In our extremely variable rainfall regime it pays to be able to adjust to wildly different conditions. For native plants and animals,waiting for the perfect moment before one blooms or breeds can be a big mistake. Those right conditions all too often just don’t show up when we think they ought to.
 
It’s hard to exaggerate just how variable our rainfall can be. Looking at the figures I have collected at my home rain gauge in Three Rivers over the past twenty-plus years, the season-to-date precipitation figures for February 1st range from 3.96 inches (1991) to 32.01 inches (1996). For comparison, the figure this year is 9.28 inchers, which makes this the sixth driest of twenty-two years
 
How do you prepare for such variability if you are a plant or animal? The answer is to be flexible.
 
Some of the adaptations are obvious. California buckeyes, deciduous trees that are highly sensitive to soil moisture, tend to leaf out early in dry years and then drop their leaves early as well. The buckeye in my garden began to unfurl its 2012 spring leaves in late January, and if the weather stays as dry as it has been, it will be defoliating by late May.  By July, I expect the tree to be fully dormant.
 
The annual wildflowers and grasses that grow on our local hills are also moving quickly to take advantage of such meager moisture as nature has made available. Yellow fiddleneck wildflowers have begun to bloom, as have popcorn flowers, lupine, and California poppies. Many of the wild grasses, plants like wild oats, are already setting seed.
 
On hills that face the afternoon sun, a more basic decision has been made. On these warm dry hillsides, many annual plants have simply not sprouted this year. Seeds on these dry slopes will wait for a better year – 2013 perhaps.
 
The native oak trees that grace our local foothills tend to be more cautious. Producing leaves too soon can be a problem forthese brittle trees if there is a cold late-season storm that weighs them down with snow. The result can be numerous broken branches, an expensive loss to the tree.  Yet the oaks, too, seem to be aware that they cannot tarry this year. The buds on the blue oak outside the room in which I write these columns are already swelling. New leaves cannot be far off.
 
Many species of animals keep a close watch on all this.  The mice and ground squirrels that feed on wild annual grasses are headed toward a thin year. Their populations will decline in the months ahead, a turn-around from last winter’s abundance.
 
The wild birds in my garden have already begun to claim mates and nesting sites.  A week ago I had three quiet hummingbirds around my feeders. As I write, I now have twice as many of these pugnacious creatures, and they are jousting aggressively for control of the nectar I put out for them.  The pair of red-shouldered hawks that live in the nearby creek bottom forest have also made clear their territorial claims. Their noisy screeching tells the world what belongs to them.
 
As I wrote in my last column, dry years come frequently to our region. As a result, the great majority of the native plants andanimals that call Tulare County home have strategies for coping. Only we humans seem surprised.
 
© Wm. Tweed

Like nearly everyone else, I’ve been thinking about our winter. So far it has included a winter major storm in October (very early for such events), nearly sixty consecutive days of dry weather from mid-November to mid-January (a time we expect to see storms), and finally, last weekend, an powerful winter storm series that put finally several feet of welcome snow in our local mountains.

If we follow the media accounts, none of this falls within the pattern we call “normal.” But allow me to make a contrary case.

The web has lots of hidden treasures, and one of these is that it is full of long-term weather data. A weather station I like to follow is the one the National Park Service maintains at Ash Mountain (elevation 1700 feet) , a few miles above Three Rivers. I find this data useful for several reasons. One is that it goes back into the 1920s, thus making it one of the longer records for the local mountains. Another is its foothill location, which means that it represents mountain weather – the place where most of our water comes from. Finally, it’s also only a mile or so from where I live.

The National Weather Service has done me the favor of working through all this Ash Mountain data, thus saving me from having to do the same. According to the Weather Service, the thirty-year average precipitation figure for the station is 26.50 inches. My twenty-year average collected nearby comes quite close to this number, so I think we can accept it.

It would be logical to assume that a majority of weather years come in reasonably close to average. After all, this is what the weatherman calls “normal.”

I tried out this assumption on the weather records for Ash Mountain. I looked over the data for the last sixty-nine years to see how many years came reasonably close to “normal.” I defined the target as covering thirty percentage points, that is, between 85% and 115% of the statistical norm.

So over sixty-nine consecutive winters, how many were “normal?” The answer is that only nineteen years out of sixty-nine (28%) fell within the target range. An equal number were wet (115% or more of average.) All the remaining years were dry.

Let me lay this out again. At Ash Mountain, over a period covering seven decades, 28% of weather years were wet, 28% were average and all the rest (44%) were dry. The most common type of winter, in other words, was dry.

