Connected Pools

I was glad to see on last Friday's visit to Mt. Tam that the Cataract Creek drainage was no longer just a collection of small, still pools separated by long expanses of dry cobble. As I poked around to try to find new locations for a couple of my trail cameras I noticed that the leaves of several kinds of creekside plants that deer like to eat were heavily browsed. Judging by the un-munched sword ferns shown in the picture above, they don't care to eat it, and indeed sword ferns are listed by this nursery as deer resistant plants.

According to the University of Washingon Botanic Gardens, “Sword fern (Polystichum munitum) growing in the wild is seldom browsed by herbivorous animals because the rough foliage is fairly repellent. That specific epithet 'munitum' in the scientific name means 'armed.' You may have seen information about Native Americans roasting the rhizomes and eating them, but this was a famine food resorted to when other resources were scarce.”

I guess it's possible that deer might also eventually resort to eating these ferns in tough times. On a related note, I was also thinking about my trail cam footage showing raccoons commonly foraging in the same dispersed creekbed pools and wondering how that sustained hunting pressure was affecting the life of whatever small animals live in those pools and hide beneath their rocks. I would think those pools would eventually be hunted out, but thanks to the recent rains, the pools are being replenished and re-connected by a continuous flow of life-bringing water.

There's a popular notion of nature being in balance and harmony, and all that. But it's only in balance and harmony until it isn't, and then the famine comes. Many years ago my sister asked me, because I'd been working for an environmental organization for a few years, what I thought the biggest environmental threat was -- whether air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, habitat destruction, soil loss, industrial fishing and whaling, microplastics and oceanic garbage patches, nuclear waste, illicit trade in rare plants and wildlife, and so on. All of which are grave threats, to be sure, but what trumps them all is climate change.

I recalled a geography class where I learned that Ukraine was Russia's "bread basket." I told my sister that our own bread baskets, here in the United States and around the world, are dependent on a particular climate. They became our bread baskets during a particular regime of temperature, season, and precipitation patterns, and putting that regime at risk could be disastrous in a way that First World people with fresh water on demand and abundant food in every supermarket can't really imagine.

Adaptation isn't always easy either. Even if suitable growing temperatures and rainfall moved north out of a future dried-up mid-western bread basket (not to mention California's fruit and vegetable basket) and the permafrost thawed, melted tundra will not provide the abundant, rich soils required to feed a nation of 327 million Americans (and counting).

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Sacred Geometry

The bark that needs no introduction. 

I first heard of madrone in a botany class at Santa Barbara City College, where Arbutus menziesii was spoken of with the kind of reverence reserved for exotic treasure. Even both parts of the Latin name are fun to say: Ar-byoo-tus and men-zeezy-eye. (I can imagine "B-Yootus" or "Zeezy-eye" being good names for a rapper.) 

Madrone was exotic treasure from my vantage point in Santa Barbara. Its southern limit is on Mt. Palomar in San Diego County, but I don't recall seeing them in Santa Barbara (although a range map does show them there), and I associated madrone with mysterious Northern California which I looked forward to exploring someday. Now I live within a block or two of ornamental madrones called strawberry trees (Arbutus unedo) and see Pacific madrones any weekend on Mt. Tamalpais, but their special aura remains.

I like how moss tries to colonize the bark of madrone, but can only get so far before the bark peels off in curls. Right now the exposed trunk is a smooth golden brown, but I've seen it become a beautiful shade of green in the summer. I also associate madrone berries with a favorite bird, the band-tailed pigeon (the beautiful wild cousins of smaller urban pigeons), which my recent trail cams frequently caught bathing, and which I first noticed years ago when I spooked a large flock out of the canopy of a madrone on Mt. Tam where they'd been feeding on its dense clusters of bright red berries.

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The Moss Abides

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Recent rains have brought the moss back into furry exuberance. Here it cloaks a canyon live oak, or maul oak (Quercus chrysolepis), on the little hill near Sunset Point (which I almost invariably visit around sunrise). According to the Forest Service, "The hard dense wood is shock resistant and was formerly used for wood-splitting mauls. It is an excellent fuel wood and makes attractive paneling. Canyon live oak is also a handsome landscape tree."

The same web site says the tree can live for 300 years. If so, the oldest canyon live oak recorded on Monumental Trees, which was planted at the State Capitol Museum Park in about 1870, is only middle-aged at 150 years. This one on Mt. Tam has a companion of similarly impressive size, both of which have endured on this very exposed and windy ridge.

Countless bits of acorn rubble were scattered over the ground beneath the two oaks, the remnants of nuts foraged by deer, turkeys, squirrels, acorn woodpeckers, steller's jays, jackrabbits, raccoons, gray fox, and coyotes. And, I suspect, many had simply been squashed beneath human shoes, as this is a popular location with an adjacent parking lot. 

I recently found a discarded or forgotten bridal veil here, remnant of someone's photo shoot, strewn in the tall grass. How long beyond the Instagram moment will the bride's marriage last? Maybe less than five years. The median age at first marriage for women in California is 25.3; the median age for first divorce is 29. Like The Dude (who recently turned 70), the moss and the oaks abide.