This weekend, I went down to UC Berkeley's Hastings Reserve in the Santa Lucia Range (inland of Monterey) for Caitlin's birthday. (She is a field assistant there for a research project on western bluebirds.) On Saturday, Chris drove down from Davis to pick Jennifer and me up, and we stopped in Palo Alto to get Vaughn (an alum of Glenn Adelson's class who I had never met before) on the way. By the time we got to Hastings, it was about 8:30 pm, so we had a late dinner of pizza and beer, stayed up even later talking, and woke up the next morning for a nice walk around the reserve before a long drive from central coastal California's largest wilderness area back to the Bay Area.

Hastings looks like classic Californian oak savanna, but the strange thing about it is that despite the dryness, many oak trees there are covered in filamentous lichen ("moss") which is usually indicative of moist climates. There was a lot of wildlife on our two hour morning walk, and we saw many black-tailed deer, California ground squirrels and a chipmunk, red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks, western scrub-jays, western bluebirds, two species of sparrow I can't identify, dark-eyed juncos, a hairy woodpecker, a northern flicker, a sapsucker, western fence lizards, a velvet ant (actually, a flightless, orange, hairy wasp) and many hoverflies. My favorites though are the acorn woodpeckers, with their clownlike black/red/white/cream plumage, their raucous laughing calls, and their complex social behavior. Poison oak had already turned a pleasant shade of pale red, and buckeye fruits were ripening in their pods. In the winter it rains and newts become abundant, so the staff have put up reflective signs to warn drivers. (Local kids seem to consider the signs to be convenient for BB target practice as well.)


(Photos by Jennifer Imamura.)