Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

It wasn't until the end of my fourth day on San Nicolas Island that I realized I'd been holding an endangered species in the palm of my hand. The little white plants, so small and fragile looking that I kept having to make sure I wasn't burying them in the dirt, were San Nicolas Island buckwheat . Just like the island foxes or the scrub jays on Santa Cruz Island, the local buckwheat plants have evolved to the point where they were different from their mainland relatives. (The foxes, in fact, are different subspecies from island to island.) The next day, on our last morning of planting, I took extra care to make sure I planted them properly. Native Americans lived on San Nicolas for thousands of years, and got along just fine. Then in the 1800s, we Europeans showed up and decided we could use the island for sheep ranching. Within a few decades, the place was trashed. The sheep thrived during the rainy years, then ate everything during the dry years. With no plan...

Our job on San Nicolas Island was part of an ongoing project, restoring the natural habitat along a three-mile stretch of roadside terrain. The Navy dug up it to replace the water pipe that runs from the Navy's desalinization plant up to the main water tanks on the highest point of the island. Channel Islands Restoration started the project by collecting seeds from all around the island and growing them in a nursery built near the base, and now it was time for planting. The hope is that the plants will grow and propagate, until the entire roadside is full of native plants. One evening, we got to see an earlier project that had been nicknamed "the Google Site," because the Navy Resource Manager in charge had said he wanted to look up the island on Google Earth and watch the planted area grow from year to year as the plants multiplied. Naval Base Ventura County, which includes San Nicolas, just won an award for natural resource management among the nation's milita...

I've been back from my island adventure for a couple of days now, and what an experience it was. A lot of hard work, to be sure. I have new respect for the agricultural workers who do that sort of stuff all the time. Our little group of 13 volunteers and 5 regular staff put more than 1800 plants into the ground, and set up a drip-feed irrigation system for 1600 of them. And even with all that going on, we still had time to visit some incredible spots around the island, full of weird rock formations and tidal pools, in the company of huge elephant seals and little island foxes. (This was the logo on the backs of our orange traffic vests. Looks much better on a t-shirt, don't you think?) I'm still processing all the stuff I saw and did, and deciding which things I want to post about. I took a few dozen pages of notes, but since I wasn't allowed to take photos, you'd have to rely on my writing everything out. But there is one thing I wanted to say right of...

Channel Islands Restoration sent me a checklist of things I'll need on San Nicolas Island. It had a few surprises on it. Looks like I'll be making a few purchases before I go. But at least then I'll have the stuff for next time. They also sent along a set of rules for visiting the island. One of them really stood out. So no Kaepernicking. Well, it is a Navy base, after all. But then there was also this one. That was a heavier blow. I always take my camera with me when I go into the wilds, and on this trip I especially wanted to record as much as I could about the experience. At first, I thought about appealing to the organizers. I'm a children's author! I'm not interested in pictures of military secrets! How are pictures of plants and foxes going to jeopardize national security? But then I decided that would be acting a little too spoiled, so I will just make do without this time. There are restoration projects on islands that aren...

A lot of shocking and unexpected things have happened during the Trumpocalypse, but there's one that's especially surprising to me, one that will also surprise most people who know me. The Trumpocalypse has significantly dampened my interest in space exploration. Not killed it completely. I still follow the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, and I'm looking forward to the new InSight Mars Lander and the New Horizons flyby of "Ultima Thule." The Chinese attempt to land on the far side of the moon should be exciting, too. But it all feels so secondary to me now. A while back, I heard the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy say it was a good time to pitch new space missions because Donald Trump likes big, impressive things he can brag about. To me, the idea of NASA being there just to satisfy some narcissist's ego cheapens the whole experience. But what's worse is the threat Trump and his minions are posing to the entire world, through ...

My weekend had a bit of craziness to it, and not just because I was getting over a cold. I took an unexpected loop around my brain and ended up with some renewed writing motivation. And it was all thanks to my Number One Anime Nerd Girl of Science . Okay, some background. Kemono no Sou-ja Erin or Erin the Beast-Player was a 2006 anime fantasy series about a girl growing up in a world with giant lizards called "touda" and giant wolf-headed eagle creatures called "beast-lords." We follow Erin from her days as a curious ten-year-old in her home village, through various adventures until she ends up as a twenty-year-old teacher in her kingdom's beast-lord refuge. What struck me about Erin was that she's a passionate scientist through-and-through. She may be dealing in made-up science about made-up creatures, but her methods of scientific inquiry and deduction are real-world solid. As I've said before, if we had more characters like Erin in our f...

