Well...I did get up early and went over to the Apple Trees...and waited for Bear...no luck....so had breakfast and curled up...did get a clip of Doe eating an Evening Primrose...and other things!...I'm acquiring a collection of Critters eating things!....woke up with time to go to the Post Office and pick up my new binoculars...really neat...should have had these all along!...on the way happened upon the Doe in the clip...which walked under the boardwalk and straight to the Lily Pads...on the way back sat at Duck Harbor...looking through the binocs....not much time...so tomorrow will do some serious searching for Hawk!...have a book now...How to Spot Hawks and Eagles....nice book...and authors have another which I've Amazon ordered...How to Spot Owls!....the text is good and the pics excellent!....have ordered the makings of a small digiscope too...one within my budget!....book had the recommendations for binocs and scopes which I studied out....happy with the binocs...have to wait to see how the scope does!...sunny warm and blue until some clouds came in...tropical looking things...but no rain...and didn't cool things off much!...oh...I learned collecting feathers is illegal...doing such for profit would do much harm to birds...which is the why of it...a good why...and explains the look from a horse riding Ranger in Tuolumne last summer when I stood to the side with a Blue Jay feather in my cap!...
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Yellow Pond Lily (Nuphar Advena)—The only place in Yosemite where this lily is found is in a little pond a short distance from the Sentinel Hotel, on the opposite side of the river. In the higher range of mountains it is found in many small shallow ponds.
The Yosemite Valley (1910) by Galen Clark
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/the_yosemite_valley/plants.html
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8 comments:
There was an article a while back in one of the Bay Area papers about how around 1900, El Cap Meadow was awash in Evening Primrose (which I dearly love). But by the late 1920s, it was becoming rare.
One theory is that by getting rid of mountain lions, the deer got more comfy grazing the meadows and ate all the Evening Primroses. Not burning the meadows as often and other things probably had an effect, but the fact (or hypothesis anyway) remains that flowers that deer find yummy have been on decline in the meadows since getting rid of those pesky mountain lions.
The Fawns are in peril from Bobcats and Coyotes too...so the Deer's population has that factor ...and of course the Indians and White Hunters will have ceased at about the same time hunting deer as well as mountain lions...
I didn't know the Primrose opened after sunset...I suspected it did something when I read it's name...along the bike path now I see them...they have four petals.
The video "Counting Sheep"...about the Mountain Sheep on the East Side..has this Mountain Lion hypothesis too in the Sheep context...and is a great video.
I overheard an old and often time visitor say there used to be a lot more deer in the Valley...so maybe there are more mountain lions now...and I think there might be many deer up in Tuolumne...it's estimated there's like fifty thousand in the whole park..but I'll have to fact check that!
DavidDavid
Evening Primrose opens late in the day, but sometimes just before sunset. That's because they are pollinated by hawk moths, which are night flyers, and they don't want to waste their nectar on day-flying bugs. I suspect that beautiful creamy yellow makes them visible in low light.
I just learned that this year. There have been a lot of EP over by our place (Granite Landing aka New Housing) so I've gotten to watch them open in the evenings and the dessicate and fall off in the mornings.
The petals pretty much last just one day, but the plant only opens a few petals per day, so it stays in flower for several weeks.
Did I mention that I *really* like evening primrose?
Yes...and I've refrained from posting the "Deer eating primrose" clip!
Granite Landing...been waiting for a name!
I just read a bit of Muir's writing...he revisits the Valley in his mid fifties...and calls it "frowsy" and wonders how anyone traveling forty miles a day can see anything...and mentions that every night 300 hundred horses were released to browse...and that the flowers in the meadows had no chance...
oh..and in trying to find the Deer population...found a book that tells how hunting in the Park stopped in 1895...
This all in Shirley Sargent's John Muir in Yosemite..and a second book..which I one clicked and then cancelled when I saw the price..sixtyeight dollars!...which was about all the Parks and how they affected the Indians...it was the Indians mostly who were hunting the Deer...cant recall the book's name...
The hypothesis is by an author named Vriginia...Morell?...how's it go..without the lions the deer are overpopulating and browsing the black oaks...and primroses...it's on the web but a sign in is required to read it..I've happened on it before...and think it hooey!...but haven't read the article...the Deer do eat oak leaves..but there's so many other things.. all the little oaks that came up from the acorns are drying out...and this gets back to when the Valley was wetter...a wetland...
I'm trying to think now if the Black Oaks only grow near meadows and rivers.
I think the Valley is still trying to recover from the time Muir saw it's frowsy state!
Oh..while I'm thinking of Oaks...I notice on my bus trips to Merced that there are few to none young Oaks on the rolling foothills...and this is all over California...those Happy California cows...
DavidDavid
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With fewer cougars on the hunt, a lot more mule deer were alive to forage on black oak tree seedlings; fewer seedlings meant fewer oaks and an increase in conifers like Yosemite's pines and firs; with the oaks replaced, the forest floor became covered with grass and ferns, while the once-common evening primrose became rare, according to Ripple and Beschta.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/02/MN5910F92D.DTL
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wiki has a page on Black Oaks..Kellog Oaks that Muir loved...and I think he knew Kellog!..up until 1965 Black Oaks across the state were regarded as weeds...
and the Deer of course use the acorns as a major food source...no oaks no acorns no deer no lions...the whole hypothesis is upside down!...but it's being used to promulgate the notion that if predartors are removed from the ecosystem it all goes haywire...story on wolves in Yellowstone had the same thing...
the oaks like to grow in soil where the conifers cant...the soil in the Valley has changed..dried out I'd say!...the confiers will grow right out of the granite.
DavidDavid
Well, an ecosystem going haywire is in itself an interesting notion, in that all ecosystems are always in flux. The question of course is whether the change is "good" or "bad" and what the criteria are for deciding that?
Many things are chicken and egg. Why are the meadows drying? Blowing up the moraine (check). Putting in roads and messing with water flow (check). Conifer "overgrowth" which sucks up water (check).
It is a strange thing when there is an official policy of "letting natural processes work" but often we don't actually have the understanding of which processes are natural and which ones aren't.
Anyway, RE mountain lions, obviously no one cause can explain everything. My brother has a saying that goes something like: If you are looking at a question and are faced with a choice between two possibilities, you probably haven't thought about the question long enough.
Dont know if Robert Frost would agree..but well said!
Robert Frost? Is that the guy who said "Two roads divreged in a yellow wood, so I decided to travel cross-country?"
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