Wildflowers and Butterflies

May is a time for rattle snakes.

Snakes-eye view of a rattlesnake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But,  it’s also a time for wildflowers and butterflies.

That’s primarily what caught my eye last Wednesday at the ranch. Here are a few photos. (read more)

Snow Plant

This snow plant has just popped from the ground.

Snow Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea Torr.) This plant is a fungi that feeds off the roots of conifers.

While returning from shopping in Susanville, I drove a back road and came upon an area loaded with snow plants. They pop from the ground in spring shortly after the snow melts and are quite beautiful. My Grandmother used to point them out whenever she spotted one.

Here’s a photo of a bunch of plants that are more mature, but also a little fried from sunlight. They don’t last too long in the sun and are found in the pine needles underneath large conifers.

Group of snow plants.

April Weekend at the Ranch

 

It was a good weekend to be in the hills. Here are a few of the photos I was able to take while traveling around the ranch. (Click to enlarge.)

 

Here's the typical view of a ranch road coyote.

Surprise. It’s unusual for ranch road coyotes to pose for a broadside photo.

Another rarity, only in spring will you see two great blues together like this.

Nice cape on this great blue heron.

Rob pointed out some baby blue eyes – with bug.

Mules ear is having a good year. Maybe it likes the cool spring.

Checkerbloom I believe.

The goldfields were looking good.

My first whipsnake of the season. He was sold cold I could have picked him up.

I don’t know whose brand this is.

Fence lizards were out in force for the first time this spring.

 

Pacific newts have a rubber look.

 

The does were in hiding with fawns, but a few bucks were around.

We went to a spot I’d never been before.

Instant replay of the earlier coyote.

For the second time in a weekend, a coyote stopped and looked back.

Mending Fences – with Distractions

The pace of work changes when you spend a couple days in the hills. It’s really hard to get in a hurry and there are many distractions. The main event- mending fence. The sub plots – turkeys, wildflowers and other photo ops.

Rob and Terry looking down at a half mile of very old or non-existent fence, an intimidating project.

 (Click photos to enlarge.)

When you’re working on a project that looks overwhelming, it pays to not get in a hurry – so we didn’t.

The starting point for the fence project was at the top of a very steep drop off into a spot we had to exit the same way we went in. In other words what you carry down, you also carry up unless it’s fence material. A few hours per day is all we could handle on a project like this. A couple hours of hanging on to the side of a cliff while working is enough.

In the mean time distractions were all around us. On the way in I came across a group of four old gobblers that have been a making a living eating grain from horse feed.

These old toms have been hanging out near the neighbor's barn.

Wild flowers were blooming. Johnny-jump-ups, shooting stars  and butter cups were everywhere. The yellow and white flowers seem to bloom early while the blue flowers like lupins seem to bloom later on. There’s likely a reason, but I don’t know what it is.

Johnny- jump-ups (wild pansy) are a butterfly host plant.

The plant, which most locals call johnny-jump-ups, is also known as wild pansy or yellow pansy. The scientific name is viola pedunculata. It is a host plant for the Callippe Silverspot Butterfly, which is endangered. http://essig.berkeley.edu/endins/callippe.htm

Other early favorites include the shooting star (“mosquito bills” variety). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecatheon_hendersonii

Mosquitobills shooting star.

While checking the spillway on one of our dams, I found a fresh mountain lion scat. The scat, about the size of my labs scat tends to be clay-like and greenish is color when it’s fresh – and if really fresh, extremely stinky.

Mountain lion scat. This is a medium-sized scat.

We also found a few stinkbells in bloom, but they seemed to be a little past their prime.

The stinkbell is somewhat rare.

The scientific name for the stinkbell is fritillaria agrestis.

The California buttercup is very common on our ranch.

The scientific name for the buttercup is ranunculus californicus.

With some fence progress and obligations at home, I departed while Rob and Terry continued to work on the fence. On the way home I came upon more turkeys. This time two gobblers were hanging out with three hens. Looks like nesting time is about here, but they were not very active.

These birds slipped into a creek and moved quickly out of sight.

It’s a little early in the nesting season and the turkeys were not in full breeding mode. The gobblers were more interested in eating than strutting for the hens.

The Mariposa Lilly

This beauty is a ranch favorite. Comes in a yellow version and white version.

It’s not a great year for wildflowers at the ranch, but it is a great year for grass. The annual grasses are about three feet tall, but they have shaded out many of the flowers.

On an walk down the canyon running through our property we did manage to find quite a few flowers still in bloom. One of them was the Mariposa Lily.

