gone too long

It's been a little busy; I'll be able to tell you more soon, for now it's enough to mention that for the past two years I've been helping to build the latest restoration site, plus a few other things. That was essentially completed in December, and since then has been mostly devoted to catching up on all the little things that had to be postponed. I've done two presentations on restoration in the past two weeks, one in Pasadena and one in Blue Lake, CA, so a lot of the thoughts are already pulled together.

I'll perhaps back up and talk about the rest of those earlier projects first, but first a bit on today. Despite way too much recent travel I needed to drive up to Brookings, Oregon today and arrived a little early. Great excuse to detour and take a look at habitat (and inhabitants), in this case a small tributary stream just barely inside Siskiyou National Forest. The real reason, besides just wanting to get outside, was to find Dunn's salamander, Plethodon dunni, which reaches the southern limit of it's range at the Smith River just inside California. This is where experience with habitat pays off, because it took less than five minutes to find one, once out of the car. Maybe the third or fourth rock turned in the stream splash zone. In spite of the weather... steady rain... it was a fun few minutes, much too brief, scrambling up that steep stream channel.

More soon.