Take Two Hikes and Call Me in the Morning

Review of Park Prescriptions: Profiles and Resources for Good Health from the Great Outdoors

By Sandi Funke, Pepperwood Education Director

Children hiking the preserve at our 2012
Budding Biologists Summer Camp

With obesity levels in the United States at all time highs, some in the medical field are beginning to think beyond treatment of disease towards promoting prevention. In Sonoma County health providers including St. Joseph Health Center , Kaiser Permanente, Alliance Health Center, Sonoma Indian Health Project  and county health services have come together to establish Sonoma Health Action. This collaborative seeks to create a healthier community through collective action. Health Action wants Sonoma to be the healthiest county in California and to this end one of the group’s goals is that residents are physically active. The collaborative has initiated the county-wide iWalk project. This initiative links residents with organized walking events and walking groups all over the county, including hikes at parks and preserves such as Pepperwood.

Pepperwood Stewards, Staff, and family members
hiking Red Hill near Jenner, CA last summer

This burgeoning local connection between healthcare providers and outdoor providers is not just happening here. The Institute for the Golden Gate in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has produced the report Park Prescriptions: Profiles and Resources for Good Health from the Great Outdoors. This fascinating report describes in clear concise non-academic language, 12 programs created by medical, public health, and park communities from across the country that aim to increase physical activity to improve health.  The report provides an introductory section that describes the way the study was conducted as well key findings that were found throughout the 12 programs.

The case studies describe each program and include helpful visuals and examples of work products.  They also have links to related literature. The Children and Nature Initiative is one of the programs described and is run by the National Environmental Education Foundation. This program holds train-the-trainer workshops to educate pediatric healthcare providers about prescribing outdoor activities to children. They even have bilingual prescription pads! This program works with specific sites that help “fill” the prescription. Similarly, the Prescription Trails New Mexico program aims to identify walking venues that are safe and accessible to patients. The program also provides prescription pads as well as trail maps and online searchable maps. Another program in New Mexico the Step into Cuba Alliance brought a large medical foundation together with partners in the forest service and national park service. Results of the alliance have been new and redesigned trails parks and trails aimed to provide the public with safe places to exercise.

Participants at a recent class hike towards Redwood Canyon
Photo by Gerald & Buff Corsi, Focus on Nature, Inc.

Several case studies were programs driven by parks and included projects close to home. SeeChange Health Insurance has partnered with California State parks to provide park information to clients and reimburse park membership fees. The Golden Gate Community Trailhead Project highlighted a partnership between the local YMCA, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Signage was placed outside the YUMCA that highlighted local hike routes. YMCA staff was trained on walking/ hiking routes and the group established a hiking club.

If you’re interested in parks, healthcare, or public policy the report is a great resource. Doctors would especially find it intriguing! For more information check out the Parks Conservancy website or click here to download the report. 

Conservation of the Western Pond Turtle

By Danielle Olivera, Pepperwood Volunteer

Western Pond Turtles enjoying their favorite log at Turtle Pond.
The white stick to the left is used to measure depth.

January: Note how close the water is to the two trees in the back left.
That little white line on the right is the top of the depth gauge.

When I was a little kid, I loved playing with tadpoles and turtles. Many years later, turtles are still high on my list of interesting animals, though now I know a lot more about them. Our research at Pepperwood Preserve has been focused on the Western Pond Turtle (Actinemys marmorata), the only native freshwater turtle in California. Unfortunately, this hard-shelled reptile has faced many challenges in the past few decades, including non-native species introductions, habitat fragmentation and human disturbance. Since then, their numbers have decreased dramatically, putting them on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN)’s List of Threatened Species in California.

Every other week, our team of three (Pepperwood Stewards Carrie Mammoser, Lloyd Cook, and myself) hikes out to Turtle Pond, where we work to monitor the health of the pond and surrounding habitat, which has a direct impact on the turtles themselves. Since this species of turtle is on a decline, we decided to figure out what features constitute their ideal habitat. One of the key factors we’d like to determine is if human and non-native animal disturbances were negatively affecting the population at the pond.

