gray fox

The Noise!!

Even on our country Farm, weekends are a noisy affair. Neighbors with ‘regular’ weekday jobs fire up their yard engines and the consistent droning of weedeaters, saws, etc., wrecks the peace…but that’s not all. Day job people fire up their World War Two era fighter planes, take off from the Watsonville Airport, head up the coast, and roar overhead doing loop-d’-loops. And then there are the crotch rocket motorcycles and revving sports-mobiles whining and growling through Bonny Doon above and along the Coast Highway below. Saturdays and Sundays are the best days to practice the meditation of detachment, trying not to be distracted by the hope of the peace of weekdays which nevertheless start with ceaseless dog barking just to keep us on our toes.

The setting sun quiets the human cacophony, but other disturbing sounds emerge. The foxes have decided to start their very own nightly chorus. And they are teaching their young. Regular fox yowls are hair-raising enough, but add in a mess of young fox kits attempting creative, attention-grabbing songs, and that will set anyone on edge. They must have recently imbibed whatever the fox equivalent of coffee might be, because this new ‘chorus’ has been going on for hours and hours, night after night. Entertaining? Sylvie says ‘nah.’

The energetic noises of Summer go on day and night!

The Best Weather

While much of the world floods, burns, and roasts, we must not take for granted the absolutely phenomenal weather of late. Apples enjoy large temperature flux between day and night. We have just that. Awakening to the very, very long and gradual dawn (high ridge hiding the fresh sun to the East), it is COOL…like 52F this morning (and many mornings). That’s mighty close to the 40s right here in midsummer. Then the rheostat cranks up, temperature climbing to the low 80s by early afternoon: 82 straight up today! No clouds – a crystalline blue, flawless sky. 50% humidity. A gentle, steady breeze picks up starting 10 a.m. and carries a bit of ocean scent through to sunset. Nearly hypnotically gorgeous weather!

Flocks

Contrasting against the startling deep blue sky, dozens of swallows whir and pitch, careening after insects or just plain having fun. Much of the Farm is fallow this year, and we let the cover crops go to seed. This must have created an invertebrate bounty as this an especially huge swallow display. (Much more impressive than the roaring stunt pilots). There are four species: cliff, tree, violet-green, and barn swallows in that flock. Sometimes, they are all wheeling up high, sometimes many come low, skimming the dry canes of cover crop. The bugs they are after seem concentrated in the fallow fields as the swallows crowd right there for hours in dazzlingly crowded, circling displays.

Where there are small patches of cover crop that someone mowed, another kind of flock alights. Massive, bomber band-tailed pigeons skim down onto the flattened thatch, voraciously pecking at a carpet of fat oat seeds. The uncannily ‘normal’ 14 farm birds have swelled to 40 birds with this bounty, and the local birds are not happy about sharing – they want to fly too close over the incursion of strangers: are they even slapping them with their wings? Possibly.

Forty birds seems like the magic number for Molino’s flocks of birds. There were forty of those swallows last I counted. Forty band-tailed pigeons when the interlopers arrive. And, there are forty goldfinches, also, batting around in a chittering flock.

Scent of a Varmint

Night walks help to catch the scent. Day walks reveal the sign. Skunk. Mustelid musk. Telling holes dug into the soil or through the thick mown thatch. Hundreds and hundreds of holes, already- more every night! Is there more than one of these industrious carnivores? Ground wasps don’t stand a chance this year. Voles – beware!

Scar of 2020 Fire on this fine small oak. Many trees are still healing. Its starting to be Fire Season, again!

Random Other Things

Stunningly yellow butterflies suddenly abound – sulphurs? Those are the wooly bear caterpillars that feed on mustard family things, of which we have an abundance.

Maw and caw didn’t have babies this year.

Banana slugs are sliming around in the redwood understory even in this dry, hot spell.

Ground squirrel babies are everywhere with cute white eyeliner.

Thrasher birds aren’t singing but they are skulking about in the underbrush. Similarly curiously quiet is an abundance of spotted towhees.

Family groups of California towhees are foraging together, scratching the duff with bluebirds watching them from nearby branches hoping they scare up something tasty to eat.

Large and medium-sized gopher snakes are patrolling. Fence lizards are molting and abundant. Mice scamper and boing when you move any cover.

Farm Work

Judy took her first trip to the Palo Alto Farmer’s Market last Saturday. She’s kindly delivering the neighbors the most delicious zucchini – also taking those to market! Two Dog picked their first really truly dry farmed tomatoes. The abundance is starting to abound.

