Follow-Up on Tin Mining in Orange County

Chris Jepsen over at O.C. History Roundup (a great blog, by the way--highly recommend you subscribe to it!) as of April 22, 2009 has a very informative post on this very topic, replete with fascinating photographs. Read it here: http://ochistorical.blogspot.com/2009/04/santa-ana-tin-mining-co.html

Spring Wildflower Season Begins...

As a Midwesterner (but also someone still relatively new to admiring plants), last year I only began to notice spring wildflowers by around April or May.

That's when you'd expect wildflowers to begin appearing in Illinois, after all. And while it's true that spring wildflower season in southern California does not reach its height until approximately the same time, there are signs of spring as soon as the first rains arrive. This season, that meant as early as November.

For me it was an odd sight. Grasses began to green. The humidity was higher than usual: on Thanksgiving Day, we actually turned on our air conditioning. By Christmastime, leaving our apartment complex at 5am for the flight to Chicago, my wife and I heard the chorus of treefrogs from a pond in the distance.

By January, in the hills I saw the youngest sprouts of wild cucumber (more interestingly known as manroot), and in a few cases, even some small fruits already developing. I witnessed tiny ferns growing in Baker Canyon on the Irvine Ranch, and giant ferns profusely scattered along the oak- and sycamore-shaded slopes of Trabuco Creek.

Today, in February, I saw Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry (Ribes speciosum, below) well in bloom. Did they begin blooming as early as January? You'll have to ask either a more observant flower-enthusiast than I, or a hummingbird. For the hummingbirds, this plant is the seasonal equivalent of an early breakfast.



While the flowers strongly resemble those of fuchsia, careful examination allows you to see it's actually in the currant family--as in the berry, like blackcurrant. (Examination need not actually be too close, as the many spines on its stem will attest just fine to its non-fuchsia status.)

California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum), whose tender but pointed, linear leaves stay green even throughout the dry season, has also begun to flower. During the dry season buckwheat flowers are still present as a dried, remnant cluster of dark red (seen in background, below).


They're quite pretty even then, but it takes spring to remind you of just how pretty buckwheat is when in bloom. Hopefully the bees are noticing as well, and making that delicious buckwheat honey of which I'm craving as I write this.


Buckwheat flowers themselves are nearly as striking as the pattern in which they grow off the stalk. I lack the botanical terminology to name this growth pattern, but the picture linked to here is worth those words.

And lastly, in the understory of a grove of live oak trees, I encountered a flower that was new to me: "Milkmaids", or California cardamine (Cardamine californica, below). The criss-cross, or "X" shape of the four petals, should have been my immediate tip off that this flower is a type of Mustard, that enormous (~3,700 species) order of flowering plants. More specifically, the Cardamines are the genus otherwise known as Bittercress, whose taproot and prolificness make them an annoyance of commercial nursery growers. These are among our very earliest of bloomers, arriving as early as December if enough rain has been present (Introduction to the Plant Life of Southern California).

Tin Mining in Orange County?

Consider this the first of multiple future posts about mining in Orange County (a place which in the last 130 years has been a site of mining for gold, silver, lead, zinc, and tin, among other interesting materials).

Since I first learned about tin ore earlier this year, I've been fascinated by it. Called cassiterite, it has very unique-looking black crystals. DK has an incredible image, visible here.

Smelted and refined as pure tin (see image), tin is a wimpy metal that saw its most recent heyday in the last century when used in cans. (Times eventually gave way to aluminum and stainless steel.) In the 21st century, it seems that tin has been reduced to little more than a lead-free alternative for electrical solder and fishing weights.

But before fishing weights and tin cans, tin was once a mighty metal. The more potent use of tin, of course, is as an additive to copper in creating the alloy bronze. Despite the relative weakness of tin and copper by themselves, the alloy is surprisingly strong. The term "Bronze Age" underscores the fact that it was the unique hardness of bronze which saw metal itself graduate from use as mere decorative curiosity (e.g. gold & silver jewelry) to primary material for tools and weaponry. So in no small way, tin lifted mankind out of the Stone Age and in so doing, brought him that much closer to the Iron & Steel Age (which continues at present).

Here's a link to a tantalizing blurb about tin mining in Orange County.

I've heard it said that no tin was ever found in Orange County, but the caption here suggests that one "A. Gasparina" discovered some tin ore in 1877.

The Geologic Map of Orange County (Morton & Miller, 1981) identifies both the Trabuco Tin Mine, and another one called the Temescal Placer Mine.

So perhaps the verdict is still out... was some tin in fact successfully mined in Orange County?

I've sent this query to several local Orange County history and geology buffs, who have already responded in kind with what promises to be some useful information. Once I learn more, I will amend an update to this post.

UPDATE: Read Chris Jepsen's post of April 22, 2009, "The Santa Ana Tin Mining Co.", over at OC History Roundup.

My First Wild Tarantula Encounter

Ooh, scary, coming toward me. (Just kidding. I was going toward it. He was actually trying to get away from me!)

Male Desert Tarantula trying to get away from me.


Trip co-leader Mike demonstrates that the desert tarantula is surprisingly docile.



