40 Fun Facts About Chaparral

Which piece of cowboy gear is believed to take its name from chaparral, the thorny brush riders crossed?

Chaps is short for chaparreras, the leather leggings Mexican horsemen wore so that thorny scrub would not shred their legs. A rival theory ties the word to chaparrón, a cloudburst.

Which bird, the state bird of New Mexico, is also known as the chaparral cock?

Roadrunner flight is weak, so it spends most of its time on the ground and can sprint at about 20 mph. It belongs to the cuckoo family and eats young rattlesnakes.

Which word for Mediterranean scrubland became the name of French Resistance bands in World War II?

Maquis comes from the Corsican word machja, the dense shrubland that covers most of Corsica. The label did not exist in January 1943, yet soon meant both the fighters and their hideouts.

Western fence lizards of the chaparral carry a protein that rids ticks of the germ behind which illness?

Lyme disease is rarer where these lizards live, because a tick that feeds on one is cleared of the bacterium and can no longer pass it on.

What does the coast horned lizard of California's chaparral squirt from its eyes to drive off predators?

Blood can shoot up to 5 feet from the corners of the eyes, and it tastes foul to dogs and cats. The lizard builds pressure in its head until tiny vessels around the eyelids burst.

Which chaparral predator, tracked as P-22, lived for ten years in Griffith Park in Los Angeles?

Mountain lion P-22 crossed two Los Angeles freeways to reach the park, a trip that often kills the cats. He was later photographed in front of the Hollywood Sign for National Geographic.

Which hot, dry gusts from the Great Basin fan Southern California's worst chaparral wildfires each autumn?

Santa Ana winds heat up and dry out as they squeeze through canyons and passes on their way to the coast. Nearly all of the biggest chaparral fires start while they are blowing.

Which material is stripped from the bark of an oak that grows in Mediterranean scrub woodland?

Cork can be stripped from the same tree every 9 to 12 years without harming it, once the oak is about 25 years old. It is the main source of wine-bottle stoppers.

Which bird of California's chaparral and oak woods drills thousands of holes in one tree to store its food?

Acorn woodpecker families reuse the same granary tree year after year, and move each nut to a smaller hole as it dries and shrinks.

Which chaparral shrub with smooth red bark bears berries that Native Americans mashed into a cider?

Manzanita is the Spanish diminutive of manzana, so its name means little apple. The berries were also dried and ground into a coarse meal.

The name chaparral comes from chaparro, a Spanish word for which low, shrubby tree?

Scrub oak thickets gave the landscape its name, since chaparral means place of the scrub oak. Chaparro itself goes back to txapar, a Basque word for a small thicket.

Which chaparral hunter, whose Latin name means barking dog, has a common name from the Aztec language?

Coyote is the Spanish spelling of the Nahuatl word coyotl. Its scientific name, Canis latrans, was chosen for the many calls the animal makes.

What is the mule deer, a common chaparral browser of western North America, named after?

Its large ears resemble a mule's, and they are one of three quick ways to tell it from a white-tailed deer, along with tail colour and forked antlers.

Which scavenger of the chaparral ranges has the widest wingspan of any North American bird?

California condor numbers fell to just 27 birds by 1987, when every wild one was captured for breeding. Their wings can span 3 metres.

Which bird with a curving head plume, common in chaparral, is California's state bird?

The California quail became the state bird in 1931, and it is so sociable that it gathers in small flocks known as coveys.

Which country's chaparral-like matorral lies between the Atacama Desert and the rainy Valdivian forests?

Chile has one of only five Mediterranean-climate regions on Earth, and about 95% of the plant species in its matorral grow in no other country.

Which country's Mediterranean-climate shrubland is called kwongan, a word from the Noongar people?

Australia's kwongan grows on sandy country in the south-west, where botanists adopted the Noongar word in place of older labels such as sand heath.

In which season does almost all of the chaparral's rain fall, leaving the hottest months bone dry?

Winter in chaparral country is mild and wet, and the hot months that follow can pass with barely a shower. Tough evergreen leaves help the shrubs sit out the drought.

Which Afrikaans word names the chaparral-like shrubland of South Africa's Cape?

Fynbos means fine bush. It packs about 8,500 plant species into a small belt of the Cape, and nearly 6,000 of them grow nowhere else on Earth.

Which huge flower of South Africa's Cape shrubland gives the national cricket team its nickname?

