Two-Heel Drive

A post an book about trees at the Scoutmaster blog inspired me to click over to Calflora.org and see how many trees are native to Santa Clara County. The result: 96 trees and shrubs — more than I would’ve guessed, and I spend a lot of time in the woods.

Stuff I like:

• How the East Bay oaks grow every which way.
• How the bark twists in ancient redwoods.
• How madrones bend across a trail and shed bark.
• The radial pattern of Douglas-fir limbs.

Those are the first that spring to mind. How about the rest of y’all?

The poll on wildlife encounters generated some interesting feedback, such as:

From Gambolin’ Man

A few weeks ago, toward the early evening around 6 pm, I caught a prolonged first-time ever (in the Bay Area) glimpse of a Great Horned Owl flying and the settling to roost for about three minutes on a tree limb, at Briones Reservoir. Luckily, I had my binos handy, to zoom in on this wondrous animal. It was quite a sighting!

Has anyone ever spotted one of these guys in Bay Area Wild before?

Winehiker responds:

gambolin’ man,

I was 9 years old and walking one morning with my 4th-grade class on Cabrillo Avenue in Santa Clara from Bowers Elementary to a concert at Juan Cabrillo Middle School. We all heard a sound coming from a tree lining the edge of Bowers Park and looked up to see a Great Horned Owl - the first owl many of us had ever seen. Fortunately our teacher knew what it was, but in retrospect, its size - and its eyes - made it unmistakable.

I later saw a Great Horned Owl get hit by a jeep on the road out of Canyonlands NP. I knew I couldn’t do much about it, but I stopped anyway, put on some gloves, grabbed some newspaper, and removed it from the roadway. I saw the light fading from its luminous yellow eyes, and it died right there in my arms. I buried it that evening in camp, but I still keep one of its primaries to remind me of that morning in the Utah desert.

ChefLovesBeer shares:

I did have an interesting encounter with a skunk last year. I sleep under a tarp. That means things can crawl under them. I woke up to a skunk chewing on my snack bag.(no bears in the area) It is hard to decide how to scare a skunk away in such a small space. I shooed it out of one side of my tarp. Moments later, it was back in the other side. I had to pack up after it came back three times. Nobody wants to get skunked.

Indeed.

Rest of the comments are here.

(There used to be a poll here asking people which wildlife they’d seen, but I took it down because it seemed to be causing system difficulties. I’m leaving the text intact because the questions generated interesting feedback).

I haven’t seen any bears and wolves (the latter of which I’d just as soon never see, truth be told. Wolves are too much like people).

I have seen one juvenile mountain lion — it had spots and a long tail, and was trotting across Calaveras Road one morning when I used to live up that way.

My favorite coyote encounter happened at Henry Coe State Park. I was hiking back to the park HQ in the rain and came upon a coyote out for a stroll. It did a big shake just like every wet dog does, sending water flying from its fur. I couldn’t have been more than 20 yards away.

My best skunk story didn’t happen to me; it happened to a guy I used to work with. He was walking on the Mercury News’ outdoor exercise path around dusk when he got too close to one without noticing. By the time the word “Skunk” made it to his brain, he’d already been sprayed. Turns out you don’t have to bathe in tomato juice, he says; there are other methods that work without buying gallons of V8 (here’s one that allegedly works).

I also used to work with a woman from Alaska who had no respect whatsoever for bald eagles — there are enough of them in some places up north that they’re considered a nuisance or pest.

Yesterday I missed the biggest news to hit San Jose since this time last year: New falcon chicks have hatched at City Hall. From this morning’s Mercury News:

The wee hours of Tuesday morning marked the first birth of this year’s falcon season at San Jose City Hall. And after that first tenacious hatchling emerged, sometime after 3 a.m., two others eventually followed.

Now, only one pocked egg remains - and it could pop at any moment.

In the meantime, proud peregrine parents Clara and Carlos took turns minding their brood and finding tasty treats (like bloodied pigeon pieces) to drop into their babies’ waiting beaks.

The whole thing is playing out, no surprise, live and up-close on “Falcon Cam,” a streaming feed on San Jose’s Web site that has attracted more than 400,000 hits from around the world. Just as it did last year, the camera’s online forum exploded with joy over the news of the hatchings.

That they hatched on Earth Day, said Evet Loewen, chief deputy city attorney and a forum moderator, only made it more special.

Falcon cam is here | alternate stream here. Still pictures at this Flickr site.

There’s no denying the chicks’ transcendent charm. Our editorial page editor is among those sneaking peaks at the cam to follow their progress.

Here’s what I wrote on June 7, 2007, after the first juvenile falcon fledged.

There’s nothing quite like watching a pair of peregrine falcon parents tend their babies along the translation from helpless fuzzy little chicks that can’t walk for the first few weeks into majestic, broad-winged predators that are a pigeon’s worst nightmare. You see nature videos, but they’re always polished, edited and cleaned up for human consumption. A live nest feed shows nature happening — messy, bumpy, scary, gory, funny. Netflix will never carry a title that good.

