NO. 3 dunkle: plant ecology, channel islands 267 



brush, and ''moss" on San Miguel Island, which now has no trees or 

 shrubs. Parish (1890) states that within the memory of living man 

 Lavatera occupied a large part of Santa Catalina, yielding only to the 

 overstocking with sheep and goats, and that it was also on San Miguel, 

 Santa Rosa, and San Clemente. These fragments are almost all of the 

 direct testimony that I have been able to find relative to the original 

 nature of the vegetation. 



Natural evidence as to the previous growth on the island is also rare. 

 On San Miguel small tree trunks, as of arborescent chaparral, are 

 still standing near the w^est end of the island. For many years such 

 fragments have been gathered from all parts of the island and used for 

 fuel. On San Nicolas most of the wind-eroded slopes have root remains, 

 incased in mineral casts, projecting well above the present surface. 

 These may be remains of perennial herbs or of shrubs. The fire-blackened 

 kitchen-middens of the aborigines in all sections of all the islands, except 

 Santa Barbara, indicate the presence of considerable fuel in places 

 where little or no natural fuel is now available. While some of this 

 may have been driftwood, there is not much drift on the beaches today, 

 and it seems probable that there must have been considerably less drift 

 in earlier times. 



Lavatera, Coreopsis, and other succulent or brittle-stemmed, her- 

 baceous plants have been mentioned (cf. p. 263) as occurring in somewhat 

 inaccessible places on nearly all of the islands. Many of these must 

 have been tid-bits for cattle, sheep, or goats, during the long dry season. 

 Moreover, their brittle stems could easily be broken by animals and 

 the plants destro^^ed. The largest island of the Anacapa group has been 

 little grazed and on the terraces the introduced grasses are thickly 

 interspersed with forbs, suffrutescent herbs, and woody shrubs (cf. 

 plate 5a). Here also steeper slopes are covered with a dense tangle of 

 herbaceous perennials and low shrubs. The eastern island of Anacapa 

 and Santa Barbara Island have extensive remnants of a Coreopsis associ- 

 ation that once covered most of the interior mesa. Bird Rock off Santa 

 Catalina, is covered with Lavatera. It seems extremely probable that 

 these plants, and others of the same life-forms, once covered extensive 

 areas on other islands which are now grasslands. 



The steep walls of canyons and northeastern slopes are now covered 

 by chaparral, by a suffrutescent coastal sagebrush association, or by a 

 mixture of these two associations. This is particularly true of the larger 

 islands, although remnants of the coastal sagebrush association are to be 

 found on even the smaller ones. The western slopes of most of the 

 islands have, at present, a patchy growth of Lycium, which, in the 



