Roger Lederer, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at CSU, Chico, has birdwatched in more than 90 countries. In addition to The Birds of Bidwell Park, his books include Amazing Birds, Pacific Coast Bird Finder, and Birds of New England. His website Ornithology.com—an excellent aid for all birders and nature lovers—has been used and acknowledged as a resource by the BBC, National Geographic, National Public Radio, National Canadian Television, and many other organizations and individuals.

Dr. Lederer served as Dean of the College of Natural Sciences for 10 years, and was the University’s first endowed Professor of Environmental Literacy. He also served as a founding member of Up the Road’s Board of Directors.

Adult male Monarch butterfly (photo by Shawn Kinkade)

Some Californians seem shocked to hear the water people finally say: “Hey folks, rethink that yard! We don’t have enough water for lush lawns.” Why the surprise? California is the only state in the union where rain doesn’t typically come in summer, which (aside from the gold rush) is why they call it the Golden State. Describing the state’s crispy hillsides as “golden” is much more poetic than burned-out brown.

California’s Mediterranean climate zones are perfect places to grow many exotics—almonds, pistachios, olives, citrus fruit, figs, apricots, wine grapes, you name it. Many of these can be grown in the U.S. only here. But lawn? No. Bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea, a complete waste of the West’s precious water.

And scarce Western water is fast becoming more precious—a lesson driven home on a daily basis, with supplies dwindling faster than normal during the current drought.

Fortunately, eliminating water waste is pretty easy—especially when you start looking around outside. Just how much water the average California family consumes monthly for outdoor irrigation and other uses varies considerably, but you can figure it’s anywhere from 25 percent for mild-weather coastal cities like Santa Cruz to 80 percent or more in Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley.

Worse, when it comes to irrigation abuse, there are superstars. According to a report from Matthew Green of KQED in San Francisco, 15 percent of California households are responsible for 60 percent of landscape water overuse.

Acknowledging upfront, then, that no one is really “average,” about 53 percent of the water used by the average California household is used outdoors.

So go ahead, kill your lawns, or let the summer heat do it. Will you’re waiting for the grass to turn “golden,” start planning new, adventurous, yet highly traditional landscape habitats to take its place.

Planting the right kinds of milkweed plants “feeds” Monarch butterflies, because the caterpillar stage will eat only milkweed. (photo by vladeb)

Everyone a Native Californian

If you can’t be a native yourself, you can at least plant some. No need to paint the dead lawn stubble a deep green, or dump a load of gravel around a few desolate cacti. Native plants are a much better way to seriously save on water while creating a lovely landscape.

Monarch emerging from its milkweed chrysalis (photo by Sid Mosdell)

Drought resistant native California plants have many qualities to recommend them, starting with very low summer water requirements. It’s a natural fact that they evolved here, and are uniquely adapted to thrive under conditions that often doom other contenders. You’ll need to provide drip irrigation for the first few years, until everything is well started, but after that it will be enough to water just once a month or during extended hot spells.

In fact, once established, natives are so low maintenance you can spend weekends year-round doing something other than work in the yard. Natives also need little or no fertilizers or pesticides, lowering the environment’s toxic load.

Because they evolved together native plants support native pollinators, providing them with food and shelter, which ultimately supports both native wildlife and plants. Attracting birds, including nectar-loving hummingbirds, as well as butterflies and other pollinators is another benefit of native plants. You’ll be surprised by the number of animals that will make themselves at home in your yard, including nesting birds. Native bees, moths, and other pollinators also directly support us,boosting food production in gardens, orchards, and fields, now that domestic honeybee populations are in decline due to pesticide overuse, parasites, and disease.

Given how much California real estate we human residents have appropriated, “giving back” habitat for the wild things seems perfectly reasonable. That gift can also provide huge support to wildlife in general, with private native gardens and landscapes serving as a valuable “bridge” between barren urban and natural landscapes.

