Elderberry – May 28, 2012
Along the Mankins Flat Fire Road into Greasy, this relatively young Elderberry bush is loaded with fruit. Potential habitat for the Valley Elderberry Longhorn Beetle, listed as a threatened species since 1980, many Elderberries can be found in the foothills up to 2,000 feet. If only the birds would treat our cherry tree as kindly.
Elderberry – May 28, 2012
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Greasy Cove, Lake Kaweah
Not much activity on the lake when we went up to Greasy to gather this morning in a light drizzle, but the lake had come alive with activity by the time we came down. For all the Vets who gave their lives for US.
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It’s getting a little crowded around the corrals since we weaned and shipped the Wagyu calves last week, waiting to palpate their mothers, yesterday. Considering our dry December and January when we turned-out the bulls, we had a great preg-check with only 2 out of 77 open, leaving us 75 to incorporate into the cowherd. With no place to go with them until we start gathering, weaning and culling the older cows, Robbin and I need to decide where to start the weaning process that will keep us busy for next 3 for 4 weeks, while hauling the 2nd-calf heifers up the hill and calves and cull cows down.
The first-calf heifers above, bred to the Wagyu, have been helping me irrigate the pasture. They also need to be sorted from the second-string bunch of older cows and late calvers with whom they been running, then driven up the creek to the pastures around the house where they’ll calve.
And we’re not getting started too soon! The weather has been cool for the past few days, forecast into the low-70s today, chance of thunder, lightening, etc., that we really don’t need, before it warms up after Memorial Day weekend. Lots of early mornings, we’ll have to pace ourselves. Here we go!
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We’ve had better days.
As Robbin, Zach and Clarence goosenecked their horses to gather our first-calf heifers and their Wagyu X calves, I grabbed a couple of bales from the hay barn on the way for chum, and for the extra calves that wouldn’t make the load that we’d be weaning. In the process of coming down the stack, I put a hay hook in my right hand.
Too much blood to contain with a tight handkerchief, I returned to the house for first aid supplies. Back on the road, I met Robbin and Clarence coming back when I didn’t show at the gate. 6:15 a.m.
I knew I needed stitches, but with truck and brand inspector coming at 8:00 a.m., calves to be sorted and weighed, I figured as long as I could keep the wound clean and blood contained, we needed to carry on. (We work all year for shipping day.) We had the heifers and steers weighed by 7:30. Jody Fuller arrived with her calves by gooseneck to fill-out the load at 8:00 a.m., having had a little trouble getting her cows in. We weighed them all, sorted, and then weighed back the heifers. 8:45 a.m.
4,500 lbs. over the truck’s legal weight limit with a 3% shrink, we then had to pull and weigh enough calves to load the truck to get by the scales on Donner on the way to Idaho. The truck left at 10:00 a.m., but not before many recalculations as to how to disperse the load by the truck driver who also let a calf escape. Not good, but easily recaptured by Robbin and Zach.
After irrigating and setting-up a feeder in the corrals for the extra calves we’d be weaning, Robbin and I left at 11:00 for the two week-old Health Clinic in nearby Woodlake, opting to forgo the usual insanity at Emergency in Visalia, where we waited and waited in a near-empty waiting room. Close to a tendon, the nurse practitioner cleaned-up the wound but didn’t want to do any sewing. We left for Kaweah Delta Hospital Emergency at 1:30 p.m., picked-up some antibiotics in Exeter and stopped to get something to eat at 4:00 p.m. on our way home.
I left to check on the calves we just weaned and to see how the mowing in the irrigated pasture was going. Home by 6:00 p.m., Robbin thought she heard water running and located a PVC pipe to the house that the cattle had cracked while we were gone. Plumbing done by 7:30 p.m., we sat down for a drink in the last of the gloaming.
Woke up this morning to a flat tire on the Kubota, but we’re laughing, glad not to be racing down the highway to punch someone else’s time clock.
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Jess & Jaro
A whirlwind visit with Jessica and her fiancee Jaro, from the Czech Republic, over Mother’s Day weekend. Quick tour of Greasy Creek and evening fun before heading back to Kauai. Sweet memories.
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Mariposa Lily – May 12, 2012
…no other number I can dial to wish you well. Happy Mother’s Day!
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I’m attempting to document my unsubstantiated thesis that the bloom period for the Kaweah Brodiaea is extremely short, making it pretty tough to find and identify. Additionally, I’ve found it blooming in the canopy of other grasses. I could only find the wildflower in one place this morning, the number in bloom substantially decreased, none at all in the other three locations I’ve been visiting. Temperatures have been in the mid-90s. I suspect in a day or two, their bloom will be over. Meanwhile the Harvest Brodiaea is popping up everywhere.
Kaweah Brodiaea – May 11, 2012
Kaweah Brodiaea – May 11, 2012
See ‘ODDS & ENDS’ for more current photos.
In the early 1980s, I got a call from Larry Norris who was conducting a Biological Assessment of the area below Terminus Dam on the Kaweah River for the US Army Corps of Engineers, in the early stages of exploring alternatives to increase storage of Kaweah River runoff. Over the phone, Larry was trying to obtain permission to access a flat area of about 300 acres in Section 26 that, according to the maps he was given, belonged to the USACE where he had found a large population of Kaweah Brodiaea, a species that had been presumed extinct since the 1920s. We agreed to meet and go to the site together.
In the late 1950s, my father and grandfather were embroiled in a condemnation action with the Feds over the initial construction of Terminus Dam in which they prevailed, requiring the USACE to revest some of the condemned property back to the family. Larry Norris had been given one of the old maps for his survey. As was typical of Corps projects in those days, the take was more than needed for the clay core of the dam.
Since Norris’ discovery, the Kaweah Brodiaea has been found elsewhere in the Kaweah River watershed, especially in the Three Rivers area, where it halted or slowed both private and public development and construction, even home remodeling. Though most people could not identify the wildflower, or distinguish it from the plentiful Harvest Brodiaea, Brodiaea Elegans, it was an unpopular species in the Kaweah River watershed nonetheless.
It was early summer when Larry and I went to the site and the Brodiaea had already gone to seed, which he identified for me, scratching through the dead debris of fillaree and foxtails, the details of an exercise I can no longer remember. But to have a large population of a rare and endangered plant listed by the California Native Plant Society and the State of California on the ranch, I thought it important to be able to identify it, but it wasn’t until the first of May in 2011 that I actually found and photographed it, aided by the memory of where Larry Norris had found its seeds. Though the Jepson manual cites livestock grazing as a threat to the Kaweah Brodiaea, its seeds survived the Drought of 1977 when Section 26 was grazed down to the dirt.
Part of the difficulty of finding the Kaweah Brodiaea is that it blooms prior to the Elegans or common Harvest Brodiaea and that its blooming period is much shorter, depending on temperatures in the first week in May. In 2011, the bloom period for the Insignis was ten days, where as the Elegans can last over a month, quite showy over dry grasses. Secondly, its on a much shorter stem and oftentimes difficult to find or see among all the other grasses.
I have included photographs below to help distinguish the Insignis from the Elegans. Noticeable differences are the flat petals and convex stamen of the Insignis. Also note the differences in the two species as the petals break into full bloom.
Kaweah Brodiaea – May 4, 2012
Kaweah Brodiaea – May 4, 2011
Kaweah Brodiaea – May 4, 2012
Harvest Brodiaea – May 4, 2012
May 3, 2012
Some older cows and their calves on the Top.
May 3, 2012
One of three stray replacement heifers that have come back to the Top where they were raised.
Posted in Photographs
drycrikjournal 