Branches

I stood at the back window of our bedroom. The sun rose over the ridge behind me, the house and trees casting long shadows across the frosty hillside and meadow below. Only the tops of the tallest ponderosa pines were lit in gold. They alone were free of ice.

The house was empty–cold and silent. I hadn’t felt like building a fire or turning on the propane heater when I woke. The cold matched my mood and I wanted to feel it sink into my bones. It had. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my jeans and shivered.

A movement caught my eye and I saw two gray squirrels (Sciurus griseus), plump and fluffed, their tails floating behind them, work their way up to the top branches of a leafless black oak. One followed the other exactly, close, nose-to-tail.

I know those gray squirrels. I had been watching them together since November, foraging around the house for acorns, pinecones and seeds. I had watched them mate, twice, at the base of a live oak.

Western Gray Squirrel

Last summer there had been only one. I watched it enter an old woodpecker hole in a snag at the top of one of the pines. For days the sound of chiseling announced its nest-building work. Then its mate showed up. They have been together ever since, though they’re not inseparable. They often forage along different ground routes, coming back together in the trees.

The experts say gray squirrels are usually solitary except during breeding season, which in our area is December through February. These two seem to be sleeping together in the same nest, but it’s not uncommon for them to have several nesting sites.

These two had been out early, before sunrise. The top of the black oak is about ten feet from the pine. The lead squirrel didn’t pause. It leapt out toward the pine, spreading its legs wide apart and stretching the skin along its flanks. It glided to the trunk of the pine. Its mate used the same technique and they scampered on up the tree to their nest.

The gliding technique they used reminded me of flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus). I had never seen gray squirrels stretch out their legs so far in their leaping. The northern flying squirrels in the Sierra Nevada glide that from tree to tree or tree to ground. However, there is no mistaking a gray squirrel for a flying squirrel. The diminutive flying squirrels are less than half the size of the 22-inch-long gray squirrels and have tiny ears and big eyes.

Northern Flying Squirrel

The flying squirrel is nocturnal, coming out at dusk to feed on insects and spiders. But flying squirrels are not adverse to taking human food when the opportunity presents itself. Cindy and a friend were backpacking in early fall when a flying squirrel glided from a tree onto her friend’s lap as they sat around the fire finishing dinner. I don’t know who was startled more–the humans or the squirrel.

According to the experts, breeding season is about over, and the two gray squirrels will be separating for their solitary lives. I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s famous saying, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of heaven dance between you.” It looked like these two were enjoying their time together, and I’m sure their time apart would be very important for their lives.

For now, though, the two leaping squirrels disappeared together into the top of the ponderosa pine, and I turned away from the window to build up the fire.

I recently skied out of Badger Pass in Yosemite to follow the Ghost Forest Loop. I remembered hiking through the Ghost Forest area on a summer day two decades ago with my family. Thousands of grey lodgepole pines stood dead amid stagnant ponds of dark water. It was an eerie, ghostly sight.

The trees had been killed by needle miner moths. The moths lay their eggs at the base of a packet of pine needles. The quarter-inch long larvae hatch and burrow into the needles. Needle miner moths are present in the forest all the time, but sometimes they have break-out years when infestations result in large stands of dead lodgepole pines.

On my recent trip, though, I found the Ghost Forest had almost disappeared. There were still some dead trees standing, but young vigorous lodgepole pines grew so thick across the area that it looked like a plantation forest. Woodpeckers had drilled holes in the remaining snags, and the calls of chickadees and nuthatches filled the air. Sunlight reflected off the broad open areas of snow. The area should be renamed: Resurrection Forest.

As Verna R. Johnston writes in, “What once appeared to be a catastrophic epidemic has turned out to be a self-healing natural cycle in the red fir-lodgepole pine forests of the Sierra Nevada.”

I tamped down the snow to make a chair and ate lunch looking out on Horizon Ridge. Later, on my way around the rest of the loop, I met a young man on snowshoes. He enthusiastically told me about his first night of solo winter camping. He had built a snow cave and slept soundly through a long night. His words were fresh and excited with a spirit of new adventure. I asked him if he was hiking the Ghost Forest Trail. He looked puzzled. “Ghost Forest? Where’s that?”

I didn’t tell him that he was camped right in the middle of it. The day was bright and beautiful. There were no ghosts of the past to be seen. The young man said he didn’t know where he would go; he was just out exploring. I watched him walk away along the trail through the infant forest. The forest and the young man were alive to the unknown possibilities of the new day.