May: So much change in just four months! By the end of the
summer, almost all of the water will probably be gone.

Each visit involves counting the number of turtles present, the types and number of all other plant and animal species present, the temperature of the air and water, wind, water height from the bottom of the pond, pH, nitrite and nitrate levels of the pond. All of these factors can affect the survival and reproduction rates of the Western Pond Turtle.

Steward Lloyd Cook taking measurements in May 2012.

While we spend most of our time observing the turtles and recording water quality, we also keep track of the other types of animals present and how those numbers fluctuate over the year. The turtles are shy and tend to jump off of their log into the water when we begin taking measurements. We’ve found that Sierran Treefrogs, California Newts, garter snakes and various fungi species are also present when there is water in the pond.

Though we only have one year of data, it’s exciting to see the monitoring project come together. It’s too early to draw any conclusions, but we can provide a couple examples of our measurements. Nitrate levels, for example, have remained constant throughout the year. The pond’s pH has also held steady at 5.5 over the course of the year. Water levels vary seasonally and can change drastically depending on rainfall – see the graph to the lower right for an illustration.

We look forward to collecting a second year’s worth of data so we can begin to compare how Turtle Pond and its community of Western Pond Turtles is changing over time.

Let's Go Camping: A Brief History

Enjoying the view at the 2012 Pepperwood summer camp

By Sandi Funke, Education Director

Going camping. Day camp. For those of us that had the privilege as young children of “going to camp” for the first time it felt so new! Like we were blazing a trail. Yet, organized camping in the United States and, in particular, here at Pepperwood, is not new. It originated in a drive to reconnect with the land in response to the growing industrialization of the country. Camping now, is also a way for youth to develop skills and abilities and importantly, learn more about themselves and what they are capable of.

A Brief History of Organized Camping in the US

According to the American Camping Association, the Gunnery Camp, located in Connecticut, was considered the first organized American camp. Mr. and Mrs. Gunn operated a school for boys. In 1861, they took the whole school on a two-week camping trip. The students spent their time boating, fishing, and trapping. The trip was so wonderful the Gunns continued the tradition for twelve years. Though boys got a small head start the girls weren't very far behind. 

In 1874 the Philadelphia chapter of the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) founded the organization's first camp. This vacation house was for "tired young women wearing out their lives in an almost endless drudgery for wages that admit no thought of rest or recreation." The first YWCA camp was in New Jersey, and was called Sea Rest. 

After the turn of the century, camping was really catching own. In 1910, the Boy Scouts of America was founded as was Camp Fire Girls now known as Camp Fire USA. In 1919 the first Girl Scout camp was set up with the organization setting out to charter additional camps the next year. Camping continued to grow in popularity in the first half of the twentieth century and by the 1950’s the idea of “Day Camp” also gained popularity.

Budding Biologists explore one of Pepperwood's oak woodlands

Pepperwood and Camping

Pepperwood has a history with camping as well. Kenneth Bechtel, who owned Pepperwood for over 40 years, loved the outdoors. Bechtel served as president of the Boys Scouts of America from 1956–1959. While the Bechtel’s owned Pepperwood Ranch, the site served as destination for his and other families. The ranch house, now known as the Bechtel House, served as headquarters. Folks liked to come up to hike, ride horses, cut down Christmas trees, and even have fun driving the jeep!

We continue this legacy through family overnights we offer. Several times a year families can join our Preserve Manager Michael Gillogly, and children’s music teacher and composer Ginger Parish for songs, hiking and a great family camping experience! We also offer a two- week summer day camp Budding Biologists. Campers get to explore the various habitats of Pepperwood while recording their reflections in nature journals. To learn more about our programs visit the events section of our website! Happy camping!

Understanding Pepperwood's Mushrooms

By Prahlada Papper, Pepperwood Steward

Helvella lacunosa

The kind of warm, dry weather we’ve seen throughout inland Sonoma County this past winter isn’t usually associated with mushroom foraging, but research on mushrooms (a.k.a. “foraging for data”) continues regardless. In order to document the effects of climate on mushroom fruiting, we need to do surveys during the dry seasons as well as the rainy ones. All that data is equally valuable to a complete picture of fungal ecology.

