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Nasty New Mustard at the BFS

Mar 8th, 2012 by

Update: On March 11, the valiant BFS Volunteers removed every known Sahara Mustard plant on the BFS. Way to go, Volunteers!

The very nasty Sahara Mustard (Brassica tournefortii) has just appeared at the BFS in two small infestations along Foothill Blvd. near the BFS entrance and the near College Avenue.

The nerve! A Sahara Mustard plant growing right next to our Bernard Field Station sign. ©Nancy Hamlett.

The Sahara Mustard, a native of semi-arid and arid deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Mediterranean lands of southern Europe, probably arrived in California with date palms from the Middle East. It was first collected in North America in 1927 in the Coachella Valley, and that specimen, which was part of the Pomona College Herbarium, is now housed at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden Herbarium (POM147846). Sahara Mustard has only become prominent in Los Angeles County in the last decade.

Sahara Mustard plants are 4 to 40 inches tall and generally have an open bushy appearance, although the form is quite variable. The basal leaves are are long, with pairs of deep toothed lobes, and are covered with stiff hairs.

A Sahara Mustard leaf. ©Nancy Hamlett.

Sahara Mustard plants flower early – the ones at the BFS are blooming and have already formed fruits. The flowers are small (petals less than one-quarter inch) and dull yellow, making them less conspicuous than our other exotic mustards. The fruits diverge stiffly from the stem at a forty-five degree angle. They are born on a half-inch pedicel (stalk) and have an obvious beak at the tip.

A fruit of Sahara Mustard with a flower at the bottom right. ©Nancy Hamlett.

Sahara Mustard is very prolific – large plants produce up to 16,000 seeds. Dried plants can break off at the base and tumble like tumbleweed, spreading seeds rapidly across the landscape. When wet, a sticky gel forms over the seed case enabling seeds to disperse long distances by adhering to animals and probably automobiles. It often first appears along roadways as it has at the BFS.

Because Sahara Mustard seeds germinate early and the plants grow rapidly, they out-compete native plants for soil moisture and light, and they produce seeds before many native species have even begun to flower. In the winter-spring of 2005 about three-quarters of the most famous wildflower areas in California and Arizona were overrun with Saharan Mustard.

A photo taken in 1998 of wildflowers in the northern end of the Mohawk Dunes in western Arizona. ©Mark Dimmett, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

The same area photographed in 2005 when Sahara Mustard covered 70-90% of the surface area, and almost no native wildflowers bloomed. ©Mark Dimmett, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

As if that weren’t enough, Sahara Mustard increases fuel loads and fire hazard in coastal sage scrub, and its high oxalic acid content may be toxic to native herbivores.

The BFS Volunteers are planning to eradicate this nasty mustard from the field station. If you would like to help, please contact Nancy Hamlett, BFS Volunteer Coordinator, at nancy_hamlett@hmc.edu or 909-607-3811.

Sources and further information:

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Thistles and trails

Mar 4th, 2012 by

On our last two BFS Volunteer Days, we’ve continued our attacks on Italian and Bull Thistles as well as doing some trail maintenance.

On February 18, ten valiant volunteers pulled up 22 bags of Italian Thistles (Carduus pycnocephalus) from the mound with the “old” toad pond.

The February 18 thistle pullers with their haul of thistles! Left to right: Will Chen (HMC '12), Diana Mar (HMC '14), John Robinson (HMC '12), Anwen Evans, Elsie Gibson (HMC '15), Carol Cox, Tim Cox, Sarah Stevens (HMC '15), and Cleo Stannard (HMC '15)

Although we pulled a lot of thistles, more still remain. We did, however, make great inroads! This area may be the original infestation of Italian Thistles. There are certainly more here than in any other location. We’ll probably attack this area again when the thistle are a bit larger.

On March 3, we turned our attention to one of a couple of newly spotted patches of Bull Thistles (Cirsium vulgare). These patches are fairly small with very few dead stalks, so we think they are relatively new infestations. If they’re recent, there may not be much of a seed bank, and we have a good chance of wiping them out. We worked on a corner of the east field that had the biggest thistles – some of the rosettes were more than two feet across and were starting to bolt.

Now that's a thistle! Bull thistles are very large and spiky and have coarse hairs on the tops of the leaves.

Prof. Dick Haskell (HMC) with a trophy thistle headed for the trash can. For scale, Prof. Haskell is over 6 feet tall.