Here’s the white version.

Hard to say which is more beautiful.

Turkey Season Almost Over, Butterflys Abundant and Deer Hunting on the Horizon

One week left in the archery turkey season and I haven’t loosed an arrow. Actually I haven’t hunted since opening day. Last year’s turkey crop was below par and only one gobler is living on our ranch where we generally hunt. However, there are still turkeys in the area and with this spring’s rain promoting good grass growth, I’m optimistic that this summer will produce good sized flocks for next year. I  may still make one more attempt before the archery season concludes next weekend.

It’s the time of year when we conduct Alameda whipsnake surveys and I was out again this week. Although snakes were scarce, I did take a few photos and here’s a sample. According to Rob, this first photo is of a buckeye butterfly.

This checkspot butterfly posed nicely. This is most likely a chalcedon checkerspot. 

Redtailed hawks rode the thermals. You can tell this bird is mature because their tails don’t turn red until they’re a couple years old. 

This taranchula ducked into a hole when I lifted up the board he was under.

The wildflowers are still blooming. Here’s an indian paintbrush.

It’s time to start planning for deer season. It looks like I’ll be hunting Nevada and California again this year. Time to tune up the bow and start shooting  more often as the coastal archery season is only two months away.

Wildflower Smorgasboard

The flowers were very impressive last weekend and I had to bring a few back with me. Here they are. Since I didn’t know the names of most of them, I named them myself.

Awsome

Common brush beauty.

Chaparal plant

Johnny jumpups were still out.

My favorite.

Something new.

Here’s a real smorgasboard.

The Snakes of Spring

 

 

On our trip to the Ranch last Monday, we observed many of the rights of spring, golden eagles feeding their young in a roadside nest, vulture eggs inside a hollow oak, a turkey gobler strutting and gobbling, trout smolt heading downstream, a gopher snake in the road, plump does ready to give birth and zillions of wildflowers.

Shooting stars.

Roadside gobblers are scarce this year. Maybe last year’s dry spring took it’s toll on them.

The warm of the sun was having it’s affect upon wildlife. Nothing seems to be more affected by the warm spring rain than snakes. One of the highlights of the trip was a rockpile home of a den of rattlesnakes.

They are always impressive and my friend Joe DiDonato has shared with me several of the photos he took was the group watched the snakes laying in the warm sun.

The brown snake is the larger, but the black snake has at least 16 rattles. I wonder how old it is.

The black snake is the smaller of the two – not sure which is the male vs female.

Spring Days at the Ranch

Drove to the ranch on Friday. Used the pick and shovel to clean the roads and cut back a fallen oak that was blocking the road. Then we glassed for turkeys, but found none. Shot my bow and fixed a problem before it got too dark to shoot. I was glad I had my backup bow, as I had to swich the arrow rest from my backup bow to the one I planned to hunt with. I’m shooting a Q32 with a whiskerbisket. Apparently the rest got bent when I crowed too much stuff into my bow case.

The weather was perfect and everything was gorgeous. I even had three hens walk by within 30 yards, but the gobbler that was with them headed off before it got too me. Maybe it got nervous. Who knows for sure.

I took advantage of the good weather and numerous photo ops to make the most of the trip. Here are some shots of the scenery, wild flowers and wildlife.

 Fiddlenecks

Red maids

Shooting stars were everywhere. 

As were Johnny jump ups.

On some locations on the ranch, native bunch grasses dominate the hillsides.

The stinkbell is a rare plant. We have at least a few dozen of them. (I cheated on this one – took it the week before but couldn’t resist including it.)

This fence lizard was quite macho.

A doe fed onto the ridge as I headed home.

And, I spotted my first gobbler of the spring.

The last photo of the days was of this canvas back duck cruzing past a couple mallards sunning on the shore of a roadside pond.

It was a good trip. One of the best aspects of spring turkey hunting is the beauty of spring.

Nature Quiz

Took a little trip to the ranch this week and came home with photos of a few early spring wildflowers. They’re not your run of the mill favorites and I didn’t know for sure the names of any of them. Nor did I know the name of the only butterfly species I found.

Therefore you can take the quiz and don’t feel bad if you can’t name these. The plants were all less than a foot tall and the flowers all less then the diameter of a nickel.

Here you go. As I figure them out I’ll post them. You can also comment with your answers if you like. Maybe it will help my research.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Ok. There you go. Of course I have the advantage because I saw them in person. I’ll be refering to the guide books and also my biologist friend, but my brother may already know them all as he’s on top of this stuff.