Snakes and a bobcat

A couple cool wildlife sightings have taken place within the past couple weeks.

A week or two ago, Wesley and Alex were down near the base of campus when they saw a large snake.  Judging by its size (the coloring is hard to discern in the video), I think it's a gopher snake - Pituophis catenifer.  Check it out:

Carlie was down at her internship at Younger Lagoon when she saw this bobcat (Lynx rufus) come near the road.

Random updates

It turns out Sierra is incredible at spotting wildlife. After our romp through Porter Cave, when we were climbing the hill back up to the meadow, Sierra stopped me and exclaimed: "Bobcat!" This Lynx rufus was a beautiful creature, sparing us a sidelong glance but not really seeming to care that we were there at all. We pursued it as quietly as we could, but it crept further and further away from us.

Since I didn't manage to get a picture of the bobcat, here's a picture of one of its favorite foods: a brush rabbit (Sylvilagus bachmani), in the upper quarry.

Sierra also showed me a plum tree at the base of Science Hill, and on one of its branches I saw a lichen which I thought at first was gold-eye, but then I saw that its discs had no lashes.  According to Natural History, Teloschistes exilis is a relatively rare lichen on campus, and looks like gold-eye with no lashes.  I have only seen gold-eye once, so I can't imagine how rare T. exilis must be.

The lichen on Science Hill that I think is Teloschistes exilis.

A gold-eye lichen for comparison.

More old redwoods in Santa Cruz?

As far as I know, there is only one redwood tree on campus that survived the wholesale clear-cutting of yesteryear.  Natural History pinpoints the location of this "old-growth" tree (people commonly use "old-growth" when referring to trees that were here before loggers ravaged the forest, but technically the term refers to forests rather than individual trees; an old-growth forest has characteristics like downed snags, old trees, etc.) near the Porter Provost's house.  Once you see it, it's obvious why the timber barons weren't interested: the tree is gnarled, twisted and short; its crown seems to have died long ago and partially fallen off.  But the hardness of the bark and the impressive width of the tree tell you it's been there a long time.

The tree is hard to climb, and the top doesn't even offer a good view because the much younger surrounding trees have all managed to grow taller - they don't seem to have the mutation that causes twisting, intense burling, and other qualities which seem to limit this old redwood's height.  Several features make this tree interesting, however.

About 15 to 20 feet up are two reiterated trunks.  Reiteration is a phenomenon that causes redwoods (and other trees, too) to sprout an extra trunk on a limb or a part of the trunk that has been damaged. Redwoods can also send up new trunks in response to new openings in the canopy, and I am not sure if damage is a prerequisite in these cases.  Twisted, gnarled redwoods seem to be particularly prone to reiteration, and this one at Porter College is a good example.  Near these two reiterations is a pile of raccoon droppings, and near the dead top of the tree, among the ubiquitous holes full of nuts, is a fire cave where raccoons live.

Moving on.  Pogonip City Park has a whopping four redwoods from before the clear-cutting, according to this entry on the College Eight Core wiki.  Last Fall my friend Jessica showed me one of them, a spectacular specimen near the koi pond.  It is gnarled and twisty (again, probably the reason it was spared the axe) and full of reiterations.  If you don't want to go to the trouble of getting a rope over one of the reiterations, several burls make it possible to climb into the lowest reiteration, and from there the rest of the tree is accessible.  Up toward the top, mosses and lichens start growing in abundance, and the top offers a beautiful view of Santa Cruz, the bay, and Monterey.

The old redwood we found today.

That leaves three old redwoods in Pogonip.  Wesley and I found one of them today, following a map from a book about the city park.  We stumbled down a grassy slope just east of Lower East Field and, after a couple wrong turns, found the tree.  It grows right next to the path and is recovering from what looks like a recent fire.  Almost the whole trunk is charred, and many of the leaves near the top of the tree are dead because the fire destroyed the connection between the roots and the top of the tree.  Redwoods are spectacular fire-resistors, however, and the tree is on the rebound.

Wesley rocking the ascenders.

As expected, it is short and gnarly.  The top has been hollowed out by fire, and at the base of the tree is the stump of what was formerly the tree's second trunk.  This second trunk is lying next to the surviving part of the tree; it looks like it was leaning so far over the path that the city decided to cut it down for safety reasons.  Considering that loggers have already chopped down over 95 percent of the old redwoods, it really doesn't make sense to chop down any more.  This gnarled, burly tree, however, doesn't seem to have much to contribute to the future redwood gene pool.

A woodland cicada at the base of the tree.

The hollowed-out top and an arboreal primate.

From the ground.

The map from the aforementioned book on Pogonip points out one other old redwood nearby that we didn't go to today.  That leaves one ancient individual hiding in the forest.  Where could it be?

Porter Cave

Sierra and I went down into Porter Cave (also called Empire Cave) today looking for some endemic species.  There are several invertebrates that are found nowhere else in the world but in Cave Gulch (the drainage containing Porter Cave), and some have their entire global distribution in Porter Cave.  We managed to find several Empire Cave spiders, endemic to Cave Gulch.  There were a bunch of small ones near the entrance, but a little deeper in Sierra spotted a big guy, and then informed me that there was a massive one behind my head.  Check it out:














Sierra also spotted two members of the ever-cute Ensatina eschscholtzii xanthopica, or yellow-eyed ensatina.

 

  

We saw this beetle in Crown Meadow.  I wonder if it's a rare Ohlone Tiger Beetle.