We think we removed every single thistle from this little patch and in the process filled three large trash cans with thistles.

Three cans full of thistles!

Look, Ma – no thistles!

After pulling thistles, we did some trail maintenance – clearing some overgrown areas on the trail around pHake Lake.

A newly cleared stretch of trail. Doesn't it just invite you in?

If you’re interested in volunteering at the BFS, please contact Nancy Hamlett – nancy_hamlett@hmc.edu or 909-607-3811.

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Attacking Thistles!

Feb 8th, 2012 by

The latest skirmish in the BFS’s war on invasive exotic plants took place Saturday, February 4, when 15 hardy volunteers attacked two patches of Italian and Bull Thistles. These two large very spiky purple-flowering thistles are native to Europe, western Asia, and north Africa. The were both introduced to North America accidentally — the Bull Thistle during colonial times and the Italian Thistle in the 1930s. Both compete with and exclude native plants.

Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare) growing on the east side of pHake Lake. ©Nancy Hamlett.

Italian Thistle (Carduus pycnocephalus) photographed at an unknown California location. ©Br. Alfred Brousseau.

The two targeted areas were a small patch of mixed Bull and Italian on the east side of pHake Lake and a larger patch of Italian Thistles on the east side of the mound with ‘old’ toad pond. At this time of year, the plants have not formed stalks — only basal rosettes, which we dug out with their tap roots.

Rosettes of Italian Thistles (Carduus pycnocephalus). ©Nancy Hamlett.

The weed diggers in action — Sarah Stevens, Cleo Stannard, Dennis Callaci, Harmonie James, and Dick Haskell digging up Italian thistles by the path to the old toad pond. ©Nancy Hamlett.

A job well done — The thistle diggers with 18 bags of thistles! Left to right: Cleo Stannard, Sarah Stevens, John Robinson, Noah Libeskind, Ben Stapp, Paul Stapp, Dick Haskell, Tim Cox, Elliott Cox, Benjamin Libeskind, Laura Kotovsky, Dennis Callaci, and Harmonie James. ©Nancy Hamlett.

We will be very interested to see next year how much the thistle population has been reduced in these two locations.

More information and resources from the California Invasive Plant Council:

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BFS Manager in the national news!

Jan 4th, 2012 by

BFS Manager Jennifer Gee’s quail research is featured both in the New York Times and on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

A female Gambel's Quail. ©Jennifer Gee.

Since April 2010, the New York Times has been running a blog called “Scientist at Work – Notes from the Field”. According to the NY Times website, “This blog is the modern version of a field journal, a place for reports on the daily progress of scientific expeditions — adventures, misadventures, discoveries. As with the expeditions themselves, you never know what you will find.”

Dr. Gee and her collaborator, Dr. Jennifer Calkin, are blogging about their investigations of the interface between two quail species, Gambel’s Quail (Callipepla gambelii) and Elegant Quail (Callipepla douglasii), in Sonora, Mexico. You can click here to see all of Dr. Gee’s posts on her Mexican adventures.

Sunset from Navopatia Field Station, Sonora, Mexico. ©Jennifer Gee.

Drs. Gee and Calkin were featured in a December 26 Rock Center with Brian Williams piece on the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter, which they used to fund their initial Mexican Expedition. You can see a video here. The segment on Drs. Gee and Calkin starts at 6:19. You can also check out our previous post on their use of Kickstarter.

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Waging War on Weeds

Dec 7th, 2011 by

One of the initiatives our Interim Manager, Dr. Jennifer Gee, has undertaken this year is to produce a BFS Vegetation Management Plan, which she developed in consultation with Dr. Chris McDonald, Desert Natural Resources Advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension, San Bernardino County.

Dr. Chris McDonald, UC Extension Service, and Dr. Jennifer Gee, BFS Interim Manager, contemplate the cattail problem at pHake Lake.

The goals of the Vegetation Management Plan are to preseve the academic and ecological functions of the Field Station, to maintain fire safety, and to monitor and manage exotic, invasive, and pest species.