Some interesting facts I found:

Factoid #1: The desert tarantula seems to be North America's only tarantula genus (Aphonopelma). Several species are readily found in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California.

Factoid #2: At dawn and dusk, the males go out in search of females. Once they mate (within their first three years of life), the males will die. Females, on the other hand, live for up to 20 years. NOT FAIR!

Factoid #3: During their final molt (shedding of their skin), males develop extremely long "pedipalps" (the spider equivalent of antennae). Then they go out in search of the ladies.

Orange Spring Amanita & Mushroom Season

Moisture in Southern California, is like Santa Claus--it comes just once a year--so I feel compelled to post about mushrooms once again (and possibly for the last time this year), before they become unfashionable.

(1) The earliest mushroom I found this season is pictured below, next to a standard-sized plastic spoon (used as a makeshift trowel). It popped up alongside several others of the same kind in January, in a patch of landscaped wood-shavings near an intersection that I drive by on my way to work every day. My hectic schedule, combined with the awkward location of the mushrooms, prevented me from getting to it before it had dried out, and thus made it virtually impossible for me to identify. As I wrote in my last post, mushroom identification can be hard enough as it is, even when spore prints are made.


(Here's a top view of the same mushroom pictured above):


Based on similarities in structure and habitat, I suspect that several other mushrooms I've seen during March and April were the same species. Here they are, in fresher form than the above:


Curiously, notice that the one in the background has been chomped on a bit. (If you read my last post, then you'll know why the culprit could not have been me.)

Since these mushrooms were fresh, I was able to make a spore print from them, which turned out to be the color of cocoa:


(2) This next mushroom is the first one I encountered that I feel somewhat confident in having identified. If I'm right, this is an Orange Spring Amanita, Amanita velosa. These mushrooms especially prefer the leaf litter found under live oak trees, which is exactly where I found them (Wilderness Glen Park, Mission Viejo):


Notice the elongated acorn of the live oak tree which was near this mushroom. Such strangely-shaped acorns are exotic to my Midwestern eyes! Also surrounding the mushroom are the dried, dead leaves of years past. Live oaks, although evergreen, nevertheless do drop old leaves--I imagine much as an evergreen pine still drops its needles.

The photo below clearly shows three features possessed by Orange Spring Amanitas: 1. the white spot on the cap (here somewhat soiled), 2. the ridges along the edge of the cap, and 3. a cup-shaped bulb around the base:


As willing as I am to shift around the subjects of a scene in the interest of making a photograph more glamorous (I confess that above I moved the acorn a few inches closer to the mushroom!), I swear the scene in this next photo was as is. It's a darkling beetle on an Orange Spring Amanita (Caspers Regional Park):


What a fun shot. Darkling beetles like to eat decaying vegetation. Perhaps he's attracted to the smell of the mushroom??

(3) Two mushrooms popped up from the soil around my potted lime tree here in Irvine in early April. No positive ID, but they left dark brown spores. (See below sketch and spore print.) I left one of the mushrooms to drop its spores in the soil, in the hopes that it will fruit again.


(4) Last week (mid-April) I encountered several small, whitish puffballs in the hills above Three Arch Bay (in Laguna Beach). They were by that point extremely dried up and had already released their spores, so identification would have been very hard. And alas, I did not have my camera with me!

(5) And, of course, there were the false morels (or maybe black morels), as featured in my last post.

I'll be very curious to see what, if any, other mushrooms I encounter in the weeks ahead, and when will mark the end of the season! The weather's been awfully dry of late...

Black Morels (probably)

It's time to play everyone's favorite game: "Turds? or Mushrooms?"

If you answered Turds!, that would be incorrect. These are mushrooms. "Mushrooms?! In southern California?!"... "But," you object, "I thought southern California was part of the Desert Southwest!"

Well, it is. But first of all, I don't even know if deserts are actually barren of mushrooms (let's check... Here: this guy from Tucson says there are a few).

And secondly, Orange County is on the coastal slope of southern California. We've even got the Santa Ana Mountains (Peninsular Range) to our east that helps keep in the moisture and humidity. I'm not saying it's a rainforest here--recall the wildfires?--but Orange County averages 13 inches per year [1]. That's 3 inches too high to be considered "desert". In fact, as fantastically varied as Orange County's habitats are--coastal sage scrub, riparian woodland, chaparral, montane coniferous woodland, tidepools, estuaries, urban, suburban, grassland savannah, etc.--it is one of our great local-geographical ironies that desert is the one habitat Orange County does not have. (For that, you have to step across the Orange/Riverside County line.).

So it's actually not out of the ordinary to find mushrooms growing in southern California, assuming you're looking during the moistest season of the year, which is now.

I have a special place in my heart for mushrooms. It's said that in ancient and medieval times, mushrooms were widely regarded as magical, the province of fairies and gnomes. I'm sympathetic to that. There is something almost magical about them. I'm not the first to be intrigued by their short-lived nature, the fact that they pop up literally overnight and are gone again in days without a visible trace. They are sometimes quite colorful, and sometimes odorous. Some of the very ones you encounter would spell instant death if eaten, while others are delicious, and yes, still others cause severe hallucinations. Paradoxically, evolutionary biologists (and mycologists--people who study fungi) tell us that mushrooms are probably more closely related to animals than to plants. And I feel like there are other reasons I'm really intrigued by mushrooms, but I'm finished soul-searching for now.


