Fox Pup in the Garage

I know gray foxes live at the Dipper Ranch because they show up on the wildlife cameras and leave me presents on the kitchen stoop. When I return home at night, I slow for the curve in the Dipper driveway where the view opens up to the deep canyon of Peters Creek, and if the moon is up, forested ridges shimmer all the way to Monterey Bay. Sometimes a smudge of motion catches my attention against the glare of the gravel driveway. It's the bushy tail of a gray fox on nightly patrol. Or even a pair of foxes, the smaller one loping behind the first, until they are just at the edge of the headlight illumination where they turn sharp faces to challenge the car to follow their floating tails under the barbwire fence and down a steep hillside.

Annual Birthday Greetings 2016

Two teenage pumas kicking up their heels at a lovely spring day.   

Last night, I had to climb through the tangled branches of a downed oak tree intertwined with poison oak vines to pick up the memory card from this wildlife camera. We tried to go around but there was poison oak everywhere, so finally I said, "I'm going through!"

What a fantastic surprise to find photos of these young pumas. Probably worth the risk of climbing through poison oak. And I hope the Extreme Tecnu poison oak scrub works. I will know tomorrow since it usually takes 48 hours for my body to react to this allergen.

Who Scrapes There?

The first time a bobcat goes by the camera in this time period is November 12 near first light.   

A few days after I posted the Puma Scrapes story, I took a hike with my neighbors. To celebrate each new year, we take a hike across our rural neighborhood, usually from one house to another. On this year's Cuppa Sugar Hike, we found a fresh scrape on a trail at the edge of a wooded area.

"What animal left this mark?" we wondered. Especially since the scrape was unusually shaped, more of a square than a rectangle, and with a long narrow scat at the back.

"No problem," I said, "I've got a wildlife camera mounted just uphill. We'll check which animal went by after the rain five days ago and then we'll know."

Puma Scrapes

Puma delicately poses on huge paws at the Dipper Ranch night of October 4, 2015.   

When I lived in Florida, we called them panthers. I never saw a Florida panther, but in the 1980's, there were only about 30 Florida panthers left and I didn't know much about Puma concolor then. Officially, they are called mountain lions in California, and cougars seems to be the most popular name in other western states. These days, I like to use the word puma because it's short.

Max Allen, a researcher with Santa Cruz Pumas Project at the University of California Santa Cruz, posted an interesting piece called How Pumas Communicate Through Scent Marking on the National Geographic Wild Cats blog. In the 15+ years I've worked outdoors in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I've seen four pumas.  But I've seen lots of puma sign now that I know what to look for: scat, tracks, scrapes, kills and scratching logs.

The Thousand-Watt Smile

Chuck, long-distance runner and trail patrol volunteer, and his partner Chris

Sometimes you meet someone whose physical appearance so closely matches your unconscious image of a personality type that something very odd has to happen for you to be jolted into seeing that person as an individual instead of a stereotype. Same, same, same, BANG, different.

Bioblitz - the wet part

California slender salamander. Tiny but if you look, they are ubiquitous in even the smallest of damp locations. Robert Stebbins found that the total number and perhaps the total biomass of either this slender salamander or another common small salamander, the ensatina, was greater than any other resident vertebrate in a Berkeley redwood forest,  (Stebbins and McGinnis, 2012).   

The bioblitz at Golden Gate National Parks continued through Saturday, March 29 with the official deadline for submitting all observations of plants and animals in the parks at noon. On Saturday, it was raining. Real rain like we actually live on the edge of a giant reservoir of water and arbitrator of weather - the Pacific Ocean. Rain like we haven't seen in two years. Rain that cut the number of attendees at the inventory hike Naiad and I led at Rancho Corral de Tierra from the 30 who signed up to five brave souls.

We led those five brave hikers into the park in the rain, past the fungi, insect, bird and botany teams, and into a forest. Many of the Monterey pines had foam streaming down their trunks in the rain which formed frothy piles at the base of each tree. I've seen this phenomenon before but never with so many trees.

