Big Basin Heartbreak

The news of the CZU Lightning Fire in California hit home for me this past week as the fire swept through Big Basin Redwood State Park—California’s oldest state park and protected habitat of the endangered Marbled Murrelet. This robin-sized seabird comes inland from the Pacific Ocean to the mature and old-growth forests during the summer to nest on the wide branches of the trees. Big Basin Redwood State Park was the center of the discovery of the murrelets’ nesting site in 1974 in a 220-foot-high Douglas-fir, the kind—and perhaps very tree that held that famous nest—that are being burned and scorched now as the fire engulfs 78,000 acres of Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties. Many of the redwoods will survive—there is some good news here from KQED.

While writing my book , Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet (Rodale 2005 and Mountaineers Books 2014), about this extraordinary bird, I spent much time in this spectacular “big-trees” state park visiting the site of the nest discovery, camping with my family under the very tree where the nest was found, and hiking the park trails under thousand-year-old trees and feeling as if I had walked back in time.

Photo of the author at Big Basin Redwood State Park (by M.D. Ruth)

Big Basin Redwood State Park’s historic Headquarters and Visitors Center burned to the ground (details and photos here) and there is extensive damage in the historic core of the 18,000-acre park, including the popular campgrounds. The headquarters building was the site where the park rangers and historian gazed down on a strange downy chick, saved by a tree trimmer in the August 1974, that they identified out as a marbled murrelet—the first confirmed and later documented scientific evidence that these birds nested in trees. Now this historic building is gone.

The remains of the headquarters building at Big Basin Redwood State Park, the site where park rangers solved the great nesting mystery of the marbled murrelet in August 1974. Image by Randy Vazquez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News Via Getty Images

The 1974 discovery eventually placed the murrelet on the list of federally threatened and endangered species and helped project much of its nesting habitat from logging—the single biggest threat to this bird’s survival. While the redwoods and other conifers are thick-barked species and adapted to withstand fire, the murrelets themselves are not adaptable. Their populations in California and throughout their range (north to Alaska) have been declining precipitously. The increased frequency, intensity, and duration of wildlife is not merely a “threat” to these and other birds and wildlife. These fires are happening now.

Please consider making a donation to the Sempervirens Fund to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park. The Sempervirens Fund is a non-profit land trust dedicated to the conservation of forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. To the first 20 of my readers who donate $50 to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park, I will send you a complimentary copy of my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. Just send me (mariaruthbooks@comcast.net) a screenshot of the to of the email acknowledging your donation and your mailing address. Thank You!

Send me a screen shot like this (with your name in the To field and I’ll send you a copy of Rare Bird!

Beauty During The Great Hunkering

I hope this blog finds you all well, safe, strong, and entertained.

My husband and I feel so fortunate to be able to shelter in place in our home, near friendly and caring neighbors, and within walking distance to all the food and essentials we need. A cleared calendar means more writing time for me and my husband can teach his GIS courses for The Evergreen State College online from home.

My niece, Emma (featured in April 3rd's Olympian), moved in with us in early December to work as a Washington state organizer for Elizabeth’s Warren’s campaign. She is hunkering down with us and working remotely on a WA state congressional campaign. We spend our days moving our laptops from room to room, walks (after 5 p.m. is a great time to encounter neighbors also out walking), puttering in the garden, watching movies, playing board games, figuring out YouTube Live or Zoom chats, dancing in the kitchen, making bread, etc. Still…we crave a break from the small world we’ve created.

Here is where the magnfiying loupe comes in. It’s a small plastic eyepiece with a magnifying lens that brings the gorgeous intricate details of the natural world up close and personal. It’s also known as a “jeweler’s loupe.” They come in 5X or 10X magnifications. You place the larger end gently against the bony part of your eye socket and then move in so the small end is about 2 inches away from your chosen object—flowers, leaves, lichen-covered twigs, the underside of sword ferns, tree bark, etc. I 100% guarantee you’ll say “Wow!” or one its variants “Cool!” “Awesome!”

The tiny details of things that are so easy to overlook now seem huge—pistils, stamens, spores, scales, a bug’s wings or antennae, the tiny bits of things in the dirt (my favorite).

The magic comes from changing the scale of things. These tiny intricate worlds will seem inordinately huge and huge. Let your eye linger. Roam around inside and around a flower or leaf. Lose yourself for a little while. Enjoy the textures, patterns, colors, fuzz, ripples, and grooves. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure. It’s a brain vacation with no side effects.

