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THE CALIFORNIA ACORN REPORT

Volume 7                   The Official Newsletter of the California Acorn Survey©        29 September 2003

Walt Koenig and Jean Knops, co-directors

Editor: Walt Koenig

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THE ANSWER IS: ACORNS

Welcome once again to The California Acorn Report. As usual, we provide you with the answers; unfortunately, the questions will have to remain secret due to current national security concerns. For further details, contact the Attorney General’s acorn-security office at any one of their many unlisted numbers or, thanks to modern electronics, just speak clearly and distinctly into the microphone cleverly printed into the paper used for this report. Let’s all say hello, shall we? Hi John!

This year saw many new and revolutionary changes for the California Acorn Survey© team. Perhaps you’re thinking that this means we performed the survey by driving counterclockwise around the state, but no, not that revolutionary. To start off with, the Minnesota Division of the California Acorn Survey© was not activated at the end of August, as is traditional. Instead, we tagged it to the end of a mid-August whirlwind tour of the Midwest that included the AOU (bird) meetings at the University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana (can’t they make up their minds where the damn thing is?), a visit to see my old high school friend Lynne at the Stillwater MN Public Library (where books come alive!), an evening with my brother Bill (yes, the famous actuary) in Milwaukee, a morning with my colleague Mary in Chicago, and (last but not least!), endless miles of corn and soybeans. It did not include dinner with my old grad school friend Bob Zink in Minneapolis, lunch at the Creamery in Isanti, dumping either of my kids with their Aunt Laurie, any minidonuts whatsoever, or even a morning at the Minnesota State Fair, all traditional activities that I deeply regret missing (except for lunch at the Creamery). My apologies to all (except the Creamery), especially to Bob, Laurie, the Minnesota Minidonut Corporation, the Midwestern Minidonut Advisory Council, the Minidonut Interstate Transportation Commission, and the Minnesotans for Eating More Minidonuts Committee.

Speaking of corn and soybeans, I couldn’t help but notice while driving through Illinois that “corn” and “soybeans” are excellent words for boggling. Without working at it too hard I came up with 65 different words that could be made from the letters “c,o,r,n,s,o,y,b,e,a,n,s,” starting (of course) with “acorn,” “bacon,” and “coon.” Even more challenging is to generate entire sentences made out of such words. For example, “Bare beans earn easy scorn says nosy acorn” and “Coarse seas score no cans near neon.” Pretty good, huh? So, for this year’s contest, let’s see who can make up the best short story (<500 words, please) made out of words boggled from “corn” and “soybeans.” Send your results to one of our two international offices or submit online at . As always, please do not forget the absolutely nominal processing fee, which, due to the poor response last year and the wavering economy, we have discounted  this year from the usual $100 to $99.95 (and yes, we are now set up to accept payment in Euros, should you prefer; thanks for asking!). The winner will receive one unreduced-rate lifetime subscription to The California Acorn Report. That’s right; you heard correctly: one unreduced-rate lifetime subscription! Are we generous or what?

While you’re pondering all this, it’s perhaps a good moment for a poem. I was reminded after my impromptu offering last year that I neglected to recognize what must rightly be considered the original acorn-counting song, made up by Janis for Dale and Phoebe back in 1994 when Jean and I first established sites for the California Acorn Survey©. Here it is in more than its original, home-spun glory:

Daddy’s counting acorns, one, two, three
Daddy’s counting acorns, without me
Daddy’s counting acorn, that’s a fact
Daddy’s down in Pozo, but he’ll be back
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
How many acorns? Eleven

Unsurprisingly, after being abandoned for eight days with a two-year-old and a five-year old, this mutated to:

Daddy’s counting acorns, one, two, three
Daddy’s counting acorns, without me
Daddy’s counting acorn, that’s a fact
Daddy’s is a bozo, but he’ll be back
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
How many acorns? Eleven

A FAIR; ANY FAIR

In a feeble attempt to make up for missing the Minnesota State Fair, we instead went to the Monterey County Fair after I returned from the great Midwest. The latter certainly has its highlights, but unfortunately, the main one, Smokin’ Joe’s Barbeque, was there sitting on the grounds but abandoned, having apparently been closed down the night before due to putative health code violations. This was truly unfortunate and, combined with the lack of any minidonuts (where is the California capitalistic spirit when you need it?), cast something of a pall on the entire event. If it hadn’t been for the funnel cakes, deep-fried Snickers bars, mariachi music blaring away from the bandstand, and an extraordinarily informative exhibit on the use of potassium rather than sodium salt in water softeners, I might have gone away with my annual quota of trashy fairs remaining dangerously unfulfilled.