Wolf's Milk - A Bioblitz Preview

Wolf's milk - actually not a fungus or a Hostess pastry - a fact I learned while browsing iNaturalist   

The National Park Service is having a bioblitz at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the San Francisco Bay area on March 28 and 29, 2014. Sponsored by National Geographic, it's gonna be huge. They expect thousands of citizens to join over 300 scientists observing and documenting the plants and animals of Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo Counties at 12 locations of GOGA (the National Park Service's four-letter code for this park).

A bioblitz is an event where animal and plant species are identified in a specific location over a short period of time. The eyes and ears of students and citizens are led by scientists to cover as much area in the park as possible and to confirm identifications. The inventory is useful to understand the park's ecology but it is also a great way for everyone to experience the biological richness of our public lands and the techniques of scientific inventory.

Bad Bad Bushnell Brown

Arrggh, that sinking feeling when I open up my Bushnell HD Trophy trail camera and the date says January 1, 2013. It's not January and it isn't even 2013. Rats, the camera reset itself! I know this means the Bushnell has probably missed some shots and quite possibly has a completely blank memory card.

I check the battery level, the memory card, and every one of the 20 steps in the complicated menu. And I check them again. Everything seems to be working fine, at least right now. One of the batteries is sticking out a little. I tap it. Was it loose or not? I don't know but the rangers are waiting for my advice and I've got a dreadful feeling.

(click Read More to continue but be forewarned there are gory photos of a deer carcass coming up and predator photos)

Zombie Rodent

Mountain beaver (a.k.a. aplodontia) is one of the unusual mammals you get to practice camera trapping on at this workshop in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. It took me several months to realize why this particular camera, Wingscapes Birdcam 2, would occasionally get great close-up nighttime photos with flash but never more than one. Something about the electronics in this model shut the camera down after one or two flash photos. This model is now discontinued. For more info about this unusual burrowing mammal go here and a fellow alumnus has better photos of the zombie rodent here.  

Dr. Chris Wemmer announced his 2014 camera trapping workshop - if you ever wanted to get serious about using trail cameras to understand the mammals on your study site or the back-40 then this five-day adventure is for you. In 2014, it will be July 13-18 at the Sierra Nevada Field Campus in beautiful Yuba Pass, California.

Thinking Backwards: the Landscape

Not much grows on a scree slope
Photo by randomtruth.  

Part 3: are you still with me? Still thinking backwards? This is my favorite part - the landscape state of mind. You are crossing a natural area, hyper-alert but at the same time in a dreamlike trance since you are not task-oriented, just absorbing as much of your surroundings as possible. Collecting images, sounds, and maybe a little scent. As an ecologist, I'm looking for clues on how the pieces fit together. This natural area is not just a list of plants and animals, but a constant flow of energy with any little click being some type of adjustment between the animate and inanimate. Even if I don't recognize these ecological relationships at the moment, my observations might help figure out patterns of the place later.

Every day in our wildlife camera trapping workshop at the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, we ventured into the beautiful montane landscape of Yuba Pass to practice our skills in a new environment. One morning, workshop instructor Dr. Chris Wemmer led the class across the North Yuba River in search of the bushy-tailed woodrat (Neotoma cinerea). But first we had to climb the side of a mountain.

Tracks Upon Tracks

A mountain lion journeys along the old stage coach road.

When Naiad and I returned to the house after our afternoon of tracking at the end of the road, we excitedly checked the memory cards from the wildlife cameras to see what "hits" we got over the last few weeks. Mostly cows, lots of cows. Cattle are irresistibly drawn to the ribbon of an open road.

The trusty old Recon camera, however, had a short series of very interesting photos taken three mornings earlier:

Tracks at the End of the Road

To find a raccoon, be a raccoon 

"We could go to the end of the road," I prompted Naiad, trying to keep her moving and distracted. "This is an old stage coach road. It probably went back to lumber mills and then the Shriner's camp before it became a state park." Now, I explained, the old road ends at a remote location on the Dipper Ranch where a steep ravine has been washing out crossings and culverts for a long time. "Maybe a hundred years!" I claimed to make the dirt road sound exciting.

Weeding at Sunset is like a Prayer

Goodnight Mindego Hill. Goodnight land of San Francisco gartersnakes.
Goodnight slowly diminishing hillsides of purple starthistle.  

