Yesterday was the day of the big wind as record breaking Santa Ana winds swept across California and hurricane-force gales raged in Utah.

I thought I’d take a day off and head up to Mariposa Grove in Yosemite to see what the wind was like in the Big Trees. I anticipated a great roar as the wind poured through the branches because the wind sounded like a freight train in the pines and oaks on our ridge.

When I arrived at the Lower Grove, there was no wind. Cold air had sunk into the basin overnight and remained at mid-morning. A few patches of old snow lined the parking lot.

I took the Outer Loop Trail, heading north first, quickly warming on the uphill trail. I stopped to shed a layer and stuff it into my daypack. In a couple of miles, I came to the top of the ridge, above the Upper Grove. The ridge drops down to Wawona on the north and the South Fork of the Merced on the east.

That’s where the wind hit. The wind raced down the Merced River canyon from the headwaters up in the snowy mountains by Red Peak Pass. My little thermometer sank from 45 to near freezing, and that didn’t count the windchill.

The Sugar Pines, Incense Cedars, and White Firs caught the wind in their branches and made it sing. After a lunch stop on windy Wawona Point (about 6,800 feet), I dropped down to the Sequoias of the Upper Grove. I searched the tops of the trees for signs of wind and listened for a roar. The smaller top branches moved sedately as if tossed by a spring breeze with hardly a sound. The trees handled the wind easily.



Looking at the massive trunks of the trees, some of which are almost 2,000 years old, I wondered how many windstorms they had endured. Perhaps this wind was nothing to what they felt, say in the fall of 1509 or during the big storm of the winter of 1173.

I followed the Outer Loop Trail on down the south side, where a fire had burned most of the cedars, firs, and pines. The trees were very exposed and the here wind hit them full force. Fir snags creaked in the wind, small branches and needles rained down. Yet here also, the branches of the Sequoias gently swayed. There were signs of recently fallen Sequoia branches--footlong sections of limbs, with needles and cones, but the trees themselves seemed little affected by the wind.

In several sections of the burn, nurseries had sprung up, featuring hundreds of Sequoia seedlings. I stopped to sit on a fallen tree and watch their tiny branches trembling in the wind. Only a few years old, they were just beginning life, and they hadn’t experienced many strong winds. A few of them will survive to maturity. Perhaps this wind will help drive their roots deeper, enabling them to withstand the blasts of the future.

For several weeks a flock of fifty or more band-tailed pigeons have foraged in the oaks along the ridge in the Sierra Nevada where I live. These pigeons are large birds, weighing almost a pound and with a body several inches larger than a common feral pigeon.

It’s comical to watch them try to balance on the slender top branches of the live oaks as the gorge on acorns. They swallow the acorns whole making large bulges in their crops. Then they flap noisily to one of the nearby lodgepole pines to sit while they process the food.

The acorn woodpeckers do not find them comical. A flock of fifty large pigeons consumes a prodigious amount of acorns and the acorn woodpeckers see their winter food supply dwindling. They rally their community to scold them from nearby trees and to fly out at the pigeons, but to no avail. The acorn woodpecker is not small, but at only 3 ounces, has no impact on the pigeons. The band-tails take no notice of them or any other birds.

Except hawks. Cooper’s and Red-tailed hawks live in the area. When a hawk flies by, the pigeons take off in a roar of flapping, circling the ridge in a synchronized formation until they deem the coast is clear.

The band-tails remind me of descriptions of the extinct passenger pigeons of eastern North America that flew over the forests, roosting and nesting in massive flocks that covered thousands of acres.

Like the passenger pigeons, band-tailed pigeons were also hunted for food. Birds of American (1917) records that great flocks ranged along the Pacific coast of North America. Market hunters shipped thousands of birds to Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco as late as the winter of 1911 and 1912.

Judging from the noise and mess the flock of band-tailed pigeons on my ridge produces, the impact of the gigantic flocks of birds of the past must have been tremendous. The ecology of the continent must have altered with their disappearance, just as certainly as the local ecology of this ridge will be affected by the nomadic appearance of this flock.

The little snow stops the plow
The big snow stops the riverboats
(Chinese Proverb Trans. W.S. Merwin)

On Saturday, I woke up several hours before sunrise to watch the Orionids meteor shower. Afraid I would miss the show, I rushed out to the back deck B.C. (before coffee), positioning myself in the hammock so that I could see Orion. Unfortunately, a corner of the house hid half of Orion and after a couple of meteors passed overhead, I realized I needed a better viewpoint.



The south deck can only be accessed through the house, so on the way I started the coffee. Opening the sliding door to the deck, the loud calling of a saw-whet owl greeted me. It was somewhere in the dark, dense foliage of the live oak by the deck. As I listened, I heard another saw-whet owl answer from down by the meadow. Since they seemed to be having such a meaningful dialogue, I decided not to disturb them.

