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Leo Carrillo

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What a joy it was, to have a full weekend of camping and nature journaling with 22 other curious nature lovers at Leo Carrillo State Park.

I got to wondering — who was Leo Carrillo (1915–1957)? Turns out he was an American actor, vaudevillian, political cartoonist, philanthropist, and conservationist. He gained lasting fame when he played the role of Pancho on early television’s “The Cisco Kid.”

Carrillo served on the California Beach and Parks commission for 18 years and played a key role in the state’s acquisition of Hearst Castle at San Simeon, Los Angeles Arboretum, and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. He was also an ardent historic preservationist and helped to save a number of historic buildings in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

His legacy is not entirely golden, however. During World War II, Carrillo advocated for the removal of all Japanese Americans from the west coast. In a 1944 telegram to Congressman Leland Ford that received extensive coverage, Carrillo wrote: “…it seems that every [Japanese] farmhouse is located on some strategic elevated point. Let‘s get them off the coast and into the interior.”

As for pronunciation of his last name, we now say “Car-reeyo“ with the “y“ for double “l“ as in Mexican Spanish. However, his autobiography* phonetically spelled what his family considered the correct Castilian pronunciation: “Cay-reel-yo” with a liquid Castilian double “l”. *Carrillo, Leo (1961). The California I Love.

Grindelia camporum

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Time for a new sketchbook. This one has a white canvas cover, which will quickly get grubby, so I decided to paint it. Watercolours definitely run amok on canvas!

Great Valley gumweed is native to California and Baja California, where it can be found in a number of habitats including chaparral and woodlands. The flower heads fill with a sticky white exudate that was reportedly used by the Chumash to treat poison-oak rash, skin diseases and pulmonary troubles.

Salvia

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Leaf comparison within a genus. Salvia (not to be confused with saliva) is the largest genus of plants in the family Lamiaceae, with nearly 1000 species of shrubs, herbaceous perennials, and annuals. Here are the plants from our garden that are known as sage, but other, less obvious herbs are also Salvias, e.g. rosemary and chia.

Dermacentor variabilis

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Ticks are parasitic arachnids of the order Ixodida. They live by feeding on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians. They’ve been around for a long time; the oldest known tick fossils are from the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years old.

I’d never heard of the American dog tick (or wood tick) till I brought one home on my neck last weekend. They mostly live east of the Rocky Mountains. Dermacentor variabilis is a three-host tick—the larva, nymph and adult all need to ingest blood.

Some ticks attach to their host rapidly, while others wander around searching for thinner skin, such as that in the ears of mammals. Mine was obviously still on the hunt for a good feeding site. Reading up on tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, I’m glad I removed it before it latched on!

Collinsia heterophylla

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Seeing the pretty Chinese Houses on a recent hike, I got to wondering how they came by their common name. Apparently someone (Collins?) thought that the towers of inflorescences of decreasing diameter gave the plants a certain resemblance to a pagoda. Not that a pagoda is a house, but back then, I guess close enough was good enough.

Cirsium occidentale

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This week in the PerpJo … We have a local, native thistle, the cobwebby thistle Cirsium occidentale. The plant is widespread and fairly common across most of California; unlike many introduced thistles, this native species is not a troublesome weed.

What a handsome plant! The leaves are a soft grey-green. The flower head is somewhat spherical, covered in large phyllaries with very long, spreading spines which are heavily laced in fibers resembling cobwebs. The ones were saw today had gathered dew drops on the thin threads — so pretty! The crown on top was a dense head of crimson florets.

Haemorhous mexicanus

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The most common bird around here is the House Finch, a gregarious participant in the life of the yard and bird bath, with a long twittering song. The red plumage of a male House Finch comes from carotenoids in the food it eats during molt (birds can’t make bright red or yellow colours directly). Females prefer to mate with the reddest male they can find.

House Finches are native to the Western United States. They were introduced to Oahu from San Francisco sometime before 1870, and had become abundant on all the major Hawaiian Islands by 1901. In 1940, they were turned loose on Long Island, New York, and spread across almost all of the eastern United States and southern Canada within the next 50 years. They can be found in a wide variety of habitats including dry desert, coniferous forests, suburbs, and cities.

Unlike most other birds, House Finches exclusively feed their nestlings plant-based foods, including seeds. Most other vegetarian adult birds feed their babies protein-rich insects. At our place, the favourite lunch seems to be rosemary flowers.