Wild gooseberry jam

As you can see the codger isn't getting much camera trap material these days, but as I was removing spines from my palate the other day, I thought I would share with you my secret for making wild gooseberry jam.

As you may know, wild gooseberries are usually rather prickly fruits. The local canyon gooseberries are among the spiniest, but some plants have tremendous loads of fruit.

Well, I'm an incurable wild food gatherer, and back in August when the gooseberries started to blush, I couldn't resist the temptation. The redhead agreed to cook them down according to a recipe I had found on the net.

Now that recipe makes no mention of disarming the berries, so we assumed that boiling the fruit would suffice to do the trick.

Not true, the jam was a beautiful deep cooked-gooseberry-color, but the berries looked a little bristly, and imparted an interesting textural quality to the otherwise delectable preserve. Unfortunately, no one in the extended family was interested in sharing in this culinary experience. The redhead concluded that it wasn't worth the effort, and advised me that if I had to have gooseberry preserves I would have to cook them myself.



Well, the next batch sat on the kitchen counter for several days, and I discovered that with dessication the spines actually become a little limp. They don't completely disappear, and the cooked fruit still looks a little bristly, but this was definitely an improvement.

Then I got a brilliant idea, which I want to share with the two or three other readers out there who might actually be deranged enough to try this. The solution to the problem of gooseberry spines is the blow torch.

I spread this last batch of berries on the table saw's cast iron surface, but you could use a cookie pan. Then just fire up your propane torch and singe off the prickles. When you boil down the torched fruit the spines will barely be noticeable to those with good vision, and older folks won't even see them. If you like slightly tart flavors, you will find the finished jam quite agreeable. The blackened seeds add an interesting visual quality, and the fascinating texture is still there.

Good luck, and be sure to wear gloves when you are picking next year.

Beautiful diggers

Gardening season has ended, but take note, good gardeners: the pocket gophers are gearing up for next year. That's right, the breeding season of our most abundant gopher -- Botta's pocket gopher -- is beginning right now.

Gopher is an emotionally charged word. In turf wars between man and gopher the reviled rodent always wins. The gardener may remove a few trespassers now and then, but victory is shortlived. What it boils down to is that gophers are far better at making a living than most gardeners are at circumventing gophers.

There are at least 3 dozen species of gophers (family Geomyidae) in North and Central America. They vary in size and coat characteristics from silky coated 5-inchers to burly bristle-coated bruisers the size of guinea pigs (like the one I trapped on Mt. Orizaba, Mexico, above). But all share the bauplan of subterranean root grazers, a thick-necked meaty forebody with powerful digging claws and beautifully enamaled orange incisors that can grow a millimeter a day. All of this makes them beautiful diggers. They dig with teeth and claws, and they don't gag on the dirt, because they can close their lips behind their incisors. If they were bigger, they could literally "eat corn through a picket fence".

As male gophers seek brief cohabitation rights the normally quarrelsome females become more approachable. Three weeks hence the mated females bring forth litters of 4 or 5 altricial young, which they nurse and later provide with fresh plant clippings. When five weeks have passed the mothers banish their offspring from their burrows.

Above ground and under cover of night the little beggars strike out for unoccupied turf. That's when aerial night vision predators get them. In the California foothills gophers have been calculated to account for 70% of barn owl prey by weight. The survivors settle on average about 240 meters from their mothers' burrows, but have been known to move as far as a kilometer. A gopher-free garden is a perfect place for a homeless gopher to settle.

There are a lot of gopher control products on the market, and if they reward the gardener with an occasional trapped gopher, the more consistent benefit is the workout in digging burrows. After setting a trap you normally wait several days before discovering the burrow is inactive, or you are lured to set another trap when a new mound materializes.

It goes without saying that if you want to catch gophers you had better understand how they think.

When the late raconteur naturalist Loye Miller, met Gumicindo Romero in Baja California in 1896 he had found such a man.

Romero, who owned one pair of clothes and a single shot Sharps rifle, was in Miller's words, "a really remarkable specimen, tall, rawhide tough, with a chest on him like a greyhound's."

