February 25, 2007Romance in the redwoods: Big Basin offers risque tour
By ROGER SIDEMAN
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
Volunteer naturalist Arlene Herring has been visiting the forest at Big Basin State Park since she was a kid. But the tour she gave recently was not the G-rated fare of her childhood.
Springtime is just around the bend in the forest and the lengthening days exert their force, ending hibernation, inciting growth — and exciting lust.
"Who wants the kinky stuff? If you don't, you better close your ears," Herring said before launching into a lesson about banana slug sex.
Among the things Herring shared on her "Romance in the Redwoods" guided walk: male and female banana slugs both have a well-endowed "sperm plug" and sometimes lunge at each other and bite like snakes; female newts choose their mates as they're surrounded by mosh pits of competing males called "newt balls;" some acorn woodpeckers don't breed, choosing instead to assist others in courtship rituals.
When Herring asked if anyone in the group knows what a hermaphrodite is, Peter Ely Jr. chuckled.
"It means they can get into some pretty wicked marital disputes," he said.
People naturally have a fascination with animals and are curious about their sexual behavior, Herring said. That's because while humans turn anxiously to books, magazines or therapists for sex tips, animals are guided only by instinct.
Although statistics about woodpecker love may not prove useful for humans in the dating scene, the tour exposed certain parallels between animal and human courtship: male crickets offering protein-rich food to females [pre-nuptial gifts], bird calls echoing through the forest [wooing with song], bees encircling females in ritual movements [dance], and birds like peacocks and barn swallows showing their fancy plumage [boasting color and ornamentation].
The rituals are not too unlike those at a traditional Indian wedding, remarked Ashwin and Arundhati Naik, visiting from Bangalore, India.
The sex tour was mostly all talk and no action. Without any animal specimens in sight, Herring employed the redwoods to put a new spin on old-fashioned storytelling.
"The Maddock family, the earliest homesteaders in these redwoods, probably found that in the winter, they had a lot of time on their hands and needed to keep busy. They had eight kids!" she said.
Tracing the origins of Valentine's Day back to ancient Rome, Herring described an ancient fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the god of agriculture.
"Look around you," she told the group. "At 2,200 years old, some of the trees you see today at Big Basin were sprouting up when those Romans were giving their version of cards and candy hearts to each other"
Despite some of the blunt talk on the tour, many in the weekend crowd were coy about their reasons for attending.
"We just wanted to see the redwoods. This is our first time, and this tour happened to be starting when we arrived," said Ashwin Naik.
Another participant, a local resident too embarrassed to give her name, said her interest was all about simple biology and the enjoyment of learning about the environment in all its forms.
