Last Bastion

This afternoon I went on a cycling ramble around Davis, a bit of a cultural field survey in preparation perhaps for a later Ecotone joint blogging exercise on suburbs and place. I was riding north on Mace Blvd. at the eastern limits of Davis, north of I-80, when I saw the above bird perched on top of a sign reading “Rick Price – Custom Homes”.

This is a burrowing owl, a species which is in the process of being extirpated from the Davis area, owing to its proclivity for living in sparsely vegetated plots inhabited by ground squirrels, the same sort of land that’s ideal for building things like housing developments and college football stadiums. This bird was part of a pair inhabiting a thin plot of ground, which looked like it was recently scraped, between the road and a tomato field. This is just east of the upper-middle class McMansion tract houses comprising Mace Ranch, which was the scene in the year 2000 of the developer deep-disking burrowing owl habitat without any notification. The city is suing the developer, but such actions are most likely far too late for the population of the birds.