After breakfast Sunday, I did the dishes (did them about four million times this weekend, no dish can loiter as it's ant season), did a couple of other tasks and then booted up and started on my morning walk. Got up the hill to the neighbor's gate, then back down past the site of the bones of a long-deceased horse, followed the top of Deer Ridge and dropped down past Altar Rock, then home as I was running out of water and getting hungry. Directly after lunch, I didn't feel "done" so I went back out and did a full loop around the Northwest Territory including a swing down to the river.


Early(ish) August nature report: the manzanitas are producing a good crop of berries and the coyotes are eating them, judging by the red pebbly nature of the coyote poop around. (Yeah I know sorry, but you can't help noticing.) Was able to confirm an identification of the White-belted Ringtail dragonfly as two of them held still long enough and allowed me close enough to really observe. Saw a kestrel, a red-shouldered hawk and three wood ducks. About every two hundred yards or so, I would cause another ground squirrel alarm call - a sharp chip chirrupupup. The ground squirrel population is robust as usual.

I wanted to see if the turpentine weed was growing this year, so was careful to take a look in the area where it's grown in the past and it's doing well. It's an interesting plant - not much to look at but it smells strongly like turpentine. While I was looking at those, I noticed a white something or other on a tarweed plant and went over to take a look.

The white was an egg sac of a good-sized very green spider. She was really guarding that sac - as soon as I bent over to take a look, she wrapped her legs round it and made sure it was secure. Post-walk research shows that she is a Green Lynx spider, Peucetia viridans, a fairly common spider in the southern half of the US. Evidently they are very good at pouncing on their prey, hence the "lynx" name. It was quite windy so I'm surprised any of these photos came out at all - here's a record shot of this little ol' gal:


I got back from that walk around 3, about an hour later Dino proposed that we go take another swim in the river, which sounded like a good idea. We ended up not swimming much; we found it more interesting to watch the fish. We got into one of the deeper pools (not very deep, maybe waist high to me, but if you squat a bit, you're all in). The water was clear enough for us to see the fish checking us out - there seem to be two kinds. One is some sort of split-tail minnow, although which species we haven't figured out. The other we haven't come close to identifying yet at all - these had a long dorsal fin, all fins with white edges, tail fin with an additional brownish stripe, and a dark spot behind the gills. While there at the river, we saw a large yellow and black butterfly, a speedy flier which we've identified in the past but couldn't remember. Didn't get around to looking that one up yet; it may be marked in the butterfly book. The other interesting find were several stands of pennyroyal.


I had a very difficult time yesterday morning getting myself in the proper frame of mind for going to work. I felt very wistful and found myself wishing that I could just wander around every day looking at interesting critters and plants and taking pictures.

HIgh Summer Wildlife Report

It must be high season for bringing babies out because as I was getting ready to leave for work this morning, there under the big seed feeder were three hen turkeys and about a dozen juveniles. I watched them for several minutes but then it came time for me to leave so I greeted the mamas (Good Morrrrning Ladies!) while they hustled the little ones back down toward the spring.

And, I saw a bobkitten on the way home day before yesterday. He or she scooted across the road just above the ford and below the second gate and ran down the creek bed toward the waterfall area. This probably explains why I've been having so many bobcat sightings recently - I suspect that I've been seeing the mama bobcat hunting for her babies/baby. The area I saw the kitten is riddled with ground squirrel burrows, and at the moment there are vast quantities of ground squirrel babies, which are undoubtedly viewed as perfect hunting practice.

Photo has no relation to the topic, it's one I've been waiting to work on because I wanted to try the HDR feature of the latest version of Photoshop, which upgrade arrived on my doorstep this week. 

The Thanksgiving Bear (Only a Little Delayed)

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, on one of my walks, I hadn't gone more than a quarter mile from, when I saw these tracks in the road. Bear! Oooh, excitement! I scurried back to the house for my camera and also hubby so he could see them too.

The tracks were visible for a good way down the road, and then it looked like the bear headed down the hill toward the river.

