Small mammals conjure a wide range of emotions, from disgust at the sight of a rat in the kitchen to affection for a chipmunk’s fuzzy face. The diversity of these animals is just as varied as the feelings they inspire — in Santa Cruz County alone, surprisingly many different species of mice, rats, moles, and gophers tunnel under our feet and climb branches over our heads. We may rarely see them out in nature, but they encompass a diversity that’s sometimes overlooked.

This month, we’ll introduce you to a few members of these small but impactful creatures, along with some local research efforts to better understand them. Our collections hold a number of specimens ranging from the petite harvest mouse to shrew moles. While some of these are taxidermy mounts designed for diorama display, many are study skins. 

Study skins are effectively stuffed pelts that allow for compact and safe storage for future research. Researchers can pull chemical information from the fur to glean details about an animal’s diet or compare coloring across specimens to find evolutionary forces at work.

First, let’s explore the California mouse, or Peromyscus californicus. Because they’re nocturnal, small and fast, you might at first think this species is the same as the house mouse, or Mus musculus. In fact, the California mouse is larger, distinctly bi-colored with a white belly and tends to live in the burrows of larger animals across California chaparral and woodland, rather than in close association with humans.

Discovering the subtle differences that enable similar looking species to thrive in the same environment is part of what captivates rodent researcher Chris Law, who collaborated with us for this post. Law will start a postdoc at the American Museum of Natural History this fall and recently earned his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCSC. While his research primarily focuses on sea otters, Law worked as a graduate mentor with UCSC’s Small Mammal Undergraduate Research in the Forest project, or SMURF, whose aim it is to monitor small mammal populations in Santa Cruz County while providing opportunities for undergraduate students to do hands-on field work.

As part of his research, Law investigated the dietary habits of mice by studying their bite force. Coaxing mice to bite onto measuring devices can be tricky, it turns out, so Law also studied skull morphology to round out his research. The differences he saw helped explain the preference these species seem to have, Peromyscus californicus for arthropods like insects and spiders and Peromyscus truei for acorns, which enables their success living side-by-side in the same ecosystem.

One reason why it’s important to learn more about small mammals, despite their seemingly inconsequential size, is because shifts in their population can warn us of problems elsewhere. Because they are lower on the food chain than many other animals in a given ecosystem, changes in their population reverberate through the population levels of the animals that eat them and the animals that eat those animals.

Against this backdrop, finding a species can be just as important as not finding them. For example, in a 2017 project, undergraduate SMURF researcher Deanna Rhoades tested several sites in Felton where kangaroo rats once roamed. They found none, which, along with other records of a population contraction, means the rats are likely extinct in parts of their previous range. 

Dusky-footed woodrats (Neotoma fuscipes), on the other hand, are common throughout Santa Cruz. These rats, distinguishable from non-native black rats in part by their furry tails, are sophisticated architects and builders. Their homes, which can have a variety of different chambers and persist for 20 to 30 years, increase an ecosystem’s diversity by providing additional shelter for a variety of creatures like salamanders, slugs, snails and lizards. 

Law notes that one of the coolest things about working in museum collections is contributing to the team of people who forge a scientific record of life. Study skins, like the mole (Scapanus latimanus) specimen pictured above, hold scientific value in that they strengthen that record, which scientists need in order to detect changes over time in the field. That particular specimen was captured on Santa Cruz’s West Side in 1901, in Lighthouse Field when it used to be known as Phelan Park. As such, it can be used as a point of comparison for more than a century of mole populations on the California Central Coast. 

Happily, museums are more than just collections. They are also public exhibits! Take advantage of your chance this month to see these small but significant creatures — up-close, above ground and by the light of day — at our Collections Close-Up pop up exhibit, right by the Museum’s front desk.

