Mud

“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” — Carl Sandburg

After the rain, the mud! While hiking at Huddart, we found a spot just saturated with thick, slick muck. Even though we had some other goals in mind that day, we could not leave the mud alone.

What started with mud skating and racing, escalated to an all-out clay-lobbing mud fight, and finished with otter slides,  wrestling, and finally lounging in the ooze.

Robin and Hesham caked on the clay to make mud helmets and head butted each other.

When we got back to the van, we hugged it! High fives and body prints livened up the formerly pristine white of the van.

Then we piled in to the van and drove out of Huddart to bring our wearable nature in to the city. We agreed to stop in some public spaces to see how regular urbanites react to our plastered faces.

In the grocery store, people stared, showing shock and amusement at the juxtaposition of the polished, bright, immaculate surroundings with our soiled grunginess.

The In-N-Out guys laughed the whole time they took our orders.

Back at the center we built up a fire.

And dried out our caked clothing.

We were so caked with grunge, some of us could not get in the car to go home untill getting hosed off.

The fire felt really nice after a day of sogginess and a soaked finale.

A Game of Agility and Awareness: Sharp Chickadee

  How is it to be a wild bird? With temperatures below freezing at night, I always wonder about the wild animals who live around us. Birds have no heaters, no blankets, no hot food, no indoors. They live only by the food energy they are able to gather during the day, and the heat they’re able to store in their feathers at night. What is it like to experience such pressure to find food, while constantly looking out for predators? Predators birds, too, must hunt for same food energy so that they can survive the night.

In the Riekes Nature department, we like to ask those questions in many ways. Study, direct observation, and imagination all inform our understanding of the natural world. But one of our best tools for animal empathy is play. The name of this game is Sharp Chickadee, brought to the West Coast Bird Language Intensive by Dan Gardoqui of White Pine Programs.

Here’s how to play: The game works best with large groups, perhaps 15 or more. Most players are Chickadees. Scattered on the land (within the agreed-upon boundaries of play) are Larders, consisting of napkins or plates of treats, some higher value than others. Some good examples of treats might be nuts, potato chips, or peanut butter cups. Every Chickadee’s goal is to eat as many treats as possible.

A few of the players are Sharp-Shinned Hawks. Hawks try to tag Chickadees.

In real life, chickadees are safe from hawks in dense cover. For gameplay, any tree is a safe base. But Chickadees can only stay in cover (touching a tree) for 10 seconds, before their quick little metabolisms drive them out to find more food. Chickadees love trees!

Chickadees have wings, not hands, so they must eat from the Larders like birds, face-first. Just like real-life birds, players can’t watch their backs when they’re chowing down!

When Chickadees get tagged they “die,” which means they must sit down and stay in one place. Every time a Hawk tags a Chickadee they get to eat from a Larder. Now, Chickadees are family birds and in real life, flocks stick together and help eachother. In game, Chickadees can revive their fallen friends if three living Chickadees all touch the dead one at the same time.

Try out this game at your next birthday party or park day, and find out what it’s like to live like a wild bird. Good luck avoiding the Hawks!

Hot Lava!

The Summit and Everest Intersession has begun and Riekes Center is full of excited new people eager to try the many flavors of athletics, arts, and nature connection available here. The Nature Awareness department has our own Summit/Everest program too. This month, we’re training for a two-week wilderness backpacking trip in May.

How do you train for a wilderness trip? Studying the terrain and memorizing maps? Carrying 50 pounds of weights in a backpack over miles of hiking trails? Well, probably. But we’re going for something more fundamental, and a lot more fun, first. Today we worked on getting our woods legs. Getting your woods legs is sort of like getting your sea legs, but for the wilderness. It takes practice, and for most folk used to walking on flat, even pavement, it can be challenging! Luckily, the training is really fun.

Remember playing Hot Lava in the playground when you were 7 years old? We did that, but through the park. We set down our stuff and challenged ourselves to get as far away from it as possible in any direction, without setting foot on the ground. We started out balancing on a fence.