Many native gardeners, for example, now make a point of planting Asclepias speciosa, showy milkweed, and other regional milkweed species essential for the survival of migrating Monarch butterflies. The hope is that if many people create milkweed “Monarch waystations” in their gardens and on other property, together we can recreate the conditions that once supported migrations of millions and millions of Monarchs. Together we can save this imperiled species.

Circling back to the original point: In supporting nature we also save water, and otherwise support our own survival.

A Cedar Waxwing enjoys toyon berries. (photo by Kevin Cole)

First Create Community

Either way, you’ll need to commit to a period of study and research. Then you’ll need to decide on the type of plant community to create.You can be a purist by planting only natives, or allow them to mingle with established landscape trees and other plantings that are also reasonably drought tolerant. That’s up to you. Both approaches can create stunning drought-resistant landscapes.

A native plant community is a group of native plants that interact with each other and with their environment in ways not greatly altered by modern human activity, as Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources explains this basic ecology concept. Recognizable plant communities (whether all-native or not) to try to emulate in Northern California include central or northern oak woodlands in valley areas such as Bidwell Park, which range up into the foothills; yellow or Ponderosa pine mixed forests just above oak woodlands; valley grasslands, where soils are too shallow to support oaks; and dry chaparral brushland areas characterized by rocky, shallow soils.

A native carpenter bee (many people mistake them for bumblebees) feeds on Western redbud blossoms. (photo by JKehoe Photos)

Make a “planting plan” based on climate conditions where you are, soil type, and drainage. The plants you select need to “create community” together. They should have similar water needs, of course, but you’ll also want to group them in correct “micro-communities.” Shrubs that thrive in woodland or forest understories, for example, need the same filtered or shady light conditions and protection in your garden. The more successfully you imitate each plant’s ideal growing environment, the more successful your garden community will be.

A great place to start educating yourself about native plants and their garden possibilities is the nonprofit California Native Plant Society (CNPS)—support it by joining a local chapter—and its very helpful website. The CNPS native plant database is very useful. As part of its in-depth Gardening Program, the CNPS will soon certify landscapers as knowledgeable about planting and maintaining natives in the garden. The first certification classes will be held in Fall 2015.

Northern California has some excellent native plant nurseries, including Chico’s own Floral Native Nursery, a peaceful place to wander, ask questions, observe various plants at different times of the year, and also see some of them established in the landscape. There’s even a useful online price list to help with garden budgeting.

California fuchsia is striking in the landscape, and a hummingbird favorite. (photo by JKehoe Photos)

The Las Pilitas California native plant nursery is a bit far afield for most of us to visit, but its website is a wonderful resource for “plant community planning,” wherever you are. Discussions of California plant communities include extensive, informative listings of plants typically found in each, complete with photos. You can also figure out what plant community you live in by city or zip code, though in “edge” areas, this tool may not be absolutely accurate. (For Paradise, for example, the dominant community listed is Central Oak Woodland, but even in middle Paradise the Ponderosa pines are already pretty thick, suggesting a quick transition into Yellow Pine Forest.) So at least here in Northern California, where native vegetation is still easy to find, you’ll get good guidance by going outside and looking closely at what’s growing wild.

Also immensely helpful is the Tree of Life Nursery website, which features a variety of useful planning tools, plant profiles, and a 30-plant short list of reliable “must-haves” that will succeed even for the beginning native gardener. Check out Tree of Life’s Sage Advice article series for more in-depth practical assistance, with topics such as How to Create a Pollinator Garden, Fragrant Natives, Natives for Basketry, and Native Groundcovers.

This is the first in a multi-part series that encourages Californians to replace lawns and other thirsty landscaping with drought tolerant native plants. The many benefits of this approach include re-creating natural animal and plant habitats that human population growth has overrun. 

Kim Weir is editor of Up the Road. A long-time member of the Society of American Travel Writers, she is also a former reporter for North State Public Radio. Before Weir embarked on a career in words, she sharpened her observation skills while studying botany and ecology as a biology student at Chico State.

