Seems that the wrath of the gods got a punch on the nose and it started to flow;

The internet’s been down for a while, so I haven’t been able to do a writeup. Hopefully this entry isn’t too long for you.

We’ve done mammals and birds as of this writing, and our first lab practical’s tomorrow. I’m not too worried. I kind of like doing these vaguely journal-esque entries; they’re a good mental break from studying scientific names and Latin words.

During lunch yesterday, we found a sagebrush lizard along the side of the cabins. He was a juvenile male and incredibly adorable. Male sagebrush lizards have blue bellies during the mating season. However, since this fella’s a juvenile and it is not sagebrush lizard mating season, his belly was pale blue.

We were also interrupted in the lab by a gopher snake who decided to come in and make herself at home. She was just a baby.

Today at lunch, we found another gopher snake. He was absolutely beautiful; I know it’s hard to see how shiny and smooth his scales are, but they just gleamed in the sun. He also had a beautiful pattern coloration; his scales started out black and went all the way to a reddish brown. He was probably about three feet long, maybe a little less. When we let him go, we put him in a tree. Gopher snakes are amazing tree-climbers. The tiniest snag in the bark can become a hold for them.

After we got out of the lab, most of the class went down to the beach to study our manuals some more. The dogs came with us, and one of them actually found something really interesting. I was throwing a stick for her, and instead of retrieving it like she normally does, she just stopped and pointed. I went to see what was up and discovered that a giant snake had crawled out of the surf and curled up on the stick. This is the other subspecies of Western terrestrial garter snake; the wandering garter.

Unfortunately, she was seriously injured. A bird of some kind had taken a bite out of her and dropped her. Her entire body wall was gone; while the viscera hadn’t been punctured, her stomach was bubbling. We ended up deciding that putting her down was better than letting her suffer further.

Last night, we went on a night drive. We piled into the back of the pickup and used lights to go hunting for critters. We caught… probably seventy or eighty Western toads in all and a Western pocket mouse. Pocket mice are so called because they have extendable cheek pouches like hamsters that they use to store seeds and grains. They either hoard these in larders in their dens or just eat them as they’re moving. He wasn’t too happy to be caught and almost got away from us on a number of occasions.

We just kept catching and catching loads like this.

Getting away from the zoological side of things, we found this projectile point. It is made of basalt and probably about three to four thousand years old. Due to the low lake levels, a lot more shoreline was exposed. It’s likely that this point hasn’t seen the sun for millennia.

We also saw two jackrabbits, but it turns out that it’s physically impossible to catch a jackrabbit in a butterfly net. Along the way back, we could see the black umbrellas of turkey vultures resting in the trees. Then today, we took three-and-a-half hour hike out to what are normally islands in the lake. Due to the droughts, the water is down very low, so they’re not islands but rather spits of land connected by sandbars. We were looking for birds and boy, did we see a lot of them! We saw a whole bunch of pelicans, California and ring-billed gulls. There were some nesting shorebirds- snowy plovers, spotted sandpipers, and American avocets. They were hanging out amongst the American white pelicans, which are large, loud, and smell disgusting. We found two sandpiper nests, as well as an avocet nest. Their eggs looked almost identical, but their nest construction techniques give the parent species away. Like all shorebirds, the eggs aren’t perfectly elliptical but are tapered at the end, which makes them less likely to roll off a rock. We also found an avocet nest with a dud egg, which is being emptied out to add to the collection. There are multiple ways to determine if an egg is viable or not. Incubated eggs that the parents haven’t abandoned are warm, and if you put a dud egg in water, it sinks.

Sandpiper nest.

Avocet nest. See how it's made out of bigger sticks?

Another sandpiper nest

On our hike, we took a look at some of the local invertebrate life. Eagle Lake has no bivalves, but the transparent shells of tiny, tiny snails cover everything and get down into your hiking boots. The butterflies here are gorgeous. The orange ones that hang out on our doorknobs are fritillaries, and today on the beach we caught a multi-tailed swallowtail. Or rather, he caught us; the wind was very strong today, and he just kind of blew right into us. 

Butterflies are pretty harmless, but these guys aren’t. I didn’t even know we had scorpions in the area.

We also saw a creche of Canada geese. A creche is a few breeding pairs of adults and their young. We actually managed to catch one of the goslings. He is probably about five to seven weeks old and cannot fly yet. He wasn’t too happy, but we let him go quickly enough.

We got to see a bit about the historical context of the area. Back in the 1910s, there was a series of projects up here to pump water out of the lake to communities in the desert to the southeast. A huge tunnel was built, as well as a small workers’ town. In 1929, the project was abandoned and nature reclaimed most of the project materials. However, a few trace elements still remain. This is the entrance to the tunnel.

And this is a remnant of the telegraph line they had leading down to the relatively nearby town of Susanville.

Perhaps the best thing we saw, though, was four juvenile bald eagles, no more than two years old. Their plumage was a mix between the first and second year plumage, and they were clearly from the same age cohort. At first, there were three and we thought they were siblings. Then a fourth one showed up, which means at least two nests in the same area. That’s exciting. At first, we just saw some hunting behavior with one eagle. He dipped down and nabbed himself a little fish, probably a tui chub. Then the others showed up and the hunting stopped. They were just swirling around in a boil on the thermals and then spiraling down towards the lake and pulling up just before splashdown. One of the smaller ones started doing that fake dive and the one we saw first followed her down. Just as she was about to pull out of her dive, he knocked into her, dunking her under the water, then flew back up. She managed to get herself out of the water, and then she chased after him for a while and then gave up, going back to the swooping on the thermals they seemed to be enjoying.

You can’t tell me they weren’t siblings.


As always, some landscape pictures to finish out. Just a couple this time, though; we’re all getting pretty familiar with the lake area. We might be going up to Modoc National Refuge this weekend to look at lava tubes, or we might stay here and go kayaking further down the lake. Either way, that’s going to be interesting.