I enjoy reading nature books organized by days of the year. One of my favorites is A Walk through the Year by Edwin Way Teale. It’s a record of Teale’s experiences of the seasons at Trail Wood, the farm of his book, A Naturalist Buys an old Farm. Trail Wood is located in Connecticut in North America between 41 and 42 degrees north latitude. I have never been there, but through his work, I can experience nature in his world.

I would like to find a book that explores the seasons from a southern hemisphere perspective or an equatorial perspective. Any suggestions?

In his December 14 entry, Teale writes, “For the naturalist who does not depend on people or people-made things for his enjoyment, all kinds of country have their charm. When the out-of-doors seems boring, it is not due to lack of interest inherent in the place, but to a lack of recognition in the beholder. There is no place without its own special attraction to one who looks with understanding and with care.”

Richard F. Fleck finds that special attraction wherever he goes, and he often expresses what he finds in poetry. His book, Canada and Beyond: Poems of Other Lands, has just been published for Kindle. Canada and Beyond is a collection of poems Mr. Fleck wrote from many of the places he has visited: Canada, Ireland, Iceland, England, Italy, Korea, Japan. The poems are written in a variety of forms, but they all create a sense of one specific time and place in nature and reveal the personal interconnection that Mr. Fleck experienced.  

It must be wonderful to look back through years of poems and experience times and places of your life again so richly through the verse you have written. A walk through the year can be in any format. My journal entries are usually in prose with a few little simple drawings. I think this next year I will try to add more poems.

A few days ago I saw my first small owl. I’d been wanting to see one for years–ever since we moved to this house and I heard them. Before that I was only familiar with large owls–great horned owls, barn owls, burrowing owls. The small owls seemed dreamlike, illusory creatures. I thought that the only way I’d see them was if I had someone to help me. I was right, but it wasn’t human help I had. The titmice came to my aid.

I went out to fill the bird feeders on Wednesday morning and the titmice were scolding fiercely from the branches of a white oak and blue oak. Four of them fluttered around from branch to branch. Usually I only see one or two titmice at a time. I assumed a cat must be hiding around the feeder. I checked under the trees where the titmice had gathered, but I didn’t see any animals–no cats, no squirrels. The titmice don’t usually fuss at the gray squirrels anyway.

There were no other birds either–no goldfinches or pine siskins or juncoes or nuthatches or robins–only the feisty titmice. The titmice were fussing in a different way than they usually do. They have a mld fussing voice when they are annoyed at my presence while they are trying to feed. They have another voice for cats. This time their voice was far more intense. They weren’t just bothered or angry. They were in-your-face-mad. I wondered if something might be in the tree.

I checked the trees and there it was, sitting on a horizontal branch of the white oak, an owl so finely colored in browns and whites, so petite, so clean and bright, it could have been a decoration sitting on a bookshelf. It was not much longer than the titmice, but stout and solid looking. A Northern Pygmy Owl sat staring at me, totally ignoring the titmice that danced and dodged around it.

The other small birds had good reason to disappear. The pygmy owl is a formidable hunter, preying on birds twice its six-inch size. It was probably waiting to make a diving attack on a siskin or junco. It calmly considered me with a tough, confident gaze. It was ready to take me on if I gave it any trouble. The titmice were, too. They harried the little owl until it finally flew away. I’m impressed with the courage of the titmice. When all the other birds fled, they stood in the gap and defended their territory.

I’ve heard the titmice fussing a few times since then, but nothing like their voice when  they mobbed the owl. I’m going to pay attention to the titmice. I’m beginning to understand their language. I think they know what they’re talking about.

Yesterday was harvest time at our house on the ridge. The acorn woodpeckers and scrub jays noisily competed for the acorns at the tips of the branches of a large live oak on the side of the house. As soon as they removed an acorn from it’s cap, they flew away to hide it somewhere. The woodpeckers frequently cached them in the telephone pole  fifty yards away or the ponderosa pines in the meadow. The scrub jays were stashing their acorns in the forest east of us. They usually bury them nearby in the ground or tuck them under leaves or between rocks.

Last year, a large flock of at least fifty band-tailed pigeons harvested much of the acorn crop on the ridge, hanging out for weeks, gorging themselves. Their nomadic lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to storing for later use. The acorn woodpeckers mostly use the strategy of central storage locations, although not always wisely chosen. On top of the ridge, the utility company replaced a wooden pole with an aluminum one due to woodpecker damage. A neighbor told me that the woodpeckers have either found or made a hole in the hollow pole and are trying to fill it with acorns. He listens to acorns ping off the sides of the pole as they fall down into it. When we bought our property, the pump house in the meadow had over a foot of acorns in the bottom–dropped through holes the birds had made in the side.