You can probably tell how challenging the fence balancing was (not at all). So we quickly moved up to clamber over logs and branches.

Even though we were only feet (or inches) above the ground, the stakes were high! We all fell into the hot lava at least twice.

Whether we pushed the edges of our experience by simply balancing over a log, or by full-body leaps into trees, we all found our woods legs by the end.

 

Fire from the Land

On New Years Eve, a group of women and girls hiked out, seeking fire from the land. We started the day, as always, with a thanksgiving circle. We gave thanks to the land and stated our intention to gather Mulefat. In our gathering, we intended to give back to the plant by cutting out the dead branches and opening the way for new growth.

By the end of the day, everyone had gathered enough dead, well-seasoned mulefat wood to make multiple fire kits. We had cut back many more dead and rotten branches, and looking at the shrubs I got the feeling of relief, of breathing easier. The wind could now play freely through the green, supple branches.

Besides materials to keep our central fires burning bright, the greater gift to us  that day was getting to connect with the land itself. On our way, we sighted a golden eagle leaping from the crown of an ancient valley oak, a reminder of the power of wild places like this one. We also sighted countless ground squirrels, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, lizards, and of course spectacular scenery.

This particular place is land where coyotes serenade the dawn, golden eagles scan for prey from high rocky crags, and mountain lions pace the drainages at dusk.

Huge sycamores cradle blue boulders in their roots, standing against the winter rush of the creek. Ancient oaks drop acorns that sustained Indian villages just a hundred years ago and on back into ancient history.

Uniquely useful and edible plants, thriving in relationship with Indian people for millennia and now languishing in disuse and decline, hang on in pockets here. This is truly a special, magical place. And the rest of the Bay Area can be this magical, too.

The native California landscape requires tending. And tending a landscape requires a community. By holding fire from the land as a communal value, by going out to the land and gathering and tending in support of that value, we’ve taken a small step, as a community, toward restoring our relationship with the land. Thank you Riekes Nature women!

For anyone who’s interested in learning more about tending the wild and restoring Mulefat and other natives to your backyard or open space, here are some resources:

Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Anderson.

How to Grow Mulefat, a creek restoration guide from the San Diego Sierra Club

Directory of Native Plant Nurseries in California

Urban Creeks Council, an organization dedicated to restoring an managing creeks in the San Francisco Bay region

Bug Tracking

The Riekes Nature Department is on winter break, so I think this is a good time to post about fun Riekes Nature events that never made it onto the blog.

In the fall, Noah Charney came out to Hidden Villa to guide us in a bug tracking expedition. Noah and his associate Charley Eisman have written the book pictured at left. It’s titled, “Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” and is an in-depth work on finding and identifying invertebrates by the signs they leave behind.

Why track bugs, you might ask. If you’re not a nature geek and don’t understand why looking for bug sign might foster deeper awareness and understanding of the myriad forms of life all around us, then here’s another reason: We got to notice and wonder about all the strange little things that our adult schedules usually force out of our awareness. We got to be curious kids again!

We gathered in Hidden Villa’s parking lot and didn’t have to go far for our bug hunt. We started by upending some furniture — namely, the picnic table that we’d all gathered around. It reminded me of constructing furniture forts as a kid, but with bigger toys. We explored the underside of the table and found at least 5 different signs of invertebrates.

My favorite (not pictured, none of the photos came out well) was a coccoon about 1/2 inch long, made of short yellowish hairs and lined with silk, with a neat circle cut out of one end. The hairs, it turned out, were the caterpillar’s own, shed to provide itself protection as it pupated into a moth. We were able to mentally match the cocoon with caterpillars that we’d seen crawling around, by remembering the color and length of the hairs on the living caterpillars.

Next we noticed the old, weathered logs that lined the parking lot. All the logs sported beautiful carved patterns, called galleries, made by both adults and larvae of particular bark beetle species. Noah showed us how to tell which species made the gallery by the pattern it carved out.

