We spent our second night on the coast in Morro Bay and came home via Highway 25. I would have enjoyed a drive up the coast, but given the road closures in Big Sur that wasn’t a possibility. Highway 25, however, proved to be a very pretty drive. It was nice to see wildflowers closer to home, too.
Almost all of the hills sported bright yellow patches, some denser than others. At first I thought they were goldfields, but as we got closer I could see that the color was too bright and lemony to be goldfields, and the plants proved to be wild mustard (Sinapis arvensis). Mustard is widely considered a weed in California. Its native habitat is the Mediterranean basin, and one hypothesis is that it arrived in California with the Franciscan friars who established missions up and down the state. Mustard is one of the first plants to bloom every spring, and it covers hillsides, agriculture fields, and the side of the road.
For the first time in several years the oak trees appear to be flourishing this spring. There was a lot of rain this past rainy season, and it’s such a relief to see the trees coming back to life. I’d forgotten what it is like to see so much green in a California landscape. I mean, just look!
Unfortunately for us, most of the land through which Highway 25 winds is private owned, which means we couldn’t just wander off on some back road to get closer to the wildflowers. We did happen upon some lupines which were growing conveniently along the side of the road. These were the big purple bush-type lupines. They were not growing in any kind of park or protected area, so I tossed a couple of sprigs into the plant press.
By this time the light was fading as the sun began to set behind the western hills, so we headed home. I made it through three days of riding in the car without having a panic attack, which is much better than my concussed brain could have managed a few months ago. All in all it was a great trip, made even better because we got to spend some time with friends and family. These superblooms don’t occur every year, and I’m very glad that I was able to see some of this one.
If you’re considering making a trip to see the wildflowers in the desert areas of southern California, stop thinking about it and just go! If you can spare even a single night away, you will see some awesome displays of Nature’s majesty. And it won’t last much longer, so go now. Don’t worry so much about actual destinations; just keep your eyes open for blooms wherever you can see them and be prepared to travel off the beaten path, because the flowers could be anywhere.
Day 2 (24 March 2017): Tehachapi, Antelope Valley, and Wind Wolves
We spent the night in Bakersfield and the next morning (24 March 2017) headed up over Tehachapi Pass and headed into Antelope Valley.
It had been many years since I’d driven over Tehachapi Pass, and I didn’t remember ever having seen Joshua trees before. Maybe I was always sleeping on that part of the trip. Once we got past the windmills at the top of the pass–most definitely Not Good for my concussed brain–and started descending into the valley there were Joshua trees all over the place! So cool! And with this year being the 30th anniversary of U2’s best (in my opinion) album, how appropriate.
To my admittedly inexperienced eye, Joshua trees are the symbols of the Mojave Desert, as the saguaro is the symbol of the Sonoran Desert. None of the Joshua trees that we saw at Tehachapi were blooming, although I heard from a friend that they were in bloom slightly farther south at Lancaster.
Continuing on, we drove through the desert scrubbiness and eventually could see orange splashed onto the distant hills. We stopped to pick up sandwiches at a corner market and then headed towards the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. And bang! all of a sudden we were in the poppy fields.
California’s state flower grows as either a perennial or an annual, depending on how much water it receives. In desert areas in the south it behaves like an annual, whereas in moister areas along the coast and in gardens it can come back as a perennial. There are several subspecies of E. californica, each adapted to a particular habitat within the state. Blossom color varies from a golden yellow (very similar to that of fiddlenecks, actually) to a deep intense orange.
Our intent was to stop at the visitor center of the park and pick up a trail map, but we never got there. We arrived at early mid-day on a Friday, when everybody from Los Angeles showed up, and the line of cars trying to get into the park was backed up almost to the road. Um, no thanks. Besides, we saw all these poppies from the road, and could find places sort of off the beaten track with fewer people tromping around with selfie sticks than would be inside the actual park. Now I’m not one to discourage people from visiting our state parks, but if you decide to go here, try to arrive earlier in the morning on a midweek day. And time your visit for a sunny day, when the poppies will be open.
And looking up towards the hills we saw pastel paintings. The orange flowers are poppies, I’m guessing that the yellow is goldfields, and the purple is lupines.
And in terms of lupines, Antelope Valley was the best place we visited. When we made plans to come here I had grandiose ideas of capturing that perfect iconic photograph of purple lupines and orange poppies together. You know the one. Unfortunately I think we arrive a week or two early to catch the peak of the lupine bloom. I never did see nice full lush poppies and blooming lupines in the same spot.
We did, however, see several nice lupine bushes in the various washes around the poppy reserve. Honeybees were glad to see them, too.
As glorious as the poppies were, we needed to keep moving in order to meet up with friends on the coast. Working our way westward we stopped at the Wind Wolves Preserve, an ecological reserve managed by the Wildlands Conservancy. I had never heard of the place and wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was a lovely surprise.