Our Community Orchardists are working miracles among the trees. Though a bit un-tidy for lack of mowing, the trees are hugely adorned with fruit. Green citrus is fattening for the winter harvest – a few Meyer lemons and oranges are there for the orchardists, who also have all the Bacon avocados they can eat. And then there are the apples…

It appears that my estimate of 11,000 pounds of apple harvest is really, really happening even despite the flocks of jays and acorn woodpeckers eating all they can way before the apples are ripe. Next year, we’ll get our first harvest of Gravenstein apples, and there are a few tasty trial fruit for us this year – getting ripe now! Hugh is our star propper – he’s got the gift of heft, knowing just where and how to put a prop that will stick and hold the weighted branches. Negative buoyancy? Even with the massive fruit set, this is the first year we’ve properly thinned the fruit – no big clusters of tiny fruit making us feel abashed. The understory is well weeded. Sylvie scored a new filter and the well-pressurized micro-sprinklers are whirring water across the wetting soil. The trees are super happy!

Night Ants

Night walks for irrigation management remind me of nature patterns not seen for a year, like night ants. Tiny empty trails through the grass, faint by the light of day, are explained by flashlight in the dark of night. Shiny black ants of various sizes, most in a several-ant wide line, most small but some much larger, the biggest ones on the fringes way out there in the taller grass. On the cooler nights, the ant crowd moves slowly, back and forth from an irregularly edged quarter-sized hole. They aren’t carrying anything obvious. I don’t know what they do, but there’s an ant expert I need to ask. I am fond of these mysterious night ants: they are my friends.

Asperitas clouds, photo compliments of Sylvie Childress

Day ants

A new ant revealed itself this year along the same trail that the night ants use. This was a daytime ant, also traveling in lines many ants wide. These daytime ants are tiny, butterscotchy orange-brown and were moving fluidly-fast and in great numbers. They must live mostly underground – I only saw them that one time, and they were gone from that place the next day. I’ve never seen them before despite years of observation.

How many ant species call Molino Creek Farm home? I once despaired that we would lose all of our native ants to the Great Plague of invasive and aggressive Argentine ants. But, I cannot find those ‘Argies’ anymore and instead have only these rare encounters of native ants in surprising times, unexpected places. I wish we had harvester ants in our grasslands – maybe they’ll show up one day.

Creepy False Widow spider photo by S Childress

Spiders

Summer at Molino Creek Farm also reveals spiders of various hideousnesses. Sylvie found a particularly scary one this past week, a large and onerous species that was living in the housing of one of the backup generators for our well pumps. We’re unsure which species it is, but it is probably a central coast endemic called Steatoda atascadera, or Atascadero false widow. If that’s what this is, she documented it near its northern range limit. I haven’t seen the year’s first black widow, a species which is normally abundant in abandoned gopher holes in the middle of our dirt roads. Duck into the orchard and under the trees and you’ll end up festooned with all manner of spiders. None of this is for the faint of heart, but we are thankful for the spiders and all of their work eating bugs.

Enough about bugs, already!

Fruit and Vegetable

Sylvie’s corn is a’tassling. Two Dog Farm’s squash is setting its first fruit but is mostly arrayed with huge yellow-orange blossoms and tendrilled runners. Beans reach up the trellis Judy put up for Molino Creek Farm. In Sylvie’s dry-farmed experimental plot, beans bush out and remain healthy and vigorous way into the dry summer – looking good!

Bacon avocados are getting mopped up as they get more and more ripe, the Community Orchardists are quite elated. There will be more of those! And, in our after-work pacing of the avocado stand, we discovered that the lamb haas are starting to get ripe, too, though they’re a ways out…at least they’ll be the next ones in line after we run out of the bacon type.

The Big News in the fruit orchard is the potential for lemonade: when life gives you ____! One of the big lemon trees is loaded with ripe lemons! Eureka!!!!

Song

Twittering goldfinches, ranting woodpeckers, chirping bluebirds, scolding jays, screaming hawks – the Farm is the stage for avian soliloquy.

Nighttime brings the owl speeches and fox caterwauling. We’ve been hearing the eerie yowls of gray fox…often…at night. The prints were evidence enough, and then there was poo. But recently the fox have been quite vocal. Raaargh!

The red tailed hawk is a real screamer, not sure why. This big bird sails back and forth over the farm screaming way more than normal, leaving us wondering if this one is very young: it certainly is whiter than we’re used to!

Ground squirrel song is at its peak. Those loud chippers are chipping up the whole place often and persistently. There’s no going stealthily around anymore – your presence is announced immediately by the loud chirp of squirrel. The cuties climb to the top of the closest lookout and await the appropriate moment to sound the alarm. Meanwhile, they are sunbathing and sometimes seeming to nap. The littlest of squirrels emerged from the burrows about 2 weeks ago, and they are still quite small: these don’t seem adult enough to have been given permission to chip. We have at least a hundred ground squirrels this year. More to come, I’m sure.

