![]() I’ve been teaching myself through observation and research for about the last ten years, and really shouldn’t be allowed to call myself a naturalist. On the other hand, if a coyote flushes a ground squirrel in a meadow and chases it toward its burrow, a strategically positioned badger will be able to dig furiously with its huge curved claws and nab it before it disappears. When a beleaguered ground squirrel pops through a thin layer of soil at the end of an escape tunnel, the waiting coyote leaps on it. The coyote waits in a strategic place while the badger digs. You can see online images of coyotes and badgers traveling together to their hunting destination, a ground squirrel colony. ![]() As far as I can tell, it’s strictly a business relationship, an experience that has proven to be beneficial to both parties. We rarely see badgers, but they live here, generally hidden in their underground burrows during the day, but sometimes visible in the daytime, hunting ground squirrels alone or with coyotes. Your book also covers the unlikely partnership between badgers and coyotes. Badger and coyote: ground squirrel tag-team. Not so! They’re after the acorns themselves. For the record, there is a 100-year-old myth that acorn woodpeckers store acorns so they can later eat the larvae inside them. On top of that, acorn woodpeckers are the only species in the world known to drill individual holes in wood to cache individual food items - in this case acorns. They appear to have the most complex social structure of any vertebrate species in the world, including humans. They even perform pseudo-copulations in group gatherings before heading into their communal roost cavities for the night. They live in clans and do everything communally-sex, nesting, child-rearing, food storage, food consumption. Why do you find them so remarkable?Īcorn woodpeckers are animated and talkative animals who kept me company when I was ill with Lyme disease. We really enjoyed your Bay Nature “Signs of the Season” piece on acorn woodpeckers a few years back. In fact, woodrats provide critical shelter to so many other species, like frogs, salamanders, deer mice, brush mice, and centipedes, that they are considered a keystone species, one that has a huge impact on biodiversity. ![]() The woodrats’ skill as builders and as masters of climate control benefits many other species who take up residence in their homes as uninvited guests. The rooms are connected by a network of hallways, and light and air enter the structure though openings on every level. Inside of what appears to be a messy jumble of sticks, there are sleeping chambers and birthing nests lined with soft materials pantries––sometimes with manzanita berries in one, mushrooms and truffles in another, and acorns in a third leaching rooms where toxic toyon, coffeeberry, or sage leaves outgas before being eaten and designated latrine areas. Woodrats are docile soft-furred animals, with big ears and big eyes, that build what appear to be the most complex aboveground houses of any mammal in the world. Tell us about one of the species highlighted in the book, and why you find it fascinating. Once hooked, I devour all the information I can find about a species until I have a fairly complete portrait, so I made it my job to tunnel through dense science articles to find little known nuggets of information and to document interspecies relationships. I can easily become enamored of an individual species, such as the California newt, or a group of organisms, such as gall-forming wasps. Secrets of the Oak Woodlands cover painting by Ann MaglinteĮach chapter in the book contains interesting info about different species that inhabit the oak woodlands and their interactions. Pretty soon I was like a garden spider, alive to everything happening in the web around me. And that led me to research the plants they depended on, the pollinators of those plants, the mammals and reptiles that ate or took shelter in those plants, and so on. First I focused on learning the local birds, but soon I wanted to know more than their names - I got interested in what they ate, what they needed for nest material, where they slept at night. When I moved to inland Mendocino County in 2001 I fell in love with this place, with its rolling hills covered with oaks, madrones, buckeyes, bays, and manzanitas. A decade of close observation has yielded Kate’s first book on her beloved ecosystem, Secrets of the Oak Woodlands, recently published by Heyday. From a homemade shelter in the heart of Mendocino County’s oak woodlands, nature writer Kate Marianchild watches and waits, jotting down notes on the often surprising behaviors of the wild animals, plants, and insects that call the woodlands home.
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