The only bears in California are black bears, as the last grizzly was killed nearly a century ago. Bear hunting season ends on December 28 this year, or earlier if it's determined that 1700 bears have been killed. I wasn't going to post about this until after the season's ended because we are in favor of bears and there are a few of our neighbors that might take it into their heads to get a bearskin rug. Since I ran into one of said neighbors yesterday on my walk and they'd also seen the tracks, I guess it doesn't matter now. I did some researching and found out that since 1980, the California Department of Fish and Game has recorded only 12 bear attack incidents, and in fact they put "bear attack" in quotation marks on their web site. One of the descriptions of the attacks reads: "Mono County, April 1996 – A man received a bite on the buttocks from a young bear. Further details are not known." I wonder if alcohol was involved in this one, ha ha.

We do make doubly sure that our garage door is closed at night, as that is where the bird seed is kept and we don't want to encourage mooching.

We got a little rain Friday night, but didn't get any additional yesterday in spite of wishful thinking. What we have gotten has done wonders for the grass and the fungi though. We're seeing what probably amounts to dozens of different species of mushrooms from tiny round white ones to humongous things a foot across. There are some that are about a half inch long at most sticking up out of the crack of a split log, looking ver much like little orange fingers - very weird.

Into the Vortex

Just as fair warning again to the arachnophobes, there are spiders in this journal post. It's just that this web was so amazing and the photo of the spider herself came out well and so I'm afraid I just have to share.

Our long bird walk was, as usual, a great one. We saw 18 different species of birds, and we're starting to notice that some of our old standbys for summer don't seem to be around any more. Season's starting to change I guess, and that means we get to look forward to some of our winter favorites showing up in the next several weeks. Yay!

We took the road to the red gate to check the mailbox, which had nothing for us. When we got to the river, we stood on the bridge looking down into the pools underneath and watched the fish swimming around. There's not much water left in the river this time of year so all the fish are concentrated in these pools. We haven't been able to identify the exact species of these, but they are some kind of large minnow - the bigger ones can get up to about 18 inches or so.

We crossed the river and continued on the road, following the path of the river headed upstream, stopping to watch for ducks and hoping to catch a glimpse of the great blue heron that we see from time to time. No luck on the heron, but we did scare up 24 mallards and a lone wood duck. (We think, we do need to hone our skills at identifying ducks in flight.) We also saw two separate coyotes; the second one shot us a dirty look as she took off running. I guess we woke her up from her midday snooze. We finally re-crossed the river and found our summer picnic rock which is shaded and had our lunch, for which we were by then famished.

And so, for spider talk. We see a lot of these spider webs - these particular spiders (family agelenidae, although we've given up on identifying species) build funnel shaped webs which are quite interesting, but yesterday we saw the mother of all funnel webs. The web was at least three feet across at its largest - a very impressive web. The Dinosaur took this shot of the web, which was the best of the shots we both attempted. The second shot is the spider herself, waiting in her lair. Reminds me of Shelob from Lord of the Rings, except this little old gal is only about an inch and a half across.

Here she is:

The Woman Who Talks to Pigs

The last two weeks have provided some interesting moments in terms of wildlife encounters. The Sunday before last, for fun and exercise, I hauled myself up to the top of a pretty good hill, and as I'm resting, catching my breath and starting to get out my water jug, I heard loud rustling in the underbrush about 75 feet in front of me. Cool, I think, deer, maybe I'll see them as they bound away. No bounding, more and louder rustling, from at least two places. Oh, it's cows. See a glimpse of medium-sized (not large cow-sized) critter, darkish. Starting to question why I'm there now, and then hear the grunting and squealing. "Oh goodness gracious, my heavens", I think, "wild pigs!" (Sure, believe that language.) Fear winning out, I slowly and deliberately started walking right on back down that hill, keeping an ear out and glancing behind me to make sure they weren't deciding that I was getting on their nerves.

