Spring Arrives at the Headwaters

The week opens on Saint Patrick's Day, which Humboldt Brews has marked with a progressive bluegrass party — a genre combination that, in Arcata, requires no further explanation. Temperatures climb past sixty-five degrees by midweek, reaching sixty-eight on Thursday in what amounts to a countywide warm spell by local reckoning. The fog has been given the week off.

The California condors continue their Bald Hills residency, twelve strong near Orick, while a Black-and-white Warbler refuses to leave the Arcata Marsh despite being, by continental standards, profoundly lost. Gray whale mothers and calves are heading north past Trinidad Head, holding close to shore — the annual procession that makes February's rain feel like a fair trade.

Saturday promises volunteer trail work at the Grove of Titans, western azalea restoration at Humboldt Lagoons, Dan Hoyle at the Playhouse, Too Short at the Mateel, and negative tides low enough to reveal things the ocean normally keeps private. The week, it is fair to say, has overcommitted.

Saturday at 8:30 AM. The weekly marsh walk has been elevated from routine to event by the continued presence of a Black-and-white Warbler at the Brackish Pond — an eastern species whose reasons for wintering on the far side of the continent remain its own. Binoculars recommended; explanations not guaranteed.

Forty years ago, the last twenty-two California condors were pulled from the wild in a gamble that required catching every remaining member of a species and trusting that captive breeding would work. It worked. Twelve Gymnogyps californianus were counted near Orick this week, with additional birds observed at Dolason Prairie and along Lyons Ranch Trail — the Bald Hills apparently meeting whatever requirements condors have for a permanent address.

Elsewhere, a Black-and-white Warbler holds its unlikely residency at the Arcata Marsh's Brackish Pond, twelve Pacific Golden-Plovers have assembled at Loleta Bottoms, and six wildflower species — trillium, fairy slipper orchid, California poppy among them — are blooming in the redwood understory without anyone's permission.

In March 1860, a late-winter storm flooded every river of consequence, destroyed what passed for trails, and sealed Humboldt County's settlements off from one another for weeks. The railroad would not arrive for another fifty-four years. The isolation was total, involuntary, and — if certain current residents of the Mattole Road are any indication — not entirely unwelcome in retrospect.

Saturday at 6 PM. Brett McFarland and the Freedom Riders play what has been described as outlaw country — a designation that in Humboldt County carries approximately the same weight as calling someone a morning person. Descriptive, but insufficient. The Eureka Theater is the proper stage for music that does not explain itself.

March on the North Coast settles its accounts quietly — the whales heading north, the wildflowers opening without ceremony, the tides revealing and concealing on a schedule that predates the county by several million years. The condors circle. The warbler stays. One could learn something from animals that do not require an itinerary.

Until next week,
Lady Humboldt