We wandered down to the creek in search of more moisture-loving invertebrates. Here we are investigating some green lacewing eggs, stuck to the bay tree’s leaves by long stalks. The eggs were so small that we could only see their details through a hand lens.

And, of course, the classic bug-hunting strategy of turning over rocks also yielded some interesting finds. Here a caddisfly is anchored alongside a clump of snail eggs.

These little constructions seemed to grow all over the buildings at Hidden Villa. Noah pointed out at least three seperate kinds of mud nests, made by three different species of wasp. The buildings with their many corners and crevices also yielded lots of kinds of web-weaving spiders, all identifiable by their webs, some crickets, coccoons of various sorts, and I’m sure many other signs of invertebrates that I’ve forgotten about. In fact, it seemed easier to find invertebrate signs on our constructed landscape rather than in a more “natural” setting.

One of our final but most interesting stops was this bin that held a couple of inches of water. The silt at the bottom had coalesced into long, narrow tracks that wound labyrinth-like around the bottom of the bin. As we watched, a translucent worm poked it’s head out of the end of one line of silt, grabbed another grain of silt, and placed it on the end of it’s own line, building up it’s protective silt tunnel just a little bit more.

I’d seen these patterns in the bottoms of rain buckets and other vessels left out in the wet. But I’d never even wondered at the pattern. Regarding the bin, Noah left us with one statement that will forever influence how I see and understand the world: Whenever you see any pattern on Earth, it’s most likely the work of a living thing.

A Wild Solstice Feast

The sun’s arc is low to the south, the day is at it’s shortest and the night is the longest of the year. Happy Solstice! Many holidays fall during this time, and our lights push back the dark while food, friends and family buoy our spirits. We’re taking a break from our homeschool programs for the winter holidays, but last week we ended the fall session with a feast and celebration.

The youngest group, Nest to Fledge, cooked up a stone soup with different ingredients from each participant. The Teens crafted chocolate-like confections from our native Bay Laurel nut and cocoa. And the Kestrels had an all-wild feast cooked up over coals in Huddart Park. Later, the NEWTS joined us and added their playful energy to our celebration by leading a tour of the mushrooms of Huddart Park.

What follows is the Kestrel’s wild food feast menu. If you made food on Friday, please add your comment about what you made, what recipe you used, and how it turned out!

We had three drinks to choose from. Yerba Buena, our local wild mint, made a delicious hot tea. We also had pine needle tea, lemony and slightly bitter. Both were sweetened with honey. Our most surprising addition was Manzanita soda, made by adding bubbles to manzanita cider that had been sweetened slightly with maple syrup. So delicious!

Yerba Buena photo by Cactusbones

Monterey Pine photo by jkirkhart35

Manzanita photo by Randomtruth

And we had such a bounty of food. Our staple was acorn that we all pounded and set to leach in a creek for a week. We mixed the meal with water, salt and honey and poured it into a hot oiled skillet, and cooked up delicious acorn cakes. We also mixed in some wheat flour (about 1/4c wheat to 1c acorn) and made cakes that way, to compare. The acorn alone was the best mix, I thought. It cooked up into a deep brown, firm, slightly jellylike cake that was delicious with our jams.

Acorn photos by tallasiandude

Some other participants gathered rosehips and toyon berries and arrived that morning with two beautiful jams. The rosehip jam was a vibrant red and tasted fruity and sweet, somewhat like strawberries and apricots. The toyon was also fruity and very gelatinous, with a tannic pucker in the background of the flavor.

Rosehip photo by Iguanasan

Toyon photo by allisondan

Alongside the acorn and jam we had a ton of sauteed chanterelle mushrooms that had grown in one participant’s backyard. Yum! We had been tracking animals near our sit spots for weeks ahead of time, and we finally managed to trap some! We did not use real traps, but track plates that recorded the passage of the animal and did no harm. So as a stand-in for the wild squirrels that we trapped but did not catch, I brought some grass-fed beef to grill. Everyone got perhaps a quarter pound of meat.

Chanterelle photo by Colros

Squirrel track on a track plate baited with participants lunch.

