Thursday was my last day in the field before a well-advertised storm was to drop 1–3 feet of snow in the Mono Basin. As I drove down to Rush Creek, the winds were picking up, snow was blowing off Sierra peaks, and lenticular clouds graced the late-afternoon skies.

Rush Creek bottomlands, a day before the storm hit.

The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP) had just lowered the flows in Rush Creek and Lee Vining Creek, and I was checking to see if certain side channels were still flowing, as well as checking on a few other things before the expected deep snow made travel to the streams difficult. (more…)

Several new items have been added to the Mono Basin Clearinghouse Website, www.monobasinresearch.org. (more…)

In September, the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District released its Reasonable Further Progress Report for the Mono Basin PM-10 State Implementation Plan. You can download the 17-page PDF file from the Mono Basin Clearinghouse Website. The report summarizes progress since the last update in 2007 (the previous reports can be downloaded as well).

During the first six months of 2010, dust storms emanating from the exposed lakebed of Mono Lake exceeded federal air quality standards sixteen times (17 in one year would be a new record). The highest concentrations of PM-10 dust were measured in 2009, at almost 100 times the federal standard the highest concentration ever measured. (more…)

October 2010, the Mono Basin’s warmest October since 2005, set a new record for precipitation in Lee Vining: 3.74 inches! With data going back to 1988, last month beat the old record of 2.41 inches set in 1992 by 1.33 inches! It also beat the 1950-1988 October precipitation record from the Mono Inn, the previous home of our weather instruments (5 miles north). Median October precipitation in Lee Vining is 0.23 inches, usually our third driest month after June and July.

At Cain Ranch, just five miles south but slightly drier, 3.11 inches of rain set a new record going all the way back to 1931! (more…)

Anyone taking a look at the water from County Park or the Old Marina boardwalk could tell you that there are a lot of birds on Mono Lake. Gulls, phalaropes, avocets, killdeer—the list goes on and on. But the exact numbers of these birds is not so easy to determine. In the case of the Eared Grebe (Podiceps nigricollis), an accurate count requires a small airplane, a digital camera, a calm day, and a lot of white plastic trash compactor bags. (more…)

Rain delays the Mars rover's Mono Lake excursion.

On Sunday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA brought a prototype Mars rover to Mono Lake, staging it under tents at the Scenic Area Visitor Center while they prepared it to go down to the lake. The plan was to test the rover’s sampling equipment and procedures in an environment that, while unlike Mars, would provide some Mars-like challenges. In the search for evidence of past life on Mars, scientists think that areas on Mars that had terminal lakes like Mono Lake might have sustained life, and preserved evidence of it.

This isn’t the first time NASA has tested its methods at Mono Lake. In August 1995, NASA used (more…)

Researcher Sacha Heath looks for insects on a "control" cottonwood.

Last week, I followed Sacha Heath down the Lee Vining Creek trail (and across the frigid stream, in my sneakers) to help count Lilliputians that live in trees. Sacha directed the Point Reyes Bird Observatory research in the MonoBasin for many years, but this season, for her Master’s thesis at Humboldt State University, she’s studying the impact foraging birds have on populations of herbivorous arthropods—i.e. plant-munching bugs—in cottonwoods. Bugs affect the growth of trees, of course, and Sacha picked the Mono Basin as her research location not only because she has an unparalleled knowledge of its riparian communities, but also because it’s a restoration setting—here, new growth is at a premium. The goal of the study is to assess ‘”the ecological service” birds likely provide. (more…)

Have you ever seen a wild bird that looks like a cross between a chicken and a turkey? A churkey? A ticken? Well, I haven’t either … but I have seen Sage-Grouse! Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is the largest grouse in North America, where it is known as the Greater Sage-Grouse. Sage-Grouse are, in fact, related to chickens and turkeys because they belong to the same taxonomic order of “Galliformes.” They range in length from 31 centimeters (12 inches) to 95 cm (37 in), and tend to weigh from 0.3 kilograms (11 ounces) to 6.5 kg (14 pounds).

Greater Sage-Grouse. Photo courtesy of Joe Fuhrman.

Adults have a long, pointed tail and feathers from their bodies to their toes. Adult males have a yellow patch over the eye, are greyish on top with a white breast, a dark brown throat and a black belly. Adult females are mottled grey-brown with a light brown throat and dark belly. (more…)

The California Gull breeding grounds northeast of Negit Island in Mono Lake.

Last July, in a chicken-wire fenced plot on an islet known as Little Tahiti, California Gull banders Kristie Nelson and Nora Livingston spotted one notable adult gull among the masses. It had both a white plastic band and a metal ID band above its ankle, on the “drumstick” part of its leg (though that may be an unsavory description). Odd, they thought, no one bands that part of the leg these days.  Kristie, who has headed up the gull banding on Mono Lake’s islets since 2005, remembered seeing this distinctive bird in the same corner of this particular study plot during other seasons, too. She suspected it was an old bird and knew that, in early banding days on Mono Lake, researchers had placed colored bands—white, say—on chicks from different  islets.

The banding scene on the Mono Lake islets is well-described as calm and collected chaos. While the adult gulls scream bloody cacophony, two banders, including Kristie, sit on overturned crates, sheets spread across their laps like aprons. Then, brave assistants such as Nora (more…)

Now available on the Mono Basin Clearinghouse are documents pertaining to the construction of the Mono Basin extension of the Los Angeles Aqueduct:

Map of the LA Aqueduct facilities from Lee Vining Intake to West Portal
A 4.3 megabyte download, this high-resolution JPG file shows the control stationing and original names of most of the features of the Mono Basin portion of the LA Aqueduct. Click on the image at right to enlarge, or click on the link above to download the full map.

1933 Map of Mono Basin property ownership, hydrographic stations, wells, test holes, gages, and streams
A 2.4 megabyte download, this high-resolution PDF file shows the Mono Basin as of 1933. Included on the map are (more…)