I'd made my plan a few months ago, to give myself something to look forward to through the long weeks of audit preparation and online class creation. Catalina Island offers a number of deals to people who go there on their birthdays, including two-for-one on the boat fare out there. I'd gone to the island just after my birthday last year and loved it, and I already knew I wanted to take Emma back there, so she was an easy choice as my "plus one." There's just one problem with celebrating a birthday in public. It's that you're celebrating your birthday in public. At the Catalina Express ticket window, they give you a big, festive button and invite you to put your name on it. Eventually, I did pin it onto my hat, but as you can see, I remained the anonymous birthday boy. Others were more into the birthday spirit, including this one lady and her gal pals who sat next to us on the boat. Pretty much everything that happened during the ride was compl...

I needed a break, and I knew it. Between audit preparations in day-job land and the online class I'm doing at home, I needed a day to get away from everything. So a couple of weeks ago, I booked another trip to Santa Cruz Island - my third one, only this time I'd be going to Prisoners Harbor, on the border between the National Park side and the Nature Conservancy side of the island. Fewer people go there, so it's a good spot for solo adventuring. Things got off to a fast start, as we found a dogpile of sea lions on the buoy marking the Channel Islands Harbor entrance. Another sea lion wanted to join them, but couldn't find an open spot, and so it swam around the buoy barking loudly. After we left them, it wasn't long before we encountered several small groups of dolphins. Most swam by and went on their way, but a few came up to the front of the boat and briefly swam alongside. I was standing up in the bow, my preferred spot to prevent seasickness, so I got ...

I turned five years old in September 1969. It was just two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing and I was space-crazy, and my mom came up with the perfect birthday party game for me. She got a bunch of leftover boxes from our local grocery store, cut holes in the bottoms for us kids to stick our legs through, and decorated them to look like spaceships. Then she decorated the back yard with signs for the moon and the planets. At the party, we all ran around in our spaceships, going from one planet to another. It was great. The California Channel Islands are kind of like that, a set of eight little worlds just off the coast, waiting for you to go out and visit them. Only one, Santa Catalina, has any permanent civilian communities on it. Two of them, San Nicolas and San Clemente, are military bases, although scientific and archeological research teams go there as well. (The real story behind the book, Island of the Blue Dolphins , took place on San Nicolas.) The other five -...

I was heading back down from Santa Cruz Island's Montañon Ridge Saturday when I met a pair of hikers on the way up. I'd just seen one of the Island Foxes (the one in the photos below, to be specific), and mentioned to them that they had just missed out. They half laughed and half rolled their eyes, and said, "Oh, we've seen plenty of foxes." The Channel Island Fox is one of the conservation movement's great success stories. Fifteen years ago, four of the six varieties (one for each island they live on) were almost extinct, the victim of an ecological chain reaction that began when DDT wiped out the bald eagles that lived on the islands. Golden eagles flew over from the mainland and filled the gap in the food chain - but they eat land animals, whereas bald eagles eat fish. They saw the foxes as snack food, and the foxes, who had never had to worry about bald eagles, didn't know they needed to get under cover. The Catalina foxes also took an en...

Last summer, I fell in love - with the California Channel Islands. They've been sitting out there, just off the coast, for all the time I've lived here, but it wasn't until I took Emma to Carpinteria last June that I really took an interest, like the proverbial special someone who's been standing next to you all along but you never noticed. Now I'm hooked. I want to visit as many of them as I can, and I've got the beginnings of ideas for stories about them (my "literary 401K," I call them, since I could be retirement age by the time I get around to writing them). There's just one little, itty-bitty problem. Boats. Unless you're wealthy enough to afford an airplane, the only way to reach the Channel Islands is by boat. Well, they are islands, after all. I made my first voyage onto the open seas back in 2012 , sailing out to Anacapa Island and back with my boss and some other people from day-job land. I did okay going out because th...