A much smaller proportion of park users recognize the flora and fauna—the trees, wildflowers, vines, and shrubs, some native and some not. Squirrels, deer, raccoons, opossums, lizards, snakes, nets, salamanders, and a variety of fish inhabit the park, often unnoticed.

People are more aware of birds because they are lively, colorful, talkative and active during the day. But without effort on the part of the observer, all birds seem alike. This is an attempt to give personalties to the varied but most common birds of Bidwell Park. Most of these birds are also at home throughout the Sacramento Valley, usually found in similar habitats and at similar times of the year.

BIRDWATCHING BASICS

They say the best birdwatcher is another bird. What you look for may not be what another bird looks for, however. Strolling by yourself, you notice only the occasional jay or robin, but after you go on a casual jaunt with an avid birdwatcher, an entire new world opens to you. Jays, sparrows, warblers, sparrows, woodpeckers, hawks, and vultures are now everywhere. They were always there, but you focused on other things.

When you try to identify birds, you have to look at them in a new way. There is typically no one characteristic that distinguishes one bird from another; it’s a set of characteristics. Just as there is no single way to tell a make and a model of one automobile from another, there is no single characteristic to tell birds apart. All autos have headlights, tires, bumpers, windshields, and other parts in common. All birds have feathers, beaks, scaled legs, tails, and wings. But the variation in those parts plus the coloration and patterning of the feathers, makes each species unique and most are easy to identify.

Obtain a decent pair of binoculars. The magnification, lens size, and features of a binocular are personal choice, but a 7×35 or 8×42 pair seems to be most birdwatchers’ preference.

Always locate a bird with your naked eye first. Binoculars give you a narrow field of View and it is hard to find a bird by scanning with them. And scan from right to left; we read from left to right and scanning in the opposite direction slows down the scan.

A song or call can be a very clue or even the clue to identifying a bird, but it takes some experience to learn these.

Finally, my best recommendation for the beginning birdwatcher: go out in the field with those folks who know the birds. If you don’t have a friend who does, contact the local Audubon Society near Chico or Redding, or, for Bidwell Park birding, theChico Creek Nature Center.

There is no one way to identify birds, but there are major clues. By following these clues, you can eliminate possibilities and narrow your choices. The clues are:

Size—Sparrows and thrushes are distinctly smaller than hawks and bigger than kinglets, for example.

Shape—Is it tall and thin or short and round? Does it have wide or narrow wings or tail? The silhouette of the bird can tell you a lot.

Bill—Both size and shape are important. Is it long, hooked, upcurved, stout?

Pattern—Does it have patches, stripes, splotches or bars on the background color, wing, or tail of the bird?

Habitat—Is it in a marsh, a forest, grassland, or lake?

Behavior—Is it pecking on a tree, probing in the grass, swimming, or soaring?

Color—Although looking for color seems obvious, color can be missing or the bird may be in dark shade, making it appear dark or even black, or it might be in bright direct light, making it look different than it would in a moderate light. But in good light, color is very helpful.

Dr. Roger Lederer, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at CSU, Chico, has birdwatched in more than 90 countries. In addition to The Birds of Bidwell Park, his books include Amazing Birds, Pacific Coast Bird Finder, and Birds of New England. His websiteOrnithology.com—an excellent aid for all birders and nature lovers—has been used and acknowledged as a resource by the BBC, National Geographic, National Public Radio, National Canadian Television, and many other organizations and individuals. He served as Dean of the College of Natural Sciences for 10 years, and was the University’s first endowed Professor of Environmental Literacy. He also served as a founding member of Up the Road’s Board of Directors.

Events make sense only in context. Sometimes the term context is used by naturalists to mean the environment or “field” in which a creature makes its living naturally. A caged parrot is out of context, then, and unable to teach us much about being a parrot. A lion or gorilla in a zoo may exhibit some genetically encoded behavior and physiology, but mostly they teach us how caged animals interact with each other, their keepers, and the observing public. Understanding context can be challenging. 