Dale and the Phoebster at the Monterey County Fair. Farm animals were scarce, but Smokin’ Joe’s misfortune permitted a few to survive long enough to be petted when we came the evening of the last day.

This was year nine for the Minnesota Division of the California Acorn Survey, and, after threatening Jean with celtic music only twice, I got him to agree that we may as well make it an even 10 before we attempt to discern something useful out of it all. So! The goods news is, you can put acorn counting at Cedar Creek on your calendar for next year, and, more importantly, see you at the Minnesota State Fair in 2004!

Otherwise, we counted acorns at Cedar Creek as usual, but at this point I’m afraid I can’t remember very much about it. I think there were some out there, which is more than turned out to be the case back home. I also put out a few iButtons, which are small recorders about which I’ll say more later, in hopes of gaining insight regarding the (most likely nonexistent) environmental differences among the areas where we count. The idea was to put them on the north side of the trees, thereby standardizing placement and avoiding confounding effects from the sun. Unfortunately, with my body starved of minidonuts, I got disoriented and faced them in random directions, thereby ensuring that the data they collect over the next year will be completely useless. It’s a good thing I’m a highly trained professional and have extensive experience acquiring, analyzing, and writing up random data.

THE DETROIT BULL ARRIVES

Having counted in Minnesota relatively early, we had a full two-week break before Jean flew out to California for the Western Division of the California Acorn Survey©. Among other things, this unusually long break allowed us to fine-tune our acorn-counting training methods to adjust for the many subtle but important differences between the Midwest and California. This is but one of the many ways we work hard to earn your acorn counting business, unlike our esteemed competitors, for whom we have no good wishes. For further information on how we can serve all your acorn counting needs, contact either of our international offices outside of normal acorn-counting hours or see our recent subliminal advertisement airing now during the sitcom of your choice. Remember, you can hire us, or you can hire the illiterate offspring of pestilent competitors who are trying to move in on our turf. The choice is yours.

As it happens, you needn’t turn on the TV to experience our idea of advertising. Since we didn’t succeed in drumming up any support from either NSF or the nonexistent state budget this year, we have been forced, for the first time, to accept advertising here in the California Acorn Report. Fortunately, because of the upcoming gubernatorial recall election, there were many candidates begging for our bargain-basement advertising rates. As you might imagine, most of these candidates were loud heathen whose pathetic tripe we would not even consider repeating. Instead, we limited ourselves to one candidate whose philosophy is fully in line with that of the California Acorn Report and whose tasteful advertising will fully enhance the quality of your acorn report reading experience. (This paragraph brought to you by the Mr. Acorn for Governor Committee.)

Back to Jean, who did eventually show up, although not in the monumentally gas-guzzling Lincoln Towncar he got from Hotwire last time. Instead, it was a standard-size piece of Detroit work, a Ford Taurus sedan. Compared to last year, it was downright minuscule; heck, I couldn’t even play billiards in the back without getting in the way of Jean’s view through the back window. It barely succeeded in holding everything we needed to take along with us, much less the hundreds and hundreds of paper bags full of leaves and dirt we hauled back, many of which would spill out of the doors and trunk every time we stopped to get something from the back seat. But it was a rental, and it did allow us to leave the 1989 Camry and the 1986 Mazda 2000 at home, both of which are veterans of multiple acorn surveys but are of a vintage that makes the many hours we spend driving around the state seem significantly longer and more unpleasant than they really are. Furthermore, neither are as fashionable as the vehicles of our puss-infested Satan-worshiping competitors, and, as you know, here at the California Acorn Report, fashion is everything.