Western Gray Squirrel photo by Just chaos

My contribution was a survival stew made of wild rabbit meat, dock greens, mallow greens, and wild onion greens. It turned out to taste strongly wild, but very nourishing. I quartered the rabbit carcass, browned the meat, added water, and simmered until I had a good stock. Then I added the young leaves of yellow dock (Rumex crispus), Mallow (Malva neglecta) and Wild Onion (Allium triquetrum) and simmered until the greens were cooked. I did not add any salt, nor did the soup need any.

Brush rabbit photo by terriem

Dock photo by The Weed One

Mallow photo by Matt Lavin

Wild Onion photo by Mat. Tauriello

Altogether we fed 13 people with almost all wild foods gathered by our own hands. The only non-wild ingredients were canola oil for the skillets, salt, honey, other sweeteners for the jams and teas, and some wheat flour. When we all had as much as we wanted, there was still a ton of food left! We invited the Teens and Nest to Fledge to share what we had made, and we got to taste their stone soup, and finish everything off with some bay nut candy.

I for one am especially excited to get the recipes for Manzanita Soda, Rosehip Jam, Toyon Berry Jam, and the Teens Bay Nut Candy. Please post in comments!

Coyote Teachings

With winter coming and nights getting long, now is a great time to pause and reflect on what’s most important. For my connection to nature, what’s most important to me are practices called “core routines.” Here’s a recent story that illustrates how powerful core routines can be. (One note: I didn’t have my camera. I’ve taken photos from Flickr to illustrate the story.)

We pounded up some acorn one day during a homeschool program at a local park. After program, I went looking for a place in the creek to tie our cotton bag full of acorn meal so that the clear running water would leach out the tannins by next weeks program day, and leave the acorn edible. I wandered down toward a particularly deep part of the creek. While I walked, I said a quiet “thanks” to the woods for being so peaceful.

There were juncos feeding on the road. OK, I wasn’t in a hurry, I thought. I didn’t get a sit-spot today, so why not stand here and watch them feed for a while? I stood at a polite distance and watched them hop and feed, hop and feed … until an oak titmouse cried “Chrrr ka-chrrr-chrrr!” from high in a tree, and the juncos lifted off together to perch at least 7 feet off the ground. What scared the birds? I waited.

(photo by Garden Beth)

Then up drove a loud SUV with an even louder ranger. “Did you walk in or drive in?” She sounded accusatory, but had only stopped to tell me that the park would close soon. (Most rangers are much nicer, and I generally appreciate their presence in the parks.) As we spoke, I kept my ears and eyes open for whatever had scared the birds. I saw a brown blur out of the corner of my eye.

(photo by Chris and Lara Pawluk)

My senses shouted at my brain, “Coyote!” though I had only seen what might have been the tip of a tail. My head snapped around trying to track the streak of brown fur. With words quicker than rational thought, I interrupted the ranger mid-sentence and blurted, “What was that? Over there?” I pointed at the path taken by the brown blur.

“What?” said the ranger. She looked both annoyed and concerned for my sanity.

“Um. Nothing. Nevermind.” I thanked her, and she drove away.

Surely it was just a deer, I thought. They’re everywhere in this park. If it was a deer, it would probably still be around. I’ll be able to see it if I sneak around the redwood circle quietly enough. So I fox-walked around the trees and scanned the woods.

No deer. No sound of hooves in the leaf-litter. The birds came down and started feeding again. I unfocused my vision and stared off into the distance, and with my Owl Eyes, I saw a trotting brown beast up ahead on the road. Coyote!

(photo by LisaWon)

I followed the coyote up the road, keeping about 50 feet or so behind. She stopped and looked back numerous times, but didn’t seem to mind that I was following her. She kept to the road at an easy trot, and I trotted to keep up with her. Then she paused, looked back one last time, and ducked off the road toward the creek.