In fact, though, several groups of mushrooms continued to be surprisingly abundant at Pepperwood throughout January and February even with less than 5cm of accumulated rainfall, including elf saddles like the Helvella lacunosa seen in the picture to the right. That one is growing in a redwood grove, but another species, Helvella maculata, has also been common under Douglas-fir along with several species of Inocybe while live oak dominated forests have been mostly devoid of mushrooms.

Inocybe

Understanding patterns like these—of when and where mushrooms appear—is the goal of a study recently revived here at Pepperwood using existing plots that had been sitting ignored and nearly forgotten for almost 15 years. Between 1996 and 1999, David Melloy, a graduate student at Sonoma State University, conducted regular surveys of mushroom diversity on the preserve using the same plots that we were surprisingly still able to re-locate after all these years. Several of those original plots were re-flagged and a few new ones were established in order to continue David’s work of studying the fungal diversity in Pepperwood’s forests and help clarify how localized climate, soils, and vegetation affect that diversity across a varied terrain and through both long and short spans of time.

From the wet and drippy Fall, to this dry and warm Winter, and now into the late Spring that we can only hope will bring rains again, our team has gathered and identified mushrooms from the plots and measured the trees surrounding them to put together spatial maps of each plot.

Combined with regularly collected data on temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, this study can help us answer basic questions about forest ecology and climate change. The appearance of mushrooms is being used as a token of the many organism-organism and organism-environment interactions that create an ecosystem.

Mycelium seen in a soil cross-section

Fungi spend most of their lives as networks of microscopic filaments in the duff layer or within the wood of fallen logs where they are among the primary decomposers of dead plant material. Or in some cases fungi form symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships with trees and plants in which a fungus helps supply water and nutrients to the plant while extracting the carbohydrates it needs to survive from the plant’s root system. At some point, environmental cues that are still not completely understood—but certainly include temperature, moisture and nutrient availability—can prompt that nondescript subsurface tangle of fungal cells to begin the fruiting process, leading to an above-ground mushroom. So fungi, and in particular their mushrooms, are uniquely suited to making many obscure environmental processes and patterns more evident. They may even be a key indicator of changing climate from year to year.

Hygrocybe

This particular mushroom study at Pepperwood Preserve will hopefully continue on for many years, generating a large enough batch of data that the more complex and long-term patterns behind the fruiting of the different mushrooms can begin to emerge from the background noise of a dynamic forest system.

This mushroom study is among the growing group of long-term monitoring projects at Pepperwood open to citizen scientist volunteers. Experience in ecological research is not necessarily required.  If you’d like to help on any aspect of the study—from fieldwork collecting mushrooms or surveying trees to lab work preparing soil samples or preserving voucher specimens—contact Pepperwood staff to be added to the project’s mailing or volunteer list. Work continues, rain or shine!

Wildflowers in Watercolor with Pamela Glasscock

By Tom Greco

Hooker's Fairy Bells (Disporum hookerii)

Pamela Glasscock paints with a great amount of attention to detail, capturing each delicate feature of her wildflower subjects with skill and patience. Yet there is far more to her magnificent paintings than botanical accuracy – there is a story hidden within each image that reflects the people and places involved along the way to its artful transcription into watercolor.

Her subjects come from diverse sources: from local gardens to wilderness areas on the other side of the world. These varied sources of inspiration lend a subtle degree of personality to each flower, a sense of character furthered by Pam’s own lens of observation.

Shooting Star
(Dodecatheon
hendersonii)

Though it is important for Pam that her flower portraits are botanically correct, she does not measure petals and leaves as a scientific illustrator might. “What I’m trying to get at is a sense of life,” says Pam, “and to recreate the experience of looking at the actual flower.” To this end, Pam’s art captures flowers at various stages throughout their lifecycle – not just at the peak of their bloom. This adds an element of complexity to her multiple flower compositions, which contain patterns and themes that may not be perceived at first glance.