THE HOMELAND REVIEW

Once Jean finally arrived, we got right down to the business of counting acorns and getting ready for the big statewide push. First off, we drove up to Chew’s Ridge for the second year of our one and only tanoak site. This was uneventful, except for three things. First, we couldn’t find the site. Second, once we finally did find the site, we couldn’t find any of our trees, and third, once we finally found the trees, we couldn’t find any acorns. Just kidding. Actually, the trees were still there, but it did take us two trips up the mountain to find the site, which had thoughtlessly moved from 0.5 miles down the summit (according to our 2002 notes, at any rate) to only 0.2 miles down. And, unlike all the other oaks in the state, the trees were well stocked with acorns. This gave us a false sense of security with respect to the acorn crop elsewhere that was to be dashed, horribly and irrevocably, a short time later when we counted The Homeland….

Well, maybe it wasn’t THAT dramatic. But the acorn situation is indeed dire. How dire? So much so that the woodpeckers are looking scared, and those of you who bought acorn shares on margin had best start picking out a window with a nice view from which to jump. Indeed, the crop is so poor that it’s time for another poem.

Jean and I counted Haystack and School hills on Thursday and the Arnold on Friday. The latter was clearly a mistake, since getting to some of the dendrometers up there involves swimming in poison oak, and we traditionally save the pleasure of that particular activity for Bill, who isn’t allergic to the stuff. We certainly will next year.

Bill showed up Friday night and we spend the better part of Saturday counting the remainder of the Hastings. And a historic survey it undeniably was. As most of you will remember, the core of the survey consists of two highly trained Certified Professional Acorn Counters (CPACs) using their binoculars to count as many acorns as possible in each designated oak tree (DOT) for a period of precisely 0.25 minutes. With practice, this can be done in very close to 15 seconds apiece, meaning that each tree can be dispensed with in a couple of minutes, depending on how long it takes to decipher Ron’s ancient scribbling directing us to the next tree.

Over the years, things have become more complicated as we have added new features to the traditional survey. First off were the dendrometers, which are stainless steel straps that measure radial growth. Jean and I put them on all our DOTs back in 1994, and now, after 10 years, we’ve finally got enough data that we can use the results to address major philosophical questions, such as why there seems to be no such thing as a Spanish-language classical music station and whether Dick Cheney really has a neck. We can also use them to see whether there’s a tradeoff, or at least a correlation, between growth and reproduction in the trees. This is a highly sensitive project that has provoked great controversy ever since Jean measured growth using tree cores and failed to find any evidence for a correlation, prompting us to write a paper claiming the absence of a tradeoff that fortunately we never succeeded in getting published.

Contrary to our earlier findings, the dendrometers indicate a clear tendency for there to be relatively a lot of growth the year before a good acorn crop, and relatively little growth the year of a good acorn crop, at least in the species requiring one year to mature acorns (valley, blue, and coast live oaks). In other words, it’s looking like there’s a potential tradeoff between growth and reproduction after all, as predicted by the “making babies gets in the way of having a life” hypothesis which, now that I think of it, seems kind of obvious.

This is of course completely boring compared to what we all really want to know, which is: how much does the Plaque tree grow in a year? It’s tempting to make this another contest, but in fact I’m going to break tradition and tell you: between 1994 and 2003, the circumference of the Plaque tree increased by 139.51 mm, or 13.95 mm/year. The really neat thing is that we can use these data to estimate the age of some of these large trees. It turns out that growth of valley oaks is pretty much independent of age; that is, if you plot growth in circumference vs. size you get a straight line. This means that we can estimate age by dividing circumference by mean dendrometer growth. As for the Plaque tree, its circumference is 5.05 m. At an average of 13.95 mm/yr, this indicates that it’s 362 years old. Cool, huh? That means it was born around 1641, which appears to have been a pretty dull year in history, highlighted mainly by the adoption of the Body of Liberties by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the War of Wolfenbuettel between the Swedes and “the Imperials” (perhaps related to the Cardacians?) near the end of the Thirty-years War. The latter, in case you were wondering, no doubt made a lot of sense at the time but its historical context at this point is so convoluted that there seems little hope of ever determining its precise relevance to anything, much less the success of the acorn that produced the Plaque tree. In any case, we’re glad it made it, since otherwise we’d have to change the name on all those “Plaque” group notes we’ve taken over the years.

V for victory! A dendrometer on one of our valley oaks celebrates the Swedish upset in the War of Wolfenbuettel.

