Pretty little puddles - saving the remaining vernal pools

Vernal pools rock my world. Essentially, they're ephemeral pools that only show up in the spring.

But in California's central valley, they're driven by an interesting mechanism: Huge chunks of the valley and low foothills are underlain by an almost impermeable clay hardpan layer that has taken years to form. In fact, California's soils have taken as long as three-quarters of a million years to reach the state they were in when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in the Sierra Nevada. Soil lies on top of that, and in the spring, at decreasingly diverse locations, the acres of shallow water gradually evaporate, leaving a nifty pattern of flower colors. First an early bloomer like bright yellow goldfields will fill in the open areas, then as the pools shrink, where there is newly bare soil, the next flower, perhaps purple downingia, will bloom, then creamy meadowfoam.

When the plow came to California, that started changing irrevocably. It wasn't so bad with initial, light tilling, but when deep plowing for real agriculture hit the dirt, the clay pan was ripped up, never to be replaced within a useful time period. Once that clay pan is gone, it's gone, and no amount of rehab within current technology can make the plains like they were.

One of my deep annoyances is that for the new UC Merced campus, the UC system had choices for location. They could rip up and build on a pristine vernal pool location, or they could make use of an old dairy farm that had already been disturbed and didn't have pools. They chose the vernal pool site. I am just boggled by that. Boggled. What goes on in folks' brains?

Anyway, I could fill this with links, but the other day on Flickr, the guy who runs the vernal pool pool (heh) on Flickr noticed one of my (not especially good, it's in poor light and from a bad angle) Table Mountain vernal pool pictures (on Table Mountain, the soil is underlain by a lava cap that protects the butte), and he asked me to put it in that pool. So I did, and rooted through the pictures there, as I love vernal pools, and they can be photogenic. When I found some of his photos, I immediately knew that Botany Picture of the Day would love them, and suggested he submit them. Not only did he do so, but the BPOD admin noticed my comment, and gave me a shout out for pushing the pics his way. There's usually a few days or weeks of turnaround for submissions there, but apparently they liked the vernal pool pictures, they got up there within 48 hours of my pointing BPOD out to the vernal pool admin.

So the links (and they go to info-filled and pretty places, have a look) are mostly off the BPOD post. Have a look.

Anyway, this is about how important California's vernal pools are and how they need attention and protection, not so much about "hey I got a shout out on BPOD." Most of the valley's pools are long gone. There are some left near Sacramento, and Dixon, and near Vina in Tehama County. The Nature Conservancy has snapped up chunks of acreage to protect them. And the University of California persists in not helping.

Because I love what I love

I’m thinking a lot about why I get the particular weird geographilic interests I get.

For instance, today I attended a talk at the Oakland Museum of California about the decline of amphibians in the Sierra Nevada. I am fascinated by this subject. Years ago, when I took meteorology at Sac State, I tried to do a term paper on it, but there was almost no research then, and it wasn’t a class set up for independent research, no resources, time; it was a term paper, not a research project. Why am I so interested in this, rather than, say, bark beetles or whether we should remove the Hetch Hetchy Dam? I don’t know.

I’m also fascinated by serpentine, the soil, the creation of the stone, the ecology on top of the soil. I’m fascinated by how it feels, its color, its association with gold. I’m fascinated by how it forms at the edge of the mantle, and how I can see serpentine, or serpentine soil, from the roadside and it feels like a familiar friend. Chert’s interesting and plays an important role in California’s geology. Jade’s interesting and valuable and scattered all over the California coast. Granite forms, literally, the backbone of California. Why does serpentine, this toxic, crumbly stuff, fascinate me?

I’m fascinated by California’s oaks. Other oaks around the world interest me, California’s fascinate me. I love the California Black Oak, how it’s neither a red oak with the hard prickly leaves or a softly lobed white oak, but an intermediate. I love the hybrid Oracle Oak, and I love noticing, when I notice one of California’s live oaks, whether it’s interior or coastal by the curve of the leaf and whether there’s hair in the armpits of its veins. I love sitting under huge blue oaks, and I love studying their ecology, how important they are to scrub jays and how important scrub jays are to them, and how valuable a food source acorns are to many different birds and mammals, and about acorn woodpecker granaries. I can cry if I read too much about sudden oak death.

I still can’t figure out exactly why I am sentimental about the aspects of natural history that rock my world. I certainly don’t need to figure it out.

"Rain! The crops are saved!"

It's weird, being a Californian, hearing the rain and being so grateful. It's been a very dry winter, some parts of the state, like Shasta County, have received almost no rain.

In much of the state, we are dry from approximately April to October, with the occasional mild thunder storm or sprinkle, sometimes not a drop. Then, from December to February or March, it rains. Sometimes that rain doesn't start until January, but it rains a lot. Sometimes we get big floods. When we moved into this house a couple of years ago, it took two moves with lots of dedicated help for which we're very grateful, in two massive rainstorms that made it unsafe to use the ramp into the truck, people were slipping on it. We had a big enough truck to do the whole thing in one trip with room left over, but it was raining too hard to safely fill the truck the first time. My partner and I each got very sick, just with so much work in the rain and the cold. Our defenses crashed.

This is a Mediterranean climate zone, one of relatively little of the type in the world. And part of that is pouring wet winters, and bone dry summers. Winter colors here are the dark browns of old vegetation and the bright greens of new grass. Summer is golden with drying grass, fall's a bit brown as the grass dies down utterly.

But this winter has been dry. Dry means we don't get as much rain and snowpack in the Sierra, so our reservoirs don't fill. It means our vegetation is crackly in the summer and our forest fires are scarier. It means our agriculture suffers and food prices rise. Dry and too warm can mean fruit and nut trees flower too early, then any spring rain or heavy wind knocks flowers off, and our orchard crops suffer horribly.

Now it's raining, and I'm relieved. It's been storming for a couple of days, alternating cloudy/damp with what Grandma called "pissing down rain," not windy stormy wet, but a steady rainfall, the kind illustrated with vertical lines and people holding umbrellas. It's the kind that brought about the denouement of the film "Paint Your Wagon." It's just wet.

I know California will change over the next 50 years, it's part of what's making me want to move gradually northward, bringing my buckeye seeds and my redwood seedlings, and settle on California's northwest coast, or in Oregon. I don't want to see the bay area's climate change to that of Los Angeles, which also has wet winters, but is in bona fide desert. I don't want to watch what happens with California's reservoirs and agriculture and riparian systems.

But for now, it's raining. I feel like I have roots and am slurping it up.

(Oh, and the dorky title? That's from a shampoo commercial in the seventies that's been an earworm for me, when it rains, ever since.)

And so it begins

I've had this blogger account for a long time, and mostly ignored it. My intention was to start a blog about geography, why I love it, what interests me, and how I would teach it and natural history (and the million or so associated subjects) once I have my master's degree.

I'm now back in school, working toward that goal. As I sit in class, a steady stream of ideas has been trickling through my brain. I write them down in the margins of my notebook. "Blog this," and "What about. . . .?" Then I remembered Geographile. Oh yes.

So here I am. I am going to try for four or five posts a week. If I have lazier times and busier times, I'll try to blog with pre-written filler. I will also, almost certainly, photo-blog from flickr (my own photos, and others that interest me), write the occasional geography-related book review, echo posts from Geographile on LiveJournal, and keep an active set of interesting links.

I will try not to babble.