The Plan was approved by the BFS Faculty Advisory Committee this fall, and we are now beginning to implement the plan, using a combination of outside contractors, interns, Claremont College classes, and volunteers. Here are some the vegetation management activities that have been going on this fall:

  • Cattail control:
    pHake Lake has a thriving population of Broad-leaved Cattails, Typha latifolia, which grow very rapidly and would take over large portions of the lake if we did not trim them back. Our goal for cattail control is to maintain some open shoreline for boat-launching and observation as well as some relatively open shallow-water areas for wading birds and dabbling ducks, while retaining areas of dense cattails for use by birds like American Coots, Song Sparrows, Yellowthroats, and the occasional Virginia Rail or Sora.In September Johnny’s Tree Service trimmed back cattails from the boat landing area, the south shore “beach”, and shallow area around the little island in the northeast corner of the lake.

    John Garbo of Johnny's Tree Service with cattails removed from pHake Lake.

  • Mapping exotics and invasives:
    Monitoring exotic, invasive, and pest plants is an essential part of the vegetation management plan, and we’ve started using GIS to map the location of some of these plants. Prof. Elise Ferree’s Keck Science class, Bio 57–Concepts In Biology, mapped the locations of Century Plants (Agave americana) and Peruvian Pepper Trees (Schinus molle), and Christi Gabriel, Seeds of Success Intern at RSABG, has mapped a number of additional trees.

    Peruvian Pepper Trees mapped by the Bio 57 class (left) and various plants mapped by Intern Christi Gabriel (right).

  • Removing invasive plants:
    Volunteer workers have started removing invasive plants from the BFS perimeter to prevent their incursion into the field station. Last Saturday’s volunteers targeted Tree-of-Heaven, Ailanthus altissima. This is a highly invasive species, native to the far east, including China and Taiwan. Last summer as part of weed abatement for the LA County Fire Department, Johnny’s Tree Service dug out a group of trees that had colonized the highly disturbed strip of land between Foothill Blvd and the BFS fence. But with the recent rains, small trees have resprouted vigorously, and volunteers rooted these out.

    Prof. Paul Stapp, Cal State Fullerton, and Mari Bennett, HMC ’14, dig up Ailanthus.

    Ben Stapp, son of Prof. Paul Stapp, and Prof. Richard Haskell, HMC, attack a big Ailanthus root.

    The little trees, however, proved to be attached to very large roots, so the task was not as easy as it appeared.

    Big, bigger, biggest! Ben Stapp shows off the Ailanthus roots.

    Once the Trees-of-heaven were dug out, we scoured the rest of the perimeter for other invasives and also removed one small eucalyptus tree, one Tree Tobacco, and small colony of Mexican Fan Palms.

    Tim Cox, Paul Stapp, Elliott Cox, and Sandra Schmid dig out the palm colony.

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BFS Director Position Posted

Nov 22nd, 2011 by

The Claremont Colleges seek to hire a Director for the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station (BFS – www.bfs.claremont.edu), a natural study area adjacent to the Colleges’ campuses. The BFS comprises a diversity of habitat types, including native sage scrub, non-native grasslands and an artificial lake, which are used by undergraduate courses in ecology and environmental biology at the five Claremont Colleges, as well as for student and faculty research.

Duties: This is a full-time co-terminus staff position with 0.75 FTE devoted to field station direction and 0.25 FTE to teaching responsibilities in the Pomona College Biology Department. The Field Station Director oversees the day-to-day operations of the field station, including coordinating field station use, maintaining the habitat and facilities, working with a Faculty Advisory Committee to develop and implement academic programs and policies, and managing financial resources, as well as establishing and maintaining a long-term ecological monitoring program and database of ecological data, projects, and results. The Director is expected to participate in grant-writing and other development activities to raise funds for programmatic and facilities needs.

Qualifications: Ph.D. in ecology, conservation biology, or other relevant field and experience with biological field stations. Strong interpersonal and communications skills, and a passion for the mission of field teaching and research are required. Experience in ecological monitoring of terrestrial communities, familiarity with Southern California ecosystems, and a record of attracting funding are preferred.

To apply: Send curriculum vita and statement of interest and have three letters of recommendation sent to:

Department of Human Resources
550 N. College Avenue
Pomona College
Claremont, CA 91711
   or
email to staffjobs@pomona.edu.

For more information: Contact Jonathan Wright, Department of Biology, jcw04747@pomona.edu.

Deadline: Review of applications will begin December 15, 2011, and continue until the position is filled.

Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges, is a highly selective, coeducational liberal arts college located 35 miles east of Los Angeles. Pomona College is an Equal Opportunity employer and especially invites applications from women and members of underrepresented groups.