Measuring the dendrometers was only the first of the many additional activities we appended to this year’s Hastings acorn count. Second was taking leaf samples from all our valley and blue oaks to look at the presence, abundance, and spatial synchrony of gall wasps. This is now the 4^th year that we’ve done this for valley oaks, a project so successful, despite the fact that I’ve yet to do anything with the data, that this year we decided to collect leaves from blue oaks as well. Actually, I added blue oaks mainly to ensure that my acorn woodpecker assistants, who just showed up, will have something to do this winter after all our woodpeckers abandon their territories down here and go spend the winter up at Chew’s Ridge, where there’s some hope of finding a few acorns to eat.

Third was the placement of an iButton on each of our valley oaks. iButtons are small recorders about the size of a large watch battery preprogrammed to record the sound of any tree that falls in the forest as long as there’s no person around to hear it. Actually, they record temperature once every 4 hours for nearly a year, which is almost as good, if not quite as philosophically significant.

An iButton facing a carefully selected random direction on one of our trees at Cedar Creek. In the background, Jean can be seen selling off his extensive portfolio of acorn futures.

iButtons are cheap (<$10 a pop) and sold by Dallas Semiconductor, whose Credit and Collections Department I fought with for months before they finally condescended to sell me any. Someone over in the Berkeley Physics department failed to pay for one a while back, and until he did Dallas Semiconductor was apparently unwilling to offer credit to anyone else from the University of California. Particularly amusing was the FAX they sent to the UC Berkeley accounting office demanding three trade references, at least one bank reference, and “an audited annual report and detailed financial statement including gross revenues, net revenues, net profit, cash and cash equivalents, current assets, current liabilities, and inventory” before they would send us any of the things. I bet that one got a good laugh over in Sproul Hall.

Eventually, after threatening to send them back issues of The California Acorn Report, they relented, and finally, about a year after I’d originally ordered them, I was able to place one on every valley oak we survey at Hastings with the goal of determining whether there is a relationship between phenology of the trees and the microclimate they experience. Does that sound like fun or what? Fortunately, I think I finally figured out how to reliably determine which way is north and hopefully placed the iButtons all facing the same direction.

By the time we put all these activities together, each tree was its own three-ring circus and involved a bewildering array of activities including measuring the dendrometer, collecting leaves for galls, throwing the Mildew Hat™ at each other, replacing dendrometers that were too short, running out of paper bags and walking back to the labs to get more, trying to remember the words to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song, arguing about why the dendrometer reading was smaller than it was last year, finding the compass, figuring out which direction is north, attaching an iButton, walking to the next tree, and, last but not least, returning to survey the (nonexistent) acorns that in our confusion we’d forgotten to count. Even with three of us, this often required five or 10 minutes, depending on how many verses of the Beverly Hillbillies we tried to remember. As a result, the Hastings survey took rather longer than usual. In fact, I’m hoping Jean and Bill will return any day now from out along the road.

Actually, despite all these activities, we succeeded in completing the survey on Saturday. Admittedly, this was to some extent due to the fact that it didn’t really make any difference whether we counted trees or not: there just weren’t no acorns nohow. That’s something of an overstatement, but not by much. Depending on what one includes, it’s pretty much the worst year ever, which I graciously attribute entirely to the policies of the current administration. In sum, we counted 944 acorns on 240 trees at Hastings. This is not a record; in 1991 we counted only 548 and in 1983 we counted 593. However, most of these acorns were canyon live oaks up on the Arnold. If we exclude the Arnold, we counted a grand total of 89 acorns, less than half the 196 we counted in the same area back in 1983 and a far cry from the 5,335 we counted in 2002. Considering only valley, blue, and coast live oaks, we counted a total of 71 acorns, less than a third of the prior low of 253 in 1983. For comparison, we counted 9,368 valley, blue, and coast live oak acorns back in 2001 and the record, in 1985, was 11,474.

Talk about an economic downturn. That’s so bad that, as I suggested earlier, the woodpeckers are almost certainly out there looking wistfully at old acorn catalogues and rethinking their winter vacation plans. Back in 1983, when we had a crop not quite this bad, 85% of the territories were abandoned and 52% of the birds disappeared on the territories that were not abandoned. Once again, I have one word of advice: JUMP!

