The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  After the Coyote fire I hiked around the burned areas, observing as a birdwatcher, not a botanist. But I couldn’t help noticing that greenery started to reappear almost as soon as the earth had cooled. This applied especially to a certain vine, rather similar to a grapevine, which spread along the ground, as lush a green as ever graced a rain forest, and wrapped its tendrils around the blackened stumps of trees and shrubs. This was chilicothe, or wild cucumber. Its appearance had been neither delayed nor hastened by the fire, by the rain that followed, or by any external circumstances at all. When its cycle of growth was ready to begin again, it began: everything necessary for the complete process—leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds—was contained in a giant tuber buried underground.

  An example of the chilicothe’s self-containment and independ­ence of the outside world was accidentally provided by the local Botanic Garden. To show the public the size of the tubers, one weighing about fifty pounds was dug up and placed in the infor­mation center. At Christmas time it started sprouting, and within the next few weeks it went through its entire growth cycle while in a display case. Again the following year, still in the display case, it grew leaves and tendrils, it flowered and fruited and went to seed. It was only during this second cycle that the tuber became noticea­bly smaller and wrinkled as its water content decreased.

  The emergence of the chilicothe was unimportant as far as food or shelter for wildlife was concerned. Yet it appeared to be a signal for the forest to come alive again. After a December rainfall of four and a half inches, oaks that looked ready for the woodpile and seemed to be still standing only because nobody had leaned against them, suddenly burst out with a cluster of leaves here, and a cluster there. No two trees refoliated in quite the same way. These native oaks are accustomed to fires and make strong come­backs, as do the sycamores. Not so the pines, which lack the regenerative powers of the other species. The pines that looked dead were dead. Although a few of them put out new needles at the top, these soon withered and dropped, and nothing further happened.

  Such debility on the part of the tree itself must, in order to account for the species’ survival through centuries of periodic fires, be compensated for by the durability of the seed or the seed’s protective device. Some pines, such as Bishop, knobcone and to a certain extent Monterey, are equipped with closed cones which open and drop their seeds only when exposed to very high temper­atures. There is a stand of Bishop pines near Santa Barbara which passers-by assume to be a state or county planting because the trees are all exactly the same size. The actual reason is that the seeds all germinated after the same fire.

  During the Coyote fire the eucalyptus trees, especially the most widely planted variety, blue gum, burned very quickly. This was partly because of their natural oil content, which caused a great deal of black smoke, and partly because they were very dry. The deep underground water which carried many large trees through the summer drought was unavailable to the shallow-rooted eucalypts. But their comeback was also quick. In fact, the adaptation of these imports from Australia to a California fire provided one of the oddest sights of the spring and summer. Normally, eucalyp­tus leaves grow like other leaves, out of branches and twigs. When the branches and twigs, however, were consumed by fire, the leaves grew instead out of the trunk of the tree. They looked like telephone poles which had suddenly started to sprout leaves from top to bottom.

  Certain trees took a long time to show signs of regeneration. These included the redwoods in the center of the Botanic Garden and the olive trees on the slopes of a canyon adjoining the Botanic Garden. This grove had been planted for the commercial milling of oil in the 1880s, about the time the first daily newspaper was established in Santa Barbara and the first free library and reading room was opened. The olive oil project was abandoned when cheap Mexican labor became scarce. One of the methods used to keep the workers on the job would be frowned on by present-day union officials: whenever the braceros gave evidence of wanting a siesta, a barrel of wine, carried on a donkey-drawn sled, passed between the rows of trees, and the braceros were bribed with booze on a considerably more generous scale than the British sea­men with once-a-day grog.

  This olive grove, left untended for years and with a heavy growth of underbrush between the trees, was severely damaged by the fire. The underbrush was the main reason for the destruction, not, as some people believed, the oil content of the wood or leaves. When I walked through the area a week after the fire ended, all the trees looked dead, and continued to do so for a long time. Yet on a visit in mid-January, sixteen months after the fire, I noticed that nearly every blackened stump was showing some greenery at the base.

  The heavy rains in November and December had caused the various kinds of grasses to grow thick and tall, and there were birds everywhere: house finches, white-crowned sparrows, golden-crowned sparrows and lesser goldfinches foraged in flocks, with the sparrows providing the dinner music, assisted by two or three invisi­ble wrentits. The brown towhees took part with an occasional chink, reminding me of gradeschool monotones who are allowed to ac­company their musical classmates by “playing” percussion pie plates or cake tins. Dozens of quail, securely hidden, ticked and talked, discussing the intruder among themselves without bother­ing to lower their voices. They made it plain that they considered me a yark and a and since I didn’t know what a yark or a kookquat was, I couldn’t very well contradict them.

  The same visit provided an unexpected bonus, a pair of black-chinned sparrows, male and female, resting on the burned branch of an olive tree. These birds are normally seen only during the late spring and summer in stands of chamise-dominant chaparral in the mountains or foothills. Finding them in January near the city limits was highly irregular. Perhaps the Coyote fire had something to do with their appearance since the species is known to be partial to burn areas where the new vegetation is only half grown.

  On my next visit to the olive grove in mid-July, most of the trees gave evidence that they would recover completely in time. Branches growing out of the woody crown were as long as six feet and covered with silver-green leaves.

  Even without the braceros and the wine wagon to keep them on the job, there will someday be another crop of olives for the white-crowned sparrows, robins and California thrashers.

  The forest was turning green again. For residents of the fire areas the change was gradual. For those who only visited from time to time it was incredibly fast and far, from death to life. At the higher altitudes the white-bark ceanothus had a fresh growth of the tough, wiry stems and sharp spikes which kept predators away from such guests as the green-tailed towhee and the mountain quail. Closer to sea level the green-bark ceanothus was performing a similar function for the lazuli bunting and California quail, the wrentit and lark sparrow.

  Soon manzanita apples would again be ripening for the cedar waxwings, toyon berries for the purple finches and mistletoe for the phainopeplas. Oak buds were already appearing for the band-tailed pigeons, and there was promise of a fresh crop of chaparral currants for the hermit thrushes, mountain cherries for the Townsend solitaires, nightshade for the grosbeaks. Through the picture window beside my chair I watched the mountains recover from the fire, each day bringing a new patch of green that turned to violet when the sun set.

  As each day of recovery came and went, and each new flight of birds landed on the ledge to feed, I was continually reminded of a letter John Keats sent to a friend in 1817.

  The setting Sun will always set me to rights, he wrote, or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.

 

 

 
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