As the Ides of March passed, thirsty shrubs sucked up the moisture granted by the intermittent rains that graced the Central Coast and put their lifeblood to work. Within weeks of the rains the spring bloom came in full force, lighting up hillsides across the coast with blossoming hues of yellow, lavender, and bright orange.
Travelers on the Foxen Canyon wine trail have been parking their cars to take photos of the pastel foothills of the San Rafael Mountains. Plein air painters can be found posted with their easels and supplies on the sides of trails and roads near Figueroa Mountain while hikers pass by, often stopping for smartphone selfies with the burgeoning bloom in the background. The Santa Maria Valley is wreathed in yellow; even as the grass has lost its green in the first weeks of April, huge swaths of non-native black mustard flower stand in contrast to the clear blue skies.
This explosion of life is a superficial sign of nature’s resilience in the face of California’s ongoing and historic drought, which has left its mark on plant and animal populations throughout the state. But the state’s water deficit is far from over, explained Joan Easton Lentz, author, lifelong naturalist, and Santa Barbara resident.
Lentz literally wrote the book on the Central Coast’s ecological landscape—A Naturalist’s Guide to the Santa Barbara Region—and explained that the area’s Mediterranean climate has naturally produced wildflowers and other plants evolved to be more drought resistant. Wet winters and dry summers are the norm for the Central Coast, she said, so the plants lay dormant for a good part of the year.
In times of extreme drought with very little rainfall, these plants take a sudden burst of moisture like March’s rains and run with it, Lentz explained.
“They are adapted to scarce rainfall, and they will bloom for a certain amount of time when they get it,” she said. “I think it’s been so long—like last year and the year before there was so little rain—and we got some this year that they are taking the chance and looking pretty good, it looks almost like Ireland in some places.”
The Figueroa Mountain area is especially explosive with wildflowers right now, and locals who daytrip out there can catch the bountiful bloom before the colors start to fade.
The Santa Ynez Valley Natural History Society leads regular hikes in the area, explained society member Tim Matthews, who attended a hike near Figueroa Mountain a few weeks into the bloom. Matthews said the hike was quite special for him. Firstly, it was his birthday, but he also got to witness the drought-stricken area brimming with wildflowers.
“There’s lupine and poppy up there like there usually is, but I’ve never seen it like this,” Matthews said. “There’s also fiddleneck, popcorn flower, and fiesta flowers; those grow under coastal live oaks, it’s a pretty blue flower, and they call them a fiesta flower because you can pick them and toss them at somebody and they stick to your shirt, they have little claws on them. So maybe they got their name from the Santa Barbara fiesta or other Mexican fiestas.”
Matthews is also a scientific aid for the Department of Fish and Wildlife and works on the Burton Mesa Ecological Reserve surrounding Vandenberg Village near Lompoc. He’s been a naturalist his whole life and is familiar with the diverse wildlife in the area.
The reserve has benefitted in a big way from the rains as well, Matthews said, and while plenty of wildflowers are blooming around Burton Mesa, other plants are sucking up the much-needed moisture as well.
“A lot of coast live oaks, the Quercus agrifolia, have died, but some of them have come back with the rains we are getting,” he said. “There are a bunch of dead branches, they look like skeletons, but with some fresh leaves poking out of a few branches.
“The coastal woodfern took a big hit too and a lot of them died, or at least looked dead, but a bunch have come back,” he continued. “I know that’s what they do, but I have never seen so many dead ferns, but they came back after the rains in a big way.”
In A Naturalist’s Guide to the Santa Barbara Region, Lentz introduces the greater Santa Barbara ecological region—which includes Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties—and reveals its unique place in California’s natural history.
The area represents the transition between the state’s northern and southern ecosystems. This results in densely varied populations of numerous species of both plants and animals. The wildlife is adapted to a number of differing microclimates and a variety of habitats.
The Burton Mesa is part of one such habitat, Matthews explained. It begins at around Point Sal and continues down to Jalama Beach. Within these bounds species live that don’t exist anywhere else, he said.
“California is the most diverse state in the nation as far as flora and fauna go, and Santa Barbara County is the most diverse county in the state as far as flora and fauna go,” he said. “So we’re in a real wonderland in this county.”
Point Conception acts as the demarcation point between north and south, Matthews and Lentz said. Many are aware that the point divides two currents of the Pacific Ocean, but it also heralds the Santa Ynez mountain range, which is the above-water divider of the north and south regions.
But even just north of the Santa Ynez Mountains, there is substantial change among the habitats across the landscape. There are rocky shores, sandy beaches, rolling hillsides, grassy valleys, dunes, mesas, and canyons. Different plants and animals are uniquely suited to each, Lentz said, including the wildflowers.
“That’s what I find so interesting is how these different plants adapt,” she said. “For instance, Oso Flaco Lake is great for the dune plants that are adapted, as you would say, to the sandy soil and lack of rainwater. So, you can see the same kinds of shrubs there, like the dune bush lupine, and then there’s the Bush Lupine you find up on Figueroa Mountain, and they’re two different things.