Mushrooms are extremely difficult to identify to species--more so than plants and animals. Not only do you have to learn the basics of mushroom anatomy (which consists of noting the gill attachment, cup shape, veil type, color, cap shape, etc.), but to be certain, you nearly always have to make a spore print. It's totally my kind of geeky fun, but even then, my attempts at identification usually fail, because I never have the passion to follow through with use of my microscope and identify the spore shape. (You just wait.) I have a sister, who's both a chef and someone interested in nature, and every few months we get to talking about it and she mentions that she's thinking of going mushroom-hunting. And given the number of innocuous-looking but deadly, or just plain poisonous-enough-to-make-you-really-sick mushrooms I always have to caution her against it.


All mushrooms are exciting to me, but morels especially so. For starters, they don't look like your typical, Beatrix Potter-style 'shroom. The inner Butthead in me wants to laugh at them. "Huh huh huh huh. Look Beavis, morels look like turds."

More seriously, morels are a delicacy, and are therefore one of the most sought after family of mushrooms in the world, after truffels. They can fetch as much as $30 per pound [2]. I've yet to eat one, but my adorable, rural-Missourian wife attests to their deliciousness, she says especially when they're battered in egg and breadcrumb. (But we ask, suspiciously, what isn't delicious when battered in egg and breadcrumb?).

Following my field guide to mushrooms, the club-shaped mushroom here is most likely a variety of Black Morel, which is edible... but I wouldn't eat it. There's too strong a possibility that this is a dark variant of a different species known commonly as the False Morel. And on that, I shall quote for you the relevant passage, from The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms: "Scientists have discovered that the Conifer False Morel develops a compound similar to the one used in the manufacture of rocket fuel. It causes acute illness and has been fatal in a few instances; it also produces tumors in laboratory animals."

You get the point.

California Poppy

Common name: California poppy
Scientific name: Eschscholzia californica
Range: southern Washington to northern Baja California, east to Nevada and Sonoran desert southwest
More information: The California poppy is a stunningly colorful and elegantly simple flower to behold. Here are five interesting facts about Eschscholzia californica (source: Wikipedia):

1. It is the state flower of California.

If you enter the state by road, you'll be keen to this immediately (it's on the welcome signs). It also graces the road signs for scenic routes, and lots of "Greetings from California!" postcards. Apparently, it was adopted as state flower around the turn of the last century--by a landslide vote over the Mariposa lily and the Matilija poppy.

2. It was named for Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, one of many 19th century naturalists who helped to explore and catalogue many taxonomically unchartered islands and territories of the "Far Side of the World"--particularly much Californian flora and fauna. He was also, in my opinion, a handsome fellow.
Eschscholtz, a Baltic-German, was professor of anatomy and director of zoological cabinet at the University of Tartu (which is located in present-day Estonia, then Imperial Russia). From 1815-1818 he was ship's physician and naturalist on the Russian circumnavigational expeditionary ship Rurik, a voyage which enabled him to collect along the rim of the Bering Sea, the Pacific Islands, California, and South America. (Says Wikipedia, "The other naturalist was the botanist Adelbert von Chamisso who took over Eschscholtz’ specimens excepting insects on completion of the voyage. The two were close friends and Chamisso named the California poppy Eschscholtzia californica in his honor.") On a later voyage, Eschscholtz returned to California where he collected over 100 unique species of beetles near Fort Ross, the southernmost Russian fort. (You know that the Creator loves beetles, right?)

3. In places where it has been introduced, it seems to be even more successful than in its native range.

According to Wikipedia: "Because of its beauty and ease of growing, the California poppy was introduced into several regions with similar Mediterranean climates. It is commercially sold and widely naturalized in Australia, and was introduced to South Africa, Chile, and Argentina....

"Introduced populations have been noted to be larger and more reproductively successful than native ones (Elton, 1958), and there has been much speculation as to why. Increase in resource availability, decreased competition, and release from enemy pressure have all been proposed as explanations.

"One hypothesis is that the resources devoted in the native range to a defense strategy, can in the absence of enemies be devoted to increased growth and reproduction (the EICA hypothesis, Blossey & Nötzold, 1995). However, this is not the case with introduced populations of E. californica in Chile: the Chilean populations were actually more resistant to Californian caterpillars than the native populations (Leger and Forister, 2005)."

4. It is reported that at the peak of blooming season, orange petals seem to cover all 1,745 acres of the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.

Antelope Valley is located in northern Los Angeles County. (This is definitely going on my list of places to visit!)

5. As with other members of the Poppy family, it contains narcotic alkaloids, which have sedative and analgesic properties.

According to reports, however, these properties are relatively mild in the California poppy. Hmm... does that mean Elaine should have eaten California poppy seed muffins, instead of Opium ones?