The only promising news is that back in 1983, which was also a good year for tanoaks up on Chews Ridge, a fair number of the birds disappearing over the winter returned the following spring. Presumably this could happen again. In any case, good luck guys; you’re going to need it.

FASHION TIPS: MOUSTACHES

As many of you know, one of the critical social functions of The California Acorn Report is to provide you with the critical fashion tips that help you survive in this fast-moving prête a porté world. And admit it; how often have you raced out the door only to realize, only too late, that you’ve forgotten your moustache? And even when you haven’t, it can take hours to decide which model provides just the right je ne sais pas for a particular occasion.

Fortunately, we’re here to help. Bill, back from a summer voyage on the QEII and several weeks on the continent, is pictured below showing off the “Fu Manchu,” while Jean models the blonde “Mr. Chips” universally favored by Assistant Professors dreaming of tenure and Mr. Acorn is elegant, if a bit over the top, with his “gay 90s” model. Personally, I found Janis’ choice (“la Française”), unfortunately not pictured below, disconcerting at first but truly bewitching once one got used to it, and it certainly got the kids’ attention.

Children can have an especially difficult time keeping up with current moustache fashions, especially when they’re like Dale and keep attaching it to their forehead. For this and other common teenage problems, see

A moustache makes the man, or acorn, depending. Bill, Jean and Mr. Acorn (complete with double chin) show off the latest models, available only by prescription (except in Canada).

CALIFORNIA UP FOR GRABS

With security concerns delaying the survey until Monday and an appearance in Berkeley scheduled for Tuesday at noon, our normally chaotic departure was uncharacteristically low-key. For once Jean actually had time to schedule delivery of The Wall Street Journal to us along the way while I was able to spend several days disinfecting the Mildew Hat™. We finally made it out at 10:15 am on Monday in time to have lunch with Bill in Portola Valley before spending a long afternoon at Jasper Ridge counting (nonexistent) acorns, placing iButtons on more valley oaks, collecting lots of leaves for galls, and GPSing trees with Japer Ridge’s fancy Trimble unit. We also finally went inside the new laboratory at Jasper Ridge, which oddly enough appears to lack a good disco but is otherwise quite impressive. Fortunately, it’s also fairly easy to break into, allowing us to return the GPS unit when we finally finished around 6:30 pm without having to return with it the next day.

The trip itself was exciting as always. Since there weren’t any acorns to count, we instead spent our time looking out for Hummers on the highway. The final count was four, pretty well spread out around the state in Los Altos, (7:29 am Monday), Oakhurst (7:07 pm Wednesday), Three Rivers (12:37 pm Thursday), and Corona (10:57 am Sunday). This seemed like a lot until I looked around when I got back and counted four of them just driving into Monterey and back to pick up Phoebe at Gymnastics. Clearly the mecca of conspicuous consumption or California decadence is right out our own back door.

Speaking of fatcats, it’s time to reveal what Jean and I do while we’re madly driving mindlessly around the state from site to site. Mainly, we listen to the radio, and if it’s between 9 am and noon, we usually listen to none other than Rush Limbaugh. But the truly awful admission is that Rush is often quite entertaining, at least in a always-mindlessly-support-our-President kind of way. Mainly, however, he prompts us to hurl insults at the radio, which keeps us awake and helps pass the time on those long drives through the San Joaquin Valley and across the LA basin. Although we still do it, listening to Rush was considerably more fun back in the 1990s when Clinton was President. Now the Republicans in office, El Rushbo has a tendency to induce severe nausea, often within minutes.

However, the real reason his show is so entertaining is because of the advertisements, which provide valuable insights into the problems and worries of Rush’s listeners, and by inference, of supporters of the current administration. In one short stretch, for example, there were ads for a $500,000 life insurance policy, Viagra, ceramic floor tiling laid in a Safari theme, an electronic system for remotely unlocking cars, and (my personal favorite) the Center for the Cure of Sweaty Palms. We concluded from this that Rush’s listeners are primarily old geysers with sweat dripping from their hands, unspeakably ugly living rooms, and trophy wives who frequently lock the keys inside their fancy SUVs while trying to insure their husbands for as much as possible before they croak. If that isn’t enough to make you pray for regime change, nothing will.