Saturday last, I got to feeling antsy and took off on a walk. I headed back up the same hill where I saw the wild pigs last week, thinking surely they would have moved on. They weren't at the top of that hill, and since I was a little bored with my route, instead of going straight back down the hill, I thought I could do a little cross country to the next hill over and walk up that one. Meanwhile, I knew of a good spring on the way where I might see some good birds so I headed for that. As I made my approach, and got up to about 50 feet away from the spring, I'll be darned if I didn't hear that same scary squealing that I did the week before. This time I saw the pig plain as day - it didn't like me much and took off downhill through the creek bed. I waited for my heart to stop pounding and caught my breath and pondered whether I wanted to continue with my plan or again make a retreat. I have to say that I had a feeling that there wasn't just the solitary pig, but I wasn't hearing or seeing any more. So I called out, "Hey is it safe to go down there? Are there any more pigs?" Instant boilup of pigs - maybe 8 or 9, all coming up out of the spring area. One of them started running in the wrong direction, i.e. toward me, so I waved it off - shoo shoo pig! What else could I do? Anyway, that tactic worked and they all went one way and I went the other.


I always thought that wild pigs were wily and wary and it was hard to get close to them. It isn't as if my approach is subtle - I just tromp along in my boots, rustling dry leaves and snapping branches, surely you would think they could hear me. I'm sure if I had had ill intent, they would be a million miles away. And yeeps, two weeks in a row!

I did continue my walk which only had one more eventful moment when I woke up a snoozy bobcat who had been taking a siesta under an oak tree.

When I got back from that excitement I had my lunch and watched several minutes of hijinks a la acorn woodpecker on the bird bath. There were three or four of them tussling and I grabbed the camera and got this shot.



More wildlife doings: some weeks ago, the Dinosaur found an empty Western Pond Turtle shell and brought it back to the house as a point of interest. Evidently, he put some saddle soap on it in the hopes of preserving the turtle leather. Lo and behold, waiting for us this weekend: evidence of coyote tampering. Guess they don't like soap.

Nobody Can Prove that We Started This Fire with the Flames of Our Love

We celebrated our wedding anniversary by taking a leisurely walk to the spring where Lion Creek comes into Dryad Ranch. We spent quite a lot of time watching birds come down to drink and escape temporarily the heat of our 111 degree afternoon. Their bills were all open in the way birds do when it gets hot - evidently it helps them cool off. In addition to the usual acorn woodpecker and oak titmouse sightings, we were able to enjoy spotting another new addition to the ranch list - a wrentit! These birds have an unusual looking eye - yellow with a black center. And yes, they do look like like a wren and also like a tit! There were several juvenile ash-throated flycatchers there as well as a Bewick's wren family, making our luncheon stop ever so enjoyable. After our stop at the spring, we headed down to the river and during portion of our walk, the clouds gathered, the thunder roared and I'll be darned if rain didn't start rearranging some of the dust, sort of.

After getting back to the house and cleaning up, we headed to Mariposa for a lovely dinner, including a gooey and sinful dessert, and on the way home stopped to watch firefighters working this brushfire, which was started by a lightning strike during the aforementioned thunderstorm. We spoke to some other folks who were also watching the fire and assuming everything stays under control, no one's home seemed to be in danger. And we were reassured that it was traveling away from Dryad Ranch.

Our final interesting discovery of the day came as we were stopped to open one of the gates coming into the ranch and saw this Common Kingsnake. Good thing we didn't squish it with the car! It was a fine looking guy or gal and a good 4 feet long.

Wrentit photo in the public domain US Fish and Wildlife Service

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Our nature walk yesterday was awesome as ever - we certainly saw a variety. And as my title implies, lots of natural nature. We saw a dead skunk in one of the little creeks - there wasn't much left of the body of it, but we could tell what it was from the head and the bit of tail left, and (sorry this is going to be kind of icky) a coyote had taken a big poop right in the middle of the whole thing. What the heck, the coyotes poop on everything interesting. You'll be thrilled to know that I did not take a picture of this mess.

While we were walking to our picnic rock by the river, my husband started to step over a rock, yelped and backed up fast. I knew what that meant - rattler! Usually they don't come out of hibernation till May timeframe, but it was warm yesterday, so I guess this one wanted some rays. It didn't buzz and was quite calm and let me take a snap. And isn't it cute nestled in among the spring wildflowers?