Miller continues . . . .
"He had an interesting method of catching gophers. Coolidge offered him ten cents each for them since the trapping was slow. At the end of the first day he came back with a dollars worth of live gophers, each tied by a string around the middle and dangling from a long pole at an interval sufficient to keep it away from its neighbors. He spoke no English, but my Spanish, along with pantomime, worked out the story. The first animal had to be dug out live and tied around the waist. The next gopher hole was opened up and the captive was allowed to start down the tunnel. Then its tail was pinched to make it squeak. The rightful occupant would rush up to do battle. When their large front teeth were locked together in combat, both animals were yanked out by a jerk of the string."

With a little business training, Gumicindo would have been a rich man in Alta California.


References

Bandoli, J. 1987. Activity and plural occupancy of burrows in Botta's pocket gophers, Thomomys bottae. American Midland Naturalist, 118(1):10-14.

Fitch, H. 1947. Predation by owls in the Sierran foothills of California. Condor, 49(4):137-151.

Jones, C.A. and C.N. Baxter. 2004 Thomomys bottae. Mammalian Species, 742:1-14

Miller, L. 1950. Lifelong boyhood, recollections of a naturalist afield. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Patton, J.L. 1999. Botta's pocket gopher, Thomomys bottae. Pp 466-468 in The Smithsonian book of North American mammals (D.E. Wilson and S. Ruff, eds). Smithsonian Press, Washington, D.C.

Hail the Valley Quail

These are the four survivors of the clutch of twelve quail chicks we saw back in the summer. Looks like they might all be little hens, but maybe the one on the left is getting a macho face mask. Not sure.

I got a few chick pics back in the summer by putting the camera under foothill whitethorn next to the driveway. It was hit and miss, and none of the pictures were very good, so I started to bait with mixed bird seed.



Now they are as big as adults and filling in their adult plumage.



The parents are always nearby, and the male stands guard while they feed.



Normally the mother bird leads them about, but I haven't seen her lately, so she might have been picked off too.

California quail (the Valley quail is one of 7 subspecies) were a lot more common when I was a kid. Starker Leopold tells us that the species peaked between 1860 and 1895 in response to land use associated with settlement and crude agriculture. Grain farming and overgrazing by cattle and sheep actually improved quail habitat. In the decade after the gold rush, cattle are believed to have reached a million head, and by 1876 sheep numbered nearly 8 million. Heavy grazing fragmented the native bunch grasses, and made way for seedbearing Mediterranean forbs like filaree and clovers. Quail were better off then ever before.

The decline of quail (1895 - 1925) is blamed on intensive agriculture, habitat degradation, market hunting, and associated practices such as broadcast poisoning of ground squirrels. Hunters could bag 25-30 quail a day using dogs, a quail caller, and shotguns, and the selling price was $1 - $1.75 a dozen. In the San Joaquin valley poachers took as many as several hundred at a time using large nets at water holes. The poachers faked legal killing by hanging the dead birds in trees in bunches of 6, and shooting them with a shotgun at 30 yards.



Leopold's book is a labor of love worth having. I really must heed his advice about improving habitat so I can hear the mighty assembly call, a sound from old California. It sure beats the roar of the Harley Davidsons these days.

Reference

Leopold, A. Starker. 1977. The California Quail. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Is Ricky for real?

What about that Subaru Outback commercial? Featuring nature boy Ricky.

The Outback is designed to answer "the call of the wild". Ricky is NOT one of those nature-trashing SUV or pickup guys. He drives a little fast, but he doesn't splash through quagmires or drive up talus slopes. He's a wuss-boy faker who wears a leather jacket in the woods, and doesn't own binoculars. He's there to dupe you into buying the anti-SUV with a crappy gas mileage of 23/28 mph. (How come they never mention gas mileage?)

This commerical gets a 3.5. It's so dumb its funny.

(Scoring criteria)

1 -- immediate repulsion; you see it once and never want to see it again
(reaction: abusive verbalization directed to the TV),

2 -- delayed repulsion; you have to see it several times before rejection sets in
(reaction: sneering and irritating thoughts)

3 -- tolerance to mild amusement
(reaction: silent neutrality to mild pleasure)

4 -- amusement to genuine enjoyment
(reaction: you'll stop doing almost anything to watch it).

Commercial viewers who post comments on the web are divided in their reactions.

