Swarms of Spring

Lisa over at How’s Robb reported yesterday on her adventures in joining some beekeepers who were catching a swarm in a yard in the Oakland Hills; today we got to witness the same process, but out our kitchen window. Our landlord’s son is a beekeeper with a pretty substantial operation that is partly based out of a workshop that is around back where our house is. This past few weeks he and his assistants have been extremely busy building up beehives and starting to truck them around places. When Pica got home today, she saw that there was a swarm of bees in the peach tree just north. The beekeepers didn’t take long to collect it, as shown at left.

In a Vacuum

Well, I ended up not being able to get on my flight to Maine this morning from Portland (OR). This is one of the hazards when you fly standby. The price is great but the reliability isn’t.

However, being given a free day in Portland is a fantastic consolation prize. I walked a good bit down Hawthorn Street, had some tea, walked some more, hopped on a bus, hopped off at the Yarn Garden (wow), had a wonderful lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, hopped back on the bus and took myself in to Powell’s, hub of the bookworld. On the way, though, I found a haberdasher (John Helmer’s ) and popped in on the off chance they might have ladies’ handkerchiefs (no, but Kathleen’s on the same block did, amazing).

The vacuum day. We’ve been considering buying a vacuum cleaner…. on M’s recommendation, I paid a visit to Stark’s, which is the largest vacuum showroom in the country which also contains a vacuum cleaner museum. I made some sketches of these (the earliest of which were operated with a hand pump). I’ll post sketches when I can (ADDED Sunday, March 28).

Slacker Birders

Even though the change to daylight savings time today gave us some excuse, heading out at 10:30 AM for a session of breeding bird atlasing is still quite late. What can we say — we’re slacker birders. For the Yolo County Breeding Bird Atlas project, this year we surveying two 5 by 5 kilometer blocks out by Esparto at the head of the Capay Valley.

On the first block, we didn’t do that well, seeing all of three species. There was a steady 15-knot wind from the northwest, and the supposedly quiet country road we turned off on was in fact quite busy, including the passage of about 15 motorcyclists in a row, off on a Sunday cruise to somewhere. We spent much more time in the block to the west, especially enjoying our session in the Capay Cemetery, a nice birding spot.

In one of those meant-to-turn-right-but-said-left maneuvers, we ended up returning through Esparto, normally a sleepy rural town but we found ourselves in a traffic jam — hundreds of motorcycles, vintage cars, the city park filled with people and stalls, a band playing last century’s rock music — we later learn we had stumbled upon the annual Capay Valley Almond Festival, now in its 95th year. Slackers that we are, we avoided the crowds at the Hog Canyon Deli there, and headed back to Davis for our usual weekend taqueria lunch.

Back From the Desert

I didn’t quite hit the wildflower peak, but wonderful to see blooming heliotropes and verbena. And black-chinned and Costa’s hummers, and a small flock of Lawrence’s goldfinches…. Lots of movies were watched, and much Ulysses was discussed.

Counting Habits

It really isn’t that difficult. Last weekend was the Great Backyard Bird Count: I ended up doing three counts on three successive days, nothing fancy, just a set of 15 minute stationary point counts. The GBBC is a citizen science bird monitoring effort that takes place in the middle of February. I also logged my point data into eBird, which is in some ways GBBC’s bigger brother — the site hosted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology provides an easy way for birders to submit their observations to be part of the readily accessible ornithological record.

I have made very little use of eBird in the past. The most challenging thing though was finding my old password to the site; it’s quite easy to enter data. This morning I did another point count here at the house, seeing 8 species and 25 different birds. This could become a Saturday morning habit — being out in the garden, counting the birds.

Weather Hound

You know you’ve become a serious weather hound when of the eight bookmarks in your browser toolbar, seven are weather-related. This phase of mine follows on to my aviation tack of the past month or two, meteorology being the first cousin to travel through the air.