The weeds have raised their ugly heads. Italian thistle is starting to blow seeds, milk thistle is fat and purple, and yellow starthistle is bolting. I hope you got many weeds at their seedling and rosette stages (see Thistle Logic for these early strategies). There is still time to capture more weed seed before it ripens and escapes.

Weeding can be hard and weeds can be depressing. We need a coping mechanism. Every few days, I make sure to weed where I can watch the sun set. Recently while admiring a tangerine-blasted horizon, I found myself singing while tossing thistles into an overflowing wheelbarrow. From whence comes such joy? Weeding at sunset is like a prayer.

Stay Calm and Mow

A clear day in April on hills that often burn. View to the west from Walker Ridge, Lake County, California.

It's smokey in the San Francisco Bay area this morning. Smoke is blowing in from wildfires in Napa and Solano Counties.  The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) now has these local wildfires 100% contained but wildfires are also moving in southern California.  With a nearly dry spring and an early increase in fire activity, the state is preparing for increased fire risk for the summer.

Earth Day and Change

This way or that way? As a large mammal, mountain lions have choices on where they can go but they are still blocked by roads and human conversion of natural lands.

Happy Earth Day. I am spending Earth Day moving my office which could be boring but has me thinking about climate change.

Driveway Moment

On a full-moon night,  the moon rises at the same time the sun sets.

Half our world is sky. At least when you are in the country and have a 360-degree view and there are clouds to remind you of that huge volume of space above your head. Or stars, sunsets, moon rises, and sometimes comets. The driveway to the Dipper ranch house is a road that shows up on a US Geological Survey topographic map from the late 1800's whereas none of the other modern day country roads existed then. Other people must have walked, ridden or driven down this road and gazed upwards. Some of them must have come through the gate, around the corner and gasped to see the full moon rise just as I did the other night.

Spring has arrived and it brings the changing of the herpetofauna guard.  The lizards are coming out and bowing to the sun and the amphibians are finishing their aquatic breeding and returning to the dark, damp earth.

The Night Has a Comet and a Lion

Comet PANSTARRS - thanks to sky-aware friends who point out these things.

We saw the Comet PANSTARRS from the Dipper Ranch gate tonight. A herd of five deer were watching too, or perhaps, as someone suggested, the deer were looking to see who was making all that racket. Just sitting in lawn chairs at the gate in the dark with binoculars and cameras. Such a pleasant way to spend a late winter evening. Meanwhile, a mountain lion has showed up several times on a wildlife camera on a remote part of the ranch. Mostly at night.

Extra Toes in the Redwoods

Large tracks on Windy Hill Open Space Preserve
(no longer sure whether these are mountain lion or not, see comments)

The San Francisco Bay Area Tracking Club will be holding their September tracking event at the Dipper Ranch on Sunday, September 9, 2012, 8 - 11 am.  Casual potluck afterwards for those who want to stay longer.  You do not need to be a member of the tracking club to attend this event, just interested in learning. Read on for details.

Coyotes to the Wind

Coyote running in its colorful winter coat

As summer progressed, the coyote pups were showing up less often on the wildlife cameras along The Coyote Brush Highway.  They were growing and probably roaming farther and joining the adult coyotes on hunting trips.  We had started a construction project on the lower end of the Dipper Ranch to remove an old road and repair landslides to improve the water quality of creeks in the Pescadero watershed.  This resulted in construction equipment and contractors driving onto the property several times a day, a big change from the usual traffic-less conditions, and I wondered if this affected the coyotes' behavior.  Furthermore, there had been several trespassing incidents, so I decided to move the wildlife cameras away from the gate.

Predator in the Middle - What Happened

If you saw this on a drive down a quiet country road, what would you think?

Press "Post a Comment" below to share your thoughts.

----------------------------------------------- A Followup: ---------------------------------------------

A few days ago, I invited readers to share their thoughts about the above photo. Responses here and ones I otherwise received speculated this situation was the result of humans persecuting animals, a giant shrike or other predator taking advantage of a barbed wire fence, even witchcraft (see comment section below).  Let me share the specific facts as I heard them, biological facts as I've learned them, and unmask this story of predators.

That is a bobcat carcass hanging on a barbed wire fence.  I did not stage that photo.  It is exactly how I found it.