The Suburban Naturalist

Cover via Amazon

I’m reading a great book right now called Crow planet : essential wisdom from the urban wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.  It’s about crows, obviously, but more than that it’s about staying connected to the wild even when you have to live in a less-than-wild place.

Suburban southern California isn’t the wildest place around, but it’s where I live and for better or worse, it’s the habitat I grew up in and am adapted to.  The creatures that share this habitat aren’t as glamorous as the wolves and lions and orangutans that inhabit the “wild” parts of the world but they are just as resourceful and just as determined to survive.

The non-domesticated mammals around here are mostly nocturnal but I have seen them: raccoons, skunks, opossums.  We probably have coyotes in the general area, but not right in my neighborhood — there are too many long lived feral cats living here; they would not live long if this was part of a coyote’s territory.

Birds are much more visible, and we have a good variety within walking distance of my house:

• American Crow
• House Sparrow
• House Finch
• European Starling
• Cattle Egret
• Turkey Vulture
• Bushtit
• Yellow-rumped Warbler
• Northern Mockingbird
• Red-tailed Hawk

Go a little further afield and you will find Black-necked Stilts, Common Ibis, Common Egret, Snowy Egret, Great Blue Heron, Canada Goose, Red-winged Blackbird, Common Grackle, Mallard, Brewer’s Blackbird, Scrub Jay, Anna’s Hummingbird, California Gull, Broad-shouldered Hawk, Golden Eagle, California Quail, Brown Towhee, American Goldfinch, Acorn Woodpecker and many more.  These are just the birds I commonly see from time to time while driving around or walking at the botanic garden.

I do have to wonder: do other people notice these fellow denizens of our scruffy-around-the-edges habitat?  Do they just see a black bird or can they tell the difference between a Crow, a Starling, a Brewer’s Blackbird, and a Grackle?  I hope that they do, but I doubt that many people can.  I feel sorry for them; my world is so much richer and wider and wilder for knowing the names of all these different creatures.

Big Trees, Short Essay

This is a short essay I found while going through the folders on my computer:

Image via Wikipedia

Big Tree.  It seems a rather simplistic name for such an impressive thing, but in the end, it’s the name that fits.  Sequoiadendron giganteum is scientifically precise, but lacks warmth.  It’s too clinical, too much of an artificial designation.  Sequoia is better, but what does a Cherokee have to do with trees that he never saw?  Better if they were  named for a chief or tribe native to California.  Mountain redwood is just wrong.  Although their wood is red, and they are related to the coast redwood, these trees are something else altogether.  They are not trees with red wood or even trees with red wood that grow in the mountains.  What they are is Big.  Bigger than any other living being that has every lived on this planet.  This is what strikes the first time observer, and what brings others back.  These trees are Big.  They are Big Trees.

Standing at the base of the General Sherman Tree, which is, as far as we can tell, the largest single living organism ever to grace our planet, it is not just his size that strikes you.  You notice I said “his” size.  That’s the point.  These trees are individuals, and you have to think of them as such.  Conifers do not have distinct sexes (unlike mulberries and holly, to cite two common examples), so I tend to assign gender tags to Big Trees based on their names or appearance.  General Sherman is a he.  The Three Graces are shes.  It’s a subjective thing, and simply helps to emphasize the individuality of these wonderful trees.

Big Trees are the most Ent-like of all trees.  If you remember your Tolkien, you  know that Ents are giant tree-like creatures, very wise and very long-lived.  Big Trees give the appearance of slumbering Ents.  There is something there, beneath the great layers of bark, the crown of branches so far, far above.

If trees have consciousness, it is of a far slower, dreamier kind than that of animals.  I imagine it to be somewhat like a person or other mammal in a coma, aware but unable to react in more than rudimentary ways.  Do the trees hear out cars, our voices, our footsteps?  Do they feel our hands touching them, or the squirrels as they run up the bark?  We will probably never know, because there is no way to tell.  To test an animal’s sense of hearing, we look for a reaction.  Trees do not react.  They simply accept.

If you don’t believe this, I suggest you go into a grove of Big Trees.  Find a spot away from the crowds (but stay on the trail – Big Tree roots are shallow and fragile.)  Stand or sit or lie down near the Big Tree.  Look at him (or her).  Listen.  Think.  Go up to the tree, if you can, and place your hand on the thick, soft bark.  Push.  Feel the spring in it.  Now look up.  Stop thinking.  Just be there, with the tree.  I think you’ll understand.

Leopard Love

Yesterday I went on a VIP tour of The Living Desert with my sister P, her friend L and L’s daughter T.  L & T had received the tour as a gift from another friend who had purchased it at a fundraiser.  All of us have been the The Living Desert before but it’s been several years since the last time we were out there, so we were all excited about it, especially the behind-the-scenes at the leopard exhibit portion.

The leopards in question are a pair of Amur leopards, a male and female, both around 18 years old.  The Living Desert doesn’t breed leopards, and they got both of these cats after their breeding careers were over (the male is neutered).  We got to go into the Commissioner’s House, which is a private party facility not open to the general public.  One entire wall of the Commissioner’s House is made of plate glass, for a perfect view of the leopard enclosure.

Here is the female leopard giving me a very “I am a cat and you are a pitiful human” look.

Male leopard

And here’s the male looking rather hungry.

Here you can see just how close we were to the cats.  This is T taking photos on the other side of the Commissioner’s House (the glass wall is sort of U shaped).

The leopards were very nonchalant about being watched.  The female stopped to wash her paws right in front of me.

Then she plopped down and washed her face.

Amur leopards are so rare that their coats go for close to $1 million on the black market.  I think it looks much better on this beautiful girl, don’t you?

This move is so typical of a cat.  That paw was just the thickness of the plate glass away from me. I put my hand up against it and our “hands” were about the same size.

It’s a good thing that glass was there, because I don’t think I could have resisted tickling this belly!

Meanwhile, across the enclosure, the male was channeling my cat Billy with this “graceful” pose …

Eventually she dozed off …

And so did he.

These gorgeous cats put on quite a show for us (I felt like one of those obnoxious papparazzi the way I was following the female around) before they settled down for a long winter’s nap.  What a wonderful way to begin our VIP tour of The Living Desert!

 

Related articles

• Amur leopard captured on camera in China for first time since 1949 (telegraph.co.uk)
• Persian Leopard Reappears in Afghanistan (naturalhistorywanderings.com)

Pickles, Pineapples, Alligators and Turtles …

Spring Break is almost over (I have to go back to work tomorrow) and the weather has been uncooperative.  Most of the time, it’s been raining or overcast and cold, and when it hasn’t been, I’ve had various appointments and errands to take care of.  I did get out in the sun on Tuesday, for a trip to the Botanic Gardens at UC Riverside.  The weather was perfect and I got some lovely photos:

No, they’re not alien trees, they’re aloes

You’ve got to love a plant called “little pickles”

Cactus topped with pineapples??

Me and a giant plant

Alligator lizard basking on a rock

Spring-time hill and the Box Spring Mountains

Cool patterns in the mud in the streambed

Rock formation or giant fossilized turtle head? You decide!

Tomorrow: Japanese dancers and drummers!