One November day, after a rain, I biked out of my drive and saw three long-tailed birds feeding off the crushed black walnuts in the street. Two were black, white, and blue-green (magpies) and the other, entirely green. When I got closer they flew off. “Parrot,” I said to myself regarding that flash of green—the best I could do at the moment.

Later Waldo (as we named him) started hanging around my feeder and I was able to observe him more closely and check with my bird books. Only the new (1983) National Geographic guide included Waldo’s kind: rose-ringed parakeet (Psittacula krameri). The length of a magpie, the bird is green in head and body, with a plum colored beak and a black gash cutting from behind the eye, down under and across the throat–-a mature male.

“What’s the story?” we often ask when a surprise like Waldo arrives. According to my book, small, resident populations of escapees exist around Miami and Los Angeles. That makes sense to a birder; this bird probably made it here from L.A. A birders’ context can make sense of a “parrot” in the Central Valley. The story here is a naturalist’s one, about native birds, exotics, and escapees with little chance of taking over and “naturalizing.”

The spread of starlings across the U.S. would be the flip side of the amusing escaped-parrot tale. When Eugene Scheffland let loose European starlings in Central Park in 1890 and 1891, determined to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare, that context soon grew into a nightmarish 150 million birds.

To me feral parrots and parakeets look out-of–place, out of context. And the lone one at my feeder would strike me, when I was in the mood, as lonely, a kind of brother or ally. There we were in rainy November getting used to each other across the feeder, getting to know which moves I make that will cause alarm and which don’t mean a thing.

Waldo created his own context, for he seemed quite at home with magpies: They would feed together, fly together, and soak up the sun together high in the elm. I imagine that it’s possible for a bird to be “lonely” just as a puppy might, or a cat, but being unique in a given setting or even geographically misplaced is not the same as being alone, or a loner. My parakeet friend took himself to be part of a flock, the rest of which was magpies.

Then there is the context I helped create by opening the bag of birdseed in the first place.

Red, white, yellow millets. Grain sorghum. Sunflower seed. Wheat. Other ingredients are listed on the label for Pretty Boy Wild Bird Food, packaged appropriately enough by the Audubon Park Co. of Akron, Colorado, but I don’t need to read more.

The bird seed label takes me back 65 years to Minnesota where as a boy I raised racing pigeons and fed them a mix of peas, corn, and “Kaffir corn,” the ancestor of the domesticated sorghum in the Pretty Boy mix. The now-taboo name sounds exotic still, with its echoes of Africa, of tensions between Moslems and “unbelievers” (the Arabic kafir, “infidel,” being the present participle of kafara, “to deny, be skeptical”). Sorghum, by comparison, is as downhome as a field of cultivated grain.

What’s in the name?

Combining “Pretty Boy” and “Wild Bird” on the label is likewise jarring, invoking caged canaries on the one hand and free birds on the other. This mixed imagery seems intentional. The cartoon-style red bird on the label underlines the “pet bird” tenor of the message: feed wild birds to lure them into your yard so you can enjoy them close up.

Packed into this label, then, are two ways to care about birds—let them fly free to be pursued by us birders using binoculars or cameras, or capture them somehow and use them to decorate our lives. The invocation of artist John James Audubon on the label, the company name, throws in on the side of captive beauty and decoration; Audubon commonly shot the wild birds of America for specimens and then arranged their dead bodies in “life-like” poses to create his portraits.

This too is in part a matter of context. Do wild birds in the neighborhood tell a story of abundance, variety, and plenitude? Do they speak of God’s creation and the usefulness of birds and beasts and plants to humankind? Will there come a day when lions lie down with lambs and all of nature becomes a Peaceable Kingdom, as the Bible says in Isaiah 11:6 -9?

Or do we as naturalists imagine wild birds as actors and agents in the dynamic natural drama described by Darwin? We may feel kind to them and protective, but a law much wilder than neighborhood kinship underlies our relationship.