There are, of course, no wolves in this part of California. So then, why the name? According to a sign at the head of the wildflower trail, the name refers to the Preserve’s long grasses, which undulate like running animals when the wind blows through them. I wasn’t carrying the tripod with me so I didn’t try to take any video. However, on our way from Antelope Valley we stopped at Tejon Pass, where the wind was blowing pretty well. I took this video there.
It does look like one of those aerial views of a herd of galloping ungulates, doesn’t it? Perhaps not wind wolves, exactly, but at the Preserve it was easy to imagine how the place got its name. The wildflower walk, a bit less than a mile long, winds through rolling hills covered with grasses and dotted here and there with flowers. There were several small groups of people hiking the trail, and it wasn’t uncommon to have them disappear completely from the landscape when they got lost in the grasses as the trail dipped into a small depression.
No doubt the resemblance to running wolves will be stronger when the grasses are a bit taller.
We were perhaps two weeks ahead of the bloom and most of the flowers were just starting to open up. The overall effect was a cool wash of green dotted here and there with bright splashes of color. There were lupines, of a smaller ground-growing type rather than the bush lupines we had seen in Antelope Valley, and a plant that we had first seen a lot of on the Carrizo Plain, another whimsically named flower called purple owl’s clover (Castilleja exserta). As its scientific name implies, owl’s clover is a member of the paintbrush family of plants.
We had already seen many familiar and not-so-familiar birds on the trip, and it was at Wind Wolves that I saw my first ever horned lark (Eremophila alpestris). This individual wasn’t very shy at all; it let us approach within 2 meters on the trail before running off ahead to wait for us again. It had such expressive postures, and a curious look on its face. If there hadn’t been a family with small kids behind us on the trail, I could have watched this bird for a long time. But we couldn’t block the trail just because there was an interesting (to us) bird standing in it, so we let the family pass and the lark flew off into the grasses. They are social birds so no doubt it had friends and family of its own to join.
We saw lizards, too, most notably the western side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana ssp. elegans). These lizards have very interesting gender expression, depending on color morph: there are three male morphs (orange-throat, yellow-stripe, and blue-throat) and two female morphs (orange-throat and yellow-throat). Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The female morphs differ in egg-laying strategy. Orange-throat females lay many small eggs and defend territories, while yellow-throat females lay fewer larger eggs and are less territorial.
Work by Barry Sinervo’s group at UC Santa Cruz showed that the three male color morphs also have different reproductive strategies. They are locked in an evolutionary game of rock-paper-scissors: each color can dominate one (but not both) of the other colors. Note that in this context ‘dominate’ doesn’t necessarily mean that one lizard beats up the other, but rather has greater reproductive success than the other. Orange-throats are the most typically testosterone-driven males; they are more aggressive towards other males and control territories containing several females. Yellow-stripe “sneaker” males hang around the edges of an orange-throated male’s territory and sneak copulations with females while the territory holder’s attention is elsewhere. Blue-throats have an intermediate level of aggression; they can defend a single female from other blue-throats and yellow-stripes, but not against an orange-throat. In a nutshell:
Day 1 (Thursday 23 March 2017) cont’d.: Carrizo Plain National Monument
The Carrizo Plain is an enclosed grassy plain in the southernmost “toe” of San Luis Obispo County, lying between the Temblor Range to the northeast and the Caliente Range to the southwest. Its average elevation is about 700 meters (2200 feet). The main geological features of the plain are a seasonal lake that receives water from both mountain ranges, and the San Andreas Fault, which runs along the northeast edge of the plain up against the aptly named Temblor Range.
Topo map of the Carrizo Plain
For most of the year the Carrizo Plain is hot, dry, and dusty. For a few weeks in the spring, especially if a decent amount of winter rain has fallen, the Plain explodes with color. As in most of the state the dominant color of the flowers is yellow, and the goldfields (Lasthenia californica) grow in huge swaths. Although it is always fun to focus on individual flowers, which I will do later, at the Carrizo Plain the focus is on the landscape.
Soda Lake Road bisects the Carrizo Plain and passes through so many stunning vistas that it is hard to decide where to look. The eye travels from the side of the road, across Soda Lake, and up against the Temblor Range hills and sees amazing splotches of color. It’s quite a spectacular display of natural beauty. Well, there’s also the humongous solar farm at the northwest corner of the lake, but let’s pretend we don’t see it, shall we?
And now let’s get up close and personal with some of the flowers. As mentioned above the goldfields were very common. I did not see any tidy tips on the Plain, although of course that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. One of the most abundant flowers on the Plain is fiddleneck (Amsinckia menziesii), which was just beginning to bloom.