By then the coffee was ready, so I took a steaming mug out to the front porch. The moon was just coming over the mountains, so the night was still very dark. I had a great view of Orion and the meteors flashed overhead. The highest density I saw was four within a few seconds of each other.

Interestingly, right after that display, the owls really started calling, a lively discussion between the saw-whet owls, and down the canyon, a northern pygmy owl hooted in the background. Soon after that, goldfinches began chattering in a live oak, even though first light was still a half-hour away.

Were there connections between the meteors and the owls? I bet they noticed the meteors. I don’t think they miss much of what goes on in their night world. I don’t know whether their increased vocalization was because of the meteors, but it sure seemed like it.

There might have been a connection between the owls and the goldfinches. The call of the pygmy owl probably disturbed their slumber, and the goldfinches chirped cautions to each other to be careful as they took their early morning flights.

One thing I’m sure about was the connection between getting up early and my observations. All that excitement would have gone on as I slept. I would have missed discovering more about the world just outside my door.

About noon we approached Buena Vista Pass, a low gap on the south east shoulder of Buena Vista Peak. The trail cut back around a granite grotto, deep in shadows, with a lone aspen reaching up above the rocks, its bright green leaves fluttering in a gentle breeze.

The snow gradually deepened, almost a foot in drifts along the trail. We could see the white granite crest of Buena Vista Peak shining in the sharp sunlight to the west. Bear tracks came from the west and joined the trail in front of us. Both front and rear paw prints with claws imprinted the snow. The bear was not far ahead. We were following it over the pass.



The snow in the trail was only about 6 inches deep, so the bear was walking its normal gait. It’s hind track was about 8 1/2 inches, not counting claw imprints, making it an average size California Black bear. The bear seemed to be coming from a high rocky area under the peak and heading straight on the trail for Buena Vista Lake in a small cirque under the north face of the peak.

We looked around for possible food sources in that area, but there weren’t many berries in that area. Lodgepole and white pines dominated the forest. Since black bears forage in the day and fall is approaching, we thought the bear might be seeking some high protein foods around the lake.

The bear led us on around the peak to a windy ridge overlooking the high country of the Sierra Nevada. From there the trail switches back to the west side of Buena Vista Lake, but the bear left the trail and headed down through deeper snow to the northwest side.

We stopped for lunch, sitting on granite ledges, looking out on the back of Half Dome, Red Peak and all the way across the range north to Sawtooth Ridge above Twin Lakes.



Later, at the lake, we saw the northwest side of the lake was thick with scrub. Perhaps some of the bushes still had berries, and the bear, while we lunched on the pass, was down enjoying lunch by the lake.

We never saw the bear, but we felt like it was our companion on the trail for a brief time in our fall journey.

An excellent guide for identifying and following animal tracks of all kinds is The Tracker's Field Guide by James C. Lowery.

21 September 2011

A Northern Saw-whet Owl lives around my house. Earlier in the summer, in June and July, I heard it in the Live Oaks on the edge of the little meadow at the bottom of the ridge. Last evening and this morning, it called from the oaks right by the front porch, a steady quick series of barks that some think sounds like a lumber jack’s saw being whetted or sharpened with a file.



Birds of America (1917) edited by Gilbert Pearson and John Burroughs lists an old name for the bird as the Acadian Owl. Acadia is a region of North America extending from Quebec and Nova Scotia down into Maine, hence the “Northern” attached to saw-whet. However, the owl ranges through much of North America, but it doesn’t inhabit the northern parts of Canada or Alaska.

The small, eight-inch owl likes to nest and roost in old woodpecker holes and to dine on mice and other small rodents. We have plenty of woodpecker holes in the trees around our house. The heavy snowstorm at the end of last March left many snags, and the acorn woodpeckers made some new holes this year. Perhaps the owl uses one of their old abandoned holes.

A new book, The Owl and the Woodpecker (2008) by Paul Bannick beautifully portrays in words, photos and sounds the relationships between the two species.

Drawing on his vast experience, Alexander Wetmore, wrote the section on owls in Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America (1965, National Geographic) in a personal, anecdotal style. Look for used copies of it with plastic sound records in a back pocket.

Hearing an owl’s call, draws me into the night world, a world filled with drama and intrigue. It sparks my imagination to recreate that world in my mind. One day I want to try to recreate that world in writing, the way David Rains Wallace did in The Dark Range: A Naturalist’s Night Notebook (1978).

I’m going to listen for the Northern Saw-whet Owl again this evening and tomorrow at first light. I hope he decides to stick around for the winter.