Hike on the Hazelnut Trail

We had a little difficulty finding San Pedro Valley County Park, which contains the Hazelnut Trail, but only because we got off on the wrong exit in Pacifica and had a tour of the homes on Reina del Mar before making our way to Linda Mar and San Pedro. The Hazelnut Trail zigzags up the side of Montara Mountain through thickets of ceanothus, manzanita, California huckleberry, and other more exotic shrubs, and under old coast live oaks, bay trees and, of course, California hazelnut. Occasionally you can peer over the brush at the ocean or the other side of the valley, but much of the hike is through an overgrown green tunnel (and watch out for the poison oak.) My husband picked the hike, since it was about the right distance for a hike under two hours, and also because it has a ridiculous diversity of plant life. This partial list he found online by a botanist at Stanford of 68 plant species seen on this trail helped me narrow down some of the unfamiliar plants I took photos of on the hike. And there are many more that I just didn't have time to snap since we were trying to finish within 2 hours. We saw many lovely Douglas iris, sticky monkey flower, paintbrush, ferns and manroot (also known as wild cucumber).
Here are some of the plants that were new to me:
Pitcher Sage (Lepechinia calycina)
Berries of False Solomon's Seal (Smilacine racemosa var amplexicaulis) turning from green to red. Love those stripes!
Fringe cups (Tellima grandiflora), named because those little bells are fringed like eyelashes.
Pacific starflower (Trientalis latifolia), which grow in a starry carpet in shady bowers.
Yerba santa (Eriodictyon californicum), a shrubby plant up to 4 or 5 feet tall that seems to be well-loved by hummingbirds. We noticed the sooty older leaves covered by a fungus that apparently does not harm the plant.
Along with the plant list, I relied heavily on the Native Plants of Montara Mountain website, that is organized by flower and berry color, as well as by common and Latin names. Now I want to go do the hike again and find all the plants I missed, like the rare golden chinquapin and fetid adder's tongue. Speaking of adders, we saw three garter snakes (harmless).

The Mockingbird Tale

This is papa mockingbird, our very visible neighbor. He has been chasing other mockingbirds (all except his timid partner), starlings, blue jays and robins away from our ivy wall and backyard for months. We believe he regards our house and garden as his, but he tolerates us when we come out to tend our garden or feed the compost. He likes to find the highest perch around--the top of our satellite dish, the fencepost on our back wall, the top of the telephone pole in front--and cycle through his vast repertoire of songs. But his behavior changed about a month ago, when he began valiantly protecting his nest in our neighbor Henry's magnolia tree. He started hanging around the tree all the time, or within about 20 feet of it, swooping from the roof, to the back wall, to the neighbor's fence, and issuing sharp chirps, either as a warning not to get too close or a warning to his partner that potential danger was near. This tree is right up against our fence, so we were intimately aware of the mockingbird's comings and goings while building the nest, but the foliage is thick enough that we have never seen it and have not wanted to poke around too closely for fear of disturbing it. About a week ago we realized that we were hearing faint peeps from the nest, and papa's stern chirps grew more frequent. A couple of times we saw him chasing off other mockingbirds and once a crow. This was a vulnerable time for the baby bird. Then yesterday, papa's chirping and swooping raised to a fever pitch, and I heard plaintive peeps throughout the day. Even I was getting a little tired of his protective fussing and helicopter parenting. How long could this go on? But today, he's gone. There are no harsh chirps nor little peeps coming from the tree. This afternoon I went over and peered up into the tree and saw the nest, but there no signs of life. We think maybe one of those predator birds got the baby bird. Why else would they all disappear overnight? It's sad. I guess if we were so aware of the nest, others were, too.

Ready to Celebrate With...Papayas?

