Home of Good Crawly Toys

Evelyn was joyfully holding a darkling beetle (what mealworms grow up to be).  This was 8 years ago and she was four.  Overcome with her enthusiasm she blurted out, "Life is just so much of a good crawly toy!"

Since that day I have tried to instill a respect for living things and encourage the children to see themselves as stewards of nature. But deep down they still think living things are the best crawly toys ever.

On our second day at Lassen I was hot to get to bubbly volcanic sulfurous things. But my friend Judith, newly arrived (with salad!), suggested we walk from our campsite to and around Manzanita Lake. We were awaiting more friends who would want to see the lavaworks, so why not? Manzanita Lake turned out to be a hot spot. Not geothermally, but for good crawly toys.

And it was stunningly scenic.

Yay!  Friends!

The kids adored the ephemeral ecosystems on floating logs below.

And I loved the views.

And then began the parade of wildlife. 

Some things stayed out of our reach.

But not this handful of baby lizards that Evelyn caught.

Or this long garter snake.

We did not try to touch this Douglas squirrel.  He's put on his winter coat and the squirrel equivalent of a hat with a pom pom--his darling ear tufts.

We could probably have touched these very tame foraging deer.
Evelyn snapped these deer photos.

We wondered what they were eating. There wasn't anything green around except pine needles. So when they moved on, we investigated.

Mushrooms!  In this photo you can just make out that the mother deer has a big mushroom cap in her mouth.

I wondered if that meant those mushrooms would be edible for people, but did not try my luck.

Evelyn discovered in our mammal guide that deer aren't the only mammals to eat fungi.  Chipmunks are connoisseurs of truffles.  We wondered if you could train a pet chipmunk as a truffler.  Chipmunks also like forbs the book told us.   What, you ask, are forbs?  The question bothered us throughout our internet-less stay at Lassen.  But you can just click on the word forbs.

Look at the tiny snake head between Evelyn's fingers.  It must have been reptile hatching day at Manzanita Lake.

Ok, which one is cuter, snake or girl?

We watched this dipper playing in the rapids.

See his little head below?

Next up, bubbly volcanic sulfurous things.  And cuddly extremophilic bacteria.

If you already knew what forbs were (or have anything else to say) leave a comment.

From Krummholz to the Pygmy Forest

We began at the sea, on a cliff dotted with seaside daisies. We walked along the cliff, skirting a prairie of sweet vernal grass and velvet grass.  Thence we traveled to Krummholz, called The Goblin Fortress by the wee people.  From Krummholz we climbed the Ecological Staircase to the Pygmy Forest, stuffing ourselves with blue and red huckleberries on the way.

It sounds like a passage from a fantasy novel, but it was the first and longest hike we took.  And the most varied and exciting.  A little over five miles round trip.  The hike begins in Jug Handle State Park.

The Ecological Staircase is a series of 5 terraces uplifted from the sea.  As you climb, each terrace is 100,000 years older than the one before.

We began at the headlands, on the first terrace, or rather, the second, as the first is now being formed just beneath the sea, where the water is lighter and greener.

Just beyond the coastal prairie you find trees twisted and bent by salt winds, giving them a quality known as krummholz, German for bentwood.  Our kids dubbed these trees The Goblin Fortress.  It was the best natural playground I have ever seen.

On the next step of the staircase you find the same Grand firs and Douglas firs growing tall and true.

Or fallen over and hollowed by fire, making an irresistible, if sooty, tunnel.

Greta found this mushroom, with the volva, the remains of the universal veil, still visible at its base.  The volva is evidence that this mushroom is in the Amanita family and may be deadly poisonous.

If there are mushroom experts among my readers, tell us what you know about this mushroom.

The trees also fell between other trees, great for climbing.  See Evelyn leaning against the trunk.

Anyone know what this powdery yellow stuff is?

These are red huckleberries.

And these are our old friends, blue huckleberries.

We picked enough to make huckleberry syrup to drizzle over our breakfast crepes.

The trail rose up through a grove of coastal redwoods and on up again to the pygmy forest.

Evelyn looked like a giant walking among these trees bonsaied by too much water and soil depleted of minerals.

Greta caught a snake on the way down.

But we saw no mammals, not so much as a squirrel, on the Ecological Staircase.

Back to School

Greta kicked off kindergarten with the time honored tradition of losing her first tooth.

I didn't believe that her tooth was really loose so it came as a surprise when my littlest's smile was changed forever.

We're starting our school year in earnest today.  As soon as I am done with this post the bags go in the car and we are off for 2 weeks traveling up the California coast to Oregon and then down to Lassen Volcanic Park.  We're hoping to see some mammals...I hear that the Roosevelt elk will be roaming our campground at Prairie Redwood State Park. 

The Sierra Red Fox, one of North America's rarest mammals, hides itself in Lassen.  In addition to charismatic megafauna we're hoping to see some charismatic microfauna.  Armed with A Field Guide to Bacteria we're hoping to see evidence of stromatolites in Oregon Caves and extremophilic bacteria at Lassen.

