By Wendy Langhans   When you pull out a roadmap of Santa Clarita, you eyes are naturally drawn to the grid of streets and street names.  Just where is that new restaurant? How do we get from here to there? But when I looked at the new South Coast Wildlands map of the wildlife corridors running through Southern California, my ...

By: Wendy Langhans   When our daughter Ellie was born, her Godmother gave her a priceless gift, a handmade quilt.  It was a lovely piece of work, with various delicate calico prints pieced together into log-cabin blocks.  The blocks were then connected to one another by means of a solid-colored border. Years later when Ellie was a teenager, she wanted ...

By Wendy Langhans To the casual observer it’s a funny-looking tree – gray patches of bark flake off the trunk like a bad case of psoriasis.  Not to mention the brown and prickly spherical balls dangling from the branches, like a cheap imitation of a Christmas tree. But to the birds and butterflies, a California Sycamore tree is a bountiful ...

By Wendy Langhans This male Red-winged blackbird is singing to establish his territory. “Chek…chek…chek…oak-a-leeee”. I hear the male red-winged blackbirds before I actually seethem.  Their metallic-sounding calls are unmistakable. You can hear an example here: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Red-winged_Blackbird_dtl.html#sound. Ah- there they are – some are sitting on the clusters of tallreeds, while others are perched on the branches of nearbytrees.  As I watch them, I ...

By: Wendy Langhans   A closer look at Desert Varnish. Desert Varnish is a thin black coating that is found on rock formations all over the world, from western Chile to Morocco to our own local Vasquez Rocks at the eastern rim the Santa Clarita Valley.  While it’s easy for a casual observer to dismiss it as dirty smudges on ...

By: Wendy Langhans   A hummingbird romance in February results in babies later in the spring. Photo by Dianne Erskine. Chirp!  My sleepy afternoon reverie on a sunny porch was suddenly interrupted by a soft chirping noise.   I recognized the sound.  It was a hummingbird, most likely an Anna’s, and my first thought was that the bird was checking ...

By Wendy Langhans Common Groundsel grows best in moist soil and in cooler weather It wasn’t much to look at right now – less than 6 inches tall, about half its mature height.  If I hadn’t been looking for wildflowers I would have walked right past it.  But the bright yellow flowers peeking out from the protective tubular green bracts ...

By: Wendy Langhans.   I watched this coot munching on grass at the edge of Bridgeport Lake The Coots of Bridgeport have been featured lately in the local news and internet commentary.  It seems to me that our response to the coots says as much about us as it does about the coots.  (So with apologies to the poet Wallace ...

By: Wendy Langhans   When we think of raindrops, we often picture a dripping faucet with tear-shaped droplets.  But in the natural world, raindrops are NOT tear-drop shaped.  Furthermore, the shape of raindrop varies according to its size.  Small drops, those with less than a 1 mm radius (roughly the diameter of a straight pin), are spherical.  As drops grow ...

By: Wendy Langhans   Coast Live Oak leaves:A hydrophobic waxy coating on the leaves helps conserve water Have you every fried up a mess of bacon in a pan, sat down to eat a leisurely breakfast, and then returned to the kitchen to clean up?  And what do you find in the fry pan?  A lump of waxy solidified bacon ...