Seabright State Beach has been a popular spot for more than 100 years, providing cool coastal relief from the valley’s hot summers and fun for visitors and residents alike. It’s also a picturesque meeting of the forces of nature and civilization, where the two vie for the shaping of place. For many of those years, this sandy cove at the end of Seabright Avenue was known as Castle Beach. 

The name was inspired by the Scholl Mar Castle — a structure that once stood across from the Museum at the beach’s entrance — and it is the unifying element of the Bob Watson Scholl Mar Castle Collection, which we’ll explore today. This collection is a recent gift from a family member of the castle builders, and consists of historical photographs and ephemera. These artifacts expand our understanding of the Seabright community in which we are deeply rooted, while allowing us to observe and explore changes in the natural world over time. 

Though it was a popular spot, Seabright’s beach often narrowed for much of the winter. What shore remained was famously packed with driftwood. In Reminiscences of Seabright community bastion Elizabeth Forbes’ turn of the 19th century memoir, the author recalls, “The coming in of the driftwood on the Seabright beach has always been one of the great excitements of the winter. I have seen several hundred cord on the beach at once.”

Even years later, as the image above shows, the very men who built the castle stood amidst a beach overrun by driftwood. Locals harvested the wood for various uses, from bonfires to heating baths, though today collecting driftwood is regulated by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. 

In part because Seabright Cove tended to gather the widest amount of beach on this stretch of coast, it was here that James Pilkington built a saltwater bathhouse in 1903. James was the cousin of foundational museum collector Humphrey Pilkington. In 1918, father and son duo Conrad and Louis Scholl took over the bathhouse, adding a candy shop and restaurant several years before the building was transformed into the castle.

It was a family affair, and Louis’ sister Gladys spent years managing the bathhouse and renting swimsuits. During these years her son, Bob Watson, who donated this collection, grew up exploring Seabright. It was also during these years that young Bob witnessed, alongside the rest of the community, the 1929 refashioning of the business into the Scholl Mar Castle. Its reception was positive and, indeed, the collection includes a letter from then-mayor Fred Swanton acclaiming the change. 

“I wish to congratulate you and the Seabright residents upon the wonderful and permanent improvement you have made on your beach property,” he wrote. “The transformation in your bathing pavilion is fine.”

As mighty as the castle was, Louis Scholl still spent a great deal of effort shoring it up against wild waves. Crashing logs battered the foundation. Storms sometimes broke windows. 

Louis sold the Castle in 1944, making way for a handful of different businesses. But the castle’s ultimate removal in the wake of a damaging fire took great effort. Margaret Koch, writing for the Sentinel in March of 1967, eulogized “…enough of the old under-structure held to make it necessary to get two bulldozers on the job. They pushed and puffed and snorted and the stubborn old building finally came crashing down.”

While there are certainly still storms and seasonal changes in our beach’s shape, perhaps one of the biggest shifts in Castle Beach happened as a result of the construction of the 1964 Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor. The harbor’s west jetty, where Walton Lighthouse sits today, traps sand that fends off eroding waves from the Monterey Bay and accumulates to make more space for sunbathing and sand castles. 

Conversely, the construction had a narrowing effect on nearby Capitola Beach, as sand that would have otherwise traveled down to the coast did not make it past the harbor jetties. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the 250-foot breakwater and trucked in roughly 2,000 truckloads of sand in 1969, and Capitola regained its beach. 

Collections like these help us to understand our place on the coast, especially in an era of changing climate and coastlines. We’re eager to dive deeper in this collection as we prepare for an exhibit on the Scholl Mar Castle Collection next summer.

As we learn about the past, we are fortunate to have a rich community of local resources, such as Gary Griggs and Deepika Shrestha Ross’ Then & Now book on the Santa Cruz Coast, or Randall Brown and Traci Bliss’s Santa Cruz’s Seabright. Here in the present, you can snag a copy of these great beach reads from our giftshop when you stop by the Museum this July to see firsthand these rich photographs of changing and changeable coast.