So far we are definitely amateur trappers.  We caught a fox squirrel just in time for our class with naturalist Susan Labiste.  Fox squirrels were introduced to California by civil war veterans.

They are now displacing native Western gray squirrels.

With Susan the kids molded tootsie rolls into various kinds of scat.  Blunt edges for cats, twisted end for dogs, tiny rounded hershey's kisses for deer.

Then we went out in our backyard and found more scat there than I ever would have believed.  Fox, raccoon, squirrel, deer.

Last weekend while camping we set up our camera traps and were on the lookout for mammals.  This decomposing deer tempted me to take it home and have a nearly complete skeleton.  But it stank.  Oh boy did it stink.

Our night camera captured a feral cat.

Our live trap caught nothing.  We saw a lot of quail, a cormorant, a kingfisher, woodpeckers, mergansers and lizards.  Mike mused that people like to say that in the time of the dinosaurs, dinosaurs ruled the day and mammals slunk around in the night.  But it is still true.  Aside from us people, you mostly see birds and lizards in the day.  And the mammals come out at night.

This black-tailed deer settled down in our yard for a good day's snooze.  Black-tailed deer were classified as a subspecies of mule deer until recent genetic analysis revealed that they are a separate species.

We'll be back here in two weeks or so, I hope with many photos of mammals.  And bacteria.

Mouse Spanker 3000

California mammals are, by and large, a nocturnal lot. To find out what is lurking in our backyard--and around our campsites--while we sleep we picked up a game camera. These are chiefly used by hunters to find bucks with the big racks. I surfed some hunting forums looking for camera reviews where I enjoyed dot sigs like this: Beer nuts--$1.89. Deer nuts--still under a buck.

In the end I settled on a relatively cheap camera (to test out the idea) with infrared flash (so as not to scare the animals away)--the Moultrie Game Spy I-40 Infrared Flash Game Camera. The night before last Ev and Greta and I walked the deer trail behind the house and set the camera up on a tree facing the trail.

In addition to ourselves, this is what we caught:

Ev suggested hopefully that it might be a feral dog, and suggested we check for a collar--which, as it turns out, is clearly visible.  At least we now have proof that the camera works.

Mammals of California suggested that we construct our own live trap for rodents.  I am quite skeptical about both the safety and efficacy of this trap, but we had fun rigging it up (and naming it).


Today a naturalist is coming to the house to teach us how to best set up our camera, what baits to use, and how to identify various rodent nests.  She'll also talk about the ethics of live traps.

In a few days we'll be camping and setting up our camera at night. This will be at a crowded campground, but with luck it will help us refine our techniques so that we'll be ready when we head up the coast to Jedediah Smith Redwoods later this month.

Lookout

Isn't it funny how a project changes your outlook?

I have a not very secret fear of bears visiting me at night when I am camping.  But as we crawled up the Sierra foothills behind a sluggish RV on the way to Berkeley Tuolumne Camp I could see a silver lining: we'd get to add black bear to the list of California mammals we've seen.

At camp I sat on the shady deck of our cabin, enjoying the rush of the South Fork of the Tuolumne, and browsed through Mammals of California and A nature guide to Berkeley Tuolumne Camp looking for mammals we might spot. The latter was UCSC alum Phil Coffin's senior project.  We should be so lucky to find such a guide to all the places we go a-mammal-hunting.

With its help we saw the pallid bat and the California myotis.  You see, the Mammals of California book has a handy dichotomous key with which it is simple and pleasant to identify a bat.  Why, first you simply determine whether your bat has one or two pairs of upper incisors.  And then you check whether it has a furred or nude interfemoral membrane.   I don't know about you, but little old rabiesophobic me is not about to check out the number of incisors a bat has even if I could catch one, which actually was pretty likely as one night they were flying all around our heads in clouds.

Woman playing pingpong with cloud of bats around her head:  "Did someone say bats?  Are there bats around here?"  Looks up, screams, clutches head.

Here is my best photo.  Can you make out the incisors?


I'll need to fiddle with my camera or maybe even take a class to improve my night photography.  I was trying to shoot on automatic settings and it wouldn't flash because nothing was in focus.  Darned bats move too fast to focus on.  However, you know what doesn't move fast?  Bat guano!

Under the Hardin Road bridge, as promised in our guide.  How exciting!  There it is again, that way that a project changes your outlook.  As part of a project bat guano=exciting!  After finding the guano we settled down to wait for nightfall.  Well, I settled down.  The kids swung on the rope swing.

The Mammals of California book also suggested we attach cyalume capsules to sleeping bats we might find in caves which would allow us to track their movements after dark.  I wish I could say I had done this. With gloves on.  And a respirator.  Because I do not want to get rabies just because I think it would be a real knee-slapper to watch a bat fly with a glowstick glued to its fur.

But the beloved and practical Nature Guide to Berkeley Tuolumne Camp told us that pallid bats roost under the Hardin street bridge and fly out in the evening to catch insects.

We waited, they flew out.  Check.  The California Myotis, it told us, scoops water from the river.  Stroll out, it says, and watch them after dinner.  Done.