In a couple of weeks the inflorescences will be longer and curled into the shape that gives them their common name, and the overall color of the landscape will shift from the brighter yellow of goldfields to a softer golden shade. Wherever the fiddlenecks occur they are extremely abundant. According to what I’ve read about this plant, later in the season its seeds will be a major food source for seed-eating birds such as finches and sparrows. I don’t remember seeing any finches when we were there, but we did see several white-crowned sparrows flitting about on the tops of the sagebrush.
Fortunately for the retinas of human visitors, the flowers were not all yellow. Along Shell Creek Road and at the Carrizo Plain there were two types of blue or purple flowers. The bluer of the two, baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii) occurred both in small patches on the flats and in big carpets on the hillsides. The bluish patch in the photo of fiddlenecks on the hills (up the page a bit) are all baby blue eyes.
The Great Valley phacelia (Phacelia ciliata) is a delicate, periwinkle-colored flower that contrasts beautifully with the golden orange of fiddlenecks. We saw it scattered here and there, and while it wasn’t uncommon it never seemed to occur in large patches in the Soda Lake area.
Continuing along past Soda Lake we passed hillsides covered with brilliant yellow and purple flowers. In this area of the Carrizo Plain the phacelia did form larger patches, although they were still not as dense as either the fiddlenecks or the goldfields.
That’s one of the truisms of life in a Mediterranean climate such as ours. The official water year as measured by NOAA runs from 1 October through 30 September, and along the central/northern California coast most of the rain falls from December through March. The rest of the year, April through the summer and most of the fall, is the long dry season.
Plants that have evolved to live in Mediterranean climates respond quickly to water when it is available. For many annual plants, this means rapid growth in the spring when the soil begins to warm up and the days are getting longer, followed by a burst of flowering as the plants complete their life cycles. Once the rain stops falling there is no water except what is stored in the ground, out of reach for most shallow-rooted plants. The annuals take advantage of the short window between the end of the heaviest rains and the onset of yearly drought to bloom and have sex (i.e., set seed). From 2011-2015 there was moderate to severe drought through most of the state and spring wildflower blooms were anemic and less-than-spectacular. In April 2016, after the El Niño rains of the previous season, some friends and I went down to southern California to check out the bloom. We had made a day trip of it, and it was a very long day that didn’t allow for much meandering or poking around. This year we had read from several sources that the heavy winter/early spring rains followed by sunshine would result in a very strong superbloom and managed to squeeze in a 3-day trip, which allowed us to visit more places and change our plans at the last minute if we heard about something interesting to see.
Day 1 (Thursday 23 March 2017): Shell Creek Road
Shell Creek road is the little road that runs north-south from the hamlet of Shandon to the northwest corner of the Carrizo Plain. The roadbed runs along a little creek that meanders through rolling hills dotted with oak trees. It is really pretty when covered with grasses and wildflowers in the spring, although it will be hot, dusty, and brown for half the year. This is where we caught our first glimpses of the superbloom in action.
The dominant color of the landscape is yellow. A quick thumb-through of any western wildflowers field guide will confirm this. We do have a plethora of yellow flowers in California. In fact, one of the hypothesized reasons California is referred to as “the golden state” is the flood of yellow that carpets hills and valleys in the springtime. The other hypothesis I’ve heard is that “golden” refers to the color of the hills during the long dry season. Both of these seem feasible to me.
So who’s responsible for all this yellow?
The main culprit is the aptly named goldfields (Lasthenia californica). They are very common members of the daisy family, the Asteraceae, and are found in most regions of the state except at higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
Another goldfield look-alike is a flower with the strange common name of Bigelow’s tickseed. Its real name is Leptosyne bigelovii. It’s a California endemic, found only in the southern half of the state. I looked at a lot of photos, mine and others’, trying to learn how to distinguish between the tickseed and goldfields, and hope I have it right.
See the differences in flower morphology? I’ve got samples of each species (I hope!) drying in the plant press, and should be able either to confirm or refute my identifications once I can take a look at them. It’s always a good idea to calibrate my intuition whenever I can.
A third yellow flower, which occurs throughout the coastal mountains but we saw only at Shell Creek Road, is the delightfully named coastal tidy tips (Layia platyglossa). This is the kind of common name that makes me smile. You’ll see why.
Perhaps the tidy tips form large dense patches more readily at other locations, but this year we saw them mostly interspersed among the goldfields. They are conspicuous enough that I think I would have noticed them if I’d seen them last year. From a macro perspective the white petal tips lend a more creamy yellow color to the landscape, compared to the unrelenting blinding yellow of the goldfields. I had never seen them before, and there’s something about those white tips that just tickles my fancy. How could I not be enchanted?
As lovely as it was, Shell Creek Road was only the first location we wanted to visit that day. Our ultimate destination was the Carrizo Plain National Monument, in southeastern San Luis Obispo County. More about that shortly.