Detail: Hound's Tongue
(Cynoglossum grande)

Works like these typically originate with Pam choosing a particular flower of interest, and capturing it on a spacious piece of watercolor paper. At this point, what might eventually occupy the rest of the paper may be far from solidified in her mind – perhaps difficult to imagine given the incredible complexity of the end product. “It’s important to me to have that uncertainty and suspense about what is going in next,” says Pam. “You want to be surprised yourself and you want the people looking at the work to have the same feeling. Not planning out the whole composition ahead of time gives a sense of adventure, and even danger, to a long and meticulous process.”

Pam’s primary artistic focus has been on wildflowers for the past 10 years. Her artistic roots stretch back to silverpoint drawing as an independent project in college, which she continued for ten years in New York before beginning to experiment with watercolor under her own tutelage. Watercolor has been her preferred medium since: “I’m really interested in watercolor drawing because of its immediacy and simplicity,” says Pam. “It is all about observation.”

April/May Grasslands and Open Woods

For her most recent project, A Pepperwood Anthology: Wildflowers in Watercolor, Pam visited the preserve multiple times during the spring of 2012, when Pepperwood’s bountiful wildflower displays were at their peak. 

Pam's paintings will be on display at Pepperwood’s Dwight Center for Conservation Science Gallery during our 5^th annual Wildflower Festival on April 21, 2013 from 9am to 4pm, and by appointment through May 5, 2013.

Pam will also teach a class on painting spring flowers in watercolor at Pepperwood on May 5th. Please click here for more information!

Seasonal Changes of Pepperwood with Bill Gittins

By Tom Greco

Pepperwood December 17, 2011 Solstice (11x14)

If you went looking for Bill Gittins on any equinox or solstice in the past year, you would have found him at Pepperwood with a canvas and his oil paints. As a Pepperwood Steward, Bill has been leading a plein air painting group of four artists, who have just completed a project entitled “Seasonal Changes of Pepperwood” that will be featured at Pepperwood’s Wildflower Festival on April 21^st. This collection of paintings captures the changing seasons near the Redwood Canyon section of the preserve, and beautifully illustrates the ancient connection between science and the arts explored by the likes of Galileo and da Vinci.

Pepperwood March 12, 2012  Equinox (11x14)

Bill Gittins has lived in Santa Rosa since 1973 and began painting in the mid 80’s. Basically a self-taught artist, Bill began with watercolors and acrylics before finding favor in the complex texture of oil paints. His vibrant landscapes truly capture the spirit of Sonoma County: “There’s such a variety,” says Bill, describing the abundance of subject matter in our region. “There’s the coast, old barns, vineyards, hills, back roads.  A lot of my paintings were done on back roads,” explains Bill, referring specifically to Riebli Road, a unique and winding road in north east Santa Rosa close to where he used to live.

As to his preferred painting style, Bill enjoys experimenting with different color palettes, often choosing to represent an object in a different tone than may be initially observed by the eye. “I prefer a looser approach than realism,” says Bill. “I like things with a lot of color. If I go out in the field and things are dull, I like to brighten them up.”

Pepperwood June 22, 2012 Solstice (11x14)

Bill first visited Pepperwood when author and longtime Press Democrat writer Gaye LeBaron gave a talk at the Bechtel House, while the Dwight Center was being built. He really enjoyed the sweeping vistas and rolling hills – and wanted to paint them! To get an opportunity to paint on the property he enrolled in an art class being held at the preserve and then took “Bio 85: Natural History of Pepperwood,” a two-semester class offered in conjunction with the Santa Rosa Junior College that constitutes the first step to becoming a Pepperwood Steward. He has been a regular at Pepperwood since, creating spectacular renditions of preserve landscapes and generously offering his assistance at classes, hikes and events.