The best tip was this: a ringtail lives in the dining hall and comes out in the evening.  If you are like many people at camp you are saying a ringtail what?  A ringtail lemur?  No, no.  They were once called Ring-tailed cats, but the same folks who took the fish out of starfish took away their cat.  These raccoon cousins are now known simply as ringtails.  Gold miners loved ringtails we are told, because they eat vermin.

Since ringtails are, according to Wikipedia, "nocturnal, solitary, timid, and rarely seen" we expected it to be a challenge to see one.  But the Nature Guide told us, "Some nights in the D-Hall, you may see a shape dart across one of the rafters, and it may even stop and stare at you with huge, curious eyes."  So we began, with great anticipation, to stake out the dining hall in the evenings.

Ok, so this is how we staked out the dining hall.  We would pass through it several times in the evening and look up hopefully.  No luck.  One morning as I made my coffee with my Clever Coffee Dripper (thanks, Moira!)  I overheard people talking about having seen the ringtail the night before.  We realized that we weren't going to catch something that darts along the rafters by passing through from time to time.  We'd have to have a real stakeout.

We entered the dining hall at 9pm.  Here is Evelyn staring up at the rafters.

The rafters, in case you were wondering.

And Clementine, demonstrating that we fueled this stakeout with hot cocoa, hot apple cider and Apples to Apples.

Yes, we set our minds to it this time.  But by 10pm the kids were flopped on the table and moaning, "I'm sooooo tired."  We went to bed.  No ringtail.

The next night was Table Night, aka the camp talent show.  And the night after that would be Bingo Night in the dining hall.  It seemed unlikely that a timid and rarely seen critter would come out on Bingo Night.  I resolved to slip off after the first act (coincidentally my kids' skit) and stake out the D-Hall.

But it turns out that I'm the sort of person who doesn't miss her friend's son's performance on the chance that I might spot a ringtail. 

And wouldn't you know it, after listening to Solomon I even stick around for the staff performance of Stand By Me instead of running straight off to the stakeout.  And Evelyn spots me and says Greta is falling asleep.

I'm about to take her off to bed when I decide to just go by the dining hall.  And I ask the first person I see.  And she says she did see the ringtail.  It was just there not more than three minutes ago.  I slumped onto bench with dejection and self-recrimination.  I could have just skipped the Stand By Me.  I lack the grit required for this project.

Sure, I managed to spot this ground squirrel living up to his new genus name Spermophilus (seed lover). But anyone can see a ground squirrel.   In fact you have to drive them off.  One ate Clementine's deodorant.  And my chocolate stash.

It is going to take persistence and dedication to see a lot of these mammals.  Do we have it?  I missed the ringtail by three minutes and the kids opted not to try at all and stay at Table Night.  Greta is here only because I dragged her here when she wanted to go to bed.

But, I told myself, at least our trip did not pass without some sign of a black bear.  Scat!  Not only did we examine the scat twice but we went back to photograph it later.  Lots of manzanita berries in there and a 

long piece of plastic wrap twisting through and holding the whole thing together.

I cheered myself up a little bit with the memory of the bats and the bear scat and the ground squirrel.   And then I looked up.  To see a ringtail staring down with huge, curious eyes.

Greta was thrilled.  It was the cutest thing ever.  I left her in the hall and ran to the amphitheater for Ev and Clem.  

When I got back the ringtail was hiding in the firewood by the huge stone fireplace.  Everyone gave it a little space and it escaped the firewood stack and streaked to the cup racks near the dishwashing station.  It hid in there, peeping out from time to time.  It was acting cornered, so I moved some trashcans to give it space to slip behind them and up the cupboard that it had descended from.

We all backed up.  But to our surprise it struck out straight across the floor.  It paused at Evelyn's foot and looked up at her.   I thought it might run up her leg.  Then it scampered beneath the tables and benches and squeezed into a bench seat at the far side.  

We decided to leave it alone and retreated.  Table Night had ended and the dining room was flooding with people.  We sat down to talk over the unbearable cuteness of the ringtail and the possibility of owning a pet ringtail.  Clementine decreed that the ringtail had been 100 times better than any of the Table Night acts.  And then he was spotted climbing up the stacks of games in a corner cupboard, over the stereo, and up to the rafters.

He darted along the rafters, and back to his hole.  I got to have my cake and eat it, too.  I got to watch Solomon, sway to Stand By Me, and see the ringtail.  And all my kids got to see it and so did Solomon and his siblings and parents.  Life is good.

Another thrill from camp was Evelyn's first fish.  A 13 inch rainbow trout.  She caught it, she killed it.

Back home she gutted it, she cooked it (with some help), and she ate it.

Clem made the owl that perches in the pic below on the railing above our cabin number.

Greta was seldom without face paint.

I hoped the owl would scare away the squirrels.

It didn't.  They must have heard me vowing to spend less time on the computer when we got back to civilization and decided to help.  Because when I was packing up look what I found.

My laptop power cord chewed into 4 pieces.  I was annoyed at first, but I perked up when I realized I could view it as a sign of mammalian life.

Coming soon:  We have a trail camera.  We plan to set it up in the backyard and see what's there when we are not.