Natural History Wanderings

2. The redbuds are coming along, not quite at peak yet but getting pretty close. I’m not sure about the poppies. They were coming on strong in late February, before the storms of the last two weekends. I suspect that some of the early blooming poppies will have packed it in for the year, but later bloomers may get a boost from the rains. On Saturday I could hardly see any poppies as I drove through; no doubt they were all closed up. I drove through the canyon in the early afternoon today, and they were a bit more open, so I could see that there were still poppies in most of the places that had them two weeks ago, but it was still hard to tell how abundant they are. I’ll go back in a couple of days and check.

I was actually surprised that there were so many poppies in the Merced Canyon in late February because we’ve had above-average rain. I know that sounds strange, but unlike most other areas, the poppies in the Merced Canyon usually have their biggest blooms in dry years. They are annuals, not perennials like the southern-California poppies, and during wet winters the grasses usually grow thickly and crowd them out. The most extensive bloom I’ve ever seen there was in 2009, after below-average winter precipitation. And 2014 was another great year, after one of the driest winters we’ve had.