A poster at BAHIKER.com wonders if the poison oak is worse this year, and if there’s a product that can prevent the wonderful itchfest that ensues when you brush up against it. It doesn’t bother me all that much so I don’t dwell on it, though I do avoid the shiny leaves-of-three on general principles. I’ve gotten itchy ankles a couple times and that was it.

Others have been less fortunate. Steve Sergeant is fond of telling the story about a poison oak reaction that put one of his Sierra Club backpacking companions in the hospital for several days. Happened to a guy who hadn’t had an outbreak in decades and assumed he was immune. If only. The rash, as I understand it, is an immune-system reaction, and the more you come in contact with poison oak, the worse the reactions get.

The folks who make Technu Extreme, a scrub that removes the oils from poison oak lives, have a nice page of poison oak tips. Their product, designed to be applied after you’ve come in contact with the stuff, gets rave reviews at amazon.com. Notable among the tips: wash your dog when you get home from the woods.

Another excellent page of tips is here — it tells how you’ll know when it’s bad enough to see a doctor. As for prevention:

IvyBlock is an over-the-counter lotion with an ingredient called bentoquatum that can be used to prevent exposure. It produces a clay-like barrier on the skin that protects against the oily resin in poison ivy, oak, and sumac. It must be applied at least 15 minutes before coming in contact with the plant. It should then be applied every 4 hours for continued protection. It should not be used if you already have a rash. And children under 6 should not use it.

Kinda like sunscreen. This guy says it works, but he says you have to bathe as soon as possible and clean all your clothes/gear/etc to get rid of the oils, which you’d do anyway. If your outbreaks are bad enough, though, it might be worth a look.

(Previous poison oak-related blog post here).

The East Bay Regional Parks District is again showing its Web strategy leaves all the other districts in the dirt: It has PDF guides to the wildflowers sprouting in each of the district’s parks, plus an overall guide of all the East Bay blooms. (Whether the taxpayers want their money spent on such a thing is another issue, mind you, but for it’s cool for us hiker types).

Speaking of flowers, the Sunol Regional Wilderness Annual Wildflower Festival is this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. More on the goings-on here.

This is a nifty tool: a map of watersheds of the West. You enter your city name and a map highlights all the areas nearby from which water flows into it. How it works is here.

Link via the Daily Dirt at Backpacker.com

The Wilderness Society has a couple of excellent videos profiling Bureau of Land Management properties. Here’s Part I (which mentions our beloved Lost Coast):

Here’s Part II:

The society’s also urging folks to send Congress a note ahead of next week’s vote (April 9) authorizing guaranteed federal protection of BLM lands. Do your duty.

Those sexy peregrine falcons have been at it again, judging from the webcam high on a ledge of the San Jose City Hall, where the happy couple are warming four eggs (”they look like little red potatoes,” Melissa exclaims) for a mid- to late April hatching. (Here’s an alternate link if the first video feed doesn’t work).

The big news on the falcon front is that Clara has a new paramour dubbed Carlos. Apparently there was a quite a scrap for Clara’s tender affections and Jose, the male lead of last spring’s drama, was sent in search of other female companionship. Carlos might be the baddest bird in three counties but right now he’s doing the ultimate manly duty: keeping the eggs warm while Clara fetches breakfast.

More falcon drama at the Yahoo discussion group devoted to San Jose’s avian stars. Here’s the new guy:

Don’t be discouraged if you see what appears to be a bird sitting there doing nothing. They fidget every few minutes and inevitably offer glimpses of their eggs.

(Say goodbye to productivity at City Hall; not that there ever was any to begin with).

Hat tip to Rick at Hike Half Dome for reminding me to post this.

Sunset magazine’s Fresh Dirt blog has a bunch of pretty pictures and tips for finding flowery goodness.

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District holds multiple guided walks each weekend at their dozens of protected swaths of open space on the Peninsula and in the South Bay. (Click here for a schedule.) I particularly like the 12 miles of trails at Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, where you can spot both woodland flowers like this hound’s tongue (above) and giant trillium (below) and grassland flowers like Clarkia blooming in the open trails along Skyline Road. Of course, for dramatic fields of flowers, it’s hard to compete with Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve; its relatively high altitude means that wildflower season stretches into May there most years.

Long as we’re on the subject, Rebecca at Calipidder.com saw a bunch of pretty ones near Point Reyes last weekend.

A few more links:
bayareawildflowers.com — has PDFs of multiple wildflower varieties (big files, around 9 mb), sorted by flower color, plant family and scientific name.

Bay Nature has another very informative page, with this nugget for South Bay folks:

Santa Clara: Stile Ranch Trail, Santa Teresa County Park

This hillside has been called a “wildflower-covered rock garden” and also boasts great views of the valleys below. A short, zigzagging, uphill trail winds through diverse wildflowers that thrive in serpentine soil, including pink shooting stars, jewelflowers, and spring beauties; yellow sanicles and goldfields; red columbines; blue gilias; and orange poppies.

To get there: Almaden Expwy south to the end, turn right on Harry Rd, left on McKean Rd, and left on Fortini Rd. Park just beyond the intersection of Fortini and San Vicente.

I’ve been meaning to check out Santa Teresa.

And finally: all posts here containing the word “wildflowers”