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 The Natural History of the San Bruno Mountains. The book will be published by Heyday Books in 2022.

I have managed to survive the coolest and driest spring, summer and fall in memory. As I sit here finishing this edition the storm of all storms continues to bombard the northern state. Luckily the several mild storms that preceded it allowed for moisture to soak into the ground; nevertheless, the flooding has started. This makes me wonder what winter has in store for me. Whatever it is, I promise to share it with you.

What I want to share with you in this edition is a remarkable story that began in 2012 and finally came to fruition in the October-December 2020 edition of Madroño, the California Botanical Society’s scientific journal. What is remarkable is that this story ran into me out of the blue, involved further serendipity, and began a friendship that I treasure to this day.

**THE STORY OF FINDING AN UNUSUAL VACCINIUM: SAN BRUNO MOUNTAIN HUCKLEBERRY**

In 2011 Dr. Peter W. Fritsch, new to the California Academy of Sciences, was merely trying to learn about some of the California species of blueberries/huckleberries when he came across a specimen from Elizabeth McClintock’s collections that had been identified as dwarf bilberry (Vaccinium cespitosum) from Kamchatka Point on San Bruno Mountain. (The collections were made between 1961 and 1963. Although V. cespitosum is highly variable throughout its range, this specimen was described as the most southerly population of dwarf huckleberry (bilberry) on the coastal side of California.)

Peter was intrigued to discover that the collection appeared to harbor two distinct entities that had been mixed on the sheets: one with thin leaves and another with thicker leaves. The thin-leaved specimens had characteristics consistent with V. cespitosum, for example, their flat or slightly undulating calyx. But the thicker-leaved specimens were similar to evergreen huckleberry (V. ovatum) in many features such as flowers and fruit, with five well-developed calyx lobes and pubescent stamen filaments. He was equally intrigued by a note written by Bob Thorne included in this collection, in which he mentioned the possibility of an undescribed species.

Peter wanted to see all this in the field. In July of 2012 he contacted me to confirm the location of Kamchatka Point, and I offered to take him there. Together we searched for V. cespitosum but were unable to find it. However, I did discover it serendipitously three months later while on a mission to the Point to assess damage from a Western Tussock Moth invasion. I notified Peter and soon after we collected specimens for the Academy herbarium. The plant had the same growth form as dwarf huckleberry, V. cespitosum, forming mats, growing in dense tufts from one rootstock, the meaning of cespitose. (Evergreen huckleberry, V. ovatum, is taller and rounded.) Peter subsequently became busy with other research and put it off to the side.

L to R: Mike Vasey, Peter Fritsch, Aaron Schusteff, Doug Allshouse

Over two years later, on December 6, 2014, I organized a field trip and invited a dozen close colleagues to study manzanitas and huckleberries, which are both in the same family, Ericaceae. The experts were Mike Vasey and Tom Parker for manzanitas and Peter Fritsch for huckleberries. We headed to Kamchatka Point to study the huckleberries. While gathered around the dwarf huckleberry, Peter mentioned that all huckleberries in the V. section Myrtillus, including V. cespitosum, were deciduous. Later I took Peter aside and told him that this population was evergreen. Suddenly he became much more interested in these plants! Several trips to the Point netted photos of flowers with well-developed calyx lobes.

Peter noted that the specimens that we collected matched the thicker-leaved specimens in the McClintock collection in the herbarium. The evergreen habit, well-developed calyx lobes, and pubescent stamen filaments also happen to be traits that are shared with evergreen huckleberry (V. ovatum), also growing on Kamchatka Point and very common along the coast from Del Norte to Santa Barbara County. Peter wrote to Madroño on June 16, 2018 with the submission materials for our manuscript entitled “A remarkable new species of Vaccinium (Ericaceae) from San Bruno Mountain, California” authored by myself and four co-authors. Subsequent detailed formal studies of morphology combined with DNA sequence data from the hybrid and two putative parents, V. cespitosum and V. ovatum (DNA from San Bruno Mountain was obtained from herbarium specimens) confirmed that the plants are indeed a likely hybrid between V. cespitosum and V. ovatum. This finding is notable in that intersectional hybridization in Vaccinium (V. cespitosum is in section Myrtillus and V. ovatum in section Pyxothamnus) has only rarely been observed under natural conditions.

The manuscript was amended over a two-year period and finally accepted and published by Madroño, and our mystery huckleberry now has a scientific name, Vaccinium x brunoense, and a common name, San Bruno Mountain Huckleberry. It appears that V. cespitosum was outcompeted by the hybrid to the point of its extirpation from San Bruno Mountain sometime between its last collection in 1979 and efforts to relocate it from 2012 to 2019. I suspect that the real cespitosum (Peter’s moniker) has been smothered by San Bruno Mountain manzanita that has grown down the west side of the point over the past 10 years. The hunt for it continues despite our hunch about its demise. Peter and I remain good friends and occasionally I will send a selfie from Kamchatka Point with San Bruno Mountain manzanita in the background and text "Greetings from the Mountain." We visit our huckleberry when he's in town to visit the Academy.

Apologies for all the juggling of Latin and common names, but sometimes you do what you need to do. If anyone is interested in reading the manuscript, email me at dougsr228@comcast.net. It is quite detailed.

Moving on to shorter days…

I decided to catch a sunrise on Sunrise Point on a late October morning. I felt that it might not be a spectacular one since the fog and clouds were too low to the east. I was sitting on the largest rock outcrop and got up to relocate from one rocky seat to another when a raven jumped off the outcrop just above my right shoulder. I had no idea that it was there. After settling down on my new location I was joined by seven other ravens, and we watched the sunrise. About three hundred feet to the west we could hear a coyote howling intermittently and high in the sky there was a White-shouldered Kite hover-hunting and screaming. It was probably trying to tell the coyote it was scaring away its prey. This was just another in a long line of surreal situations that naturally happen in the wild; cheap entertainment for those who are easily entertained, which obviously means that I am. No apologies.

See you on the Mountain