We’re getting a nice little storm right now — the rain starting this afternoon and expecting to last until the middle of Saturday. California weather seems pretty simple though; just watch those cyclonic systems come in eastward from the Pacific. I am much more mystified by the weather elsewhere in the country though. My officemate is heading on a big trip to Africa tomorrow, and was quite dismayed to learn that a major snowstorm is on its way to hit Washington D.C. tomorrow, through where he was scheduled to fly. (The flight has already been cancelled; he was working on rerouting the trip as I left this evening). Where did that storm come from? Why is it expected to be an epic one?

Time to get back to the meteorology texts. It’s not so easy though; there’s a dearth of textbooks on what actually goes into making weather forecasts (there are plenty of texts on physical theory, not so many on the actual practice). I’m nosing out some resources, though.

Crows Overhead, Skies Are Gray

Today was the second annual UC Davis winter bird count; we did a sector of campus centered around the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works. The best birds were a bufflehead and a sharp-shinned hawk: Pica has a full list on Bird By Bird. It was overcast all morning with occasional sprinkles.

It’s been a good week for weather-watching, with a nice series of storms hitting California. We’ve logged 4.35 inches of rain here since Monday. I’m glad I bought a new pair of rain pants last weekend. I’ve been reading up on my meteorology, and found a great educational website yesterday for learning all about operational forecasting. This is the MetEd site (Meteorology Education and Training) site which is run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. I spent several hours today working through their educational module on Skew-T diagrams, which are the graphs made to illustrate the data collected from weather balloon soundings.

River Otters In The Arb

We’re expecting three weeks or so of solid rain so we decided to go for a walk this morning out to the UC Davis Arboretum before the deluge hit. We saw a few new birds for the year (green heron, orange-crowned warbler…) but the big excitement was seeing a couple of river otters in the Arboretum waterway! Pica had heard that they were around several weeks ago but received no subsequent news about them. The waterway is a closed body of water so the mystery is how did they disperse into it — probably taking a sneaky path from Putah Creek following any number of culverts. We saw the otters working their way along the north side of the waterway: they were mostly underwater but we could spot their wake and air bubbles. The best view was after they had ducked into one of the storm culverts on the side of the waterway. One of them poked their head forward, and we had a clear view of his muzzle and whiskers! There is plenty of carp for them to eat, so we hope they stick around.

Geese Flying IFR

We had rain today, both a shower in the early morning and another in the afternoon. This is a change in weather pattern from this past week, where we’ve had dense and low fog (tule fogs) in the morning lifting to about 1000 feet by midday. The wetlands of the Sacramento Valley have lots of water by now, and frequently I will hear the calls of geese flying above well in the fog. As a pilot would put it, they are flying under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) conditions. It’s easy to imagine that they are calling frequently so as to stay in touch with other members of their flock, but how are they managing to navigate? How do they know when to set down in their favorite flooded field? It’s a mystery. To me that is, but not to the geese.

Thanksgiving Mix

Having taken care of all of our familial Thanksgiving duties a week-and-a-half ago, we were free to do what we much prefer for the holiday, to have a mellow day on our own. These past several years we’ve had a little tradition on Thanksgiving to go on a walk up Mix Canyon Road, which is a steep road that goes right up to the crest of the Vaca Mountains about 25 miles west of here. We never make it into a big hike, rather we just enjoy being in the canyon in late fall with the chestnut-colored buckeyes rolling down on the ground and the bigleaf maples in color. Alas Pica didn’t make it a hike at all today: she slightly wrenched her knee looking at a Nuttall’s woodpecker within 50 yards of the car, so she stayed put and drew while I walked up the canyon a ways where I was lucky to see a couple of pileated woodpeckers.

We wanted to have the traditional Thanksgiving meal of going out for Chinese food — I was especially craving hot-and-sour soup — but none of the Chinese places we looked at in Davis were open. Happily, the Nepali restaurant Kathmandu downtown on G Street was open so we now have a new tradition of having palak paneer and saag chana masala thali plates on this day.