Chapter Excerpts

  Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks   Excerpts from the California buckeye chapter   “California buckeyes unfurl their soft, many-fingered leaves in late winter and early spring, bringing luminous green cheer to landscapes still clad in somber grays. In May and June they again brighten our hillsides and canyons by transforming into giant flower candelabras, and in fall their seeds—the largest produced by any California native plant—droop like exotic testicular ornaments from bare silvery branches. The seed husks later crack open, allowing glossy brown “bucks’ eyes” to peek out between thick greenish lids. In winter, sculptural trunks adorned with moss and colorful lichens curve skyward while festoons of light green lace lichen dangle from … Read more…

Excerpts from the California newt chapter   Three dead hunters  “In the predawn coolness of a fall day around 1950, a hunter in a campsite somewhere in Oregon’s Coast Range walked to a stream with an empty coffeepot. After scooping up water in the darkness and walking back to camp, he set the pot on the grill, added coffee grounds, and boiled the coffee. As the sky slowly lightened, he poured three cups, handed one to each of his two companions, and saved the third for himself. While sipping their coffee, the men began to notice tingling in their lips and hands. Soon they were vomiting, and within thirty minutes all three hunters were dead. When hikers found them two … Read more…

Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild     Excerpts from the California quail chapter   Whrrrr! In the dimming shadows of dusk a covey of California quail explodes into flight, foiling the dinner plan of a stalking bobcat. The thirty-odd birds fly a dozen feet and land on the low branches of a live oak, murmuring to each other until the cat has wandered off. With heavy bodies and strong legs, quail are designed more for life on the ground than for flight. They rarely fly farther than the nearest tree or shrub when escaping from danger. Hunted for millions of years by hawks, snakes, and mammals—including humans for the last twelve … Read more…

  Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild   Excerpts from the California sister chapter   “The first time I see a California sister butterfly flutter by each spring, my heart flutters a bit too. These are the most colorful of our early spring “flying flowers” and their appearance reassures me that life in the oak woodlands is gliding along much as it has for millennia. It means female butterflies laid their eggs late the previous summer or fall, caterpillars hatched and ate oak leaves, and just before winter the caterpillars built nests to protect themselves from the cold. ” Camouflage, anti-freeze “Sisters lay green eggs singly on the upper edges of the … Read more…

Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild   Excerpts from the coyote chapter   “The first time I slept in my yurt, a cacophony of yips and howls sliced the night, sailing through my open window from a point about twenty stone’s throws away. Twelve years later I still get goose bumps when I hear coyotes. Their crooning carries me back along moonlit trails toward a primal wildness I long to rejoin. I want to sit skin-to-fur with the “song dogs,” muzzle raised, howling to their eerie harmonies. Coyotes are keystone carnivores who keep their local ecosystems healthy by controlling populations of small plant-eating and nest-raiding mammals. They also strengthen populations of deer … Read more…

Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild   Excerpts from the manzanita chapter   “Manzanita first appears in the fossil record about 37 million years ago in central California. About 1.5 million years ago it began diversifying and dispersing to places throughout the West and as far away as Guatemala and Eurasia. Not surprisingly, the central California coast is the world hub of manzanita diversity. With an extraordinary ability to adapt to unusual habitats, the sixty-two-odd Arctostaphylos species come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes, from two-inch-high ground covers to tall shapely trees. Common manzanita and big berry manzanita, the two species discussed here, fit the genus’s popular image of a … Read more…

Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild   Excerpts from the western gray squirrel chapter   When you see swaying branches high in the oak canopy on a windless fall day, prepare to watch heart-stopping acrobatics. A western gray squirrel may be bounding from branch to branch sixty or eighty feet overhead. These daring gymnasts sometimes leap across twenty-foot chasms to land on finger-sized twigs that careen wildly under their weight and occasionally break. Other times the graceful athletes seem to float through the treetops, shining tails undulating like waves behind them. (p. 161) Marvelous multipurpose tails The tails of western gray squirrels serve at least eleven purposes, probably more. When one of … Read more…

Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals among California’s Oaks by Kate Marianchild   Excerpts from the woodrat chapter   “Once upon an epoch, perhaps three million years ago, a storm-swollen stream tugged a log from a section of bank, leaving a mother woodrat and her newborns exposed and shivering with cold. With four babies clinging to her nipples, the mother scuttled away from the stream to the base of a boulder. Using her teeth, she pulled a few dead branches over herself and her infants, warming and hiding them. One baby eventually died of cold and two were eaten by rattlesnakes, but the one who survived imitated her mother and pulled a few sticks over her own babies … Read more…