Weird Clouds

This past week, the region around the Farm including into Bonny Doon experienced the oddest of clouds, riding in front of the remnants of a tropical storm (!). Asperitas clouds were first documented in 2006 and only officially named in 2017 – a recent and very rare cloud type! Let’s call them “climate change clouds.” Very odd.

Wind and Cold

March…the warmest and driest in decades. Might May be the coolest? The heat’s gone to Europe and the East Coast where the poor folks roast and sweat. Will the cold, windy May place at more distance Summer’s wildfire? Nay, this topsy turvy human-driven climate change world gives us dizzying unpredictability. Just out of sight, out on the horizon, who knows what lurks? For now, this week, fog and drizzle rule.

Two layers of clouds roll downcoast: wispy white puffs rapidly curl and pout in the sky over the farm, and an unbroken wall of fog, dark gray and more oceanward is more ponderous and slow in its southward march. The wind’s sudden roar bends trees, flattens grasses. I glance towards the ridges far above our land where scantly needled (post fire) firs and redwoods move more subtly, boughs flexing, tree tops swaying. Birds dart low lest they be pitched downwind by the gusts. Tuesday this week was a day to be inside. Luckily, it lasted only one day. And still the chill remains. Ah- surprises! Rain! Tomorrow!! Maybe a half inch…

Feisty Animals

We sneeze loudly outside (the pollen is thick and swirling) and turkeys gobble back. These foggy days lengthen the bird chorus from dawn to midday. A pair of white throated swifts called their sharp tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee for a bit this morning – perhaps drinking at the pond and then playfully departing, wheeling through the swallow and martin flock. Antlers fat and velvety, the brood of deer is moving less furtively away. A two-foot-long Santa Cruz aquatic gartersnake spends mornings on the cement front porch, preparing to molt. One eye is blind: from shedding skin or from old age? This one is far from its aquatic home…old and big.

Sylvie caught a fox and bobcat standoff in the deep, dark night this past week. The sound recording is awesome and harsh. Those screaming and hissing critters were doing their level best to avoid each other’s’ teeth and claws through loud ‘diplomacy.’

Santa Cruz Aquatic Gartersnake basking on the front porch

Liquid Sunshine

We celebrate the fruit, which becomes more numerous and tastier each year. The pride of the orchard recently has been citrus. There are still some (very few) Persian limes. Lisbon lemons are ripening and a few Meyer “lemons” are ready every day or so. Two Valencia orange trees, one much larger than the other, bear juicy, thin skinned, sweet fruit: 3 of those will make an 8-ounce glass of liquid sunshine. Thanks goes to Chuck Overley for planting those and more thanks to the legions of Community Orchardists for nurturing them to bear such mighty crops.

The Wetting

We are officially on the irrigation routine, no turning back until the winter rains next October. Just in time, our second solar-powered well pump is on line for this dry season. The sun allows us to keep the irrigation going to meet the needs of hundreds of trees. 9 more irrigation lines need to be ‘renewed’ before the whole system is ready to roll. We have a total of just over 100 irrigation lines feeding the orchard and each one needs looking after (some- a lot) at the outset of the watering season. That’s a 20 hour job, and it sure is nice to be 90% of the way. But oh my gosh did portions of the orchard get dry before the water flowed! We hope the trees forgive us.

Jen and Ian donated a weed eating crew and look what happened: nice understory to Wickson Crabs!

Mow, Mow, Mow

The first mowing is almost done in the orchard and nowhere is the last mowing taking place. A donation from Jen and Ian brought forward a paid, Highly Skilled weedeating crew to make short work of nearly 25% of the orchard, a thick late Spring tangle on the steepest part of the North Orchard hill. That part hasn’t looked that nice for years! Uplifting!

The mowing machine had chopped and ground up head-high bell beans between the orchard tree rows, and then they resprouted and are flowering 2’ tall, again. Where they grew thickly, regrowth is deep green: the nitrogen those beans created is in evidence and we are thankful. Now to mow the resprouting things to keep the cycle going: second mowing, anyone? Some years it takes 4.

Aster chilensis – native perennial late spring aster!

Floral Report

Ah, where to start with the flowers? Our local version of the perennial bush lupine has its lavender flowered charm and is in peak blossom, especially evident roadside. Native summer aster has started flowering, spikes of many petaled stars. Poppies still color field and hillside, but it has become difficult to find a single annual sky lupine. The farewell to springs opened their magenta petals this past week, joining the late spring tarplants.