Let’s try another question: how many years were really dry – that is less than 75% of average? Using the same sixty-nine-year sample, the answer is that twenty-one years (30%) fell into the really dry range. That means that, at least during the past seventy years, extremely dry years have occurred in the Tulare County mountains more often than so-called “normal” (average)years.

So what does all this say about the winter of 2011-2012? So far, despite the storms last weekend, we have yet to climb out the “extremely dry” department for the winter as a whole. In other words, we’e having one of our dry years.

It is not impossible to catch up to average or even above-average at this point, but the odds are against us. We’ve done that only once in modern times, in 1990-1991, when a very dry November through February weather pattern was followed by an extremely wet March. Generally, years that reach February 1st with less than average precipitation end up dry.

So are we in a drought again? Not by my standards. As I’ve tried to demonstrate above, dry years happen here frequently and can be expected. When several of them come back to back, however, then individual dry years come together to form a prolonged dry spell – a real drought. This happened most recently in Tulare County between 1986 and 1992, when every winter but one was well below the statistical average.

The winters of 1975-1976 and 1976-77 provide another model of dry years coming together to form a genuine drought. Those were years when, just like this year, the High Sierra went through much of the winter with little or no snow.

The bottom line: dry winters are so common here that they are a form of “normal.” In this case I mean, of course, not what is statistically average but rather something we ought to expect to happen regularly.

To live in Central California is to live in a place where dry winters are both inescapable and common. When they surprise us, we are only demonstrating that we have not been paying attention.

© Wm. Tweed

Questions drift my way now and then, and one such query not too long ago inspires today’s column. How it is, I was asked, that Tulare County has a county-managed giant sequoia grove?  We’re talking, of course, about Balch Park.

If you are not familiar with the 160-acre park, it’s located in the mountains east of Porterville and offers summer camping and day-use recreation in a setting studded with impressive monarch sequoia trees.

The oddity here, of course, is that although nearly all of the giant sequoia groves in our local mountains are in public ownership, the protection of these trees has long been left mostly to the federal government. Locally, that means the Giant Sequoia National Monument, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, overseen by the National Park Service. These large federal reservations contain thousands of acres of giant sequoia forest. Also in Tulare County is the Mountain Home State Demonstration Forest containing 4,800 acres with numerous sequoias.

And then there is tiny Balch Park, operated by the Tulare County parks department. How is it that this small county park came to exist amongst its huge federal and state neighbors?

The story goes back to the late 19th century and a pioneer entrepreneur named John Doyle. Taking advantage of the generous lands sales statutes of the times, Doyle took control of the 160 acres of sequoias in the middle 1880s.  He intended to develop the property, which he called “Summer Home,” as a mountain resort. Doyle hoped to sell up to 125 lots to families seeking relief from the summer heat of the San Joaquin Valley.

The lots sales never happened, however, and Doyle maintained control of the entire tract until he finally sold it in 1906 to the Mt. Whitney Power Company.  This corporation, which was developing hydroelectric facilities on the Tule River, intended to cut the sequoias and use the lumber to build a flume to carry water to a new power plant. (Just a few years earlier the company had done the same thing on the Kaweah River, where it cut sequoias at Atwell’s Mill to build a flume to provide water to Kaweah Power Plant Number One.)

Now fate intervened.  A major figure in the power company was engineer John Hays Hammond, and it was Hammond’s wife Natalie Harris Hammond who, after visiting the property, convinced her husband not to allow the harvesting of the 200 large sequoias on the site. So the Mt. Whitney Company cancelled its logging plans and held on to the property. Eventually it was purchased privately in 1923 by Allan C. Balch of Los Angeles, president of the San Joaquin Light and Power Company. (San Joaquin Light and Power had taken over the Tule River power plant project from the Mt. Whitney Company; today, its facilities are part of the Pacific Gas and Electric system.)

Allan Balch and his wife Janet purchased the property with the express intent that it be given to the County of Tulare as a public park, and that donation was finalized in December 1930. In subsequent years, an attempt was made to transfer the property to the State of California for addition to the surrounding Mountain Home State Demonstration Forest, but the terms of the Balch donation made such a transfer impractical.

Eventually, the county parks department installed a number of recreational improvements on the property, making it a comfortable place to camp, and confirmed the identity of the site as “Balch Park.”

Now, more than eighty years after Tulare County took title to Balch Park and its campgrounds, the small park offers exactly what John Doyle dreamt about so long ago:  a “Summer Home” in the green, cool forests of the Sierra for those seeking relief from the heat of summer. For that we can thank Natalie Hammond and Allan and Janet Balch.

© Wm. Tweed