As the Rod Shippey Educational and Field Lab Facility nears its rough completion we all look forward to a bright and well-lit future of extension work that will take place within.  Most final lighting fixtures are now in place, most floor finishes are completed, but we still await the tri-fold glass doors for the north side of the building and a few other odds-and-ends.  

We are carefully budgeting our remaining funding for the final completion work ... much of which must be done by our HREC staff.   Kitchen appliances, tables, chairs, and other interior needs still need to be purchased.  Donations are still welcomed to support the vision.

So sorry for the hiatus of HREC posts over the last couple weeks.  The Rod Shippey Educational and Field Lab facility is progressing well with just a couple minor hiccups along the way.   The contractor is wrapping up much of the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems and each day gone by seems to be a new look towards completion.

The UC Hopland Research & Extension Center is responsible for completing the audio-visual system and many of the outside features, so construction will continue for the next few months. 

Despite the dry conditions of early summer in chaparral brushlands one can stumble across cheery patches of magenta to blue wildflowers.   This beauty of a wildflower, Foothill Penstemon or Foothill Beardtongue (Penstemon heterophyllus), is found in all major coastal mountain ranges where it prefers dry hillsides and rocky cliffs ...usually found in chaparral brushlands.  It can also be found in open oak woodlands and grasslands.

This cheery late spring/early summer flower has five petals that are untied to form a "two-lipped" tubular flower that attracts hummingbirds.  This flower is endemic to California and is rather common at the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center.

The California Ground Squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi), which used to be called the Beechey Ground Squirrel, is a very common rodent throughout the western U.S. and Baja California.  These seed-eating characters live in the ground, as their name suggests, in a network of burrows which they excavate themselves as a colony group.  Some of these burrows are used communally, however, each individual squirrel has its own private entrance. 

These ground squirrels are often preyed upon by rattlesnakes, and here at the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center, it is the large, adult Pacific Western Rattlesnake that fills this role.  The California Ground Squirrel has evolved with the rattlesnakes and has developed interesting behaviors to counteract the predation ...such as chewing the shed skins of rattlesnakes and then licking the pups to disguise their scent, sand-kicking the snake to get it to rattle which allows the squirrel to assess the size and risk-level of the snake, and swishing of its (squirrel's) tail (which is super-heated) which conveys a confusing message to the snake's heat-sensing organs.  All of these facts have been discovered by a UC Davis interdisciplinary research team over the course of several decades.  Some squirrel populations also have levels of immunity to the snake's venom.

Here at UC-HREC, the ground squirrel burrows and their feces play an important role in the reproduction of the sand fly which transmits a species of malaria found in Western Fence Lizards.