But the Rush Limbaugh Show is not all we listen to on our annual circumnavigation of the state. Not at all. We also spend an inordinate amount of time scanning the local religious stations in search of insight and inspiration. Interestingly, there appear to be an incredible number of them in the San Joaquin Valley—eight at least, catering to all your religious disorders—while we could only find one or two around Santa Barbara, even on Sunday morning. But what was truly disturbing was their distribution, which appears to be strongly biased toward the low end of the FM dial, often boxing in the usually solitary and conspicuously forlorn public radio station. It’s as if the Religious Right is slowly making its way in for the kill. I shudder to think that I might be listening to Bob Edwards one morning only to hear a knock in the background followed by the hideous screams of NPR broadcasters being dragged out the back door by members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association all wearing matching Rush Limbaugh Signature Apparel. On the other hand, I suppose it might not be much more depressing than listening to the regular news these days.

Perhaps it’s perhaps time to move on and discuss our annual culinary adventures. So, get out your knives and forks and Let’s Eat!

THE ANNUAL RESTAURANT REVIEW

Alpine Inn, 3915 Alpine Road, Portola Valley

The trip started out remarkably promising. First off, Jean and I met Bill for lunch at the Alpine Inn in Portola Valley, just south of Jasper Ridge. Located in an area that was still pretty rural only a few years ago, The Alpine Inn (formerly Rossotti’s) exudes every indication of having been built around 1880 by psychologically disturbed Italian immigrants deluded into thinking they had stumbled through a wormhole into the Black Forest. Although a few of the original immigrants still appear to be working there, most have been replaced by Latinos with a flair for grilling hamburgers and sausages. In short, the place is great.

Bill and Jean enjoying a postprandial moment in front of the Alpine Inn.

Particularly atmospheric is the beer gardens out back, where at noon there were but a few couples sitting around the picnic tables in their lederhosen and dirndls trying to protect French fries from marauding Steller’s jays. Jean and I got their Portuguese sausage, which came on a toasted bun with nice onions and fries and was marred only by the lack of decent mustard. Bill, meanwhile, had the grilled chicken sandwich, which wasn’t exactly nouvelle California cuisine but was still the perfect prelude to a fun-filled afternoon of meandering around Jasper Ridge counting (nonexistent) acorns. All in all, we were pleased to have been able to experience a place this anachronistic so close to some of the priciest real estate in the world. Be sure to have lunch there soon; surely it’s living on borrowed time and will be replaced by an Olive Garden in the near future. Rating: 2.5 acorns.

The Red Tavern, 1250 The Esplanade, Chico

Few readers are probably aware that The California Acorn Report is supported by a worldwide network of food professionals constantly working to provide us with tips about the trendiest places to eat in California. These include Dave Wake, recently retired former Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, who was kind enough to check out several potential eateries in Chico during the Evolution meetings last summer. The best of these, according to Dave, was The Red Tavern, one of several new restaurants doing its best to counter Chico’s reputation as the Velveeta capital of the world.

And for the most part it was pretty good. Jean got the summer prix fix dinner that consisted of an arugula and fig salad, grilled herb-crusted pork tenderloin, and a nice vanilla-grapefruit frozen dessert. I got the green salad and a nice chicken dish that came with vegetables and au gratin potatoes and tomatoes that must have been sliced with a microtome. These were all nice, except for a salad dressing that was too vinegary and the easy-listening jazz playing in the background that was conspicuously out of place. In fact, I probably would have come away lukewarm on the place had I not ordered the peach and blueberry crisp for desert, which came in an individual circular dish, was beautifully caramelized, and was possibly one of the best deserts I’ve ever eaten in my life. I wouldn’t claim the place is worth a special trip, but if you’re in Chico, you should definitely go here instead of the Velveeta Outlet Center and don’t forget to order desert. Rating: 3.5 acorns.