We've been buying a lot of these Marabol papayas. The ones we've been getting are from Mexico. They look like this on the outside:
They are a different variety than the Hawaiian ones, that look like this:
The difference is, the Marabol ones are less flavorful and sweet, but much cheaper, maybe $3 each. I used to only buy the Hawaiian ones because of that--when the Hawaiian ones (the variety is Solo) are best they are bright red-pink inside and incredibly sweet and juicy and floral--but they can be $5 each and are much smaller. My husband started buying the Marabols because he liked them, but I tend to want to put them in things rather than eat them straight.
Like papaya salsa:
Or how about a smoothie?
In Latin America they make papaya smoothies with lots of milk and sugar. We add strawberries, bananas, orange juice, yogurt, or whatever else is in the fridge.
And so, what's to celebrate, beside springtime?
I took my last final today, in syntax! This was a class that took up lots and lots of notepaper drawing trees (not oaks, but sentences). Here's an example from my studying for the final, for which I used 28 notebok pages:
The final was hard, and there were no other assignments. One final, one grade. Here is a sample sentence: "It is certain to be demolished." Here's another one: "Whom will he be persuaded to visit?" Analyze those, will you?

Still Spring on Mt. Tam

We went for another great hike last weekend, to Bolinas Ridge, where it's still green and flowery. While San Francisco was smothered in a blanket of fog, from the ridge we looked down on the cottony blanket. We could even see the tip of Sutro Tower poking up from the fog (not quite visible in this photo). There were lots of California poppies and blue lupine and clover (maybe owl's clover, I'm not sure which one), none of which I took a photo of because I take them for granted.
I did take a photo of two flowers I couldn't identify. I've been looking in my field guides and online at Calflora, but still have not found these. The first one was growing right alongside the trail on the sunny exposed slopes:
The other one was in a shady bower below some oak trees, near where a creek runs down the hill, although it was dry now.
Any ideas?

Note: I found out that the top flower is Bellardia trixago, a native wildflower from the Mediterranean that has naturalized here, thanks to a reply from a kind staff person from the Marin Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. They have a great website with a log of citings of different species in specific places.

Lunch at the French Laundry

My husband and I had the good fortune help our friend Mark and his wife Karen celebrate his birthday at the French Laundry this weekend. Before we had even gotten out of the car, we were impressed by the restaurant's beautiful garden, and while we waited for our friends, we saw a chef in his white apron scurry across the street to get a bunch of herbs for our lunch. About our lunch, what is there to say? The food was perfect. There was absolutely nothing you could quibble with about it. Each course--all nine of them--was exquisite. The service was discreet, knowledgeable and helpful without going overboard in any way. Even afterwards, although I felt full, I did not feel that there was a crise de fois waiting for me around the corner. That evening, as we remembered our meal, I made a comment about it being inspiring for our own cooking, and we wondered whether we could achieve grilled mackerel en escabeche with orange slices, fennel, chorizo and saffron emulsion with the silky texture and mild flavor of the French Laundry's without being oily and strong-tasting.

But does a meal like that really bring inspiration to the round of breakfast-lunch-dinner cooking we do every day? Or is it just a fantasy world of tartare of Kuroge beef from Shiga Prefecture and Moulard duck fois gras en terrine that we live in for a couple of hours, until the magic stops, and we're back to the reality of burritos and spaghetti with only a faint memory of cauliflower panna cotta with oyster glaze topped with California sturgeon caviar? Honestly, it's unlikely that I will attempt to make the New Bedford sea scallop course, which involved trimming the scallop, creating a mousse with the scallop trimmings and molding it together with the scallop to cook it sous vide, then rolling the outside of the scallop in powdered hazelnuts and serving it on a puddle of black truffle sauce with a soupcon of melted leeks (my favorite dish, if I had one, and one whose preparation one of the staff described for us in detail).