There is contention even among birdwatchers about context. Some birders feed back yard birds for their own listening and visual pleasure, and others oppose feeding absolutely, on sanitary and ethological grounds. They condemn those misled sentimentalists who lure wild birds into urban ghettoes to eat amid mites, germs, and scat, not to mention danger from cats.

Both feeders and non-feeders approach birds as categories and kinds, as species—white-crowns, towhees, nuthatches—rather than as individual beings. Rarely do we birders know a particular bird, such as the white-crowned sparrow at my feeder some years ago with a unique, aberrant white tail feather, or the blackbird with only one eye.

The rose-ringed parakeet who showed up one day at our feeder in Davis was surely an escaped exotic, but we named him and looked for him each day for two years until finally Waldo came no more, the victim of colder weather, we assumed.

Were it not for feeders, most birders would never get the chance for such day-by-day familiarity with individuals.

Like Waldo.

At seven in the morning hundreds of blackbirds and several dozen crows forage on the grass in the field I walk and jog around for exercise. I’ve gotten to know their ways, a bit. Glossy black male Brewer’s blackbirds hop, cock their tails up, or send them straight back. Some drop their wings as in courting displays although nesting season is well past. The brownish females, dark-eyed, fluff up as round as English robins; at other times they affect a sleeker look. Both drink from the sides of their bills from the shallow puddles on the track. 

Several of the blackbirds and one crow stand out as individuals, but only because of their deformities. One black bird has no left foot; another, a foot turned under, as does the crow. They excite my compassion, but then I wonder: Is my pity proportionate or symmetrical to their experience of their deformity? None show any awareness of their “handicap.” They hop just the same, balanced on one leg, as they forage with the others. No mobbing or harassing of them by the “normal” birds occurs.

Walt Whitman writes: “I think I could turn and live with animals . . . They do not sweat and whine about their condition, . . . Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth” (“Song of Myself,” Section 32). He has mammals in mind more than birds, here, but my blackbirds do not seem unhappy, either. If “compassion“ means to “share the suffering of another,” as my dictionary has it, what’s to share if the birds seem not to suffer? And yet, they evoke feelings of compassion in me.

This disjunction between my feelings and the apparent lack of suffering in these birds, the subjects of my observation, raises a larger problem, both philosophical and ethical. How can we know what another feels? Must we infer from objective evidence only? Or may we draw on our intuition of likeness in another? Many do, including vegetarians, pet owners, dog trainers, cat keepers, naturalists. Interestingly, however, so do many hunters and fishers. Ethologists like Tinbergen seemed to share understandings with herring gulls, even wasps; von Frisch, with bees; Lorenz, with geese and jackdaws.

I spent my undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota amid logical positivists, students of language and symbols who left no room in the world for such “sentimental” or anthropomorphic projecting of our human subjectivity, either “down” into animals or “up” into gods. And literature’s “new critics” taught me to beware of any hint of what they termed “pathetic fallacy” in verse or prose, that is, the imputing of human emotions to animals, landscapes, weather.

It now seems sad to me that anyone would feel disallowed from sympathy across chasms between one and another, themselves and creatures, themselves and forests, themselves and creation. To throw out the human richness of sympathy with others, of compassion for others, just because of some of the sappier excesses of certain romantic and Victorian painters or poets is to “throw out the baby with the bath water,” as a slice of folk wisdom warns.

Metaphor is our deepest human way of thinking and knowing, as Gregory Bateson was fond of saying. Birds are us, Mutatis mutandis, “with those things having been changed which need to be changed.” We allow for obvious differences while we also live and breathe metaphor. We are as grass (Psalms 103:15). Or like wolves (Lois Crisler), or Coyote (Ursula Le Guin), or Balinese chickens (Alice Walker). Or the Great Salt Lake (Terry Tempest Williams) or ocean (Rachel Carson). We are human beings.

Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

Here are 181 Candidates to Seriously Consider

On October 22, 2014 the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences identified 181 dams in California that are “high-priority” candidates for reallocating water flows, to protect the health of related watersheds and sensitive species—in keeping with the state constitution’s “beneficial use of water” section, the public trust doctrine, both state and federal endangered species acts, and Section 5937 of the California Fish and Game Code, a rarely enforced state law more than 100 years old. 

In their technical report Assessing Flows for Fish Below Dams: A Systematic Approach to Evaluate Compliance with California Fish and Game Code 5937, Theodore E. Grantham and Peter B. Moyle acknowledge reasons most dam owners haven’t complied with the Fish and Game requirement that they release enough water “at all times” to keep fish “in good condition.” There are well over 3,000 dams in California—some federal, some state, some privately owned—and enforcement would carry with it financial and political costs that most leaders prefer to avoid.

Sometimes dams outlive their usefulness: dynamited early 1900s mining dam at Emerald Lake, Trinity Alps. Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

“This drought year, as in those past, California water regulators have given away to cities and farms some river flows critical to fish and wildlife,” say Grantham and Moyle in the online summary posted on the California Water Blog.“It’s a dicey tradeoff considering most of our native fishes are in trouble even without the drought.”

Yet citizen lawsuits—to provide healthy water flows for the San Joaquin River, Putah Creek, and a handful of other waterways—have succeeded, whether or not these represented the most critical need statewide.

Which led to the question that prompted the UC Davis watershed report: “If Section 5937 were more broadly applied to improve fish flows, which dams should get the focus of attention?”

To come up with an answer, the Center “developed a systematic and science-based approach for evaluating and targeting dams for potential enforcement,” a detailed research protocol soon to be formally published in the peer-reviewed Oxford Journal BioScience, published on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Rusted steam-powered winch above Emerald Lake in the Trinity Alps. Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

Adequate for most of us, though, is the shorthand explanation of how they evaluated dams for “evidence of inadequate downstream flows for sustaining healthy fish populations,” information that allows managers and policymakers to perform “triage”—to focus their efforts where the need is most urgent.

First, researchers identified dams subject to fish flows law, “those on relatively large rivers and streams with enough storage capacity to change the timing and magnitude of river flows.” These dams were then reviewed for changes in downstream natural water flow that could harm fish. Finally, the impact of altered flows on fish was assessed, to flag dams in watersheds where fish are imperiled.

Using these admittedly coarse “filters,” the UC Davis researchers evaluated 753 California dams and identified 181—almost 25 percent—as “high-priority candidates for Section 5937 enforcement.”

Letting It Flow

According to Grantham and Moyle “there is ample evidence that many large California dams likely fall short of providing adequate flows to keep fish in ‘good condition.’” More than 80 percent of California’s native fish are at risk of extinction, they say, if present trends continue. How we manage dams is the key factor for their survival.

Lake Shasta is a high priority for Section 5937 enforcement, say UC Davis researchers. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

Removing dams entirely is one possible solution when below-dam flows aren’t enough—or are too warm—to support healthy fish and wildlife populations, though the report doesn’t address the whys and wherefores of any action. Yet it’s not the only possible approach. Releasing water at critical times can keep fish healthy during crucial periods in their life cycles.

Aerial view at Folsom Lake showing low water, January 16, 2014. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

The researchers believe “strategic implementation of Section 5937 could provide reasonable protections of California’s dammed river and streams.” Such implementation would have to be “systematic and transparent,” from monitoring and evaluating water flows to mitigating any environmental effects.

And, the report points out, being identified as “high priority” doesn’t necessarily mean a particular dam violates Section 5937: “That determination requires a closer, on-site investigation of dam operations and their effects on fish.”

Still, “enforcement” candidates reasonably close to home here in Northern California include some dams whose removal—even the very thought of their removal—would cause gasps of disbelief: Folsom Dam on the American River, in Sacramento County, for example, and Anderson-Cottonwood, Keswick, and Shasta Dams on the Sacramento River, in Shasta County. Other notables include Dwinnell Dam(Shasta River Dam) on Shasta River, in Siskiyou County, and both Lewiston Dam and Trinity Dam on the Trinity River, in Trinity County.

