Friends of Sausal Creek

by Mystery Nests Unveiled!

By Pete Veilleux

A couple of weeks ago I needed a short break from the computer, so I drove up in the hills for a walk not too far from the headwaters of Sausal Creek. Noticing a few beautiful madrones and oaks on a ridge, I searched for a trail to get up there. Finding none, I decided to do some bushwhacking through the poison-oak chaparral. The trees were beautiful, and there was no sign of people having trampled through the area no broken branches or packed and bare earth. When I first got up the hill, crawling on hands and knees, I found a four-foot-high stack of small sticks. Before long, I came to another even larger one. This one was close to six feet high and was just as neat and orderly as a pile of sticks could get! To my amazement, around the next knoll, one of these huge nests was hanging from a low branch in a coast live oak. It was hanging about five to seven feet off the ground and looked to be six or seven feet high and four feet wide.

By the end of my hike, I had found nine of these nests along this quiet ridge in the park. Having also found another patch of the rare and beautiful pallid manzanita (Arctostaphylos pallida), I was feeling pretty good. After stuffing myself with huckleberries, I scrambled out of there just before dark. I was anxious to get home to search the Internet for the mysterious stick-nest builder.

I Googled for "large stick nests on the ground or in oaks" and discovered that the nest builder was a dusky-footed woodrat (Neotoma fuscipes). There are eleven subspecies that range from Oregon through California, and they live in loosely cooperative, matrilineal societies. Although most of these live in moist woods and riparian settings, some live in dry chaparral, where live oaks are present. They live for generations in these large stick houses, which are aggressively protected.

Although the common dusky-footed woodrat is not endangered, the Fish and Wildlife Service lists one of the subspecies, the riparian woodrat, as an Endangered and California Species of Concern. It possibly lived at one time along Sausal Creek, but according to Hooper's Taxonomic Analysis, there was no suitable habitat remaining in the San Francisco East Bay region by 1938.

We who live in the Bay Area are blessed with natural beauty all around and even within our neighborhoods. There are many unusual, and sometimes rare, native plants, birds, and other animals living among us here in the East Bay. According to paleontologist Michael Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History, approximately 30,000 species on Earth are going extinct per year, and many scientists believe that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of this planet.

The Friends of Sausal Creek offers a wonderful opportunity for you to become directly involved in turning this mass extinction around on the most local level. Take a look at our Web site (www.sausalcreek.org) or e-mail us at coordinator\@sausalcreek.org for more information about our activities.