Acorn Woodpecker

Sounds of birds flapping and fighting filled the air yesterday. The woodpeckers fought with each other and the jays. Acorn woodpeckers usually cooperate within their social groups, so I think two groups were vying for the same acorns yesterday. Land to the north was cleared last spring so there are fewer trees. Even with two woodpecker groups and jays hard at work, they didn’t get all the acorns. They dislodged many acorns that plunked onto the roof and bounced to the ground where two grey squirrels rounded them up for their own horde.

After a walk along Lewis Creek, I sat on the front patio reading the mail and listening to the sounds of the birds. As the birds’ squawking crescendoed, a Pacific tree frog croaked vigorously from nearby rocks. In our area, November is mating season for these frogs. Perhaps he was so excited about mating, that he mistook the noisy birds for frogs, or maybe he was just adding his voice to the sounds of a beautiful fall day.

It was a bright early October day when I topped the Sierra Nevada crest and dropped down into Kerrick Meadow in Yosemite National Park. I entered at the head of the meadow and planned to spend a couple of days working my way down its long sloping grassland, exploring what there was to see. I love the high meadows in fall, when the grass is golden, and the slow streams trickle and pool along. It’s a quiet time for the birds and insects, too–not many of them left at this elevation, 9500 feet. The nights were freezing hard.

I expected to see what Yosemite is famous for–the alpine meadow, granite domes, towering trees, glowing light, wide, clear skies packed with stars at night. And I did see these, but Kerrick meadow surprised me with something unusual for Yosemite–sand dunes.

The large dune in Kerrick Meadow, Yosemite, California

I was looking for a place to camp and had wandered off the trail, since backpackers are required to pitch their tents at least a hundred feet from the trail and from water. I rounded a small forested hill that extends into the meadow and saw them–sand dunes, the largest I judged to be about ten feet high. The big one has the classic crescent shape with the steep incline to the north and the long slope to the south. The shoulders curve softly around to cradle a small lagoon-like pond, very shallow at this time in a dry year.

The dunes seem to be formed in the typical way. Wind laden with sand from the lower meadow meets the forested hill and, rising, drops its burden to the ground where the sand is sculpted by more wind and more sand. Long ago, Kerrick Meadow was probably a lake where sand eroded from the surrounding mountains settled, for it is a very sandy meadow.

The dunes don’t have a name, but the meadow was named after James D. Kerrick who kept sheep there during the summers around 1880. There are no sheep there now of course.

I left the dunes to make camp, but I returned at sunset to sit and watch the evening. I was all alone–the quiet day descending into a silent night. The dunes glowed white, like they were releasing some of the sun they had absorbed during the day. Suddenly, one lone duck flew swiftly in from the north. It landed in the lagoon and began squawking loudly, paddling in circles. Settling down, it tucked itself into the reeds, disappearing into the shadows.

On a recent trip to northern California, I drove through the Cascade Range on Highway 97. I stopped at a rest stop along the “shores” of Grass Lake. In the early 1900’s the area in the photograph below was covered with water, a lake. People vacationed on its shores at a popular 32-room resort.

There isn’t a resort there now. There is no lake either. In an attempt to expand, developers used dynamite. The explosion opened a crack in the lake bed and all the water drained out, leaving the resort high and dry. A highway rest stop and historic marker are there to remind visitors of the truth of unintended consequences.

Grass Lake, Northern California

The signs also remind the visitor of another side of that truth. Although the flora and fauna that needed the lake died, or left the area, other plants and animals now thrive in the grasslands that turn into wetlands in a rainy winter. It wasn’t rainy that day. California is in a major drought and Grass Lake is parched.

Hours later I drove through the California Central Valley, which used to be, as late as the mid 1900’s, a vast network of grass lakes, hosting millions of water birds. Mile after mile, I drove past suburban houses and strip mall stores–many of which stand empty. The recession is not over here.

I didn’t see any waterfowl, but I did see a few hawks, red-tails, working their way south along the traditional migration route they have used for centuries. They sat on telephone poles and billboards watching for ground squirrels and rats.

Charles Darwin, in his autobiography, says that in his younger days he loved art and music and poetry, but after years of labor in his life’s work he lost the ability to appreciate  those things, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness…”

Monday, rain fell on our ridge, the first in six months. Yesterday I walked out in the meadow at the bottom of the ridge to check the pump house. I saw the native bunch grass has already started to green and wiry dry aster stems have blossomed with small purple flowers. It made me so happy, I ran back up the hill.