Fourth Visit

Name and Location: Lake Sonoma Wildlife Area - No Name Trail

1. Time and Date: 11/04/2020; arrival 3:15pm, departure ~4:30pm                                             
2. Weather: 82 degrees F, wind SSW 5mph, no rain, humidity 34%, air quality 24                                                          
3. Alone or with people?: With fiancé

Obligatory oak tree appreciation picture.

My first observation today was that it felt colder, but after doing my 10 min observation and then taking inventory of today's conditions I realized that the temperature was 82 degrees, which is only 4 degrees colder than last time, and which is also still a very warm one. It felt chilly to me. Humidity has also gone up again, and that's definitely very much detectable. It has been going up consistently since the first visit, but at this point we jumped from 19% to 34%. It feels really nice and it creates perfect autumn hiking and outdoor conditions.

I think what might be contributing to it feeling less hot is that the sun is getting less intense with us moving further into November. We also changed clocks a few days ago, so that makes a difference because it's actually an hour later. 

The air space animal kingdom is also a little busier today: So many more birds! Is it nesting season? How many birds stay in California and how many leave? Do any leave??

Also, less fun and less fascinating, but there are even more flies than last week. Why are they so attracted to smelly humans :-D

 

A little overview of some of the different plants growing in the main part of my site.

 

In the right corner, you can spot my observation/contemplation rock. He and I have grown really close over the last couple of months. Every visit before taking any notes I sat there for at least 10 minutes just oberserving everything around me (and my hairy legs and freckles). It's how I even spotted the Western Dwarf Mistletoe and other plants that are documented here.

 What you can see here is a juvenile Gray Pine

This is not my proudest moment and it makes me realize how much I want to get better at drawing especially the seemingly simple things, like grass. On the left, you can see the pictures of the actual plant and on the right side, you can see my drawing of it.

 

And here you can see a species of grass that is known as California fescue. It looks super bunchy and made me think a lot about what we talked about in class and understory fires. It seems like this would perfectly enable an understory fire to stay in that beneficial zone.

And the last observation for today's visit is this beautiful Western Dwarf Mistletoe. I thought I had taken a picture of it, but apparently, I did not, so my sketch will have to do ;-)

This one through me off a little and originally I thought it was the fruit or pollen of the tree.