Feathers are a marvel of evolution. They do a few different biological jobs: they insulate, waterproof and, of course, they make flight possible. But today, one especially large feather — the subject of this month’s close-up — will do more than fly. It will carry us into the world of California condor conservation and the birds’ returning path from the brink of extinction.

This dark feather, almost the size of a human arm, once belonged to a California condor. We’re not sure which exact bird it belonged to, but UC Santa Cruz environmental toxicologist Myra Finkelstein, who facilitated the gift of the feather to the Museum from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and whose research has revealed a great deal about the birds’ plight, has narrowed it down to two animals. The first candidate, condor 222, is still flying over Central California today, where you might spot her identifying wing tags. The other, condor 306, is no longer soaring. On her last day in 2013, she flew into a power line while carrying ammunition pellets in her digestive tract and toxic levels of lead in her liver.

The fate of condor 306 is far from rare among these birds. While hunting condors has been illegal for nearly a century, their populations are still recovering from human activities that nearly exterminated the species. Exposure to poisons like lead ammunition (the leading cause of their mortality today) and DDT, and unintentional killing from predator control, among other pressures, forced populations into decline.

As far back as 1894, a newspaper clipping from Laura Hecox’s scrapbooks speaks of the birds’ low numbers: “Some day the nesting place of this great bird of the clouds may yet be found, but it must be soon, for ere long not a vestige of the doomed race will remain, save only on some lonely hill an ebon feather or bleaching bone.” Almost a century later in 1982, fewer than 30 of the animals survived worldwide.

What use does a feather have in helping to conserve a species so challenged? In the past, assessments of condor lead exposure were based largely on annual or biannual blood sampling. Lead tends not to stick around in blood for very long, however, so these samples only reveal so much. Feathers tell a different story.

Look closely at the close-up specimen — notice the small notch cut toward the top. Here, the delicate feather vanes extending from the hollow central shaft were trimmed when the feather was growing so biologists could go back and sample it when it was finished growing. Just as tree growth rings record past climatic conditions like dry and wet years, feathers reflect a condor’s history of lead exposure. Where blood samples reveal a few days worth of information, feathers can show months.

Biologists never remove whole feathers from condors. Instead, researchers gather them after they’re molted, or just cut the trailing edge of the feather vane. This feather is a primary remige or flight feather, meaning it generates much of the thrust needed for flight, helping to carry condors the roughly 100 miles they can travel each day while foraging for carrion.

Today, the California Condor Recovery Program leads the captive breeding and wild reintroduction program that, with great effort, has helped condors toward recovery. In 2017, 463 California condors were alive in release programs and captivity , with 170 of those individuals flying free outside of captive breeding programs across California — compare this to the mid 1980s, when the 22 remaining wild California condors were captured and placed in a captive breeding program to combat total extinction.

Wild release sites for the current southwestern population of condors already exist in Mexico and Arizona, and in California at Pinnacles National Monument, Ventana Wilderness and the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Complex. A partnership facility between the Yurok Tribe of Northern California and federal agencies in Redwoods National Park is planning to release the first condors in Northern California skies as early as 2020 — an effort that designates the birds’ expansion into northern territories they were once common in.

Even sooner, Assembly Bill 711, which requires the use of non-lead ammunition when hunting wildlife with a firearm in California, is set to go into effect July 1, 2019. Studies show that, without eliminating or at least substantially reducing lead poisoning rates, the conservation of the California condor will continue to require intensive and ongoing management. In other words, lead poisoning stands in the way of a self-sustaining wild California condor population.

Dr. Finkelstein recommends http://huntingwithnonlead.org/ as a great resource for savvy hunters to help safeguard the health of condors and other wildlife. For other folks excited about helping condors, look to the citizen science project Condor Watch where you can help enhance project data by identifying individual birds. Finkelstein says this project is about to be overhauled, but to keep an eye out for its reboot over the next few months.  