Those who like the ad seem to be all hung up about who Ricky is, and can't tell moose from caribou from elk. (Not sure you need to read these, but it's doubtful many of these folks ever peed in the woods.)

For entertaining comments and theories howevere, check out what the cynics say on commercialsihate.com.

Vile epithets and the dangers of learning foreign language

"The men of mixed blood jabbered in French, Cree, and Chipewyan mainly, but when they wanted to swear, they felt the inadequacy of these mellifluous or lisping tongues, and fell back on virile Saxon, whose tang, projectivity, and vile epithet evidently supplied a long felt want in the Great Lone Land of the Dog and Canoe."
The Arctic Prairies, 1911, Ernest Thompson Seton

The need to use virile Saxon comes at a young age. We were highly amused when a friend's son, wrought with angst over a childhood vexation told his parents he wished he could swear. He made it quite clear that his limited English was simply unequal to the task of expressing his frustration. I always thought that Zachary might have already known of a few tangy words, and was discretely asking permission to use them.

My first awareness of virile Saxon came when I was in Kindergarten. My grandfather and father had a fascinating language of their own. They used special words whenever they worked together. I thought I was entitled to use "the man's language". I never knew my mother was capable of such swift and decisive movement until the morning I exclaimed, "You dumb bastard!" It was probably one of the rare instances of single trial learning in my youth.

Somewhere I heard that biologists, the earthiest variety of scientist-- are more prone to use expletives than say, physicists or geologists. Among biologists, they say zoologists use racier language than botanists.

I am not sure any of this is true, but I always assumed that Steinbeck sanitized his portrayal of Ed Ricketts as Doc in Cannery Row. If Ricketts was as "concupiscent as a rabbit" he must have seasoned his speech.

Now the flashbacks:

ca 1979: Yenching Palace (a Chinese restaurant), Connecticut Avenue, Washington DC
We are zoo staffers prepared to celebrate the kind of personnel change that makes you sing, "Ding dong the witch is dead". The management knows us and seats us on one side of the room among a few other diners. We order steamed dumplings and beer while our mentor, who opts for Wild Turkey begins his catharsis -- a one-man passion play of sweeping erudation, surreal outbursts, and brooding pathos -- richly seasoned with expletives. An hour passes before we order food. Three hours later we are burned out, and it's time to go. That's when we notice that all the other customers are dining at the farthest corner of the room.

And now the faux pas of learning a language.

August, 1965: a hut on the banks of Rio Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico
I am learning vernacular Spanish from the natives (mainly a working guy named Ruben), and am much taken with slang words, like cabron (billy goat). We refer to each other as cabrones. I know it means more than billy goat, but I'm clueless to its nuanced and vile usage. Reno, and Dave and I are dining at the home of a humble family of campesinos, when Ruben announces that I have taught myself Spanish. This is a cue to perform. I do my little routine (all in present tense) and then lightly refer to Ruben as "un cabron". I am on a roll, and fail to notice the family's mortified body language. Ruben apologizes and explains that I don't know what I am saying.
"No, no, no, no no!" I insist. "Es verdad. Ruben esta un cabron muy grande."
When I realize how furiously Ruben is backpeddling, the damage has been done, and the rest of the meal is as solemn as a wake. I now know that cabron is not a word of mixed company.

1980s: an airport following the annual conference of the American Society of Mammalogists
Recognizing two gals from the meetings, I buy them coffee as we wait for our flights.They are grad students from Louisiana State University, with field experience in Brazil. "What about language problems?", I ask. They tell of a fellow student studying bats who approached a young woman at an airport to practice his Portuguese. (Yeah, right). The turning point was when he told her, "There's a fly in your hair." The lady politely replied he was mistaken, and the conversation quickly fizzled. Later he learned there are two words for hair: pele (fur) and cabelo (hair). The young man understandably used the word for fur and pelt -- pele. It was just bad luck. It also means pubic hair.

December 1, 1982: Delhi Airport, Security Check line (RNAC flight to Kathmandu)
I strike up a conversation with a couple of young Indian architects boarding the same flight. At the body frisking stop, one of them has an altercation with the security officer. "What happened?", I ask afterwards. "He is a silly old bum." He explains that the customs inspector was obviously from Haryana, so he addressed him in Haryani as "friend". The customs inspector correctly identified the architect from the Punjab, and assumed the architect was being a smart ass by using the Punjabi word that sounds the same. "What does that word mean?" I innocently ask. "It means the '(mammary) glands of a prostitute'!"

