Diario de jcjavier

So, I went around campus looking for common species as listed on iNat and was able to find these pretty easily!

1. Daisy
2. Greater Periwinkle
3. Nasturtium
4. California Poppy
5. Red-flowering Currant (this one might be a little off, since the colors weren't as vibrant as the ones on the list)

UC Berkeley’s first bird list ?
Many places that we visit have bird lists or guides on what wildlife surround the area. Many university campuses have one, sadly, ours does not. It is important for our university to have a list just so that people who visit from different places get to see our kinds of birds. Our proposed project is to create a bird list for the UC Berkeley campus. The goal of our project is to bring awareness to students, visitors and faculty on campus about the nature that surrounds us during our years here. Our plan is to put together a bird list from using sightings of specific birds on inaturalist, going out and actually observing the birds, and obtaining information from the net and from professors on campus who might specialize in birds or ecology. We will look up North American bird field guides and add potential birds we might be able to see.

iNaturalist will stand as our platform and we hope that our fellow classmates will help contribute to our project. There are so many birds on campus that we encounter on a daily basis that we wish we could identify, and it would particularly interesting to find out more about them with such things like diet, migration patterns and origins. However, we will try to do a small-scale field study and focus primarily on this season's wave of birds rather than overviewing the vast history of birds in Berkeley.

Jorelle Javier
Silvia Lopez

1. Regular flowers plant: Osteopermum

2. Irregular flowers plant: Geranium
   3.Monocot:Calla Lily
   4.Dicot: Chinese peony

3. Gymnosperm: unidentified
4. Pea family: African Daisy
5. seedless terrestrial plant: Moss
6. Pinnate leaves plant: unidentified
7. Opposite leaves plant: unidentified
8. Sunflower family: Cootamunda Wattle

Everything is lively and colorful. Previously budding and dormant leaves on campus and flowering plants have blossomed beautifully. Most trees are no longer naked, as they are ornamented with various flowers. It's quite a pretty sight, especially during the warmer days. The campus is in bloom!
Much of my pictures are actually from the aboretum in UC Davis.

For this assignment, I took a hike up to Inspiration Point and found some interesting interactions going on. The fox squirrel sighting was of course found right on campus, near Mulford Hall.

What's going on:

1. Fungus on Fungus action: I saw two different fungi growing on the same branch. One of the was more fibrous-looking while the other looked budd-ish and leafy looking. Symbiosis seems to be happening at the expense of the latter, since the stringy fungus seems to have flourished.
2. Fungus on tree: Not sure what either are, but symbiosis appears to be at work again! Most likely parasitism.
3. Fox squirrel and tree: this little thing was popping its head into a fallen unidentified tree, perhaps looking for acorns.

Moist Evergreen:

This past weekend I went to the upper fire trail. I found that this region was more moist than the chaparral area, and therefore had a far more of a diversity in plant species. Trees were significantly taller and slightly thicker trunks. There was a greater range in the hues of green evident in the foliage throughout the area compared to the chaparral as well. The plants that I found exemplify the moisture availability that the nice provides. Leaves were broader, larger, and various in color, given the combination of sunlight and moisture.

Chaparral:
For this niche, I went up the Stonewall Trail. Elevation was various here, it was quite a steep hike most of the time. The first thing I noticed were the trees--they weren't the tallest, average at most, and very slim at the trunks. Overall, I noticed much of the shrubbery was mostly short in height and was situated very close to the ground. There weren't a lot of flowering plants, and if there were, they were very small flowers. Leaf structures from the plants I observed were also small and often waxy to preserve water. The soil isn't as rich or moist compared to the evergreen niche, which explains why leaves were not rich in color.

I wasn't able to go to last week's field trip, so I decided to explore around the greener areas of the campus to find five different things. I found that photographing animals is not as easy as it looks. At one point, this bird caught on to my antics and played cat-and-mouse with me as it jumped from tree to tree. Camera-shy, I suppose. I found this exercise to be quite enjoyable, minus the salamander experience. I'm not quite fond of slimy, worm-like organisms..

Mammal: Fox Squirrel

Fungus: Xanthoria parietina

Bird: Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Arachnid: unidentified species

Amphibian: unidentified species

I went to the Eucalyptus Grove area next to VLSB. There were large trees and vast patches of seemingly disturbed grasses and foliage. I wasn't quite fond of the greenery.

I encountered this photographed plant with small, white flowers that were budding but still had dormant buds and leaves all throughout. It didn't look like a garden plant because it was the only one I saw in the area, and it happened to be growing under a tree stump.