Please stop by this June and see this specimen for yourself! As a bonus for stopping by in person, you’ll be able to compare the notched feather to an un-notched specimen given to the Museum in the 1950s.

Wind is a mighty force. It moves our ocean currents, shapes the landscape and helps forge plant communities. This month, we showcase an artifact that not only gives shape to this force, but also calls attention to the rich history of citizen science that powers our country’s weather science: a vintage printed map illustrating the wind currents of the Pacific Coast.

This gorgeous map, crafted with delicate linework and sharp detail, was purchased by the Museum in 1977 and originally published in 1879 in Elliott’s Illustrated History of Santa Cruz County. It depicts the wind-powered currents that batter the Pacific Coast, with Santa Cruz near its center.

As you can probably tell, the scale of the map is shortened along the vertical axis — the author was keen to depict as many important “coast openings” as possible in the small space. An illustration toward the bottom of the map depicts idealized geological layers of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Ocean currents are driven by a mixture of wind, water density differences and tides. The map depicts what we today refer to as the California Current: a large-scale current system that brings cool waters southward along the Pacific Coast. Simultaneously, land breezes push ocean surface waters away from the coast, which allows cooler, nutrient-filled water to rise up from ocean depths.

This process, called upwelling, supports California’s rich coastal ecosystems. For a more modern visualization, check out NASA’s Perpetual Ocean, which displays ocean current surface data from June 2005 to December 2007.

The map was compiled from U.S. Coast Survey data recorded by Dr. Charles Lewis Anderson, a local naturalist extraordinaire. On top of his day job as a medical doctor, Anderson found time to discover new plant species, became well known for his scientific publications on local natural history and even held public office. As a Santa Cruz Public Library board trustee in the early 1900s, he was instrumental in founding the “library museum” that first hosted Laura Hecox’s collection.

Anderson was struck by the interplay between winds at the border of land and sea: “When the wind blows down the coast,” he wrote in Elliott’s Illustrated History, “overlapping the land, and flowing over capes and promontories with a strong current, two or three miles inland the air is often calm and warm. Such is remarkably the case in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We may observe the white caps a mile or so out, whilst standing on some high point, scarcely a couple of miles inland, we enjoy a very mild breeze.”

One person who contributed to both our understanding of Santa Cruz weather as well as the life of the Museum was early trustee Robert Burton. In addition to his career as a high school science teacher, his collecting trips with dear friend and Museum donor Humphrey Pilkington, and his involvement in the Museum and Santa Cruz City Council, Burton was also the Santa Cruz weather station’s volunteer weather observer for over four decades.

He reported weather observations from 1931 to 1947 and 1950 to 1976. The Weather Bureau even awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Award, which denotes outstanding achievements in the field of meteorological observations. The highest honor available to volunteer observers, the award is named for Thomas Jefferson’s own decades-long meteorology career.

The length of Burton’s service represents more than just a single volunteer’s devotion to weather. It’s also part of a trend in the history of Santa Cruz weather reporting. Santa Cruz observers tended to commit for many years, and many of them lived near one another. Because Santa Cruz’s weather observations were so geographically consistent for so long, Santa Cruz is an important location for studies of long-term climate variability.

Indeed, while information provided by citizen observers continues to be essential for the daily forecast, historical data can be used to explore a future governed by changing climate. This includes projects like Old Weather, which invites members of the public to transcribe old ship logs to gather climate data, and this map that relies in part on historical data to suggest what a given American city might feel like in the late 21st century.

As we close out April, which boasted both Citizen Science Day and National Volunteer Month, we will continue acknowledging the myriad volunteer efforts that sustain not just the Museum but a great deal of scientific labor. Check out the fruits of this labor by visiting the Collections popup on display this month by the front desk, or get inspired and get involved through our volunteer options. If you’re mad for maps, check out our May 21 workshop on understanding geology through maps and illustrations.