As long as I'm on the subject of various "undesirables", the scorpions are busy too. I found one on the hallway floor last night just outside the pantry. The ones we get around here are tiny, but pretty basically revolting anyway. I tried to get that little number onto a piece of paper to escort outside, but it scurried under the pantry door and it's lurking in there somewhere. They get in between the plates in the cupboards too, I always am re-washing because ewww. (Apologizing to scorpions, I'm sure they have their place in the grand scheme of things.)

And then, while we were watching a little white-breasted nuthatch foraging on an oak tree, a kestrel flies into the same tree, trying to catch that very nuthatch. Only about 8 feet away from us! It didn't succeed, possibly having been distracted by humans it wasn't expecting. We like the kestrels and all, but we like nuthatches too!

And last, we found a hatched wild turkey egg. Gooooooo turkeys!

Old Journal from the Ranch

I found this snippet from an old journal – I didn’t keep the rest of that journal but did keep this page from what appears to be a couple of years after we bought the place. I won’t embarrass myself by posting the drawing I refer to, and I promise to talk about Chaps the horse-fellow again. (Below a picture of me with Chaps - in this picture he is very interested in my sketch book.)

There is a rock at the edge of the meadow below the house that is shaped like a short fat rodent. I have made a drawing of this rock and go back from time to time to see if it still looks like an animal. So far it has and I am grateful because it means that I can draw it again from another angle the next time I visit. In the lee of that same rock are plants that I have watched grow through the seasons of a couple of years. One is a plant that blooms in the late spring with a long square stalk and a series of small red blossoms hanging along the sides of the stem. Now, in January, the leaves are a dark glossy green and deeply serrated. Last year’s dead stalk is still there, surprisingly, I suppose there had not been enough hard rainfall to knock it down.

The other plant we call a wild cucumber. It is vine-like, turning in the branches of another shrub and from it in the summer will hang spiky green fruits the size of my fist. This plant has not pushed it self up yet, but I can see wispy pieces of last year’s vine and two or three deflated carcasses of the old fruits. I wonder if the fruit is edible.

I love to watch the horses graze, the sound of their teeth snipping at the short grasses is hypnotic. They don’t seem to mind me watching them, but they know me by now, and ignore me, mostly, unless they think I may have a special treat for them. One day recently, I sat on an old oak stump to watch them and enjoy the day. I heard leaves rustling in the little wash below us and from behind the trees stepped a yearling mule deer. He walked past me slowly not twenty feet from the stump, so I watched him too. He made his way past and up the hill behind me and I was glad that I was still enough that he didn’t fear me.

My favorite horse is Chaps, a gray Appaloosa. He is short and strong and square and gives me kisses that I maintain are only partially due to the carrot treats I give him. He is not a towering intellect but is smart enough, I guess, for a horse.

The Horses

At the moment, we do not ourselves own horses. Instead, we open our gates to the horses who live on the next ranch up the hill. Our neighbors, actually relatives – aunt and cousin, and her husband - have their winter ranch here, and operate a guest ranch in the High Sierra during the summer. They have something around forty horses just now, many of them having been born on their ranch. The most recent addition is Marie, a yearling buckskin filly. The horses stay here most weeks of the year, but during the summer are trailered to the mountains.

During the time the horses are at the winter ranch, they are left free to graze across 800 acres of ranch land, including our 128 acres. At the end of summer after they return from the Sierra, they receive supplemental hay feeding as there is very little forage after the hot and dry summers.

And of course, we have been known to offer the occasional carrot treat when one of the horse groups comes to visit. We enjoy greatly seeing the horses graze as we look out our kitchen window and watch them arrayed across the meadow at the bottom of Ant Hill, where the grass seems to be especially sweet and tasty.

When we move to the ranch full time, we will get our own horses, a prospect we both happily anticipate. For now, we are having fun enjoying our occasional visitors without the feed or vet bills!