Bill and the other painters, which include Marsha Connell, Phil Salyer and Dale Wiley began their inaugural landscapes of the “Seasonal Changes of Pepperwood” project on the December 2011 winter solstice. There had been very little rain that winter, so Bill’s paint brush recorded mostly gold colored hills, largely uncharacteristic of the season that is typically Sonoma County’s wettest. By his March expedition the green hues had returned, along with a herd of cows (part of Pepperwood’s grazing program) that also found their way onto his canvas. “What I discovered is that the dates of the solstices are really the ‘beginning dates’ of these seasons.  We should have painted at the mid-point between the solstice and the equinox.” says Bill.  

Pepperwood September 22, 2012 Equinox (11x14)

Bill’s art, along with that of three of the other artists, will be on display, and for sale, at Pepperwood’s Wildflower Festival, held on Sunday, April 21^st from 9am to 4pm. A portion of any sale at the event will be donated to the Pepperwood Foundation. You can also view a more expansive grouping of Bill’s works during the annual “Art at the Source” open studio program (Studio 76b) during the first and second weekends of June, and then again at his studio during ARTrails, held the second and third weekends of October. 

For more information about Bill and to view is online image gallery, please visit Bill’s website, www.billgittins.com.

Wildflowers - Bloom Today, Gone Tomorrow

By Sandi Funke

Shooting Star - Dodecatheon hendersonii © 2007 Dianne Fristrom

Every year at this time I feel wistful. I gaze at of Pepperwood’s sprays of wildflowers and begin to hum the Al Dubin classic, Tiptoe through the Tulips or even Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven  with its hedgerows and all. I get the crazy urge to run through the fields and spin like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

As it turns out, my connection to wildflowers is reflected across countries and cultures. The Aztecs, who ruled a large portion of Mexico in the middle ages believed in a flower goddess called Xociquetzal (sho-chee-KEt-sal). Her name meant “feather flower” which probably referred to her sacred flower - the yellow marigold. Xochiquetzal was said to live in a flowery garden paradise and was married to the rain god Tlaloc. The moisture that Tlaloc created in the sky helped her flowers grow. The Greeks also had myths related to flowers. As legend tells, the fragrant flower Narcissus was said to have originated a conceited youth who loved to stare at himself by the water’s edge, which is where Narcissus grow.

Indian Warrior - Pedicularis densiflora
© 2003 Michael Charters

 But why do wildflowers come up this time of year and where do they go? Many of our wildflowers, such as our friendly bird’s eye gilia, are annuals which germinate, flower and die in less than one year or season. These species survive between generations by creating very resilient dormant seeds.

 The seeds can sometimes survive for years in the soil, and like Xochiquetzal’s marigolds, germinate when the rainfall, sunlight, and temperature are just right.  Many of these annuals flower for a few weeks or longer while others are here this week and gone the next. These very flashy wildflowers are known as “ephemerals.”

Other wildflowers native to our area are perennials and lucky for us, these individuals come back year after year. Their flowering is also triggered by weather and temperature.  Indian warrior is a beautiful maroon to pink perennial herb that blooms year after year. Henderson’s shooting star is a favorite of North Bay hikers with its dramatic thrown back hot pink to purple petals and apparent black stamens which produce pollen.

Leopard lily - Lilium pardalinum

© Tom Greco

We also have a number of perennial wildflowers that bloom from bulbs and underground swollen stems known as rhizomes. The star lily grows on rocky outcroppings and produces large clusters of pretty cream flowers in early spring.  A very common blue wildflower, whose name produces smirks when mentioned, is blue dicks. The leopard lily is a very showy, robust native wildflower that can grow over six feet tall on wet soils here at Pepperwood.

Star lily - Zigadenus fremontii© Michelle Jensen

So how can you best get out and take in this season’s boundless beauty? Pepperwood will again be hosting our annual Wildflower Festival on Sunday, April 21^st. It will be great chance to go on guided wildflower walks and self guided hikes that will feature our spring wildflower display. If you can’t make it the Sonoma Ecology Center will be hosting several wildflower walks at the Van Hoosear Wildflower preserve in Sonoma.  Sonoma County Regional Parks will hosting wildflower walks at Hood Mountain and Shiloh Ranch and Landpaths will be leading a wildflower walk at Tolay Creek Ranch.