Ecological Musings: Stevens Creek Reservoir, Cupertino, CA -- May 23rd, 2025

Background:

I’m currently taking a California Ecology class. One of the class assignments is to keep a field journal of each of our weekly trips. Today’s journal is about sloshing through the creeks at Stevens Creek Reservoir.

Baseline Data

Name: Stevens Creek Reservoir

Address: 11450 Stevens Canyon Rd, Cupertino, CA 95014

Coordinates: 37.3063° N, -122.0748° W

Date: Friday, May 23, 2025
Time: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

🌤️ Weather Overview

  • Temperature:

    • High: 91°F (32.8°C)

    • Low: 55°F (12.8°C)

  • Cloud Cover: Clear Skies

  • Wind:

    • Direction: Southwest (SW)

    • Speed: 2.2 to 4.5 mph

  • Humidity: Approximately 24%

  • Precipitation: None

If I had a nickel for every time I used my waders in this class, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

I’m not gonna lie, the Stevens Creek Reservoir hike was one of the hikes on our list that I wasn’t particularly excited about. I didn’t know much about the area and couldn’t really imagine a hike in the Cupertino/Sunnyvale region to be particularly thrilling. Although it wasn’t my favorite, it also wasn’t too bad either.

We started out by testing the water quality of the first creek that we came across. The water was pretty nice: not too turbid, decent temperatures, and a decent pH. We noticed that the creek was relatively lively. We encountered small fish, larvae, water striders, and more. There were even remnants of shellfish which led us to believe that there were very likely crawfish in the creek. I even came across the carcass of a dead banana slug in the water. That was particularly surprising. The creek was near a road with fast-moving cars and I imagine that’s why we didn’t see too many big fauna in that particular area.

We drove to a different trail where we encountered some cormorants and local butterflies. I’m not going to lie, I kind of zoned out on that section of the trail because it started to get really hot and the last part of the hike became super uphill. Lowkey, I was dying.

We then drove to yet another nearby site. We stopped by a little birding gift shop where I bought some black oil sunflower seeds for my backyard birds along with a cool birding t-shirt. We encountered a lot of different types of birds around the shop including an acorn woodpecker. As we continued walking down a new trail that was farther away from the main roads, we began to encounter larger fauna. We saw deer, what could have either been stray or local domestic cats, and we even found a dramatically large gopher snake next to some nearby goat pens. Afterwards, we walked to a different trail and noticed that the water quality was slowly starting to worsen. The water was less visible and more turbid. We measured the quality at another site and found it to be far worse than the water quality at the first site. Interestingly enough, the water by the second site contained way fewer wildlife species (from what we could observe) than the water at the first site.

Overall, this hike was not too bad. I don’t know if I’d be super gung ho about going again, but I would visit to buy more birdseed at the onsite bird store! They also had a deal where you could get a vintage birding book for a one dollar donation to the park. I took advantage of the deal and grabbed myself an old-style 1960s California bird species identification book.

Maybe one day, I’ll use it to see if I can identify species on one of my future hikes.

huda .