“If you learn one, you can learn the other,” she added. “That’s what’s so amazing, everything has a niche and it seems to manage.”
A much more remote habitat in the region is the Carizzo Plain, which is just north of the Santa Barbara County line in eastern San Luis Obispo County. It’s a grassy valley between the Caliente and Temblor mountain ranges.
The plain is teeming with plant life thanks to the recent rains as well, said John Chesnut, the California Native Plant Society SLO chapter’s rare plant coordinator. Chesnut spoke with the Sun from a wildflower-filled field in Carizzo where he is currently doing research.
“The hillside daisy is bright yellow on the Caliente ridge,” he said. “Much of the plane is beginning to dry, but the bush lupine and the paintbrush on the San Juan Grade is real bright.”
There are also other more rare flowers that have blossomed there as well. The desert candle, whose Latin name is Caulanthus inflatus, is a tall-stalked flower that has flourished on the plain since the rains. This is a “once-in-a-decade” bloom, according to Chesnut.
The explosion of forb life—that’s flowering plants—has served as a tremendous boon to the animals on the plain, Chesnut said. He’s been conducting annual research on the population of the giant kangaroo rat that lives on the plain for a University of California research project.
The giant kangaroo rat is a small burrowing rodent that stuffs its cheeks huge with vegetation and seeds to get by. Its measured population has dipped each year of the drought, Chesnut explained, but this year is different as he’s seen a marked increase in the number of the hopping rats.
“There’s been a rebound in the population numbers of the kangaroo rat, which is the primary herbivore out here,” he said. “So that’s a good sign there’s enough moisture to sustain the populations.”
In a Mediterranean climate such as in Santa Barbara County, the plants are adapted for longer periods of drought, Lentz said, but it’s the animals that suffer most.
Without the necessary plant life to sustain the lower organisms, everything else up the food chain suffers, and many animals forego breeding until there is a sustainable food supply, Lentz explained. For Chesnut, he’s seen effects on more than just the giant kangaroo rat’s population over his years of research on the Carizzo Plain.
“The plains were hurt by the drought,” he said. “The kangaroo rats were the bottom of the food chain, so the kit fox, their predators, were hurt as well.
“It was hard on the pronghorn antelope too because they need forbs for nitrogen and protein, so they had real nutrition problems,” he continued. “They were up on top of the ridges eating oak leaves.”
Many miles north of the Carizzo Plain, east of Atascadero, is Shell Creek Road, which Chesnut described as “world famous in California flora.” The stretch of road winds through ranch land and links highways 58 and 41.
The California Native Plant Society SLO chapter’s president, Bill Waycott, told the Sun that he was there recently and observed the wildflower bloom and the other wildlife it was supporting.
“The flowers help the bees and the flying insects,” Waycott said. “I was out at Shell Creek last Saturday and I just plopped myself down among a big patch of flowers and sat there for about 20 minutes, and I watched all the flying critters and took pictures of about 20 different types. So when the flowers grow, every level of the food chain gets serviced, in this case the insects that feed off of nectar and pollen.”
Back in Santa Barbara County, Matthews is noticing a spur in the wildlife population on the Burton Mesa Ecological Reserve, including the state bird, the California quail.
“The quail are doing well, the morning doves are doing quite well, and so are the deer,” he said. “Out on the reserve, the fauna does quite well, it always does. I see them every day; deer, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions.”
The Department of Fish and Wildlife gave the animals a helping hand through the drought, by installing two water basins called “guzzlers,” Matthews explained. But the animals have certainly benefitted from the renewed plant life, he added.
Lentz and Matthews both described the El Niño as lackluster so far—Matthews playfully called it “El No-No”—though both were hopeful for April showers (the Sun conducted interviews before the rainy weekend of April 8 through 10). The rainfall this year is still below average, Lentz said, which could be a sign of climate change.
“The question is, is this the new normal? I don’t know, it’s very complicated,” she said. “I tried to explain the typical El Niño in my book—I used the ’82 and ’83, and the ’97 and ’98 as examples—and we’re talking huge storms, and we got none of that.
“And there was a huge, huge El Niño out there this year, lot’s of warm water, but we didn’t get any of it,” she continued. “Why didn’t we get the Pineapple Express? Why didn’t that happen? Nobody knows yet.”
While California’s drought appears far from over, recent rains have given many varieties of plants the moisture they need to keep their biological game going. The spectacular display of wildflowers along the Central Coast is a hopeful sign to professionals and researchers, as well as being a pleasant sight for hikers, but they are also a life-affirming presence to the myriad animals big and small that depend on them for sustenance.
Will there be more blooming following some April rains? Will the rains continue closer to the region’s typically dry summer? Or is this California’s new normal?
“People really want a simple answer, but nature is complicated,” Lentz said. “Everything is tied to everything else.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 14-21, 2016.