And yet, I did feel a renewed interest in food upon our return. No, I did not go to the specialty shop to ask for Kuroge beef (they probably don't have it anyway), but I didn't just throw my top sirloin steak in the pan either. I trimmed the fat, rubbed it with olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and watched it carefully to judge when it was done. I went out and bought a pineapple so we can try to somehow recreate the golden vanilla-roasted pineapple on coconut sorbet. I haven't looked for mackerel yet, but last night's red snapper I marinated in a Moroccan chermoula sauce, baked it in its sauce and spooned out the juices to sop up with bread when it was done. Maybe I would have done all those things without going to the French Laundry, but somehow I feel I did them with more attention and care. Every once in a great while, we need an immersion in savarin au citron, surrounded by citrus vierge and drizzled with Per Mio Figlio olive oil, to bring some creativity back to our table at home.

Birding on Mt. Davidson

Photo by Donna Dewhurst, courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
I had a great morning birding today with a group organized by Nature in the City. There were about a dozen of us including expert birder Dominik Mosur and a couple of other highly knowledgeable birders. Normally when I bring my binoculars up there to look for birds, I see hawks and lots of hummingbirds and white-crowned sparrows, but I've been unsuccessful at seeing the smaller birds in the trees and thickets. Today I learned to concentrate on the edges of the forested areas, and watch the patches of sunlight because that's where the insects are and thus the birds. I also learned that the best time for seeing spring migrants is when the wind is from the east, blowing the migrants off course toward us. I watched Dom listening for birds and then locating them visually. I also learned that I probably need to get better binoculars.
We saw many birds, some residents and some of them migrants on their spring migration, headed north. First off, we heard a winter wren singing off the forested path. The expert birders located it and Dom set up his scope, so we all caught a glimpse of it singing, beak open. Further along we watched the fierce Anna's hummingbirds defend their elderberry bush, and then Dom found a lazuli bunting in some Scotch broom. He set up the scope again and we all gazed at it. Here's one that's a bit more blue than the one we saw:
Photo by Dave Menke, courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
We saw a red-tailed hawk like the one below, as well as red-shoudered hawk, Cooper's hawks, and sharp-shinned hawks. I can recognize the first two kinds on my own, but not the Cooper's or sharp-shinned.
Photo by Lee Karney, courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
We saw a large flock of cedar waxwings catching insects and being chased off by the hummingbirds, and a pair of band-tailed pigeons. We saw a Wilson's warbler darting around in a bush (that's the yellow one at the top of this post).
We watched an olive-sided flycatcher (one of the migrants) on a dead tree swoop off repeatedly to catch an insect, and return to his perch, for about 15 minutes. I learned that they wipe a bee's stinger off on the branch before they eat it! You don't see it in the photo below, but the feathers from the back are iridescent emerald green, which probably helps them blend in to the central American jungles where they winter. They are a threatened species, mostly because their forest habitat is being clear-cut. This photo does show its distinctive shape of the head.
No photo credit, from a Canadian government website
We also saw an orange-crowned warbler, a tiny thing with no particular markings to distinguish it, as you can see from the photo below. This is a bird that I would never ever have found with my own eyes or even my own binoculars, since I could barely see it even with my binocs. In the scope, I could even see the tiny orange patch on the back of its head, which you also can't see in this photo.
Photo by Donna Dewhurst, courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
I did not mess around trying to get any of this with my camera. But I do have a better sense now where to look when I go up to Mt. Davidson on my own.
Note: Jeff, a fellow birder on the walk, also blogged about it and found some even more gorgeous bird photos here.

The April Garden

There are lots of things growing in the raised bed right now. With all the rain, interspersed with sunshine, they just can't help but grow. In the foreground, chard on the left, African Blue Basil on the right. Behind the basil are the sugar snap peas that are just starting to flower. In a row just to the right of the chard are lettuces, but they are too small to see in this photo, as are the row of carrots to the left of the peas. I think I will put in some more lettuces in a week or so right in the middle. In the way way back is a volunteer potato plant. Love those volunteers.
Below is a cymbidium flower spike that my husband coaxed out of a discarded old plant he found at Urban Ore. It took a few years, but it's the kind of gardening challenge he likes.