



At the sandbar we whittled out a board and spindle, and made a long cord of dogbane. Wrapping the cord three times around the spindle, one of the more indefatigable participants took the ends of the cord and began spinning the spindle. In minutes, our bowless bow drill yielded a coal. Others had been working hard gathering pine, and importantly, downed valley oak, as firewood. We had big piles beside the sandbar to fuel us through the night.


Meanwhile, we had been discussing the lack of plush accommodation on the landscape. The sky told of dry weather for that night at least, so we only had cold to consider. We would spend the night at the sandbar to make use of the sand and fire as our shelter. We dug a trench about six inches deep, with the idea of spreading oak coals along the trench, covering them with sand, and sleeping all eight of us side-by-side on heated sand. Then someone piled in stones they'd gathered from higher land away from the water, and we made our fire on the stones.


The fire took a long time to burn down. We roasted cattail shoots, all eight that we were able to find that day, and tried various ways of eating thistle. My favorite is to bake the whole plant near coals, then to eat it from the root end up. The heart of the basal rosette and the leaf bases become sweet and succulent with heat.



We snoozed, curled in our warm clothes, nestled in soft (if a bit damp) sand, by our bonfire. Time passed. Some talked. Some watched the stars. Some dreamed.


When the blaze finally settled we had the stones glowing like coals. We hadn't dug the trench with stones in mind, and now we only had a little flame left to light our work. We built up a second fire for light, spread the stones and coals as best we could (some were too heavy to move with sticks), and piled on sand. Where smoke had wisped before, now steam billowed into the night. The sand was wet. We curled around the little fire as we waited for the sand to dry. And waited. And waited.



Finally the steam seemed to lessen, and some of us braved the heated stretch of sand. We quickly found where rock poked through, and piled on more sand. And waited again for the sand to steam off. When we finally lay down, the Big Dipper had revolved quite a way around Polaris, and all were very ready to sleep. Still, the heat and steam came up. We could only lie for so long before the heat became unbearable, and we'd have to move.

Eventually some of us slept, steam or no. The rest lay by the smaller fire, alternately tending and napping, and keeping mostly warm through the frosty night.

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.

Kitchen Wisdom

We began the session with the usual wander for cougar sign. None found, as far as we could tell. We tracked eachother, the returning winter birds, the warm pools of Indian Summer sun, and the new wild radish sprouts that follow the early rain.

Back at camp, we met Matt Berry and his collection of pots made from wild-harvested clay. We were going to do the same, to have some communal kitchenware appropriate to our rustic open-fire setting. We began by digging the clay from the ground just twenty feet from our fire, and mixed it with sand (grog).



We mixed the clay by foot and by hand.



The pots were big communal affairs, with some people pinch-pot molding the pointed bottoms, some people rolling "snakes" to make coils, and some people building up the coils into pots. All were absorbed in the work, even the junior contingent. We grudgingly set asid our creations when dinnertime rolled around, to be finished at a later date.

A highlight from the next day was Matt's wild foods walk. All plant uses listed here are my off-the-top-of-my-head recollections. If you're looking to use wild plants, take one of Matt's or another experienced instructor's classes yourself, and start studying some reputable books. One not listed at that link, that might be a good starting point, is the Peterson guide to Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants. Learn what'll kill you before (or at the same time as) learning what'll nourish you.



One of the first and most nutritious gifts of the season that we encountered were new green Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) sprouting by the creek. These are even edible raw if you roll the leaf so that the hairs (on the underside) face in.



Cow Parsnip (Heracleum maximum) is a common, moisture-loving native. The skin can have phytotoxins that can cause severe sunburn, but peeled stalks have been called "Indian celery."



Dock (Rumex crispus) was present as a dry stalk and seedhead, and as fresh young growth at the base of the dead stalk. The seeds are edible and are like miniature buckwheat kernels. Toasting (also known as "parching") or soaking them may utilize the seeds to best effect.



Dock leaves are rediculously high in oxalic acid, but can be boild in a change or two of water to make them more tasty. A relative, Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetosella) makes delicious sour accents in salads. The deep, hardy, woody and yellow root is a traditional and powerful remedy for liver deficiencies and related skin problems.



Radish (Raphanus sativus) was not only springing up as new succulent sprouts. In dry places, the old woody ones still dispersed the peppery seed or stood skeletal and moldering. In some shady spots the plants were in flower (my personal favorite way to eat wild radish is to bite the flowers straight off the plant), while in others the freshly immature, spicy seed pods hung. Still other wet spots had young plants yet to flower. Radish seems to be the master of the microclimate.



Broadleaf Plantain (Plantago major) was in seed near the veggie garden. It's leaves and seeds are edible. It's also good soothing medicine for bee stings. Its cousin, Narrowleaf Plantain (P. lanceolata) is even more medicinal than edible, being very good at drawing out toxins when poulticed on a sting or insect bite.



Beaked Hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta) are not really in season now, having ripened and largely been devoured by squirrels back in mid- to late-summer. But they get a pass because they photographed so nicely.



Manzanita (Arctostaphylos spp.) berries are ending their season, but some bushes still carry the tangy, dry, powdery fruits. Crush lots of the berries in cold or hot water, strain it, and impress your friends with one of the most delicious wild ciders around.



Madrone (Arbutus menziesii) trees have started to drop their bright red berries, shown here with the big, broad, leathery leaves as well. The berries are edible and tasty raw -- I usually just nibble the flesh off the stony core. The tall trees are most noticeable from the forest floor not by their leaves or berries, but by their bark. The big ones have blocky, chunky, craggy bark on the main trunk, papery peeling wine-colored outer bark on the limbs, and sunset-gold inner bark that shines beautifully in the light. They also feel cold to the touch.

Toyons (Heteromeles arbutifolia) also have fruit lately, but I haven't seen it ripe yet. It's a shrub, represented here by it's green oblong berries and smaller toothed leaves. I've never eaten the berries, though multiple friends and teachers have said they're edible. I've heard they're good if wilted over a fire first.



And here we have Bay (Umbellularia californica) nuts, the second biggest mast crop of the season. They're shown here both fresh and roasted. They're inedible raw, and must be roasted to volatilize off some of the more noxious bay oils. Even roasted, they're strong stuff. The nuts have a chocolate-like flavor, are very high in fat, and can be ground up in a mortar and mixed with sugar for a very chocolate-like effect. But this stuff is far more of a digestive and vascular stimulant than is chocolate. Overconsumption has been known to cause effects as diversely unpleasant as trembling muscles, migraine headaches or explosive diarrhea. I've also accidentally absorbed the stimulant through my skin while cooking with the ground-up nuts, giving myself a much higher dose than I'd planned and getting none of the lovely bay flavor to justify my jitters. Though delicious, bay commands respect, patience, and careful self-observation in it's use.





The biggest and most important wild crop is of course acorns. Lots of the oaks near me have already passed their buggy first drop and are in full swing of their mind-bogglingly plentiful second drop. Acorns everywhere! I wish I had more oven racks to dry more acorns on. These here are Valley Oak (Quercus lobata), a low-tannic-acid starchy acorn in the white oak lineage. The jar in the background holds Black Oak (Quercus kelloggii), a high-tannic-acid oily acorn in the red oak lineage. One must of course wash out the tannic acid before eating acorns, as tannin can be toxic in high doses.



Finally, an early crop of Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata)! The young leaves look much more like grass blades or chickweed (Stellaria media) leaves (and taste a lot like chickweed, too) than like the commonly recognized round leaves of the mature plant. Yum!