Natural History Journal

Autumn is a beautiful time in California's Great Central Valley: the weather is mild, the winter birds have returned, and the low sun casts a beautiful golden glow over an already golden landscape.  And, ideally, autumn brings the first rain of the season, the first rain we've seen in over six months!  (Still waiting on that rain - hopefully tomorrow it will arrive!) Black-necked Stilts We recently spent a dry, dusty, windy day birding at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, logging over 50 different species and thousands of individual birds.  Thankfully, regardless of rainfall or lack of it, the National Wildlife Refuge system is able to allocate enough water to fill, or at least partially fill, their managed wetlands up and down the Valley.  (This is largely due to the support of waterfowl hunting organizations over the last century or so.)  For when the wetlands fill with water, the birds arrive in droves! Ducks over the wetlands: pintails, s...

Summer is waning and autumn - that glorious season of deliciously rich color before the quiet sleep of winter - is softly approaching. California is a state of gold: golden grasses, golden trees, golden sunlight and, of course, literal gold!  Oftentimes, trees, especially our brilliant autumn star the aspen, steal the show this season.  (I wrote about them  last year , and the year before .)  But of course, the unsung heroes of the fall color pageant are the background characters, those who quietly put on a stunning performance no less brilliant for its subtlety.  I'm talking, of course, about California's wildflowers.   While spring is the traditional glory season for wildflowers across the lower elevations of the state, autumn has its moments of jaw-dropping splendor as well. John Muir called it, "... a most extraordinary outgush of plant-life, at the very driest time of the whole year.  A small unobtrusive plant, Hemizonia virgata, from s...

The rain is falling, the wind is blowing, and on a day like today, I am (for once) content to be indoors.  The storm is doing a number on the autumn leaves, which are fluttering wildly down from trees to lay in thick tapestries of color on the wet earth.  We've had several weeks of glorious color, trees ablaze in crimson and gold, and I have happily followed the progression of autumn from the golden quaking aspens of the high Sierra, through the magical scarlet dogwoods of mid-elevations, all the way down to the mellow-hued riparian willows and riotous colors of introduced ornamental trees which grace neighborhoods of the Central Valley. But now, with Thanksgiving leftovers [hopefully] gone and sodden leaves blanketing the ground to become next year's mulch, it's time to turn our attention to the winter season and all it entails: sparkling snow in the Sierra, mysterious tule fog in the Valley, stalwart conifers and their intricately beautiful cones, resplendent red berrie...

Autumn might just be my favorite season in the Sierra Nevada. Maybe. Gone are summer's long, lazy days of exploring creeks in cutoffs and swimming in mountain lakes. But I'll make the exchange, for golden leaves swirling on the breeze and crunching underfoot, chilly nights with starry skies, cozy flannel shirts and woolly mittens holding warm beverages around the campfire... We spent last weekend on the Eastern side of the Sierra, taking in the sights and reveling in the beauty of the season. And I can safely say, fall is in full swing: now is the time to get out and see the fall colors! California is known as the golden state for the obvious reason: gold was discovered here, triggering a booming gold rush during the mid-to-late 1800's. But I'd like to add a few more of my own reasons for the nickname. In spring, golden carpets of wildflowers spread across hills and valleys in varying hues: California poppies, goldfields, tidytips and their yellow compo...

As temperatures drop and hours of daylight decrease, autumn steals quietly across the Sierra Nevada.  There is no pomp, no great fanfare to accompany the change of seasons, like there is in the east.  Here in the west, the change is more subtle, but perhaps all the sweeter in its humility.  Undoubtedly, the star of the western autumnal show is the Quaking Aspen ( Populus tremuloides ).  All across the mountainous west, stands of delicate aspen trees burst into glorious autumn color: liquid gold and pure sunshiny yellows are most common, but under the right conditions, leaves become brilliant shades of flame orange, salmon pink and even vivid crimson.  Each heart-shaped leaf is attached to the branch by a long, flattened petiole (leaf stem) which allows the leaves to dance and shimmer at the slightest breeze, hence the common name "quaking" and Latin specific epithet "tremuloides." Aspens prefer moist soil and abundant sunlight, and ...