If you can’t get outside, the loupe works well inside, too. Explore the back of your hand, your fingerprints, the your morning buttered toast, the inside of an apple, the tops of broccoli, granules of sugar, the carpet, the fury of your patient sleeping dog, pixels in a photo from the newspaper (printed edition!), the foam atop your IPA.

These loupes are inexpensive ($3.95) and can be acquired through Private Eye (in Lyle, WA!)

Double your fun by putting the loupe up to your cellphone camera and take close-up photos.

Use your loupe with your cell-phone camera to take close-up photos. Here are the new leaves of a salal plant. Cool!

If you want to completely disappear into the the marvelous macroscopic universe…you can get special attachment lenses (macro and telephoto, too) for your smart phone, Android, or tablet and zoom way in. You can purchase such at reasonable prices from various online vendors. Just search for “clip-on mobile lens set.” The photos below feature early spring buds of native plants. (All photos by M.M. Ruth)

End Note: With Governor Jay Inslee’s new order to shelter in place extended to May 5, this is the perfect time to enjoy the beauty of spring in your back yard…and to remember to pass on that beauty if you can. Wandering around your yard with a magnifying loupe will not help the neediest in our community who do not have a home to shelter in or the resources to buy food, medicine, necessities—not to mention a magnifying loupe. Both the Thurston County Food Bank and South Sound Senior Services need volunteers to help getting food and meals to those in need in our community.

State's Marbled Murrelet Strategy Finalized

December 3rd’s Board of Natural Resources meeting in Olympia, Washington, brought to an uneasy conclusion the development of the state’s conservation strategy for the endangered Marbled Murrelet. The meeting was appropriately long (5+ hours) and gripping thanks to a very engaged board, much public comment, and agreement that today’s vote was “historic” given the twenty-two years that have passed since the “interim” conservation strategy for the murrelet was put into place.

The upshot: Alternative H was approved in a 4-2 vote with Clallam County Commissioner Bill Peach and Jim Cahill (Senior Budget Assistant to Governor Inslee for Natural Resources) voting “nay” and the rest “yay.” For those of you following this issue, Alternative H was not the alternative preferred by the conservation coalition (Washington Forest Law Center, Washington Environmental Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Conservation Northwest, Olympic Forest Coalition, Seattle Audubon) and other murreleteers as it does not provide enough conservation benefit for marbled murrelets. Nor was Alternative H the preferred alternative of the timber industry and trust beneficiaries as it does not provide enough revenue and jobs. Alternative H, according to the DNR and US Fish and Wildlife Service, meets the requirements under the Endangered Species Act and also the DNR’s fiduciary responsibility to the trust beneficiaries. And, in striking the “right balance” between conservation and revenue generation, the DRN has made no one happy.

Commissioner Peach voted nay on Alt H because he stated his belief that it does not represent the best interests of the trust beneficiaries. He is concerned that the financial impacts to the junior taxing districts have not been clearly explained by the DNR to the board or members of the public. Peach moved to delay today’s vote until March 2020 but his motion was not seconded and so failed.

This fall, Audubon chapters and others in the conservation community also advocated for a delay in the vote (for different reasons) but it became clear later on that such a delay could open the door to involvement by the Department of Interior (via Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Southwest Washington timber industry) and result in an alternative with less conservation value to murrelets.

Jim Cahill voted nay, he stated, because Governor Inslee requested he do so because of his gubenatorial concerns about changes in ocean conditions and what it has done to the marbled murrelet. (I think there is more behind this request, but I am not privy to Inslee’s insights on murrelet conservation issues).

Alternative H is definitely not the win-win everyone was hoping for but with DNR’s mutually exclusive (in my opinion) orders to protect marbled murrelets and log their nesting habitat, Alt H is meh-meh at best. The proof will be when the strategy gets played out on the ground—in the forestlands where murrelets nest.

The highlight of Tuesday’s meeting for me came toward the very end of the meeting when Board Member Chris Reykdal, Superintendent of Public Schools gave this impassioned 3-minute speech (recorded by TVW) about the future of Washington State and the funding of K-12 school construction from DNR timber sales.

The pith of Reykdal’s three minutes: “The $80-90 million that K-12 gets in school construction—we need to phase off that in time. This money has to go to counties. It has to go to the industries that are impacted by these decisions and ultimately to species preservation and habitat preservation.”

