The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Another can't-miss plan

Deer, bears, and chipmunks were excellent aspects of my summer camp experience. Then there was the frog relocation scheme. Sometimes – often – and I now realize that at these times we were probably supposed to be in the crafts A-frame or playing volleyball by the lake or rehearsing for the talent show – we would prowl the creek that flowed from Mosquito Lake, catching frogs. Catching frogs is hugely fun. Unless you are frogs.

We meant them no harm, and always released them. We just enjoyed the hunt, and pitting our amphibian-capture capabilities against their mammal-eluding capabilities. Sometimes amphibians won, sometimes mammals won.

 Frogs have a tactic in which they leap off a bank (often with a charming croak or yelp), dart to mud at the bottom of the creek, and freeze in place, holding their breath. This can work well to prevent detection, especially if there is enough mud to bury the frog. In Mosquito Creek, there was often insufficient mud, and we would crouch on the banks, only a few feet from the frog, staring at it as it hunkered in plain view on the creek bottom. The frog would regard us from lovely gold-laced eyes, perhaps thinking itself triumphantly hidden. 

 Slowly, slowly, the frog hunter would lower a hand into the water, slowly so as not to alarm the frog, not to trigger its motion-detecting neurons, though still visible to it, and slowly slowly maneuver to be close enough to snatch it. Ha!

 Then you have a frog, and after you have admired its beauty, what to do?

 A pool in a stream is made more beautiful by a frog on its banks. Some pools had two or three frogs, riches indeed. It seemed to us that if a pool with one frog was good, and a pool with two or three frogs was great, a pool with, say, twelve frogs would be completely fabulous.*

 We found the finest frog pool on the stream, and rearranged it to be even better, and then went up and down the stream capturing frogs and relocating them to the perfect pool. They would swim to the bottom and hide themselves and we would go off in search of more frogs.

 We'd return, expecting to find the pool thickly jeweled with frogs all around its gorgeous banks. But no. Maybe they were still hiding. We would release our latest prisoners and try again.

 But to our chagrin, all frogs immediately repatriated themselves, so we were never able to achieve our dream of a heavily befrogged pool. (I know. We were ten.)

 Fortunately frogs weren't involved when we invented a new game, Army Corps of Engineers.

 

(*Or, as we eloquently phrased it, really neat.)

   

 

 

 

 

Tough fishy story

Once upon a time there was a giant diving ocean goose – wait, no, maybe a giant diving ocean duck – so specialized for diving after fish it couldn't fly. It was as big as a Canada goose – anyway, a small Canada goose – okay, probably as big as nine pounds.

Maybe it was tasty, too, because its bones are found abundantly in old kitchen middens on the California Channel Islands and along the coast. Although with all that diving it must have been tough. Tough and fishy. (Plenty of tough fishy meat for the whole gang!)

This extinct diver is called Chendytes lawii. (I'm saying chen DIE teez.)  Here's a picture made by Stanton F. Fink, who likes to portray extinct creatures.
 
I wouldn't have expected it to be so blue, but who knows? (I also like Fink's shastasaurs.)

Chendytes only went extinct around 2,500-3,000 years ago. We just missed it.

A Chendytes bone 10,000 years old was found in a cave on San Miguel Island. Maybe a duck-eating person left it there, or maybe it was some other duck-eating animal. Yeah, yeah, or maybe it tottered in there to be alone.

Chendytes is material for arguments about human-caused extinction. This charming big duck (imagine if you were hungry and this enormous creature popped up to the water surface within easy clubbing distance – you'd be totally charmed) became extinct before the arrival of Europeans, so we can't blame so-called Western civilization. (Actually, I bet netting was a more likely technique than clubbing, but clubbing sounds cartoonier.)

It's generally thought that an earlier Western civilization, that of the coastal Indians of California, drove or helped drive Chendytes to extinction. Climate changes may have contributed. But there is debate about whether it can be considered a late, outlying part of a hypothesized Pleistocene Overkill in North America, or whether its demise is actually evidence against an overkill “blitzkrieg.”

Here's the deal. A whole bunch of very large North American mammals went extinct right about the time humans (from the Clovis culture) showed up, about 11,000-13,000 years ago. Mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, 8-foot long beavers, the stag-moose, a large camel – there must have been thundering herds everywhere you turned. As these species vanished, other species that preyed upon them or scavenged their carcasses, like saber-toothed cats (gone) or like condors (barely hanging on) were affected too.
 
Did they vanish because we killed them off, or because of climate change or other factors, or some of each? And if we killed them off, did it happen so fast because we indulged in “overkill”? The idea is that people killed far more than they could eat. The classic – and often repeated – example of this is the buffalo jump, in which a big herd of buffalo is chased off a cliff. (It doesn't seem like it's so easy to stage a buffalo jump, but I admit I've never tried.)

There's fierce debate about this. Some people would include Chendytes as an example of big animals wiped out. (See Tim Flannery, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples.) Others cite Chendytes as a counter-example – the species co-existed with people for thousands of years before it went extinct. Some say that's because they were relatively safe on the islands.

But Jones, et al. (T. L. Jones, J. F. Porcasi, J. M. Erlandson, H. Dallas, Jr., T. A. Wake, and R. Schwaderer) say that people seem to have been in the Channel Islands for about 11,500 years, so it took about 8,000 years to eat the last Chendytes. In “The protracted Holocene extinction of California’s flightless sea duck (Chendytes lawi) and its implications for the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis” Jones et al. argue that if it took so long for humans to hunt out Chendytes, it should have taken them a comparable time to eliminate other species. So maybe it was something else that happened to the megafauna.

Opinions differ on when Native Californians had boats that enabled them to get to the nesting islands that were probably Chendytes's last stronghold. (I say: right away. People always turn out to have been boating longer than we thought.)

Thus some say we co-existed with Chendytes for millennia. Others say we wiped Chendytes out practically the minute we got the seafaring equipment to get out to the nesting places and gorge ourselves (on tough fishy meat).

Occasionally I think about a Pleistocene Revival event, in which a little DNA cut-and-paste work would bring back cool megafauna. I'd love to see mastodons and mammoths and those giant beavers. (Did they make huge dams?) But if you didn't bring back giant predators the giant herbivores would multiply crazily. I'm not ready for dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. I'm not even sure how we would manage with the herbivores. Mastodons in the arboretum would not be popular. If you don't like gophers in your garden, you're gonna hate ground sloths. People skipping to the fruit stand for the beginning of cherry season would be upset to learn that giant camels had beaten them to it.
 
I was thinking that Chendytes might be easier to get along with. What if we could re-create them and let them hang out on the Channel Islands again? With our effete modern eating habits, most of us would readily agree not to eat those tough fishy types. Huge diving ducks! What could be bad?

Oh no. Unless they went after our shellfish.

Were there but world enough, and time

At Point Lobos, wild irises are blooming now. That's about sea level. My migratory habits are such that I'm more used to seeing wild irises flowering at the end of summer, in late July or August, in the Sierra near Tioga Pass. That's about 10,000 feet.

(The irises at Point Lobos are Iris douglasiana, the Douglas iris, and the  ones in the high Sierra are I. missouriensis, the Western blue flag, so I'm considering irises as a genus.)

 Wouldn't it be dreamy to spend six months climbing California along with iris flowering time?

Maybe we could raise awareness for something.

(Stan Shebs; GNU Free Documentation License.)