Protea flower heads look so much like artichokes that the king protea's scientific name means artichoke-like. It is the national flower of South Africa.

Which red-berried chaparral shrub, also called California holly, is the official native plant of Los Angeles?

Toyon branches were so popular as Christmas decorations that in 1921 California passed a law against picking them on public land.

Which nutrient do California lilac shrubs add to poor chaparral soil with the help of root bacteria?

Nitrogen is captured by Frankia bacteria that live with Ceanothus, the California lilac, and it ends up enriching the ground for neighbouring shrubs too.

Which spiky chaparral plant, nicknamed Our Lord's candle, sends up one huge flower stalk and then dies?

Yucca flowers are pollinated by a moth that lays a single egg inside each bloom, then rubs a ball of pollen into it so there will be seeds for its young.

Which desert chaparral shrub yields a liquid wax, sold as an oil, that is prized in cosmetics?

Jojoba seeds are about half liquid wax, and only one animal, Bailey's pocket mouse, is known to be able to digest it.

Which chaparral sumac is named for the drink that can be made from its berries?

Lemonade berry cannot stand frost, so it keeps to the mild coast, though it crosses with a hardier inland cousin where their ranges meet.

Early California farmers took laurel sumac, a chaparral shrub, as a sign of safe land for which crop?

Oranges are hurt by cold and so is laurel sumac, so growers reasoned that wherever the shrub thrived their groves would be safe.

On which California archipelago does a dwarf fox, found nowhere else, hunt through coastal chaparral?

Channel Islands foxes descend from mainland gray foxes that arrived thousands of years ago, and each of the six islands they live on has its own subspecies.

Which chaparral hummingbird hits 385 body lengths per second in its courtship dive, then squeaks with its tail?

Anna's hummingbird is named after Anna Masséna, Duchess of Rivoli. The male climbs about 130 feet before the dive and pulls out of it at about 50 mph.

Which chaparral rodent builds stick houses up to eight feet tall that successive generations keep enlarging?

Woodrat houses have many rooms, including pantries for leaves and nuts, and the animals sometimes build them in hard-to-reach spots such as thorny brush.

Which small chaparral bird has a song often compared to a ping-pong ball dropping on a table?

Wrentit is the only species in its genus, and it never migrates. Scientists moved it between several bird families before settling on the parrotbills.

What kind of landscape replaces chaparral when fires return too often for the shrubs to recover?

Grassland of non-native annuals takes over when fires come less than 10 to 15 years apart, because shrubs that regrow only from seed burn again before they are old enough to make any.

Which woody swelling at the base of a chaparral shrub sends up new shoots after a fire?

Burl tissue holds buds and a store of starch, enough to fuel regrowth before the shrub has any leaves. The briar root carved into tobacco pipes is one.

Why do so many chaparral shrubs grow small, thick leaves with a waxy coating?

A thick, waxy skin helps each leaf to hold in water through the dry season, when a chaparral shrub can go months without a drink.

Which botanical term, from the Greek for hard leaf, describes the tough evergreen foliage of chaparral?

Sclerophyll trees include the olive and the holm oak of southern Europe, which have to get through the same long dry season as chaparral shrubs.

Which chaparral shrub with needle-like leaves is nicknamed greasewood for its oily, flammable foliage?

Chamise is one of the most widespread plants in California's chaparral, and after a fire has burned off its stems it simply resprouts from a woody base at ground level.

Which desert shrub, linked with the smell of rain, goes by the name chaparral as a medicinal herb?

Creosote bush can live for an astonishing time: King Clone, a ring of it in the Mojave Desert, is thought to be about 11,700 years old.

Which chaparral songbird, a gifted mimic, digs and sweeps through leaf litter with its long curved bill?

The California thrasher is the largest of all the thrashers, and chaparral is its main home from California down into Baja.

Desert chaparral grows on the dry inland side of California's coastal ranges, in a zone known by what name?

Rain shadow deserts form because air drops its moisture while climbing the seaward slopes, then warms and dries out as it sinks down the far side.

Along which edge of a continent do the world's chaparral-type climate regions typically lie?

The west coast of a continent, in the middle latitudes, gets this pattern of wet cool seasons and dry hot ones, and it happens north and south of the equator alike.

Which herbal tea comes from a broom-like shrub grown in the Cederberg, in South Africa's Cape shrubland?

Rooibos is usually grown in one small mountain area of South Africa's Western Cape, and it only caught on around the world in the early 2000s.