More flowers from summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains to lighten up your winter.
More summer mountain flowers
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Tag Archives: California
More mushrooms of the field, plus a mystery thing
I know my last mushroom post left you wanting more, so here they are: the fungi of field season 2014.
This one looks like a sunrise.
Summer mountain flowers
For those of you beginning to tire of winter, here is a flashback to last summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Flowers seem like they ought to be sensitive, but they grow on bare rock and in tiny crevices, flaunting their hardiness with their petals.
Hurray for California rain
California is in the middle of a severe drought. Winter is the rainy season here, and the last two winters weren’t rainy. The drought’s major human impact has been agriculture-related: California grows a hefty portion of the US’s fruits, vegetables, and livestock, all of which require water. The drive to my field sites takes me through the agriculture-heavy Central Valley, and the drought was clearly apparent this summer. The fields were all cracked dry earth and yellow grass, with the rare irrigated green square standing out like artificial turf. One afternoon late in the field season, a light rain sprinkled as we drove through the valley, and we rolled down the windows and cheered.
The Central Valley is thirsty.
Concerns over agriculture affect everyone; but beyond them, and more personally, I can’t help seeing the drought through the lens of a field biologist.
I have colleagues who slip and slosh through mud all summer to study Black Rails—or who hope that there will be mud to slosh through, anyway, because the small, secretive Black Rail relies on the existence of marshes in which to hide from predators and hatch its comically large-footed chicks. Less rain means fewer and smaller marshes for the Black Rails.
Climate change in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Climate change will affect every corner of the globe in some way, from rising average temperatures to ocean acidification to increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather. It may eventually lead to coastal habitat becoming submerged and the desertification of once-green areas. Currently, however, one of the areas in which climate change exhibits its most dramatic effects is on mountains.
Sierra Nevada mountains
On mountains, the variation in elevation causes habitats to change over relatively small areas. Species may be adapted to just a small strip of habitat within a certain elevational range. With changing climatic conditions, those strips of habitat may move on the mountain, and species then have to follow that strip – track their climatic niche – or stay put and adapt rapidly to the new conditions there.
Tough Little Birds 