January, 1990. Casino Hotel, Trichur, Kerala
"Can you tell me what he's saying?" the redhead (my wife) asks with an embarrassed look. Our Keralite friend smiles and patiently repeats "How was the bed wetching?" (His accent is Malayalam, not the Hindi we hear mimicked so often.) I translate. "He wants to know, 'How was the bird watching?'" Later she tells me she thought he was asking, "How was the bed wetting" I admit it sounded a lot like that.

April, 1998. Chatthin Wildlife Sactuary, Burma
The premonsoon heat is terrible, and the redhead is not having fun. When the boyish Aung Moe delivers the cool drinks and notices her forlorn look, he timidly asks. "Scuse me, are you boring"?

Mammoth stirs Stockton

[Image from Penn State's Eberly College of Science]


Something neat happened last week. Construction workers in downtown Stockton drilled up a pile of mammoth bones. They were 80 feet down. In case you don't know where Stockton is, it's 80 miles east of San Francisco -- a Central Valley town on the deep fertile silt of the California delta.

Here's the fun part. The construction workers thought they had found human bones and called the coroner's office. Since the femur was as tall as the coroner, it could only have been a murdered NFL player. This is what happens when you watch CSI and its ilk instead of NOVA. But to their credit the workmen reported it, and for that they deserve a few "attaboys".

The news even fired up a few people who were sufficiently moved to comment. "Pissed off", for example, averred that "It's awesome to know that such huge beasts roamed locally." I agree.

My mammalogist friend Frank Iwen used to assist paleontologist John Dallman in prospecting for mammoth bones. When farmers called the University of Wisconsin's Zoological Museum about giant bones, these two packed their gear and headed for the field.

The best time of year for prospecting mammoth bones is in the spring when Wisconsin's deep glacial loess is moist and loose from freezing and thawing. But you need the right tool -- a smooth spring steel rod about an eight inch thick and 8 - 10 feet long. This you bore into the ground with the attached T-handle.

The chance of locating bones is slim at best, so you have to look for fragments in likely places like drainage ditches and cut banks. Then you start to plumb with the rod. The sound of the rod tapping the object tells you whether it is bone, rock or wood. They all sound different. You need patience and a discriminating ear.

One of my treasued belongings is a large shard of mammoth leg bone from a cobble bar on the Lawrence river, Kansas. All kinds of wonderful bones from ground sloth to giant beaver tumble from the eroded banks in the river's spring floods, and often settle on cobble bars. One blistering August day back in the 80s the family scoured that island like beagles, and I was the only one who couldn't find any bones. Embarrassing, but the girls let me curate the collection.

It was sheer luck that the foundation of the $110 million San Joaquin County administration office was over the old elephant. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a full size bronze mammoth before the entrance. We need reminders like that for folks who think the world started 6000 years ago.

Human shields

You've heard me say it here before. When the puma's image appears in my local camera traps the local black-tailed deer seem to spend more time lingering in the neighborhood gardens and driveways. The observations could be a coincidence, but maybe something else is going on. The puma, for example, could be following the deer, or the deer could be using the proximity of people and large dogs as a "human shield", a place where human disturbance is more likely to discourage most predators.

Well, Joel Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society recently published a interesting example of how human activity affects wildlife ecology in wilderness areas. During the ten-year study, Joel showed that the moose in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons adjust their use of space in relation to human infrastructure and activity.

Specifically, he found that over the years radiotracked moose have moved closer to roads at calving time. During the birth season, deer in general become secretive and restrict their movement to a very small portion of their home range. Since grizzlies feed on moose calves, but avoid roads in places like Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, they are less likely to encounter this brief but nourishing windfall. The evidence suggests that moose and other prey species find humans more benign and at certain times gravitate to human-modified lanscapes for safety. People just don't tolerate predators as well as they do prey, and thus they create safe havens in the vicinity of buildings, roads, and campgrounds.

Good work, Joel (and send me a reprint, please!)