“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.” – Donald Gershe, Butterflies Are Free
As a child of the 70s (I turned 18 in 1975) perhaps I can be forgiven for taking my blog title from the Goldie Hawn movie of 1972, based on a play by Donald Gershe. But hey, butterflies are free. In some ways they epitomize freedom, as they flit and flitter from flower to flower in a seemingly random fashion. No one, and I mean no one tells a butterfly what to do.
However, you won’t find me jealous for the life of a butterfly. Depending on the species, the adult butterfly lives anywhere from a week to no more than a year. Given that, I think I’m just fine with where I sit in the circle of life. But as part of that I can certainly admire the beauty and apparent freedom of the many butterflies that grace our trails. Chief among them, in my opinion, given their size and color, are the Swallowtails (Papilionidae). They come in a number of varieties, and I’ve captured photos of at least two different kinds in recent days.
The Western Tiger Swallowtail (pictured above) is eye-catching with it’s yellow-and-black patterning. But there is also the black-and-yellow patterning called (naturally enough) the Black Swallowtail. Any way you look at it, we have a plethora of butterflies in a variety of colors and sizes (as well as moths and other interesting insects such as dragonflies) on our Sonoma Valley trails. Keep a sharp eye out and you may see something you haven’t seen before.
Meanwhile, butterflies may be free, but in the end we are even more free. We can observe these amazing creatures year after year, generation after generation. Perhaps we can’t flit from one flower to another on a whim, but we are blessed in many other ways.
An Alligator Lizard.
Wild flowers are not the only things now gracing the hills above Sonoma that a network of trails traverse. Lizards of a number of different varieties are out in profusion as well. Many times on the trail I’ve thought I would surely step on one, but they zip down the trail or off into the underbrush with a speed that is astonishing given how low to the ground they are.
The wide variety of lizards always has me checking to see if I’ve seen that type before, and recently I’ve been rewarded with seeing some quite beautiful types. The California Alligator Lizard is certainly one of the largest you will see on the trail, and also one of the most colorful with it’s stripes of alternating colors.
But there are many other varieties as well. A very useful web site for identifying lizards is the CaliforniaHerps.com, which provides a visual index to try to spot the one you saw on the trail.
Since lizards are cold-blooded and must regulate their body temperature by careful but frequent sun exposure, you can sometimes see them sunning themselves on a rock (pictured at left) or on the trail. If you have a camera with a long enough optical zoom (say 20-30x), you can sometimes get in close with the camera without scaring the little guy off. This is important, as they are easily scared by us giant humans thundering down the trail.
Recently I saw a multi-colored lizard smack in the middle of the trail just below the Overlook Trail meadow (pictured at right). I’m not very good at identifying lizards, but I think this fellow is one of the types of Fence Lizard.
But whatever the types, there are clearly at least half-a-dozen or more different species of lizard that can be found on the Sonoma Overlook Trail and Montini Open Space Preserve, and that’s just fine by me. Most days you’ll find me hiking the trail with an eye scoping the ground, partly to avoid rattlesnakes, but also to avoid stepping on these little guys. Sure, they’re quick, but I still worry.
Now that it’s official, we can definitely say that spring has arrived. But you would have to have been living in a cave to think that spring in Sonoma only arrived a few days ago. Call it climate change or just yearly fluctuations, but we seem to be experiencing some early arrivals of bud break, wildflowers, and other indications that Winter is over.
The Blue Dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) have been going crazy, as have the glorious California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica, pictured), as well as a plethora of other beautiful blooms. There seem to be more with each passing day. The insects are also out in vast numbers, as this bumblebee illustrates. Note the large packets of pollen on either side. This bee has visited a number of flowers already to amass such wealth, which of course pollinates the flowers the bee visits any carries on the magic of spring.
To help identify what you see along the trails, don’t miss our Flora page on this site. Although there are not a lot of flowers identified there yet, we will be working to include as many of the flowers and other plants that you see on your hikes as we can. Also, don’t miss our Gallery of Trail Flowers. If you have pictures of your own you wish to add, just let us know!
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley has incredible historic collections, which began when the university acquired Hubert Howe Bancroft’s personal library in 1905. By that time Bancroft had amassed quite a personal collection, including personal documents from General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, whose Sonoma home sits right next to the Montini Open Space Preserve.
So I can’t say I was all that surprised when I came across this photograph that appears to be a view of the town of Sonoma in 1887, taken from the hills above which is now the Montini Open Space. Carleton E. Watkins had been hired to take photographs for the Sonoma Valley Improvement Company as a promotional tool.
I cleaned it up a bit, including taking away the brownish cast that comes from film aging. However, feel free to look at the original digital version at UC’s digital portal, Calisphere.org.
Needless to say, Sonoma has changed quite a bit in the last 128 years. I suppose you could say that the Sonoma Valley Improvement Company was perhaps more successful than they could even imagine being at the time.
Sonoma Overlook Trail • Montini Open Space Preserve 