Branches

Joshua Trees in bloom.

Last week I visited Mojave National Preserve to see if the Joshua Trees there were synchronously blooming as they were reported to be doing in Joshua Tree National Park further south. The Mojave National Preserve has the densest Joshua Tree forest in California. Usually a few plants bloom each year–but not all of them at one time.

But they are this year Almost every Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia) I saw at all elevations and locations were blooming or had bloomed and were producing seed pods. Even small Joshua trees and ones that looked like they were struggling to survive were blooming. Only the trees that looked like they were dying or very immature had failed to bloom.

As if to keep up with the Joshua Trees, all the yuccas were blooming.

Mojave Yucca in bloom.

The Mojave Yuccas (Yucca schidigera) were in full bloom everywhere and the Banana Yuccas (Yucca baccata) were beginning their blooms. It was an amazing sight. In all my years of visiting the desert, I have never seen so many yuccas blooming at one time.

There are many theories as to why the Joshua Trees are all blooming at the same time. Ideas range from sufficient rain at the right time this year to a last ditch effort by the plants to reproduce in the face of drastic climate change. I haven’t heard any scientific ideas about the other yuccas.

I drove to the Mojave Desert through Walker Pass in the southern Sierra Nevada. The Joshua Trees near the pass were also in bloom. However, the Joshua Trees between Barstow and the town of Mojave were not blooming. They and the rest of the desert plants in that area looked very dry.

Banana Yucca beginning to bloom

I am not a scientist, so I have no theories to propose. I enjoyed seeing the yucca blooms and the other plants that had burst into bloom this year. Shrubs of all kinds are particularly beautiful right now. In the Mojave National Preserve, insects had also ‘bloomed’ and flocks of birds noisily foraged through the scrub and yucca.

I’ve learned over the years that I don’t always have to understand the ‘why’ of nature in order to enjoy it. This was one of the times I was willing to simply let myself be impressed.

On April 3, I hiked down Alder Creek to the South Fork of the Merced River. I had wanted to do this hike for years, and I had searched for the trail head sign often as I drove past the creek on Highway 41 in Yosemite National Park. I never saw it.

The sign isn’t visible from the road. When I parked at the narrow pull out by the bear lockers, I found the small rusted metal sign about 30 yards down the steep slope as the narrow footpath descended through a thick carpet of kit-kit-dizze.

The kit-kit-dizze (Chamaebatia foliolosa) is endemic to the Sierra Nevada and it produces a strong scent that makes me feel at home in these California mountains. There are certain things that give me a timeless feeling, a sense of being welcomed as a friend by the earth and kit-kit-dizze is one of those for me.

But not for everyone. My friends laugh when I tell them of my love for kit-kit-dizze. Old miners and settlers called it mountain misery and hated its smell and sticky leaves. The native Miwok people, however, found the plant very useful, using a tea made from the leaves as a medicine.

The Alder Creek Trail drops down through the kit-kit-dizze about three miles to Bishop Creek. In places the kit-kit-dizze is three feet tall and I was glad it was dry. It’s soft, ferny leaves hold rain and dew and I’ve quickly soaked my boots and pants after hiking just a few feet through it in the early morning.

At first the trail follows the bed of the old Wawona to Yosemite Valley road. You can still see the narrow route winding along the side of the mountain. I imagined mule-drawn wagons loaded with supplies and adventurous families lumbering along the rough road, hoping to be in the valley by nightfall. I heard cars racing along the new road, Highway 41, a hundred yards above me. Their passengers would be in the valley in a half hour.

The trail leaves the overgrown old road bed and drops down through the Bishop Creek Ponderosa Pine Research Natural Area. The target study species is the ponderosa pine, and there are some large ponderosa pines there, but the most interesting tree I saw was a hybrid oak. The official Forest Service report mentions hybrids of deciduous black oaks and evergreen live oaks growing in the area. I came across one near the trail.

It is a beautiful, multi-trunked six-foot tall tree. Its leaves, like small black oak leaves, were still bright green, but insect eaten and scarred, so I’m guessing they were last summer’s leaves. The black oaks around the hybrid were bare.

The wildflowers became numerous as I dropped down to the Merced River. In a few weeks there should be a splendid display brought on by the recent rains. I think I’ll return later in the spring.

In many ways, Alder Creek Trail is a forgotten corner of Yosemite. There are no waterfalls or granite domes. It offers a more subtle experience, but reveals its beauty to the one who seeks.

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.