Indeed, de-linking school construction from timber harvest is long overdue and it would be a real victory if Reykdal could accomplish this through the state legislature rather than the U.S. Supreme Court (upon entering the Union, Congress mandated the newly formed Washington state use a portion of its natural resources generate revenue to fund schools, hospitals, reform institutions, and other social services; it did not, however, specify logging).

The seven years of board meetings have been largely civil and congenial, especially under the leadership of Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz. The board members expressed their gratitude to DNR staff and also to the members of the public who have been showing up at meetings over the past several years. I think they were sincere.

So, this wraps up a very long effort to craft a Long-Term Conservation Strategy for one very special bird and its extraordinary habitat. My thanks to you all for your attention to this complex and important issue. I have a hunch it’s not quite over yet since a large swath of the public audience at the board meetings these any years are lawyers.

My hope is that the murrelet will have the last word on this.

Listen here to its call: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Marbled_Murrelet/sounds

Walden Pond is a...Lake

One of the most delightful and serendipitous of my summer’s wild swims of 2019 was Walden Pond just outside the town of Concord, Massachusetts. The Walden Pond made famous by Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, or Life in the Woods. Now that it’s November and my local lakes in the Pacific Northwest are nearly unswimmable without a wetsuit, it’s the perfect time to reflect back on my wild swim in the mild waters of Walden Pond.

Since first reading Walden in high school, I have always imagined Walden Pond as a pond—a smallish, shallowish roundish body of water. When I first visited Walden Pond when I was in college, I do not recall being struck by the pond’s lake-ish look. I was there to cross-country ski on the trails above the pond, which was completely covered in deep snow.

When my older brother recommended a swim in Walden Pond while I was rambling around New England in September. I thought he was joking. Who would want to swim in a scummy-though-historically-important pond? My brother was not joking and my husband and I set off for the premier destination for a wild swimmer, English major, nature writer, and tiny-house coveter.

Most people who come to Walden Pond do not come to swim. They come to see the pond, to see the cabin where Thoreau lived between 1845 and 1847 in a cabin he built by hand. An estimated 600,000 people visit this site every year to pay homage to this writer and philosopher and to imagine what life was like in the mid 19th-century. Walden Pond and 462 acres of surrounding woods are now protected as a Massachusetts State Reservation (state park) and also a National Historic Landmark. The original cabin the 30-year-old Thoreau built by hand on land owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson no longer exists but a fine replica has been built for visitors to step into and step back in time.

Despite what our poor memory and imagination want to tell us, Thoreau’s one-room cabin was not in the wilderness. Nor was it remote. Nor was Thoreau a hermit during his two-year stint living here. Thoreau went often to the town of Concord (one-and-a-half miles away) and was visited by friends and family regularly. He lived simply and intentionally at Walden Pond for two years (1845-1847). (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

From Thoreau’s cabin, a paved path leads across a busy road and down to the lake. Yes, lake.

Lakes and ponds are both are slow-moving bodies of water surrounded on all sides by land. Walden is 61.5 acres big and 103 feet at its deepest. That qualifies as a lake in my book and my book is Ernest Walcott’s Lakes of Washington, published by the Washington Department of Ecology in 1973. A body of water with a surface area of less than one acre is a pond. Walden doesn’t come close to being a pond. But “Walden Lake?” That doesn’t sound right. Thoreau’s tiny cabin and story of his two years of life in the woods belong on a pond.

Thoreau’s original cabin was sited on one of five coves of Walden Pond, a cove likely to have been warmer than the rest of the lake and also weedier, muddier, and at times stagnant. Historians believe he accessed the lake from a gravelly beach nearby 432 feet away. Thoreau enjoyed the views of the pond, watched wildlife, went boating and fishing, drew his drinking water, and bathed in Walden Pond. “I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” I am not sure if “bathing” meant taking a bath or taking a recreational swim for Thoreau. As a back-country camper, I think they may have been one in the same.

Thoreau devotes two chapters in Walden to Walden Pond. He waxes most poetically about the remarkable clarity and depth of the water. “The water is so transparent,” he wrote, “that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty-feet.” And the color!

The water was palette of blues and greens and ochres that Thoreau marveled at: “Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the colors of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint net to the shore…then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond.” He discerned a “matchless and indescribable light blue…” (which he goes on to describe). Wild swimmers dream of such water!

I walked slowly, almost ceremonially down the path from the cabin for my first real view of Walden Pond. The colors were just as Thoreau had described.