Yesterday I joined some friends on an impromptu day trip to southern California to see the spring wildflower bloom. The El Niño rains had brought forth a “superbloom” this year, and while we didn’t have time to go all the way to Death Valley we thought we’d be able to see lots of flowers in closer locations.
It was interesting to note that we saw poppies only on the south-facing slopes. Wanting to get a closer look we continued on our way.
Stop #2: Cerro Noreste/Hudson Ranch Road above the Maricopa Flats
We stopped briefly in Gorman and got our first close-up look at wildflowers. I got to see my beloved California poppies (Eschscholzia californica), but they were not nearly as abundant as I had hoped.
The flowers in Gorman weren’t as spectacular as we had hoped, and in the interest of expediency we didn’t take much time to explore a site that didn’t look promising. We crossed I-5 and headed west through Frazier Park and onto the Mil Potrero Highway, which at some point becomes the Cerro Noreste/Hudson Ranch Road. And along this road we saw purple and yellow/orange flowers.
I took some close-up shots of the purple flowers, hoping to be able to identify them when I got home. They’re very pretty! And I was able to determine that they are Phacelia ciliata. They were by far the most abundant blue or purple flowers we saw yesterday.
Wanting to check out conditions on the Carrizo Plain, we headed northwest on Soda Lake Road. Our first views of wildflowers on the hills looked like they were part of a pastel painting.
On the Carrizo Plain itself, the most abundant flowers were baby blue eyes (N. menziesii) and goldfields (Lasthenia californica). They made large colorful patches on the plain. So pretty!
I had never made a trip specifically to see wildflowers before, and although it was a 16-hour day and my allergies and asthma are horrible today, it was totally worth it. The fleeting spring wildflower bloom is one of the things that makes California special. In a state with a Mediterranean climate, this short period of blatant reproduction before the onset of the dry season is a pretty magnificent thing to witness.
One of my agenda items for spring break this week was to return to Elkhorn Slough and finish the hike that I started with my students a couple of weeks ago. I got out there only to be forcibly reminded that the visitor center, where the hike originates, is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Since I’d driven out there, I figured I might as well poke around the area and see what else would catch my eye. I ended up at Kirby Park, a public access area where kayaks put into the water. The tide was out when I arrived, shortly before noon, and the flats were occupied by foraging birds.
I was able to identify birds that forage in the water (avocets, northern shovelers, cormorants, and grebes) and birds that forage in mud (willets, marbled godwits, yellowlegs, and whimbrels), and there were others that I couldn’t see well enough to ID. I didn’t even really try with the gulls. I do know they weren’t either western or California gulls, but that’s about it. Someday I may be able to tackle the gulls, but with their multiple juvenile plumages they’re a notoriously tough group to figure out.
Many areas of Elkhorn Slough have been invaded by the Japanese mud snail Battilaria attramentaria. This snail was accidentally introduced into the area as tag-alongs on Asian oysters that were imported for mariculture. Battilaria aren’t very big, reaching lengths of about 30 mm, but they can occur in astounding densities. A researcher at the slough has documented how this invasive snail came to be so prevalent, and how it has affected the native California snail Cerithidea californica. From the boardwalk trail at Kirby Park I could look down and see many Batillaria in the exposed mud flat.
This isn’t a particularly dense group of Battilaria, either. Across the highway towards the ocean there are mud flats that, when the tide is out, appear to be carpeted with wood chips; all the “wood chips” are the shells of living or dead Battilaria.
One of the Slough inhabitants that I find very interesting is the plant Cuscuta pacifica, commonly referred to as marsh dodder. Dodder is a parasitic plant, and at Elkhorn Slough its main host is pickleweed (Salicornia pacifica). Pickleweed is a perennial succulent that dies back in the winter; it is now beginning to regrow into the mounds that will be the predominant plant in the salt marshes of the Slough.
The first time I saw dodder I thought that some clown had vomited a can of orange Silly String over the pickleweed. I still think that’s what it looks like:
One of the clues that something interesting is going on with dodder is the orange color. We are used to thinking of plants as being green, or at least green-ish, because they are photosynthetic. Dodder, on the other hand, is a parasite and lives off the tissues of its host; it therefore has no need for chlorophyll, the green molecule that captures light energy used to fix carbon into organic molecules. Looking more closely at the structure of dodder gives you an idea of how it makes a living:
Dodder consists primarily of orange tendrils that wrap around the host plant. The tendrils penetrate into the vascular tissue of the host and begin withdrawing phloem (the syrupy solution of sugars) from it. Once the dodder has established this internal connection with the host, its own roots die and the dodder becomes entirely dependent on the host. A single plant of dodder can send its tendrils around multiple host plants. From an evolutionary perspective it is impossible to believe that host plants such as pickleweed don’t have defenses against dodder. They may be able to repel the tendrils by producing noxious chemicals, but this is a topic that hasn’t been well studied. Somebody needs to fix that, as inquiring minds want to know.