(photo by Jim Culp)

I ran the rest of the way to the spot where the coyote left the road and stopped. I couldn’t tell where she’d gone. Then I remembered something a tracking instructor had told me: enter the woods like a cat being let out the back door. Stop and stretch your senses out ahead of you, to find out what’s out there before you run into it. I looked and listened. I heard the ranger’s SUV driving up the road, and then I saw the coyote. She was squatting next to the creek. I stood on the road, listened to the ranger drive past me, and watched the coyote lay a big scat.

(photo by Alan Vernon)

Ranger gone, the coyote continued on her way up the creek and I hopped off the road after her. But down in the creek bed, by the  coyote’s freshly-stinky pile, I lost track of her again.

(photo by randomtruth)

I heard a junco chipping and a squirrel barking in alarm upstream. Rock-hopping up the creekbed, I found the junco, but no coyote anywhere. I listened and looked for a long time. When I looked down, I saw a single coyote track splashed in creek water over a rock. That was the last I saw of the coyote. But had I found a great place to leach the acorn meal.

…

If it weren’t for practicing the core routines, I would never have had the pleasure of following this beautiful coyote. Here are some of the routines that helped make this story possible:

Survival living: Meeting your needs with what nature gives you. Food (like acorn) is a fun place to start!

Wandering: Approach the moment without an agenda.

Giving thanks: Take some time to say thanks, and dwell in an attitude of gratitude.

Sit spot: Sit in one place quietly. See what you notice.

Expanding our senses: Pay attention to all five senses together.

Listening for bird language: Everything the birds do conveys a message.

Animal Forms: As with Fox Walking and Owl Eyes, let the animals show you how to move.

Questioning and Tracking: Notice and wonder about the patterns in nature.

Story of the Day: Tell your story, inspire others, reflect on what you’ve learned.

Knife Making Workshop

  Andy Webster came to the Center on Saturday to help nine participants, both kids and parents, turn blades, blocks of wood, and a chunk of leather into beautiful knives. We started with a group effort to light a fire, since it was a cold day. Everyone put their work into snapping kindling, building the tipi, spinning up a coal with a bow-drill or a hand-drill, or making the tinder bundle. Our industriousness in lighting the fire set the tone for the whole day, which was good, since we had a lot of work ahead of us!

Here are the knife blades.

We started by taping up the blades.

When the blades were taped over, and the metal taped to the wood, we drilled holes for the pins. We cut the pins out of brazing rod.

Then we gooped everything up with 5-minute epoxy,

And clamped the whole shebang.

Since it was a cold day, we tried to warm all the epoxied knives in the sun to help them cure.

We cooked lunch over the coals and watched Andy cut out a pattern for our knife sheaths, while we waited for the epoxy to set up.

Warmed by the fire and food, we got to work again cutting leather to make our sheaths. Then we used electric drills to punch holes for the stitching (much faster than an awl).

We set rivets at key spots in the sheaths

And started lacing them up.

Once we got started on the sheaths, we took the knives off the fence, unclamped them, and started cutting away the extra wood.

Everyone seemed fueled by excitement to keep working. Rasping the knife handles was one of those tasks that draws you in and keeps you going, kind of like eating potato chips. Everyone kept thinking, “just a little more work. I know the sun is getting low and the air is getting colder. I’ll just rasp a little more wood.” They were still rasping when they walked out the door!

Even though a knife is too big a project to finish in one day, all participants carried home knives that were well on their way to being beautiful works of craft. One final comment that I overheard was, son to father: “Thanks for taking me here today, Dad. This is really awesome.”

“Everythings Green and Sprouty!”

Green grass! Sun (sometimes)! Soft earth! The rainy season transforms the land, and if you let it, it’ll also transform … your toes?

Now that the rains have softened our stony, hard-packed clay soil, the moisture has rotted away many of the plant world’s sharp spines, and new green springy sprouts round the contours on our landscapes, it’s time to take off the shoes.

I started going barefoot on a regular basis about a year and a half ago. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of incredulity from folks who don’t believe it’s possible, or healthy, to live without shoes. Here are some of the questions I get asked:

Oooh, doesn’t that hurt?