Eggs can reveal a good deal about who laid them — hue, markings, shell shape and size can sometimes suggest the identity and even the health of the nester. But they can also show, as is the case with this month’s closeup, much more. Let’s take a close look at this month’s item: a selection of eggs from a larger collection of bird eggs, skins, nests, and mounted specimens gifted to our Museum’s founder in the early 20th century.

Over 100 years ago, on the 13th of April, 1904, Laura Hecox deeded her natural history collection to the City Of Santa Cruz. In documents detailing this gift, a note written in loopy cursive stands among them. It describes how Laura’s friend and fellow naturalist Ed Fiske gave these bird specimens to her for the very special occasion of the new museum.

Among Fiske’s locally-gathered eggs, you see a snapshot of what avian species were present in late 19th century Santa Cruz. Looking at the labels, we find many birds we’re familiar with today. They span a few species, from a wrentit (C. fasciata) and violet-green swallow (T. thalassina), who produced the smallest eggs, to our state bird, the California quail (C. californica), with the largest egg among the collection.

A few years before Fiske made his gift, he and a collaborating naturalist, Richard McGregor, compiled a checklist of 154 bird species found within a 20-mile radius around Laura’s lighthouse. In this “Annotated List of the Land and Water Birds of Santa Cruz County, California,” published around 1892 as part of “Edward Sanford Harrison’s History of Santa Cruz County,” you can read the status and habits of each of these birds, some of whose eggs are on display this month. You can also read some of Fiske’s own collecting notes, as published in an 1885 volume of the publication “The Young Oologist” (“oology” was the term used to described the study of bird eggs during its heyday from the 1880s to the 1920s).

Fiske and McGregor were far from alone in their enthusiasm in collecting. Publications like “The Young Oologist” proliferated in their time, in addition to more scientific resources such as “The Journal of the Museum of Comparative Oology.” Museums amassed encyclopedic egg collections, including exotic and undescribed species, while amateur collectors tended to gather more local specimens.

Ultimately, the huge popularity of egg-collecting proved its undoing. Public outcry in the face of destructive collecting practices, for those taking eggs as well as decorative feathers, led to legal and cultural changes. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 is often considered the death knell of America’s egg-collecting fervor. It prohibits the collection of most birds, nests, and eggs except for scientific purposes.

Around the same time, the culture of birding shifted away from collecting birds and their parts to simply observing them. This was due in large part to conservation efforts of groups like the Audubon Society, as well as increased availability of tools like binoculars and cameras.

While eggs are no longer collected in the same way, the specimens that linger within museum walls offer a wealth of information. They answer questions in ornithology, including those of bird taxonomy, evolution, historical population distribution and breeding behavior. By showing researchers where nests were laid, what compounds have passed through a bird’s system and more, examination of eggs can inform research on climate change, environmental contamination, and conservation best practices.

Perhaps most infamously, a comparison of shell thickness between museum collections and contemporary specimens provided evidence that DDT was harming bird populations. This was crucial to the federal banning of DDT for agricultural use in 1972.  

Our particular collection also illustrates the role small natural history collections can play within the larger scientific community. Like many naturalists of the day, Fiske donated specimens to more than one institution, one being the California Academy of Sciences. Tragically, the Academy’s collections were destroyed in the the 1906 earthquake and fire, in which only one specimen was salvaged.

Disasters like this emphasize the role a little natural history museum can play as a kind of biodiversity insurance. Because Fiske gifted specimens to his friend Laura Hecox, the natural history he captured — and all the information it carries — lives on into the 21st century.

Come visit us this month and browse Fiske’s eggs for yourself! If you’d like to dive deeper into the world of ornithology, the interactive birding data platform eBird is a great way to discover what birds are in your own backyard, and you can even make your own contributions. Nestwatch, too, is another tool that can help you better connect with local species while contributing data. The Santa Cruz Bird Club, who meets regularly at the Museum, also offers a wealth of resources to share with interested local birders.