Most citrus blooms have past but apple flowers persist. Deep purple, pale blue and many shades in between – vetch, twining and matting, is having its flowering heyday.

Bluebirds Now, Acorns Later

The bluebirds’ wet warbles call from fence lines, the birds swoop, scooping up grasshoppers from the dusty ground, picking off caterpillars from stalks of dry grass. Acorns fatten on the oaks, not yet ripe, not yet falling. The days shimmer from bright sunshine and a clear dark blue sky. It is nearly half way between the summer solstice and the fall equinox; the days are becoming noticeably shorter, the nights sometimes warmer, the cricket songs more diverse and louder. And, full moon is tomorrow.

Citrus Hill, now with oodles of new avocado trees growing up fast

The Silence of the Birds

The jays and acorn woodpeckers are more silent. Most of the birds have quieted considerably. Cooper’s hawk is terrorizing the entire range of bird life, but the quail are its favorite game. It is everywhere: flying through the apple orchard, winging around corners of buildings, soaring above the fields…full of the energy of the hunt. The northern harrier is more surprising, returning for stints and then disappearing for a day or hours – its hunting ground extends beyond Molino Creek Farm. Two red tailed hawks are constantly but less energetically hunting, sometimes soaring, often perched, watching, waiting. The night brings the barn owls’ metallic screech; these are as commonly calling as the great horned owls- the fire may have favored the return of barnies because there is less of the great horned’s favorite dense tall forest cover. There’s even a barn owl baby calling in the San Vicente creek canyon just over the ridge. I worry, though, since there are great horned owls…when will we find a pile of barn owl feathers in the field- that’s a repeating pattern: the great horned owls always seem to win.

Sunflower Show

Judy’s sunflowers are making quite a show. What skill to keep a batch always coming into bloom through the entire farming season, making bouquets for farmers’ markets each week. Bright yellow cheerful sunflower heads…the dominant cut flower in the irrigated field alongside onions, zucchinis, cucumbers, and pole beans. She grows a lovely small patch of diverse market crops.

Sunflowers – for sale at local farmers markets

Apples A’ Hoy

Meanwhile, in the apple orchard the burgeoning crop of fruit is unbelievably large. Almost every branch of every apple tree is bent with full weight of fattening fruit, props holding them from breaking or resting on the ground. The frequent zipping by of the hawks have substantially decreased bird damage to apple fruit. Gala apples are always the winners: last to set and first to ripen. We recalled that the second week of September is the week of gala, but it might be early…

Oranges at Molino? Moooo

On Citrus Hill, near the Barn, we have been plucking cara cara oranges from the two trees we planted a few years back. The first substantial crop of cara cara has been wonderfully juicy and sweet: Score! Cara cara navel oranges are crosses between ruby red grapefruit and navel orange. Its flesh is redder than normal oranges. We are very very stoked to be able to grow a tasty orange: the others we’ve tried make okay juice, but they aren’t that good to eat just plain- cara cara oranges ARE good.

The view downhill of Molino…down Molino Creek Canyon to the coast

Night Walks

Shorter, hotter days create conditions for night watering of the orchard, leading to late night walks to turn off irrigation valves. This leads me to unavoidable opportunities for nurturing the nocturnal naturalist in me. Tonight’s observation: black widow spiders aka Molino farm road median lurkers. Over and over again I witnessed (for the first time!) black widow spiders busily building web networks 4” or less from the soil surface on the unimproved road median strips, emanating from web encrusted gopher holes that must be their lairs. Another nocturnal roadside observation: the emergence of many brown field crickets, now evident in the chorus from various areas. Also, slender shiny dark brown ‘night ants,’ tiny cockroaches, big greasy looking black field crickets, and a myriad of different spiders. No mammalian eye shine gave something away with my bright headlamp, darn.

Rodent Fiasco

The fact that this is an epic Rodent Year still is in force. Mark Jones reports hundreds of rodents fleeing the path of the mower. Every inch has been rototilled by gophers. Farmers are losing crops. Orchardists are seeing girdling, making for more urgent trunk clearing. Every storage shed reeks of mice. A family of 10 mickey mouse deermice greeted me when opening up the small orchard tool storage shed. The bunnies have proliferated in areas, as well. And that fox which we had been seeing down the road a bit…well, its moved onto the farm! Prints in the dust, leaping fox scattering to hide: welcome back Gray Fox!

Hoping you get some warm weather basking!

-this is from my weekly blog at Molino Creek Farm’s webpage

Grey Hayes

Reindigenation through restoration and conservation