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Today it's wet in Pacifica. For California, that's pretty weird for
July. Even on the coast, the fog usually kind of floats. Today, the
fog is coming down.
I wanted to tell you guys about a house down the street that has
6-foot tall pencil cactus in the front yard (I don't know how
this is even possible in Pacifica) and they were
flowering the other week. It looked like 6-inch diameter
Gerber daisies were glued onto each plant, and the placement
was flirtatious - like a flower behind an ear. The flowers were pale
yellow and quite fabulous.
At work we just completed a controlled burn. We are setting up a
very long-term experiment (15+ years) to look at how burn frequency
affects bunchgrasses and Amsinckia grandiflora.
The experiment has taken three years to get off the ground. The area
had to be completely burned, then the plants were planted and allowed
a year to establish. Yesterday we started our selective burn. The
firefighters did it - they had a flaming wand that they used to touch
off the grass. I was standing on the other side of the canyon (about
a quarter-mile away) and I could hear the grass crackle. It was
loud! Most of the burn fuel out there is Avena (wild
oats). Flames got pretty high some places, maybe three feet.
They had people out there with hoses to keep the flames under
control, so that the plots we wanted unburned remained intact, and so
that areas not in the experiment didn't get burned. The wind came up
a couple of times and it's such a steep hillside... fire travels very
easily uphill. It was kind of stressful, as my job was to make sure
nobody walked where they shouldn't walk or dragged the big fire hoses
across the plots.
Tomorrow we set out a second round of seeds to see if more get eaten
in areas that have been burned compared to unburned areas. Not that
many seeds got eaten before the burn, so it'll be interesting to see
if granivory (love that word - it means seed-eating) increases.
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