Unexpected Events of the Day: Floods and Foxes

There were some pleasant sights to be had today. They didn't seem at all related at first (foxes and floods), but in a way they were.

We've had rain, finally, in amounts that might make some small dent in the drought that has plagued California for nearly five years. I was headed into work and crossed Dry Creek in the Waterford area. Something was different: the creek was flooding. Not a vast flood, not one likely to produce widespread damage, but still, the banks and some of the oak tree trunks were underwater. It was a shock to see so much water after literally years of dry channels under this bridge.

Dry Creek (who comes up with these imaginative names?) heads in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada, so it is never fed by melting snowpack. Peak runoff occurs instead during intense rainstorm events. The creek flows into the Central Valley near Waterford and eventually joins the Tuolumne River at Modesto, for a total length of about 60 miles. It no doubt earned the name "Dry" a century ago, but in more recent years water flowed in the creek most of the time due to irrigation runoff. And during the drought of the last four years, it has been dry for months at a time, once again earning its name.

There have not been many floods during the drought years. The soil has been so parched that what little rain fell soaked into the ground, leaving little for surface runoff. The 2015-2016 water year has been different. November and December provided above-normal rainfall (and a Sierra snowpack), so when the January storms hit this week (the first attributed to El Nino), the ground was pretty well saturated. Close to 2 inches fell over the region on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the river peaked today at almost 1,000 cubic feet per second. As can be seen on the flood hydrograph below, the river will recede relatively quickly to tens of cubic feet per second within a day or so.

The last time Dry Creek really caught my attention this way was back in March 2011, when the discharge was around three times higher than it was today, at 3,000 cubic feet per second. Compare the difference in the picture below, taken from the same bridge. The river was even higher in the El Nino year of 1997, and with a probability of once in 500 years the creek may produce flows as great as 18,500 cubic feet per second. That would be something to see, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Dry Creek in March 2011

The other unexpected event of the day was seeing a Red Fox out my office window. The fox lives on our campus so I've seen it two or three times before. It was running through an area slated to become an outdoor educational area for our Great Valley Museum of Natural History. The lab will emphasize the natural vegetation and animals of the valley. It was nice to see nature getting a bit of a head start!

Seeing these two different things reminded me that there is a small remnant of a natural ecosystem left in our valley, one that can never be completely obliterated by dams, farms, and cities. We can never truly control the rivers or droughts, and the tattered remnants of the original ecosystem will for the most part adapt and survive our invasion, albeit in small pockets here and there.

Can You See It? Seeking a Natural World in an Urban Setting

Can you see it? Look carefully, it's easy to miss...

We have a drainage pond on our west campus at the edge of town. It's been a mostly neglected corner of the campus, used occasionally to graze sheep from our agricultural unit. I've been exploring it for the last two years looking to photograph birds (forty species and counting). It's not far from our Science Community Center and Great Valley Museum. The museum and science teaching facility are new, and have garnered a great deal of community interest, with a planetarium, observatory, Science on a Sphere, and all kinds of science-related exhibits. The final jewel in the crown, an outdoor education laboratory, was sort of a political football in the last year or two as the bond issue that paid for these incredible educational facilities started to run short.

Luckily, there is funding in place to build the outdoor lab, with plans in place to plant native vegetation and habitat for animals that could thrive there. The California Drought, about to enter a fifth year, put the kibosh on what was to be a central attraction, a pond. No new water features, they said.

We're going to let nature decide that issue for us. We will be designing an artificial vernal pool, a habitat almost unique to our valley. Such pools only hold water after storms in the winter and spring, and give rise to a number of endemic plants and animals. In the meantime, our attention shifted to the drainage pond. It's been there since World War II and has evolved into a natural habitat, sort of a mini-wilderness on the edge of our campus. Since we can't make new ponds, we are going to make improvements to the old one, putting in walkways, and adding a platform that students and visitors can use to take water samples and observe wildlife.

It's always a thrill to see a bit of wildness in the middle of an urban environment. That's what the picture above is about. I had my own thrill of discovery as I was taking an evening walk before class. If you look at the left side of the picture, you'll see a bit of nature staring back at me.

I've seen this beautiful fox (or a parent or sibling) on just one other occasion. It's been said it was living in one of the abandoned buildings nearby, although there seems plenty of shelter in the pond area. It was comforting to know that a bit of wildness still exists nearby. The children in our region need to know that they are part of a larger environment, and it's wonderful that they just might have a chance to see a creature such as this. It might be something else, squirrels, muskrats, turtles or birds, but it will be something. I'm looking forward to the future on this campus!

Postscript: As cute as they are, the Red Foxes are not native to California. There is a threatened subspecies, the Sierra Red Fox, that lives in the higher parts of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range. All others across the state were introduced more than a century ago and have proved a problem in many ecosystems, as they eat just about anything and adapt easily to new environments at the expense of native species. I don't know what role they play in our area, or if they are a problem. My feeling is that they help control rodent populations on the campus, but I'm no biologist!

Sharing Science in the Local Community: What Ideas Do You Have?

How often do you wish you had a blank slate? The term can have many meanings and contexts, but most often it means the chance to start over, or to start a project free of restrictions. That in essence is what you see in the pictures in this post. After 10 years of uncertainty and doubt, we have received the green light to begin planning and designing the last component of our Science Community Center at Modesto Junior College.. What you see in the pictures above and below are views of what is almost literally a blank slate. It's made of clay (and silt), the same material that slate starts with, but it hasn't been compressed yet. It the footprint of  the future Outdoor Education Laboratory.

This last piece of the puzzle is part of a science education complex that includes teaching laboratories for biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics and geology, a planetarium, an observatory, and a wonderful new museum based on the natural history of the Great Valley in California. The building on the left in the picture above is a new museum storage structure, and the buildings in the background are condemned and will be removed, probably to become an eventual parking lot. We were worried for some time that the parking lot was going to be put on the site of the outdoor lab.

I hate committee meetings. A lot. I find that many of them don't accomplish much. But today's meeting was fun. It was a gathering of professors and museum staff to decide the shape and nature of the Outdoor Education area. We had a lot of discussion about how it would be laid out and what it would include. It is meant to be an area that will be utilized by students for research, and by the school children of our region to learn about the biology and geology of our region. Our only restriction is that because of the horrific drought, we can't include new water features.

The water restriction was a sour note (even though it was understandable), but it turns out that a pond is already in place, and it's not really using up any water. It's actually capturing used water. If you've followed my blog for any period of time, or if you follow my birding adventures over at Geotripper's California Birds, you would know that an old drainage pond exists just a few hundred feet away from the future outdoor lab, and that it is shaded by mature oak and cottonwood trees. We will probably adapt it for use as an education feature.

So my question to you is this: What would you do with a barren stretch of ground, an adequate (but not infinite) budget, and a commission to enhance the natural science education of our students (both young and "mature")? What would you include in the plans? We had some long discussions today, but I'm wondering what we might have missed. What would you do?

By the way, if we seem somehow privileged to be doing this, it might help to know that all of these wonderful improvements to our campus are not funded by the state or the federal government. They were paid for by the voters and taxpayers in our own economically distressed community. We have one of the highest unemployment rates and the highest poverty rates in the entire country, but our citizens saw their way to support the future of our children by producing some of the finest teaching facilities possible, not just in the sciences, but across the entire college. I'm really proud of my community these days.