Dry times at Folsom. Photo by John Chacon for California Department of Water Resources.

(Dwinnell, though, is no longer a “high priority.” As the result of a lawsuit—dam owner Montague Water Conservation District has agreed “to release significantly greater flows and to take other measures to protect fish down stream.”)

Others candidate dams close to home includeBlack Butte Dam on Stony Creek, in Tehama County; Englebright Dam on the Yuba River, in Yuba County; La Grange Damon Tuolumne River in Stanislaus County;New Hogan and New Melones Dams on the Stanislaus River in Calaveras County;Conn Creek Dam in Napa County; andWarm Springs Dam on Dry Creek, in Sonoma County.

Then there’s Boca and Stampede Dams on the Little Truckee River, in Sierra County;Donner Lake Dam on Donner Creek, in Nevada County; and Lower Scotts Flat Dam on Deer Creek in Nevada County.

Truly stunning to contemplate, however, are the many Southern and Central California dams the report identifies as top priorities, the great majority of those 181 enforcement “candidates.

Long Valley Dam on the Owens River, which saves water for transport to Los Angeles, is one of those candidates and a case study included in the report. Several species of fish native to the Owens River, including the Owens tui chub, are affected by this dam below Mono Lake in the Owens Valley.

Salmon need cool, fresh water to survive and thrive. Photo by Carl Costas for California Department of Water Resources.

If you haven’t already taken a look, download the UC Davis report here and read up on its results and research methods. Neighborhood fish will be grateful.

Rock wall, Sutter Buttes. Photo by Christian Ostrosky/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Any place is more than just material objects, landscapes, and homescapes. Things carry names as part of the history of a region. Names give meaning to the raw data of dirt, streams, weeds, and animals in a particular place, and especially to the integration of things. Layers of namescapes cover any landscape.

Common names like “blackbird” or “poison oak,” “sparrow“ or “weed” may suit a population of adults and children who participate in everyday interactions with nature more or less absentmindedly, uncritically. Similarly, “proper common names” for birds, like Brewer’s blackbird, Anna’s hummingbird, white-crowned sparrow, turkey vulture, and yellow-billed magpie, realize a web of names approved by the American Ornithological Union (AOU) that articulate a specialized taxonomy of place.

Impressive Vulture. Photo by Tom Talbott/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

But names are not the things and cannot substitute for real birds or plants.

Even so, getting the names right may accomplish part of the mission of an immigrant making a home in the Valley.

Of course, common names taken for granted in one climate may also mislead nature lovers in a new setting. Our blue birds and blue jays, for example, do not look or act or sound much like blue birds and blue jays east of the Sierra. Our so-called scrub jay’s name is not meant to demean the species but to refer to its habitat.

Nevertheless, anyone trying to become at home in this valley might well adopt a bird species or plant species and then learn everything about it from books, from Google, from monographs and images, from poems and from folklore and even from extravagant yarns: consider the wonderfully funny “Baker’s Buejay Yarn” by Mark Twain:

Baker said that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays were the best talker he had found among birds and beasts. Said he: “There’s more to a bluejay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and, mind you, whatever a bluejay feels he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk—and bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling.”

Scrub jays commentary bristles with metaphor, according to Mark Twain. Photo by Amit Kotwal/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

West of the Sierra Nevada scrub jays are more raucous and pushy than jays back east, and not handsome in the way that eastern blue jays native to the Midwest are. Scrub jays speak Central Valley. Hear Storer and Usinger (Sierra Nevada Natural History) on the talk and posturing of our jays:

This avian busybody of the foothill oaks is easy to see and hear. Often it perches alertly with feet spread, head up, and tail level or tilted upward; again it will sit motionless for minutes with the tail hanging vertically. Being bold and curious, it watches all local events and is quick to dash off in noisy flight and investigate. If an owl or other predator is sighted, the bird’s excited calls promptly bring others of the species. The varied “vocabulary” evidently is meaningful to others of the species.