Rocky’s Downtown Bar and Grill, Frazier Park

Frazier Park is the town just west of Tejon Pass. It’s primarily a resort community for the nearby recreation areas and a bedroom community for survivalist lawyers who work 75 miles away in downtown Los Angeles but want to be able to head into the hills as soon as the apocalypse descends upon us. There isn’t much in Frazier Park per se, but the town has crept over to take advantage of the hoards passing into and out of southern California along I5. Among the restaurants next to the freeway is Rocky’s which, being one of the few non-chain establishments in sight, drew us in for dinner when we decided to spend the night nearby. This turned out to be a mistake. Despite the sign advertising “Great Food; Park and Eat”, it wasn’t even clear, once inside, that there was a restaurant there and, almost unbelievably, there was actually someone smoking at the bar. Gadzooks! I grabbed the fire extinguisher and started to head back toward the offender before Jean calmed me down and quietly led me back outside. But really; where do such people think they are? France? Haven’t they heard that those things cause cancer? We briefly considered the “Can buy, call Bob, 818-968-7749” sign outside but decided it would be socially more responsible to hope that the place gets less business. Rating: 0 acorns.

Los Pinos, Frazier Park

Fortunately, there turned out to be at least one other non-chain restaurant in the vicinity, and since we hadn’t had any Mexican food lately, we decided to try it. Things didn’t look good initially when we were shown into a back room where a couple of retired members of the Manson family were seated who the ownership apparently felt might otherwise disturb the main clientele. We briefly assessed the situation and moved out to the main room where the 1950s vinyl seats were held together with duct tape, the table was unbalanced to the point of almost falling over, and we had a better view of the decorations, including a nice Emiliano Zapata poster and lots of beer advertising signs. In short, all the hallmarks of a great Mexican restaurant.

For all this, the food was not what I’d call memorable. Best were Jean’s tacos, which were reasonably authentic, while my tostada and chile relleno were decent but ordinary. The rice was bizarre (is there really anyplace in Mexico where they throw a few green peas and corn kernels into the rice?) while I strongly suspect the refried beans of being canned (although this may be true of all Mexican restaurants). The salsa was chunky and passable.

There are three ways that Mexican restaurants try to stand out. The best is with good food. The second slightly less satisfying but still acceptable method is with great margaritas, while the third technique is with huge portions of mediocre food. Unfortunately, Los Pinos relies on this last approach to satisfying its customers, as their food was marginal and their (wine) margaritas lacked the zing of the real thing. All in all, about the best I can say is that the former Manson family members kept to themselves and no one was smoking. Rating: 1 acorn.

Los Olivos Café and Wine Merchant, Los Olivos.

One of the few silver linings of little-known Proposition 38, which passed in 1997 and mandated that the entire state of California be turned into vineyards, is the appearance of lots of gentrified eateries trying to capitalize on the allure of the local wines. Los Olivos Café in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara is one such establishment, splitting its space between a store hawking about a hundred different Santa Barbara wines and an upscale but relatively informal restaurant.

Eschewing the local wines, Jean ordered a beer while I got the Passionfruit ice tea. The latter was good but not really so special as to warrant the limitation, stated on the menu, of only providing one refill, a policy violating Koenig’s first law of a great restaurant (“ice tea shall be freshly brewed and provided in unlimited quantities”).

Jean had a New York steak with very good mashed potatoes and caramelized onions. I, on the other hand, ordered not the herbed salmon, not the pesto, not the wild mushroom pizzeta, but pot roast. Why pot roast? I figured that a mundane dish like that should either somehow be made to be excellent or shouldn’t have been on the menu in the first place. Either way, it would provide a foolproof way to find out how good the place really was.

The good news is that my dish came with nicely prepared veggies and an outstanding preparation of crispy new potatoes. The bread was good, and my Ceasar salad, garnished with pine nuts and shaved parmesan, was excellent. But the pot roast? It was, unfortunately, only pot roast. Why it was offered at all is beyond me. Perhaps it was there to lend a homey touch to the menu, but wasn’t actually meant to be ordered, explaining why, when I asked for it, the waitress first stifled a laugh and then started to make frantic gestures to someone lurking behind the bar. In any case, although the Los Olivos Café may not be ready for prime time, it has definite promise and, being only a few minutes from Sedgwick, is certainly worth knowing about. Rating: 2 acorns.

AND OTHERWISE…?

There were not many places where the acorn crop was what you could call passable. Overall, it’s the worst year ever, or did I say that already? In the whole state we counted only 6,572 acorns on 1,019 trees (mean = 6.5/tree), compared to the prior low of 6,853 acorns on 881 trees (7.8/tree) in 1995. The best year, by the way, was 2000, when we counted 33,140 acorns on 994 trees (33.3/tree). As presaged by Hastings, things are particularly bad for the one-year species. We counted only 972 (1.5/tree) valley, blue, and coast live oak acorns, compared  to 24,932 in 2000 (37.8/tree) and an average of 19.4/tree. Once again, I highly recommend staying away from open windows at your local Acorn Stock Exchange.