Walden Pond is full of surprises, including its clarity, range of cool colors, and seeming lack of change since Thoreau’s day. (Photo by M.D. Ruth)

Not wanting to rush my Walden Wild Swim, my husband and I sat on the beautiful stone wall above the main beach and just took in the scene—a handful of open-water swimmers steadily stroking their way down the to far end of the pond and back, a few kids playing on the wide beach, small groups of walkers, and some late-season sunbathers. We then ambled along the 1.7 mile “pond path” above the lake, stopping at side trails that lead down the steep hills to small pocket beaches. These small beaches as well as two large beaches are not sandy, but stoney, giving the lakeshore a naturally paved look. Thoreau puzzled over all this stone and suggests in Walden that they originated from broken-down piles of stone created when surrounding land was cleared (for the railroad and other purposes). Thoreau supposes that the name Walden may have originally been called "Walled-in” Pond.

When we reached the far end of the pond at Long Cove, I stripped down to my bathing suit, handed my husband my clothes, shoes, and hat and stepped onto the sandy bottom and into the water. It was pleasantly warm (~80 degrees F).

The length of Walden Pond from Long Cove—a lovely entry point for a Wild Swim. (Photo by M.D. Ruth)

And off I went swimming in the water Henry David Thoreau swam in. I was absolutely giddy. I was in water that buoyed not only Thoreau and possibly his friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also all the people who visited this pond over the decades since 1847 who knew Thoreau, who read Thoreau, who studied Thoreau, and who thought about his life and legacy while they were swimming. This was a unique swim for me—one that had cultural and historical significance. I cannot think of another pond or lake that holds such an esteemed place in American literature, history, and culture. I was swimming in a shrine.

And when you swim in a shrine, you don’t want to get out. I wanted to swim back and forth all day long as if I were running transects so that I could experience every inch of Walden’s sixty-one acres. Instead, I swam a zig-zagging line into the coves—Ice Fort Cove (a nod to the commercial ice-block harvesting on the pond) and Thoreau’s Cove (site of his original cabin). I popped up often just to look around and the forested hills encircling the pond and to slow my progress toward the end of the swim (had it not just began?) I floated on my stomach and looked through the crystal-clear water to the bottom of the lake. I floated on my back and looked at the cloudless September sky. I think I was bathing as much as swimming this day. Eventually, I swam over to the Red Cross Beach (where swim lessons were taught by the Red Cross) to meet up with my husband who had been walking the path around the lake and taking a few photos from the trail. Here I am (below) swimming in all this gorgeous color and clarity and history.

Thoreau wrote about the wildlife around and in Walden Pond (including the petite Mud Turtle) but failed to mentioned one particular wild resident. (Photo by M.D. Ruth)

Just in case you missed it. I’m the long white splash in the upper right. The SNAPPING TURTLE is the massive oval shape in the lower left.

This snapping turtle was basking at the edge of Walden Pond when my photographer-husband spotted it from a clearing on the trail above the pond. (Photo by M.D. Ruth)

While the snapper may look tiny in this photo taken well above the water, this fine example of a was about 18 inches long. Snapping turtles aren’t aggressive in the water but I might have lost a finger or two if I had come ashore on this beach where it was basking. I dressed and joined my husband to walk the trail back to the spot where he photographed the snapper. There it was, still basking at the edge of that stunning water. We lingered for a while, oohing and ahhhing and feeling very grateful.

Here’s a very short video of the snapper sliding into the water —to my delight and the delight of a group of 11-year-old boys on the trail with us (and who were carrying a small dead fish they named Wilbur, which they decided to toss into the pond for the snapper).

I hadn’t expected to be swimming with a snapping turtle in Walden Pond. Earlier in the week, in Vermont, I had gotten myself all worked up about encountering during my lake swims there. I knew they were “a factor” for wild swimming on the East Coast, along with water moccasins and lake-side poison ivy—factors we don’t have in the Pacific Northwest. I think perhaps my mind was so focussed on Thoreau, his life of simplicity and stoicism, his contribution to environmental literature, and his near-mythic status among those who know that “back to nature” is the only way to go. Though I know Walden Pond has changed since 1845, I’m grateful that its waters can still hold snapping turtles and swimmers in its liquid embrace

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into it which the beholder measure the depth of is own nature.”

If you are anywhere near Concord, Massachusetts, please make time to visit Walden Pond. You can swim, canoe, fish, walk, sunbathe, cross-country ski, snow-shoe, and pay your respects. Here’s a link to a map and information from Massachusetts State Reservation.