Hi Ian,
Thank you for all the information. It is greatly appreciated.
Here in California, the weather has finally shifted. We had some rain, mostly in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and temperatures have turned much cooler – average autumn temperatures for this time of year.
When I was working at the Placerville farm this past week, I had my camera ready to photograph some of our wildlife, in particular our native birds. Maybe the rain altered their patterns. I did not encounter much. Most of the birds stayed well out of camera range – at least for my simple camera. Some Red-shafted Flicker were fussing in the nearby oak trees, but I never got a good view of them. I could tell that the California Quail had visited. They leave circular patterns in the dry soil where they dust themselves. Maybe next week I will have better luck with the wildlife.
Our native Blue Oaks, Quercus douglasii, are so stressed from the hot, dry, prolonged summer. Many of their leaves are turning brown. I hope that they survive. So many native oaks have died over the past few years. The oak savannah is turning into grassland. I am very concerned about this trend. The loss of trees alters the surface energy budget and creates an undesirable feedback loop – the soil becomes drier, temperatures rise, and more trees die.
