Demiamputation

The nectarine tree, burdened by fruit, cracks in half. A Nuttall’s woodpecker drills into not-quite-ripe fruit. The lavender is crushed.

(Submitted for the 38th Festival of the Trees.)

East College

I’m back from my vacation to Brunswick, Maine and Greencastle, Indiana. Here’s a sketch of East College at DePauw University in Greencastle. The cornerstone of the building was laid down in 1870.

Avian Sasquatch

My officemate wasn’t in this morning which means I get to field his phone calls most of which aren’t as interesting as the one today — the gentleman on the other end explained how he had found a flight feather a good bit longer than his outstretched arm (and he is 5’ 7 1/2”) but had lost it and this was up near Klamath Falls and there was an account of such a giant bird from Mexico in 1921 (killed — the 25-30 pound bird probably fed a family for a week) and another account from Switzerland of a different type of bird much bigger than a condor — these are high altitude birds, generally soar at 10-12,000 feet which is why no one ever sees them…

So do look up — you never know what you might spot up high.

The Clade Launched

The Clade is a new community environmental website that holds that the environment is about more than climate change. Join the conversation…

At The Local Airport

UC Davis is the only campus in the University of California system to have its own airport (though UCSB is quite close to the Santa Barbara commercial airport). For the past few years, the University Airport has held an open house in the spring; aviation buff that I am, I try to go to these, usually doing some sketching while there. At today’s open house, I sketched this Rockwell 112A, manufactured in 1975. A note on the sketch: I used gouache here — I recently built up a little paintbox of different gouache colors and this seems to be a good complement in the field to my box of watercolors.

You Know You've Been Standing In One Place Too Long

…when a squirrel runs up your leg. This happened during yesterday’s outing: I was finishing up this sketch of an azalea in front of the State Capitol at the time.

Davis Joins Cooperstown

The city of Davis has just been selected to be the new home of the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. This hall had been located in Somerville, New Jersey but was forced to relocate due to a redevelopment project. More than 25 communities submitted proposals to be the new home, and the choice eventually came down to between Greensboro, North Carolina and Davis. According to the chair of the selection committee, Bill Brunner, “The distinguishing difference between Greensboro and Davis was that Davis was so bicycling friendly…all those bike lanes and the sheer number of people who use the bicycle as a method of transportation or recreation or sport.” Nobody knows where in town the hall will be permanently located but the city would like to see the hall and museum open in a temporary location in the next six months.

Shops Out Of Time

We went to Berkeley today for a family gathering and early birthday dinner and unexpectedly had a bit of time in the afternoon for some shop-wandering, ending up at two stores that though their contents couldn’t be more different, both seemed like reliquaries rather out of time. The first place was the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles. The friendly folks at the Albany yarn store k2tog directed Pica to go to Lacis to find some fine mercerized thread for lace knitting. This storefront and museum, which has been around since 1965, has a fantastic collection of materials, tools, and resources for textile crafts. But not Joann’s Fabrics sorts of crafts. Rather, these are for crafts that are arcane enough that we were both gobsmacked that anybody still practices these. There were the fifty-seven different sorts of tatting shuttles. The doll’s heads for making interesting tassel forms. The horn thimbles. The Battenberg lace kits. And a full range of corset-making supplies, including both plastic and metal stays; the place offers workshops as well and a DVD on corset-making. Pica found her thread, but the true prize was a specially-made wrist yarn holder, good I think for knitting socks while going hiking.

The second store was Al Lasher’s Electronics on University Avenue which has been in Berkeley since 1960 but I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in there before. Electronics components stores are very thin on the ground nowadays, the professional market for these long having given way to mail-order and now online places like Digikey and Mouser. Nevertheless, Al Lasher’s has somehow hung on, and judging from the numbers of customers passing through, still seems to be doing okay. One woman came in there for wiring supplies to resurrect a turntable she found on Craig’s List, the previous owner having been a photographer who didn’t actually play it but rather used it for a backdrop to a photo shoot. Some of the components I think have been in the store since the 1960s, or as they say on their web page, “we tend not to throw things away.” I particularly liked the two tube-testing machines up near one of the front windows (remember those, commonly found in supermarkets and hardware stores in the 1970s). A sign over these said these testers don’t really tell you that much, other than if the tube is shorted out or not, but all the tubes we sell at this store are good. I didn’t buy anything today, but the store has now been added to my places to shop in Berkeley list.

Today, by the way, is the sixth anniversary of Feathers of Hope!

First Birds of Spring, 19th Century Version

Despite my lack of faith in the long-term durability of digital archives, it’s always nice to see digitization projects bringing resources out from dusty basement file cabinets to the light of a world-wide audience. One such project is the North American Bird Phenology Program. Housed in one of these proverbial file cabinets in Maryland is the Migration Observer Card collection, a set of about 6 million handwritten cards giving observations of the timings of the arrivals and departure of migrant birds. These observations were collected between 1880 and the Second World War by a network of up to 3000 birdwatchers. These observations are very valuable today because they help tell the story of how shifts in climate affect the distribution of animals.

Not having the funding to digitize the card files themselves, the biologists at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center where the collection is housed came up with the idea of crowdsourcing the project. They have started scanning the cards and are recruiting volunteers over the Web to transcribe the information on the scanned images. The project is barely a month old and already has over 400 volunteers. But more are needed, so if you are interested in helping see here.

Living New Deal

Last week I heard Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin and Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From The California Dream speak on campus. After working on those two books, he needed a cheerier project, so he has been involved with the Living New Deal Project. This is an effort to document the public works in California created through Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. These projects included schools, gardens, amphitheatres, infrastructure like power stations and airports, public art works, and many other features on the landscape, constructed by federal programs such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Their map of California New Deal projects is here — if you know of other sites that should be added do let them know.