Some notable animal sightings on my jaunt to Dechambeau Ranch and back.
First, I shooed a wee, gray garter snake off E. Mono Lake Drive, for fear of its life (I've seen several squashed around the neighborhood). I actually said "Shoo," and whisked my hand like a brush, to make it slither, which it did.
Then, on the jeep trail at the end of the Drive, I came across a modest-sized gopher snake. Not sure there are any gophers out here, but what do I know--maybe there are gophers that dig sand and pumice, and feast on succulent sagebrush root.
Some call them bull snakes. Take your pick.
Anyway, I crouched down with this 2.5 foot gopher/bull for a few minutes to observe. Not great for training, but hey, it was an easy day, and I was in no hurry. One should always have time to commune with the wildlife. I usually do.
The serpent let me nudge it a few times--I mean literally push a curve into its smooth, scaled side--but it didn't budge. Seemed a bit stiff. It was only when I stood up and loomed again that it wended into the brush, and disappeared like a barber pole turning out of sight. Gopher snakes have a beautiful checkerboard back that kind of plays tricks on the mind if you watch for a long time. I took a few steps to run on, but then decided, nah, I better go after it in the brush. But it was gone, must have slunk down a hole (dug by a gopher?). It felt slightly radical to be looking around for snakes in the sage in my short shorts.
Snakes love pavement, and shadeless roads in general, and so do runners (not the shadeless part), so I've had more than a few encounters with them. All practice for when I finally run across a rattler. I'm betting on this summer. In any case, this won't be my last post about my running relationship with snakes.
Now, a follow up on pinyon jays: Down where the the jeep trail from Mono City dumps onto Cemetery Road at Wilson Creek, I flushed another flock. This time, they rose in a united squawk--and sheesh, there were so many. I tried to count them as they passed a certain point in the sky, but my eyes (and legs) couldn't keep up, and I lost count in the 30s. Actually, I think I counted the 30s twice, accidentally, before I called the exercise off. They were hard to count because they weaved all over, trading places with each other, unlike another more regimented, tight-flying type.
But there were about 50, I estimated. As I learned the other night, their flocks can get as big as 500 birds, and many individuals spend their whole life in the flock they were born into. They nest in a colony, too. I'll have to read more about their society.
And finally, running through Dechambeau Ranch, suddenly there was a great, gray motion by my left shoulder! An owl that I'd roused from a low crux in cottonwood! It took flight without a sound, but I locked one eye with one of its--we were both a bit scared.
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75 min, 10+ mi; Around Dechambeau Ranch from Mono City, evening
Showing posts with label pinyon jays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pinyon jays. Show all posts
Friday, July 9, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Independence Day
A good day, I hope, to declare a new blog?
S and I went to see the fireworks over the Bridgeport Reservoir tonight, parking behind the airport among the throngs of other cars (robust pickups, playing country music). The booms of the display echoed off the rampart-ish Bodie Hills, and the showers of flares and embers, like fireflies from various distances, were spectacular in the darkness over the still-glowing, many-angled horizon of the High Sierra.
Oddly enough, the show reminded me of an eruption I’d seen—caused, actually—earlier in the day, on my run. Adding a few miles on to a nice loop around Conway Ranch, I hit the jeep trail that diverges from E. Mono Lake Drive into the sagebrush along Mono City. It was around 11 am, not spectacularly hot, but with a flat, harsh light.
Suddenly, birds began exploding from the bushes on either side of the sandy road: a couple towhees, a sparrow, a meadowlark, and many pinyon jays—a whole flock. The jays didn’t lift off all at once, but one at a time, as I flushed them from the umbrellas under which they’d perched, one individual to a bush. Each lifted off in flurry of blue and gray feathers with a characteristic nasal call.
I stirred up about twenty jays over two-hundred meters of road, and they burst in every direction, with something like the whistling-thump of a launched firework. Then they all headed north, toward Highway 167, gathering in a flock like blue embers pulled by the wind toward the pinyon pine hillsides.
As their name suggests, they’re pine seed specialists. In fact, they apparently don’t have feathers covering their nostrils, unlike other jays, because they’d get gunked up with pinesap as they reached into a cone. Like other jays, however (notably, the Clark’s nutcracker), they have an incredible spatial memory which gives them the ability to store thousand of seeds and retrieve them, even under the Mono Basin’s occassional drifts of snow.
Pinyon jays are year round residents here, but should the Basin’s crop of pine fail, they would head, in mass, to a more productive, distant region. And that, as the Cornell Lab of O notes, “makes them one of the truly ‘irruptive’”—or patriotic?—“species of North American birds.”
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12 mi, 84 min run; Conway Ranch-Hwy 167 Loop
S and I went to see the fireworks over the Bridgeport Reservoir tonight, parking behind the airport among the throngs of other cars (robust pickups, playing country music). The booms of the display echoed off the rampart-ish Bodie Hills, and the showers of flares and embers, like fireflies from various distances, were spectacular in the darkness over the still-glowing, many-angled horizon of the High Sierra.
Oddly enough, the show reminded me of an eruption I’d seen—caused, actually—earlier in the day, on my run. Adding a few miles on to a nice loop around Conway Ranch, I hit the jeep trail that diverges from E. Mono Lake Drive into the sagebrush along Mono City. It was around 11 am, not spectacularly hot, but with a flat, harsh light.
Suddenly, birds began exploding from the bushes on either side of the sandy road: a couple towhees, a sparrow, a meadowlark, and many pinyon jays—a whole flock. The jays didn’t lift off all at once, but one at a time, as I flushed them from the umbrellas under which they’d perched, one individual to a bush. Each lifted off in flurry of blue and gray feathers with a characteristic nasal call.
I stirred up about twenty jays over two-hundred meters of road, and they burst in every direction, with something like the whistling-thump of a launched firework. Then they all headed north, toward Highway 167, gathering in a flock like blue embers pulled by the wind toward the pinyon pine hillsides.
As their name suggests, they’re pine seed specialists. In fact, they apparently don’t have feathers covering their nostrils, unlike other jays, because they’d get gunked up with pinesap as they reached into a cone. Like other jays, however (notably, the Clark’s nutcracker), they have an incredible spatial memory which gives them the ability to store thousand of seeds and retrieve them, even under the Mono Basin’s occassional drifts of snow.
Pinyon jays are year round residents here, but should the Basin’s crop of pine fail, they would head, in mass, to a more productive, distant region. And that, as the Cornell Lab of O notes, “makes them one of the truly ‘irruptive’”—or patriotic?—“species of North American birds.”
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12 mi, 84 min run; Conway Ranch-Hwy 167 Loop
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