Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with the semester break means that things are relatively quiet at this time at Hastings.
     John Thompson and Mark Stromberg continued to organize for a January 31 meeting in Santa Cruz that will bring together private landowners, local government agencies and non-governmental agencies who manage natural lands with the ecologists from the region. We are calling this the Santa Lucia Gradient study because so many interesting genetic and ecological changes occur in organisms whose populations span the gamut from the hot dry Arroyo Seco side of the Santa Lucias to the sodden, cold foggy Big Sur coast.
     Walt Koenig continued his work on several behavioral ecology and oak ecology projects described in the last issue. Some interesting news includes his discovery of cheap, small, data loggers that record air temperature every several hours for up to a year. These iButtons are about $10 each. Walt is figuring out how to program them and will deploy them on up to several hundred oak trees across the state on his next annual acorn survey in search of the precise temperature cues used by oaks to synchronize masting events. Walt also attended the Sudden Oak Symposium in Monterey in December and, along with Bill Monahan, gave a talk on the potential impacts of this disease on California’s oak woodland birds. Closer to home, Walt continues to work closely with interns Kirsten Hall and Patricia Hartman, who are in the Robertson House.
   Mark continued to work on a book on the Grasses of California. Mark, Paul Kephart and recently-hired Chris Meacham, are preparing a project budget and plan. The book will be mostly digital, and will require additional line drawings, a taxonomist to help develop a multiple-entry key that uses non-technical characters, and a Java-based application that will run the database of images, species accounts and text. We are in discussion with Lesley Randall for additional line drawings. Lesley illustrated many of the grasses in the Jepson Manual and in the excellent Flora of Yosemite, one the most lushly illustrated and wonderfully integrated paper texts on the flora of that stunning part of the state.
     Janis Dickinson, working with Katy Greenwald and Dia Shizuka, also at the Robertson House, continues to monitor the wintering populations of western bluebirds both here at Hastings and at Rana Creek Ranch.