Except for the acorns, it was a fine count. We were once again generously hosted by my college friends Robert and Tania in Los Altos on the first night and otherwise stayed at a record four field stations including Hopland, Sierra Foothills, Sedgwick, and, thanks to Kathy Purcell, the San Joaquin Experimental Station. Facilities at the latter were truly memorable, consisting of an  old, slightly neglected adobe building with a lovely courtyard complete with a pond and grape arbor. It was charming and peaceful, exactly the kind of housing that all field stations around here would surely have if the Spanish had held onto California.

Although acorns were few and far between, there were a lot of tarantulas (six at the Santa Rosa Plateau alone), a bobcat at Liebre Mountain, a coyote in Yosemite, and (once again for you, Brad) a flock of 40+ Lewis’ woodpeckers at Sierra Foothills (not to mention two at Dye Creek). Hopefully the gossip at Sierra Foothills about closing the place was overly pessimistic, although if they do decide to close it, I hope they consider turning it into the first of a series of National Woodpecker and Acorn Preserves.

Without real acorns, the main controversy of this year’s trip was over what are fondly known as dipshits, which are either abnormally small acorns, immature acorns that haven’t grown to full size yet, or (most likely) acorns that grew a bit before they crapped out. The question is: do we count them? Take a look at the photo, which is of a few Engelmann oak “acorns” from Santa Rosa Plateau. I think we can all agree that the one on the upper left should not be counted, while the one in the middle probably should, but what about the other two? It’s dicey, I admit. I say count ‘em, or at least count the ones that look half-way decent. Jean, on the other hand, just isn’t a dipshit kind of guy, which leads to a lot of tension when we come to a tree that has no “real” acorns but thousands upon thousands of dipshits. Please let us know what you think. You can submit your comments online at and as usual, please do not forget the 100% nominal $99.95 processing fee.

Is it an acorn or not? A panoply of dipshits from Santa Rosa Plateau.

SPOTLIGHT ON: LIEBRE MOUNTAIN

There isn’t much space left, but I can’t think of anything better to do than to say a few words about Liebre Mountain, one of my favorite survey sites. The higher elevations of this intriguing area in Los Angeles County near Gorman contain some of the largest and most productive black oak stands in southern California; indeed, there are years when every tree is literally dripping with acorns. On its lower slopes are both valley and blue oaks, both of which come close to reaching their southern limit here. According to the book there are also canyon live and Oregon oaks, but we’ve never seen them. If you go, be sure to drive down Pine Canyon Road, which goes along the San Andreas Fault zone through a fantastic stand of valley oaks virtually in sight of Joshua trees, turning to meet the road to Lancaster at a classic middle-of-nowhere place called Three Points.

 

 

Looking out across Antelope Valley from Liebre Mountain.

Up at our black oak site at 5,200’ you get a fantastic view of the west end of Antelope Valley. Meanwhile, down lower at our blue oak and valley oaks site there’s evidence of an old structure of some sort, which, thanks to a monument that just appeared this year, we now know to be the remains of the Sandberg Inn, built in 1915 along the Old Ridge Route between Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley and in operation, in its declining years apparently as a good old-fashioned whorehouse, until it burned down in 1961. Too bad it’s not still around; it certainly would be an exciting alternative to the Motel 6 in nearby Frazier Park.

Our site on the lower slope of Liebre Mountain back when it was occupied by the Sandberg Inn and as it looks today. I particularly like that limo; I wonder if we could rent it for next year’s survey….

WRAP-UP AND FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE

That’s all for this year. The California Acorn Report is owned and operated by the California Acorn Survey Corporation. Contact us anytime (providing you include at least one totally nominal $99.95 processing fee) at:

Hastings Reservation, 38601 E. Carmel Valley Rd.

Carmel Valley, CA 93924 (831-659-5981)

or

School of Biol. Sciences, Univ. of Nebraska, 348 Manter Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0118 (402-472-6449)

Special note: if you see any acorns, please let me know; there are birds around here that are going to need them.