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Yellow-headed Blackbird added to BFS Bird List

Oct 8th, 2011 by

We have a new species addition to the BFS Bird List — the Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus), which was spotted by Dr. Paul Stapp’s class on September 29. The brilliant yellow head makes identification of this blackbird easy, and its loud, rusty-hinge call is also quite distinctive.

A Yellow-Headed Blackbird photographed at the Salton Sea. Photo by Glenn and Martha Vargas © California Academy of Sciences.

Yellow-headed Blackbirds occur throughout the US west of the Mississippi River, where they breed in marshes in the northern part of their range and migrate to Mexico and the southwestern US in winter. In California, Yellow-headed Blackbirds have historically bred mainly in the Central Valley and Northeastern California with a few scattered breeding sites in the southern part of the state. Since the 1950s, more breeding sites have appeared in southern California, including the Salton Sink (where the photo above was taken), and marshes in the desert created by development. Yellow-headed Blackbirds often nest and migrate with other blackbirds, and the one spotted at the BFS was in a migrating flock of Red-winged Blackbirds

Habitat loss threatens California’s Yellow-headed Blackbird populations, which have declined in some of their traditional breeding areas, and the Yellow-headed Blackbird is a California Species of Special Concern.

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I’m still here! Western Harvest Mouse spotted at BFS

Sep 30th, 2011 by

Dr. Paul Stapp‘s Mammalogy from Cal State Fullerton is trapping rodents at the BFS this week and caught a Western Harvest Mouse (Reithrodontomys megalotis), in their trapping grid in the SW part of the station (near the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden). This species has not been seen at BFS since 1990, so we’re glad to report it’s still here.

The Western Harvest Mouse, R. megalotis, trapped at the BFS. Photo © Paul Stapp.

Dr. Stapp says, “At 9-12 g, this is the smallest mouse on the site and prefers grassy habitats (though probably not the rank swards of exotics in the East Field). They are reportedly granivores, but they are opportunistic in their diet, eating some small insects. Harvest mice are not uncommon regionally but certainly have lost habitat with urban development, exotic grass invasion, and the presence of cats. It was great to see them here and a nice surprise, given how shrubby most of the site has become. That SW corner is really special.”

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Sora added to BFS Bird List

Sep 18th, 2011 by

We have a new addition to the BFS Bird List — the Sora (Porzana carolina).

The Sora is a small, secretive bird of freshwater marshes and is most often found in cattails and bulrushes, where it forages for snails, small crustaceans, insects, and seeds. At the BFS it was seen foraging among the cattails between the two little islands in pHake Lake. Since the lake level has been lowered to facilitate cattail removal, this area has become basically a mud flat with some shallow water — just to the Sora’s liking!

Although the Sora is seldom seen, I was able to get a few photos:

A Sora behind the little island in pHake Lake.

This photo gives a good sense of the Sora's coloration and its stout, yellow bill.

Successful foraging!

The Sora belongs to the Railidae family and is the most common and widely distributed rail in North America. Other Railidae at the BFS include the American Coot and the Virginia Rail, which also skulks around in the cattails. The Sora has a grayish body, a short yellow bill, and black on its face, while the Virginia Rail has a longer thinner red bill, a more reddish body, and no black on the face.

Since the Sora is hard to spot, you may have more luck hearing it. It has two distinctive two distinctive calls — a long, high, descending whinny and a two-noted “sor-AH” call, with the second note higher. You can hear recordings of the calls on All About Birds.

Many thanks to Dan Stoebel and Nina Karnovsky for identifying the Sora!

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Tarantula!

Aug 26th, 2011 by

Look who was spotted crossing the main east-west road yesterday evening!

A male California Ebony Tarantula crossing the road.

This new addition to our invert list is a male fall-breeding California native tarantula, Aphonopelma eutylenum – the California Ebony Tarantula. It is more accurately called Aphonopelma “eutylenum type” as this species has been described by several different validly published names. In the fall, the males go out seeking mates, so be extra careful if you’re driving on the field station.

Another view of the tarantula.

These “eutylenum type” tarantulas were once quite common in the flatlands of southern California, but have been expirpated from most valleys by developement and farming. They are still common in most coastal sage scrub communities, and it appears we have a remnant population at the BFS. They have also been seen next door at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.

Many thanks to Tom Prentice, UCR Entomology, for identification and information about this species.

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