| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Naturalist's Almanac What to look for this Spring April Three thousand miles is a long flight, especially when food supplies are few and far between. So it is no surprise that every spring up to 32,000 migrating black brant eagerly congregate at Humboldt Bay’s rich eelgrass beds. Undisturbed estuarine eelgrass is an increasingly scarce habitat. Before 1958 more than a third of the Pacific Coast’s brant population wintered in California. But with 90 percent of the state’s coastal lagoons developed and human disturbance growing, nearly all of these small geese have been pushed south to wintering grounds around Baja California. A proposed salt evaporation facility at San Ignacio Lagoon now threatens even this resting place. Fortunately, the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge (707) 733-5406 protects a critical feeding ground for migrating brants and provides an ideal opportunity to view this now scarce bird . School groups can participate through the International Black Brant Monitoring Project, http://sd69.bc.ca/~brant/. Just a week after giving birth to up to four young, the female fisher must leave behind her blind and helpless litter for a few days to quickly search for a mate. Sexually receptive for only a couple days and with males few and far between, the odds are stacked against her. As if this weren’t hard enough, a combination of heavy trapping in the 1800s and continued habitat loss due to logging has severely diminished populations of this large weasel relative. Fortunate indeed is the backpacker or hiker who chances to glimpse this rare mammal where it persists in California: remote wildlands of the Trinity Alps and portions of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. May If you’ve eaten the sweet delicacy called hamachi at a sushi restaurant, you’ve probably tried a fish known as California yellowtail. Equally treasured by angling aficionados for their fierce spirit and tremendous strength, the “fork-tailed fighters” follow warm ocean currents north this month out of their Mexican breeding grounds to take up seasonal residence around the Channel Islands. Even though the waters around the islands are rich in food items like anchovies and squid, yellowtails depend on warm ocean temperatures and will remain in the south if the waters off California don’t heat up enough. Silver-bodied with yellow fins and side stripe, these attractive fish can reach 60 pounds or more. Sportfishermen in southern California eagerly await their arrival. Whale-watching expeditions and scuba trips from Santa Barbara and points south also encounter this fish from April into early summer. Companies such as Island Packers (805) 642-1393 run whale-watching and Channel Island trips. After a noisy, social winter in the Central Valley where they gather in the thousands, most sandhill cranes depart for distant breeding grounds in the boreal regions of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. But each year a few pairs can be spotted settling into the sparsely populated northeast corner of California. Here, atop the wide-open Modoc Plateau, these five-foot-tall birds are a beautiful sight as they stride elegantly through head-high meadow grasses. With numbers at only a fraction of historic levels, some sandhill cranes find refuge at Modoc National Wildlife Reserve and Ash Creek Wildlife Area, where they nest in matrices of wet meadows interspersed with emergent marshes. Modoc National Wildlife Reserve (530) 233-3572, supports the largest breeding group left in California. The snows have melted just enough to give hikers access to the lofty range of one of North America’s rarest pines, a tree scarcely known to most Californians. Found around 8,000 feet on the slopes of Mt. Rose and the Warner Mountains, the Washoe pine was discovered in 1938 by an astute survey crew that noted it was slightly different from similar Ponderosa and Jeffrey pines. Recognized by its small seed-bearing cones and dark purple male cones, the Washoe pine begins its reproductive cycle as the snows begin to clear. Newly emerged male cones split and release pollen while female conelets open to receive the free-floating grains.The conelets then close, but the trapped pollen does not fertilize the egg cells until the following April. The small population on Mt. Rose grows mostly along Galena Creek on lateral moraines left by Ice Age glaciers. The Washoe pine’s origin remains an enigma because of its remarkable similarity to Ponderosa and Jeffrey pines. For example, it is unclear whether the Washoe pine is the result of an ancient hybridization of Jeffrey and Ponderosa pines, or whether it is a geographical race of one of the two species. With summer’s brutal heat approaching its crescendo and desert wildflowers long past their flamboyant displays, few people wander to the southeastern desert to witness the quiet exuberance of blossoming California fan palms. But with each palm producing about five million flowers, this is one of the desert’s greatest secret spectacles. Other animals don’t miss out, however, and most of the flowers are decimated by hungry carpenter bees; other insects and birds drink nectar from flowers missed by the bees. California’s only native palm is a relict species that ranged from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Coast ten million years ago. Today it survives in California mainly in small groves along the San Andreas fault, where subterranean waters leak to the surface to form a line of desert oases. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Joshua Tree National Park, and Hidden Palms State Ecological Reserve are some popular sites to view fan palms.
David Lukas is a freelance writer living in Nevada City, California. |