The wit and poetry packed into the names of things draw me on as an explorer myself. Who discovered and named the animals and plants for us and how does all that fit into the story of flora and fauna in the Valley?

I ponder this question, again, as I head again into the Sutter Buttes. Occasionally I lead hikers intrigued by the flora and fauna and geology of the Sutter Buttes, “Smallest Mountain Range in the World,” as a guide for the Middle Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit assembly of citizens, ranchers, neighbors, and naturalists whose aim is to appreciate and cherish this unique remnant of nature and earlier ranching ways now surrounded by the modern agricultural and urban development of northern California.

The importance of the Buttes to me and to my discernment of the special iconic quality of the place began in 1983 as I traveled north to Chico from Davis. At first the hyperbolic epithet, “smallest mountain range in the world,” struck me as typical American hype. But as I drove by on the west side one day the Buttes became a background for the nearer farming scenes of drained rice “paddies” and standing farming machinery in the foreground. When I drove by on the east, the Buttes served as background for the dome of the Sikh Gudwara, and I caught a glimpse of the special spiritual centering the Buttes exemplify.

When one Saturday I at last entered Peace Valley in the Buttes, I felt embraced by the landscape between the Buttes’ “castellated core” and “ramparts,” descriptive tropes applied to features of the Buttes by Howell Williams, whose pioneering geological monograph first described the Buttes for fellow geologists. He saw the Buttes as an arrangement of core, moat, and ramparts resulting from the uplift of valley floor by intrusive volcanic events a million and a half years ago. Seen from the outside, the Buttes display profiles of a lumpy landscape with several peaks. Seen from above, as we today may see from an airplane and as Williams imagined them, we are startled to find them an almost perfect, ten-mile-in-diameter, circular landscape feature, a mandala, as it were.

The Sutter Buttes as seen from Gray Lodge. Photo by Miguel Vieira/ CC BY 2.0.

Modern students of this valley island have learned that our predecessors here had regarded the Buttes as sacred and as shared territory long before Spanish, Mexican, and American invaders “swarmed into the Sacramento Valley,” as Walt Anderson puts it in his Inland Island: The Sutter Buttes:

With respect to our modern Sutter Buttes, the Maidu Indians called the circular ring of stoneEsto-Busin-Yamani, Middle-Mountain-Lodge. The translation is more accurately rendered as Mountain Dance Lodge in the Center, important as the name clearly identifies the Buttes as the primal prototype of the most sacred center of religious life, the dance lodge.

These natives did not live in the Buttes, but in the lands around, coming into the Buttes for sacred ceremonies and to harvest acorns, as testified to by the numerous bedrock mortars where acorns were pounded into flour.  We later arrivals who love the Buttes similarly go into the center for nourishment and refreshment, perspective, and reverence of creation.

The Buttes mean different things to different folks. They are grazing land for sheep ranchers, ranchland for cattle ranchers, and icons of place for citizens who embrace The Buttes on signs, murals, placemats, and mastheads for local newspapers. They even offer a useful response to urban insult. When more than two decades ago Rand-McNally ranked nearby Marysville/Yuba City dead last in a long list of congenial communities in which to live, they galvanized local pride in the form of bumper stickers, T-shirts and tractor caps announcing Rand McNally, Kiss My Buttes and Up Your Atlas, Rand McNally!

Looking out on valley rice fields from the Sutter Buttes. Photo by Alan Grinberg/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

To me the Buttes mean a coherence of nature, of land use, of flora and fauna and of the dedicated attempts of locals to take care of and cherish the mandala around which we live. The spirit of the place – its true name – remains unchanged.

Citizens from surrounding farms and foothills often fix on the Buttes as a signpost of familiar territory, as in: “When I see the Sutter Buttes I know I am almost home.” So do I.