Like many (most?) Californians, I was swept up in the 2023 wildflower superbloom, which followed on the record-setting rain and snowfall we saw in the previous winter. The rain caused disruptions in many areas of California; in my area, I had multiple students whose homes were flooded when the levee along the Pajaro River failed….
Tag: plants
Earthwatch 1: Counting crowberry
This summer we finally got to take a trip that had originally been scheduled for 2020. It was an Earthwatch expedition to Acadia National Park in Maine. It was also the first time I’d traveled outside the Pacific time zone, flown, and taken public transit since the COVID-19 pandemic began. All of those were stressful….
Anniversary
One year ago today a lightning storm settled over the Santa Cruz Mountains and dry lightning ignited a bunch of wildfires. Given the drier-than-normal conditions at the time the fires took off like crazy and eventually merged into one megablaze that CalFire dubbed the CZU Lightning Complex fire. The CZU Lightning Complex fire burned over…
Life is a beach
The first field trip of the semester for my Ecology class is always a jaunt up the coast to Rancho del Oso and Waddell Beach. It’s a great place to start the practice of observing nature, because we can explore the forest in the morning, have lunch, and then wander along the beach in the…
Where the streets have no name
Joshua Tree National Park gained a certain notoriety this past winter, when idiots went there during the federal government shutdown and trashed the place. The vandals chopped down the iconic Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), let their dogs run around unleashed, left litter scattered over the landscape, and carved new roads through the desert. I’d like…
Anza-Borrego
The first new-to-me visit on our spring break road trip was Anza-Borrego State Park in the southern California desert. We arrived late in the day on Monday and had just a brief chance to look around. On Tuesday we got up early and went for a hike, trying to avoid some of the midday heat….
Wildflowers
We’ve had a good strong wet season this year, resulting in another wildflower superbloom. Over spring break we went to southern California to chase the flowers and, while we were at it, visit some places that I’d never been to. Our first stops were at familiar stomping grounds that we’d visited in 2017: Shell Creek…
Pools, plants, and ponds
The other day my students and I lucked out with the weather and managed to get in a full day of exploring a former military base. Fort Ord, on Monterey Bay near the small city of Marina, was an Army base until it was closed in 1994. Since then, most of the land (~14,600 acres)…
Blitzing an old military base
This weekend a subset of my students and I spent a day at the Fort Ord Natural Reserve (FONR) to participate in the 2018 spring Bioblitz. We were supposed to visit FONR for a class field trip in early March to do some vegetation studies, but that trip was rained out. Today’s visit was sort…
More botanical weirdness
In biology, it is often the exceptions to the rules we teach that are the most interesting organisms. For example, every child knows that the sky is blue and the grass is green. With a few leading questions you can get a child to generalize that all plants are green. We all know this, right?…