After the family Christmas gathering, E the M and I made our way down the California coast towards the M’s house.  Every few years we find ourselves doing this, stopping sometimes in Santa Cruz, sometimes Big Sur or Davenport, but more than once in Cambria.  The twee shops in the village don’t draw us as much as the surrounding coastal landscape, gentler and less remote than the raw edge of the Big Sur coast (that jagged and temporary fringe of an entire continent): it’s less dramatic but more accessible.  Humans are not the only organisms to find this coast attractive: Sea otters, harbor seals, dolphins, and gray whales can readily be seen in season in these waters; also, northern elephant seals.

In our long ago years at Santa Cruz, E and I would visit the elephant seal rookery at the point Año Nuevo, in those days the only place the enormous pinnipeds were known to haul out on the mainland.  The visit involved advance reservations and a naturalist-led slog through seal-festooned dunes to a viewing point looking down on the rookeries and the island lighthouse of Año Nuevo, in which, the story was told, the lighthouse-keeper’s claw-footed bathtub still contained the skeletal remains of an elephant seal that had crawled into it to die.

So, imagine our surprise when we pulled off from Hwy 1 to hike a bluff trail just north of San Simeon — a hundred miles south of Año Nuevo — and looked over to see a heaving heap of snorting, snoring blubber, jostling and making the same distinctive bladdery croaking sound (described as a Harley starting up in a gymnasium, listen here: 02-alpha.mp3) that we remembered from the rookery north of Santa Cruz.  Since 1990, Elephant seals have colonized the narrow strands stretching south of Piedras Blancas lighthouse, and each December, they return to give birth and mate on these beaches.  Viewing them is easy — a couple of  parking areas have been built atop the bluffs along coast Hwy 1, and low-visibility fences are in place to separate scarred, cantankerous males from pesky human voyeurs.  By mid-December, bulls have staked out their section of beach, and cows are lying about in harems.  The real draw, though, is the young of the year: wrinkled black-furred seal pups lying at their mothers’ side, chirping and bawling until she rolls over to expose a teat, or, rather, a slot where the teat lurks.

We’ve never been lucky enough to see an actual birth, but we’ve seen such newly-born pups that gulls and Brewer’s blackbirds were still fighting over afterbirth among the sandy heaps of seaweed. Last year 4000 pups were born just in the Piedras Blancas rookery, and they’re expecting similar numbers this year.  The density of seals is astounding: in addition to hefty 1600 pound cows, massive 4500 pound bulls, and an assortment of bulky young males, there are piles of blond yearlings lying about in the dunes, snuffling and spraying briny snot on one another, occasionally engaging in mock baby-fights, baring their teeth and striking at each other in practice territorial behavior, then falling back into a doze piled together in heaps like bleached drift logs.

For those of us less inclined to gawk at the unnatural concentration of the world’s riches crammed into William Randolph Heart’s folly (the ersatz Moorish castle overlooks the rookeries), the Piedras Blancas elephant seals put on a different type of oversized spectacle.  Check out the website of Friends of the Elephant Seal for more info and images.

A tip to would-be visitors to Piedras Blancas Rookery: Because viewing access is easy here, there are lots of people, and parking can be problematic.  So, go early (before 10am) or late (after 4 pm, and sunsets can be spectacular!).  Or, visit alternate viewing sites along the same coastal bluffs, where you will see fewer seals, but fewer people, too.  For a less drive-up experience of the seals than at Piedras Blancas, take a hiking tour out to the rookery at Año Nuevo, but don’t forget to get advanced reservations for peak breeding months (Dec -Mar).

By the way, if curious architectural follies of eccentrics do appeal, drive by the eclectic Nitwit Ridge in Cambria, in disrepair but surprisingly resonant with Hearst Castle.

…family and clients who enjoy, enhance, and support Three Star Owl.

Especially to two friends who generously shared their time, creativity, and expertise to make Three Star Owl a better artistic enterprise in ways I couldn’t have managed on my own.

Thanks to Jack Follett who made wonderful copper shelving for portable displays at Three Star Owl sales events.  He based the design on original shelving made awhile back by another good friend, Leslie Wood, in St. Louis.  Both the old and new shelving are strong, easy to transport and set up, and are so elegantly conceived and constructed that people come over to the booth to admire them!  Many thanks, Jack!

And thanks also to the inestimable Ed Bustya who created the threestarowl.com website for me, and who generously offers me the benefit of his experience with sales events, and ideas for outlets, ventures, and possibilities for new directions for the flight of Three Star Owl.  Much appreciated, Ed!

Ed and Jack have in common a deep appreciation of birds and the natural world, and each one spends a lot of time outdoors and traveling, Ed photographing, and Jack birding and volunteering for bird and wildlife related organizations.

Hope the coming New Year is a healthy, happy, and hopeful one for everyone!

Peace on Earth!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Three Star Owl

Here’s a couple of scenes to get us low-elevation desert dwellers into a holiday mood:

Photos: A. Shock, Three Star Owl.  Both were taken after a snowstorm, Tonto National Monument, above the Tonto Basin, AZ.  The top photo overlooks Roosvelt Lake and the Sierra Ancha Mountains.

…bigger all the time.

And here she is: meet Miss B.

Sorry, that’s all you get.

It was leaning, but not that much.  On Thanksgiving morning while we had breakfast (E, the M, and me), it fell with a huge thump from no particular direction. Later, E found the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea): under the back mesquite, lying split like a toppled Doric column on top of beloved cax and sux, some in the ground, some in pots on shelves. Its weight had splintered a 2×12 pine shelf, cracking it nearly in two.  It popped a mature barrel cactus out of the ground roots and all, and launched pots in the air, so that they landed in uprooted piles.  It took all three of us to dig out the victims pinned under the wreckage, embedded in green flesh, impaled on spines.  Lots of crushed plants, but only two pots lost and only one hand-made one; a small clay “miracle”.  Still, it was gruesome, and the saguaro, although probably 50 years old, wasn’t anywhere near the end of its expected life span.  It hadn’t even grown arms yet, like some of the older saguaros in this mature desert neighborhood.

Pictures tell the story best.

In order to remove the plants from under it, we had to prop the saguaro incrementally up onto cinder blocks, where it now lies abandoned like an old car, awaiting decomposition, its length unnaturally separated from the soil below.  Sadly, as damaged as it is, it looks very whole even lying there, and a few of its roots, still buried in the damp desert soil, are so far keeping it green and living, a support system that won’t bring life back.

…feels especially cranky.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)