Doug's Mountain Journal
A Chronicle of Natural History on San Bruno Mountain
Doug Allshouse has been writing his seasonal Mountain Journal for many years. It appears in the quarterly newsletters of the Yerba Buena Chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS). We are very pleased to share his reflections on the natural history of the Mountain. Together with David Nelson, he is writing San Bruno Mountain: A Guide to the Flora and Fauna. The book will be published by Heyday Books in 2022.
When I started to write this edition they had just closed San Bruno Mountain Park, and the park is central to my journal. The reason was the overwhelming number of people who were visiting after the shelter-in-place was announced and walking, running, and bike riding were considered essential activities. This virus is nothing like anything I've ever had to deal with and I'm sure that everyone else is feeling the same way. So that was on my mind when I began the journal with the paragraph below.
Shelter in place; social distancing; essential activities; these seven words are so alien to the human fabric that they fly in the face of our existential core of joy. We are social animals drawn to each other through touch—the hand-shake, holding hands, the hug, the kiss. Will that world ever return? While it is currently much too soon to even consider our future post-COVID-19, I’m feeling hopeful that it just might happen eventually, but I feel that the trepidation that is built into our DNA might need to make some adjustments. If we learn nothing else, I am hopeful that we have realized that something as sinister as COVID-19 has exposed how unprepared we are to face the unimaginable, which happened so swiftly. Who knew that toilet paper is the glue that binds the country together? We used to throw it over our friends’ houses as a teenage prank, now we hoard it as if it were gold. And thanks to those seven words they closed all of our county parks on my birthday.
Meanwhile, nature just keeps trucking along as though nothing cruel and unusual is happening. Despite a rather dry and cold winter, the wildflowers and wildlife are behaving rather normally. The rain season on San Bruno Mountain lasts from July 1-June 30. Precipitation through March 31st was 13.13 inches. Over the seven seasons from 2013-2020 the average rainfall on March 31st was 20.18. The lowest total of 12.44 was in 2013-14 and that season total was a measly 13.85 Inches, the last year of the drought. The highest total through March was 32.84 in 2016-2017, our wettest year in about a decade at 36.22 inches. Unfortunately, this year will not find itself in that category. We still could salvage a decent rainy season but it will take a Herculean seasonal fourth quarter to win the game.
In my winter journal I was pining about the disappearance of several bird species. I’m happy to report that a few have been seen or heard in March. A European Starling, the avian equivalent of fennel, was making some noise in Fog Forest. It was probably looking for a cavity to build a nest. I’ve seen these scofflaws evict a Northern Flicker if need be. A couple mornings later I heard a Downy Woodpecker hammering a eucalyptus trunk to attract a mate and an Orange-crowned Warbler was singing in the acacias on the Old Guadalupe Trail. Three days later I heard a Varied Thrush singing. This vagabond was probably practicing for some serious mating further north. A week later I heard a Pacific Wren actually singing a mating song above Colma Creek.
On another note, there was a robin with an unusual twist to his song. He precedes his typical song with two rapid notes, a whit-whit, and then the song. I've heard Black-headed Grosbeaks do this many times, where they will insert these quick phrases into their songs. I wonder if this enterprising robin was riffing so he could offer something different. I can almost hear a female robin thinking, "ooooh, better check this out." This love-struck Romeo kept it up for a few weeks so I hope it worked.
Choris’s popcorn flower (Plagiobothrys chorisianus var. chorisianus)
On February, 25, 2017 David Nelson, Mark Sustarich, and I discovered a small plant in the Borage family, Choris’s popcorn flower, Plagiobothrys chorisianus var. chorisianus. I have made it a spring habit to check on this population every year since, so on March 25th I visited the site. The winter of 2016-2017 was a gully-washer with over 36 inches of rain for the season (see above). Popcorn flower loves moist soils and the high-water mark of April Brook that year was a good three feet above the creek bed. The population covered several meters along the bank and it was shocking to realize that these tiny rosettes were three feet under swift-moving water just a week or two before we came along. Subsequent annual visits have shown the community to be resilient and abundant in wetter years. The rainfall last year was slightly over 29 inches and I shot a couple of videos of April Brook gushing downstream. This year was the first time that the creek was bone dry. The flowers were blooming but the plants were stunted compared to previous years. I looked for Cleveland’s cryptantha, Cryptantha clevelandii, which also grows by the creek bed, but to no avail. Not a single hairy rosette. I took my requisite photos of the community, checked the creek mosses then started back uphill.
Sample of spring wildflowers on the mountain
As late as the year 2000 the Great Meadow was a large grassland between two ridges, but today it is a series of adjacent grasslands broken by strips of coyote brush. Mark and I made some trails through them three years ago so I decided to walk diagonally up the hill to Radio Road to take in some wildflowers in the two other meadows. It was quite a show despite the dry year with goldfields, two species of owl’s clovers, and checkerbloom. I was rewarded for taking the long way back to my SUV. It wasn’t until I got home and uploaded the photos that I accidentally noticed something quite unusual and exciting.
Little Black Ants on popcorn flower
I was looking at a photo of the popcorn flowers on my 24-inch monitor and noticed something strange. For the uninitiated, a Choris’s popcorn flower is 3-5 mm wide—very small. It has five white petals, each with a yellow appendage at the base that forms a yellow ring at the center, common for some of the Borage family. A couple of flowers lacked the yellow base so I used the digital magnifier on my photo app and noticed that there was an ant on each of the two flowers at precisely the center of the flower, as if they were looking for nectar. (At this point you must realize that when you bend over to take a photo of about a square couple of feet, the flowers are still mighty small.) That made these ants 1-2 mm long, scarcely visible to the naked eye when standing. A couple of hours of research and a check of my SBM Ant list narrowed the search to Monomorium ergatogyna, the Little Black Ant. How apropos!! They are omnivorous ants in the family Formicidae that are often mistaken for the more common Monomorium minimum (which was my first guess). The colony has multiple fertile queens that produce a single worker caste, making them a monomorphic species. The queens of this species are the longest living of the genus, living up to two years compared to 39 weeks of other species. They are native to California, Nevada and Utah.
You will think I was totally nuts for having done this (I did!), but I looked in every photo folder on the dates we went to see the plants over the four years since discovering them. I noticed another photo with these ants on them, so they’ve been at this location for quite a while taking nectar and, who knows, possibly aiding pollination? At least that’s a romantic possibility that I’m fostering in my mind.
Final thought: For high school and college senior classes and sports teams there will be no proms, graduation ceremonies or sports championships to celebrate, only thoughts of what could have been but ultimately were never to be. I will remember 2020 as the spring that promised so much, but never was able to deliver through no fault of its own. The spring wildflower show will ultimately do its thing and no one will get to see it. It’s like the tree that falls in the hollow forest, if no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? But why ask what could have been when we have so much to look forward to. Next year!!
See you on the mountain…