Crown Meadow

A visit to Crown Meadow today yielded sightings of a woodpecker, some kind of spider, deer scat, a flower I don't know the name of, and lots and lots of rattlesnake grass.  Check it out:

Rainy season salamander

I haven't posted about amphibians yet, so here are two pictures Carlie took with her phone of a yellow-eyed ensatina she found.  We had been searching for hours under logs and rocks in Cave Gulch, above Porter Cave, and had almost given up when Carlie lifted up a log and there this guy was.  Ensatinas are lungless salamanders, which means they breathe through their skin instead of into lungs.

Natural Bridges

No, we're not naive college freshmen.  We know we're getting on the 20.

A fun day at Natural Bridges State Beach, where my friend Carlie and I saw anemones, crabs, sea stars, and of course a lot of birds: seagulls, pelicans, geese, and black oystercatchers.  Stupid Blogger won't let me lay out the pictures in a nice order, but check it out:

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

You can tell by the split on its back that it was
a cicada that discarded its skin.  The
unanswered question is - why in the meadow?
According to Natural History, it uses those
enlarged front pincers to cling to vegetation
as it climbs up the redwood and moves about
in the canopy.

Title says it all!  Best birthday evar at Henry Cowell Redwoods, which is really close to campus.  Henry Cowell is known for its old-growth grove of redwoods (the tallest is about 270 feet), its unusual sandhill habitat (which harbors some young ponderosa pines), and its abundance of both burly, twisty redwoods and albino redwoods--individuals (or root sprouts of existing redwoods--I can't figure it out) which lack pigment and parasite off a host redwood's roots for nutrients since they can't photosynthesize.  Professor Jarmila Pitterman here at UC Santa Cruz has done a bunch of research on them.

Some more updates for those interested in natural history: The other day my friends Wesley, Alex and I caught a snake which Wesley had spotted.  It was little and blue-eyed, and after a look at Natural History we determined it was an aquatic garter snake--although we found it in a grassy meadow instead of in water.

In the same meadow, some friends of mine found the discarded skin of a woodland cicada clinging to a blade of grass--which is odd, because Natural History indicated that the cicadas' entire life cycle consists of spending two years underground sucking on roots, climbing out and up their host redwood's trunk during the spring of their second year, leaving their old skins near the base of the tree, and then finding relative safety in the redwood canopy, where they click their mating call, mate, bear offspring, and then die.  No meadow involved.  It is a puzzlement.

Here are some pictures of all three updates.  Thanks to Alex, Wes and I don't remember who else for the pictures!

Sierra and me with a big redwood tree.

A redwood leaning very far over the path.

A pre-logging redwood.

Mushrooms!

A stand of old redwoods.

So tall.

  

Wes with snakey.

A portrait of snakey the aquatic garter.

Lost cicada thinking "I thought redwoods
were a lot taller."

Ranting on Redwoods

There is nothing like a redwood.  I frequently rant to my friends about redwoods, so I figured anyone who comes across this blog should have to endure the redwood rant as well.

When people say "redwoods," they can mean one of three things.  Most likely they are talking about coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which is the species that grows on campus.  However, the term "redwoods" may also encompass giant sequoias, Sequoiadendron giganteum.  These are currently the most massive (but not the tallest) species on earth and are coast redwoods' closest relatives.  They grow exclusively in select areas of the Sierra Nevadas in California.  Lastly, "redwoods" could refer to dawn redwoods, the only other species in the ancient Sequoioideae subfamily.  Dawn redwoods were once thought to be extinct but have been discovered surviving in a remote valley in China.

The reason I am so fascinated with coast redwoods is not just that they are the tallest tree in the world.  It's not even that they were possibly the most massive species in the world before the biggest ones were felled for logging¹.

Until the late '80s and early '90s, scientists assumed that the redwoods canopy, which lay hundreds of feet above their heads and had never been accessed by humans, was pretty much bare of anything except redwood needles.  But some pioneering work and innovative exploration by some daring scientists led to the discovery that the opposite is true.  In fact, once you start learning about what the top of the redwood forest looks like, the trees seem less like individual plants and more like columns holding up a vast sky world.

Where to start?  In the top half of a giant, 300 plus-foot redwood tree (the tallest known is currently 379.1 feet), a whole forest in its own right can emerge from the tree.  Extra trunks of the main tree grow along massive limbs, while separate trees such as firs and spruces sprout from the redwood limbs as well.  Gardens of ferns, huckleberry bushes, mosses, fungi, and lichens color the canopy and give it the appearance of a hanging jungle.  These all grow from soil mats, layers of rich soil built up from years of accumulating redwood needles and other plants.  Wandering salamanders are the predators of the canopy, and birds, squirrels, and the occasional raccoon share the space.  The diverse plants also sometimes tap their roots into springs, yes, springs in the canopy in areas where wood has rotted around a vein that pulls up water from the redwood's roots.  Caves hollowed out from fire add protection for the tree's inhabitants.  The redwood canopy can grow so complex that, for example, when canopy researcher Steve Sillett brought his fellow scientist (and, later, wife) Marie Antoine into the canopy for the first time, Antoine became lost in the canopy and it was twenty minutes before Sillett found her¹.

In short, redwoods support a shockingly diverse array of species.  The tragedy is that during the logging frenzy of the past couple centuries, more than 95 percent of them were cut down.  Who knows what unique species depended on some of the 95 percent that are no longer here?  Who knows how complex, structurally and biologically, the canopy became?  It will take thousands of years of re-growth the get an inkling.

In the meantime, we can watch in our own backyard what happens at the genesis of a forest of giants.

1. Preston, Richard. The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.