Well, it did at first. When I took my shoes off and hiked barefoot for the first time, I was hobbling and wincing in a matter of minutes. But after a few weeks of shoes-on, shoes-off, shoes-on-again training, I could walk for hours without missing my shoes. Then it was days, weeks … finally I went over a month with no shoes, ever. Now I use shoes sometimes (for bicycling, going to restaurants, and if I’m feeling ill and want to bundle up), but I’m not tied to them!

After a little practice, your body will get the hint that your feet are no longer in the protective womb of their shoes. They’ve been born into the world, and it’s time for them to start growing up and learning to take care of themselves! Three things will happen: your skin will get tougher, your foot and ankle muscles will get more toned and strong, and the pads of your feet will get more padding. You can help these processes along by easing into going barefoot.

These feet have pads as thick as any dog’s.

Aren’t your feet cold?

Nope! Well, yes, sometimes, but they were when I wore shoes, too. My feet are only consistently cold when I go barefoot on super wet, rainy, chilly days. And those were the days that, when I went shod, no amount of waterproofing or wool socks could keep my toes from becoming little popsicles, anyway. With bare feet, I can climb a tree or sit on the ground and get my feet off the cold earth, and they warm up nicely in a minute or two. With shoes, my feet stay cold all day.

I’ve never tried snow, though. Only really cold rain.

Don’t you get thorns in your feet? What about stepping on glass?

I’m not worried. Glass is not as prevalent as some may think, and when it is present, often the weather and action of other walkers have worn it down and pressed it harmlessly into the earth. I can avoid thorns by noticing the plants and going around them.

I also practice walking with sensitivity. When I’m in a place where I might step on a thorn, I try not to commit to my next step before I know it’s a safe place to put my foot. Some folks call it “fox walking,” because the same technique allows you to be as quiet and stealthy as a fox in the woods.  I’ve snuck up on more deer than I can count, this way.

I do still get thorns. But it’s also a matter of recognizing what pain signals mean. When I first started barefooting, any pain in my feet, no matter how small, freaked me out. Now I know a little prick of a trailing blackberry thorn is just a little prick, and I easily remedy it with tweezers.

Delicious, but painful if you don’t notice it!

There’s some inspiring reading out there that can help new barefooters find their footing:

Barefoot Running, by Michael Sandler. With chapters entitled things like, “Get Grounded by Learning to Play (again),” “Turn Your Feet into Living Shoes,” and, “Barefoot Children,” this book covers everything you need to know to be a safe and healthy barefooter. Even though I don’t intend to run barefoot a lot, it’s been a worth-it read for me.

Born to Run, by Christopher Mcdougall. I was so inspired by this book, that I started to have dreams of running down deer. It’s a really entertaining and fun story.

Some photos courtesy of: Chiot’s Run, Frielp, Wikimedia, and Elmschrat.

How to build a Tule Boat

We recently built a tule boat with 5th/6th grade students from Pacific School in Davenport thru funding by the Bureau of Land Management.  Expert boat builder Charles Kennard came along to show us some of his secrets.  Here is how you do it…

First, find some tule.  What is tule, a.k.a. bullrush?  It’s a tall sedge that grows in local wetlands.  Scientific names, Scirpus acutus and Scirpus californica.

Next you need to gather tule before it starts to decompose in the fall.  There are creative options as to how to do this…

After you gather, store and dry the tule, it’s time to make a boat.  You will need a lot of tule cordage.

The student twisted over 160 feet of cordage!

You can try tule limbo…

Then it is time to lash the tule together.  You’ll need a good bone tool though.

Then you lash it with some grape vines.  Traditionally we were told that cattail was used.

Then you have a completed boat and are ready to test it.

But first you have to get it to the pond.  Notice how light it seems when dry…

IMG_3261

►

IMG_3262

►

Then it’s time to float!

But then you need to get the boat back!  It’s a little heavier this time.

IMG_3283

►

Here are some other cool things you can make with tule.

Tule is truly an amazing plant!