Anodonta Adventure on the Eel River

My latest Trail Signs project is one I worked hard to obtain - the Mountain Lake Restoration within the Presidio. I lowballed my pitch to the Trust because I really wanted to tell this story. It worked. This body of water is probably the most famous within San Francisco. It was because the Spanish soldier's in the De Anza Expedition of 1776 found fresh water for their horses here, crossing a sea of sand dunes, that the Presidio was even founded.
Mountain Lake has been punched in the gut ecologically for centuries - literally halved when Highway 1's approach to the Golden Gate Bridge was put in and a dumping ground for non-native pet turtles and fish.
Jonathan Young, a wildlife biologist/herpetologist with the Trust is working with others to restore historic species to the lake.
I joined he and a mollusk/water expert named Niveen Ismail yesterday in collecting California Floater Mussels ( Andonta californiensis )
along the South Folk of the Eel River ( Mendocino Co.) Once part of Mountain Lake, these mussels will have a great deal to do with stabilization, filtration and sustainability of the finished restoration. The Fish & Wildlife permit allowed for the removal of 35 of these Species-of-Concern. This creature has a parasitic relationship with the Three-spined Stickleback fish (which we saw this day and will be restored to the lake as well). It's this relationship I'm excited to try to paint and the Trust seems cool to allow me to try to tell the more obscure stories there. ( No slur to the Birding Community, but if I'm asked to paint one more Great Blue Heron for a trail sign, I'll barf.) The California Floater ( so named for it's behavior of floating to the top when it dies...) turned out to be much more beautiful than I imagined: bronze tones and muddy greens. It was in amongst the more common Western Pearlshell mussels ( Margaritifera falcata ). I played shore su chef to the experts, immediately putting each Floater in a cooler as they came up from snorkeling along the edge of the river, passing me each with trembling hand from the extremely frigid water. I was SO HAPPY I wasn't the one in a wet suit.
Got to explore and iNat cool stuff in a part of California I'd never been to: is there really any better way to spend a day?

Posted on Οκτώβριος 21, 2013 0642 ΜΜ by robberfly