Western Fence Lizard

Although there are other types of lizards that share Dryad Ranch with us, the most common is the Western Fence Lizard. We believe the particular subspecies here is the San Joaquin Fence Lizard, Sceloporus occidentalis biseriatus. The males of this species have blue underbellies, while their topsides are typically of light gray to black blotched coloration. Evidently they can change their coloration allowing them to blend nicely with whatever they are choosing to sun themselves on at the moment. They are typically six inches long from head to tail-tip.

The fellow in this picture was observed catching some rays on top of some rocks while we were out and about yesterday. You can just see a little of his blue underside.

These lizards like to sit on top of rocks and fence posts to warm up as well as to keep an eye out for prey. They eat spiders, beetles, flies, caterpillars and various other insects. They are inactive during cold weather and hibernate during the winter. We started seeing lizards this year in late February.

One interesting feature of fence lizards is that their blood contains some factor that destroys the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Evidently, if a larval tick feeds on a Western Fence Lizard, the spirochetes carrying the Lyme disease are destroyed. It’s nice to think that our little scaly friends may also be keeping us protected from this unpleasant disease! Here's a link to an article from the San Francisco Chronicle giving additional information about the connection between Fence Lizards and Lyme Disease: Link

Nature Walks - It's Harder Downhill

It is very typical for us to take a long walk to see what we can see when we come to the ranch - yesterday's walk was excellent, although I must admit I'm tired today - a couple of body parts are talking that didn't have anything much to say before! But that's because we walked pretty much straight uphill till we came to a nice spot for lunch. And then, we looked around some and came back downhill. I think downhill is worse, especially on the knees! The joys of being 50-ish! We had our picnic on a mostly flat place overlooking Lion Creek, so named because evidently the mountain lions like it. There are mountain lions around here, and although I have never seen one, my husband has, and he has heard them as well as seen other signs of their presence. I think I'd like to see a mountain lion, but only from a safe distance, you know?

We saw the golden eagle again and a new bird for us, a red-naped sapsucker. they are uncommon around here but we had a good long look and were able to compare the bird to the book while the bird was still in front of us. So that was neat! We did debate quite a lot about the bird, but all the signs were there. There are a lot of species of woodpecker here: acorn woodpecker (of which there are vast quantities), Lewis, downy, hairy, Northern Flicker and the occasional Nuttall's, but it was apparent immediately upon spotting it, that this was a different bird.

It's also great fun to watch all the Anna's hummingbirds at our feeders - not sure how many we have just now but I've seen 7 at a time hovering around a feeder, with more waiting in the wings for their turns. And we can also watch the house finch couple building a nest in a little lantern that we have hung up under the eaves of the front porch. There were finches there last year too, and they had two broods. Right now they are in the process of bringing in fresh nesting material although it's so packed in there right now I can't imagine there's still room for anything. But who am I to say, not being a house finch myself.

Walking with Eagles

Our walk last Saturday was probably the best ever. We started out thinking we would just go look for Sierra Newts in the creek as we did last week, and then walk along the river as we usually do. We ended up running into the owner of the property where the newts live and getting permissions to walk wherever we wanted so instead we took off up the hill and spent the next six hours exploring. We saw a golden eagle and watched it for some time while it soared and hunted. And of course we saw lots of other birds, and definitely we can tell that spring is coming because it's a different set of species as our winter visitors head out and our summer residents are starting to move back in.

Some of our favorites are now in evidence again, including a Lark Sparrow who spends a lot of time in our front yard. He is an absolute terrorist when it comes to eating grasshoppers, which are evidently yummy if you're a sparrow. We also saw a score or more of white-throated swifts which we had never seen before around here - they were eating some sort of insect on the wing, and it was quite fun to watch them.

We gained about 800 feet of elevation on our walk, getting up to 2100 or so. The view from the top of the ridge looking down into the valley toward our ranch house and the Chowchilla River was unbelievable - so beautiful! The river was just shining with the sun on it - it reminded me of that Paul Simon song, "The Mississippi delta was shining like a National guitar." Breathtaking, not that our little river is as grand as the Mississippi, of course.