BIRDS
By Corey Raffel and Tracey Diaz
Illustrations by Obi Kaufmann
Summertime around June Lake offers the opportunity to observe a variety of birds, some migrating through on their way further south, others that are year-round residents.
Perhaps the most impressive are the raptors, whose fishing prowess makes every angler jealous. The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) who skims the water’s surface and effortlessly snags a fish in their talons does it all while barely getting wet. The “fish hawk” osprey (Pandion haliaetus) is just as impressive — it hovers then plunges into the water like a missile, resurfacing with its catch an impressive 90% of the time; these fish-eating birds are a marvel to watch.
Bald eagles and ospreys are both conservation success stories. Their populations fell dramatically in the 1960s due to egg-thinning caused by the insecticide DDT. After DDT was banned in the ’70s, populations rebounded and both species are reclaiming their original ranges.
Other birds making the region their home include the mountain chickadee (Poecile gambeli), brown creeper (Certhia americana), several types of nuthatches (Sittidae), and the western tanager (Piranga ludoviciana), which is the showiest of the bunch with the male displaying a vibrant yellow and black body with a red face.
However, arguably the most important bird in the area is the Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana). Easily identified, these corvids (members of the crow and raven family), are gray with black and white wings and tails. They specialize in eating pine seeds, especially those of white and whitebark pines, thereby providing an essential ecosystem service.
Because pine seeds are not available year-round, the Clark’s nutcracker spends the majority of its days collecting as many as 150 seeds at a time in the large, expandable pouch under their tongue and efficiently transporting them throughout the forest. The industrious bird stores an estimated 98,000 seeds in one year1, typically burying them underground in caches of up to 50 seeds.
The remarkable memory needed to remember the location of these seed caches has been extensively studied. The birds can remember the location of an individual cache with great accuracy, even nine months after burying the seeds and even when buried under as much as three feet of snow2.
If conditions are right, the 10% of seeds that are forgotten and the ones they or other critters don’t eat are left to germinate. In the Rocky Mountains, almost 100% of whitebark pine trees are thought to grow from seeds stored by these corvids. Thus, Clark’s nutcrackers are actually involved in the preservation and renewal of their own habitat. With the damage currently being done to pine tree populations by outbreaks of mountain pine beetles, the Clark’s nutcracker’s role in repopulating pine forests is essential.
GEOLOGY
By Jeff Ludlow
There’s a reason US 395 is a world-class drive, beckoning adventurers worldwide, paralleling California’s iconic Sierra Nevada and dividing the Great Basin desert from 14,000-foot peaks. Near June Lake, glaciation and volcanism are literally staring back at you outside the window – or in front of your next cast to a rising trout.
Driving south on Hwy 158 past June and Gull Lakes, one notices Reversed Creek flowing west, anomalous among creeks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. The glaciation of the June Lakes Loop area created this unique flow direction.
Pleistocene glaciers off the Tuolumne Icefield formed in the high Sierra and flowed east down the Rush Creek drainage over the Silver Lake fault escarpment, which bounds the western edge of the Lake. Encountering resistant granodiorite bedrock of Reversed Peak, the Rush Creek glacier bifurcated. The northern lobe, Grant glacier, flowed northeast following softer fractured rocks of a fault zone between Silver Lake and Grant Lake, eventually terminating in the Pleistocene-aged Lake Russel further north, which once covered the entire Mono Lake basin about 13,000 years ago3.
The southern lobe of Rush Creek glacier flowed east forming the Reversed Creek glacier. Encountering similar hard bedrock as Reversed Peak, the base of Reversed Creek glacier rose in elevation flowing “uphill” as the glacier was pushed up and over the bedrock, from the continuous ice flow off the higher Tuolumne Icefield, eventually terminating in Lake Russel. What resulted after the glacier retreated about 10,000 years ago were Gull Lake and June Lake, and land that sloped down towards the high Sierra resulting in the westward flow of Reversed Creek4. Further evidence of glaciation can be seen in the lateral and terminal moraines around June and Grant Lakes, known as the Tioga Till5, and numerous glacial erratics, boulders carried from the high Sierra and stranded in place once the ice melted, including one striking example near the June Lake Fire Station.
VOLCANISM IS DORMANT BUT NOT EXTINCT
Volcanic rocks of the June and Mammoth Lakes area are unique among the geologic formations of the Sierra Nevada. Numerous features have formed in the past 2 million years. Of note are the Long Valley Caldera and Mono-Inyo Craters Volcanic Chain. Mark Twain described a near-fatal junket by boat to a Mono Lake Island (crater) in his Western adventure book Roughing It, describing it as a lake with no outlet. Mono Lake has a history of controversy with lawsuits limiting the water exports by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which were effectively draining an alkaloid lake with only a couple of east slope Sierra streams to fill it. But back to geology.
The Long Valley Caldera, second in size to the more renowned Yellowstone system, formed multiple volcanic features in the June Lakes area. Among these include the Bishop Tuff, a dense welded volcanic ash flow, which forms the Aeolian Buttes east of Hwy 3956, a well-known rocking climbing area. The other is Obsidian Dome, southeast of June Lake, which erupted from rhyolite dikes along the northwestern flank of the Long Valley Caldera in 1350 C.E.7 The obsidian in this area is created from lava that cools rapidly, which prevents crystal growth and instead results in its amorphous glassy texture and was a valuable natural resource to the Paiute nation for tool making.
About Obi
Illustrator Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California’s ecology, biodiversity, and geography. His 2017 book The California Field Atlas, currently in its seventh printing, recontextualized popular ideas about California’s more-than-human world. His next books, The State of Water; Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource, and the California Lands Trilogy: The Forests of California, The Coasts of California, and The Deserts of California present a comprehensive survey of California’s physiography and its biogeography in terms of its evolutionary past and its unfolding future. The last in the series, The State of Fire; Why California Burns will be out in September 2024.
1 Hutchins, HE; Lanner, FM, 1982. “The central role of Clark’s nutcracker in the dispersal and establishment of whitebark pine”. Oecologia. 55 (2): 192–201.
2 Tomback, DF, 1978. “Foraging strategies of Clark’s Nutcracker”. Living Bird. 16: 123–161.
3 Konigsmark, Ted, 2003. Geologic Trips: Sierra Nevada, GeoPress ISBN 10: 0966131657
4 Konigsmark, Ted, 2003. Geologic Trips: Sierra Nevada, GeoPress ISBN 10: 0966131657
5 Bailey, Roy A., 1989. Geologic Map Of Long Valley Caldera, Mono-Inyo Crater Volcanic Chain, And Vicinity, Eastern California, U.S. Geological Survey.
6 Bailey, Roy A., 1989. Geologic Map Of Long Valley Caldera, Mono-Inyo Crater Volcanic Chain, And Vicinity, Eastern California, U.S. Geological Survey.
7 U.S. Geological Survey, 2023. Long Valley Caldera Field Guide – Obsidian Dome. November 11.
