Bird Scheming On Tomales Bay

These past two days I’ve been at a meeting at the Marconi Conference Center on Tomales Bay, near Point Reyes in Marin County. This meeting was about developing a data schema for exchanging bird inventory and monitoring data (one example being Christmas Bird Counts). It’s fun being at a meeting with a bunch of ornithologists. One participant seated at the far end of the room would use his binoculars to read the fine print on projected slides, and discussion came to a halt one time when a Nuttall’s woodpecker called nearby.

I had a bit of time for doing some art before and after the sessions. Above is a sketch I made yesterday looking south towards the landward end of Tomales Bay. This morning I went up to Tower Hill (the former site of a set of radio receiving towers: Marconi, the guy who pioneered the use of radio, had a trans-Pacific station here starting in 1912) and, in the fog, did a sketch and a small painting. One amusing event while sketching was that I heard a goat-like bleating which turned out to be chanting coming from a woman running up the hill. Afterwards I learned that the Motherwave Institute was also having a session at the conference center while we were there. According to their website, “motherwavework opens new multidimensional doorways to the Field that allow it to be perceived not only ‘within’ in some virtual, ‘spiritual’ realm, but in every realm including our bodies, our emotional selves and our outer world.” A very Marin County thing, that.