Country In The City

I heard a seminar today by Richard Walker, a geographer at UC Berkeley, on the environmental history of the Bay Area, following the lines of his recent book The Country In The City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. The tale of how so much of the Bay Area landscape came to be preserved as open space is a remarkable one of grass-roots politics, and Walker gives a good telling of it. The bit that cuts to the bone for me is how much of my own identity (I who roamed Tilden and Wildcat Canyon when young) has been shaped by the results of their efforts. His book now rides high on my reading list (soon to be joined, I suspect, by Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco — Brechin is giving a seminar here in a couple of weeks.)

The Great Parking Lot Bird Count

As Numenius said, we spent hours in the rain on duty on Sunday providing radio support for the start of Stage 1 of the Amgen Tour out of Davis.

I completely spaced this weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, but I can report the following birds from my six-hour stint at the east end of the City Hall parking lot in Davis, the first hour of which was in total darkness:

Cedar waxwing (max. 43)
American robin (max. 35)
Rock pigeon (max. 12)
Long-billed curlew (1, flying west-northwest).

The end.

A New Count

Today we participated in the first ever UC Davis winter bird count. Andy Engelis, who heads up the Museum of Wildlife and Fisheries Biology, had the idea to start this count of the 5,300 acre campus (the largest campus of the University of California system), modeling it on the Christmas Bird Counts. This first edition got off to a great start, with about 50 participants (I figure that many of these folks have been suffering from Christmas Bird Count withdrawal and needed their fix.)

We got to do the bit nearest our house; five of us walked the portion of campus east of Old Davis Road and south of the railroad tracks, birding along Putah Creek and in and behind some of the Vet Med field buildings. The most exciting bird was the Purple Finch that we tried very hard to turn into a Cassin’s Vireo based on its call and song, which faked both Pica and me out before Pica finally got a good look at it.

There is a lot less territory to cover on this count than on Christmas Bird Counts, which are based on a 7.5 mile radius count circle, so our count was over by noon and we all convened at Steve’s Pizza in town for our compilation lunch. Some of the good birds seen included a White-Throated Sparrow, a Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, Lark Sparrows, and an immature Golden Eagle. The number of bird species seen in total by everyone today was 102. We all had fun, and are looking forward to next year’s edition!

Flunking African Geography

When I flew back from Maine last November I sat next to two women who were studying a map of Africa, pointing to Kenya. “That’s where Obama’s family’s from,” one of them said. They struck me as people, residents of Sacramento, who had probably backed Hillary in the primaries but were now pleased to have voted for the first African American president and were eager to learn more about him. (We later played poker, badly, cooperatively as women do, which is not how you play poker.)

The current issue of Science News features unmarked maps of Africa showing first percentage of men circumcised by country vs. percent of people with HIV. The negative correlation is high — these maps are a great indicator of how government responses to demand for circumcision have helped slow the spread of AIDS — but to me it was a test. I knew all the countries, right?

Not quite. West Africa remains a jumble; I’d forgotten (how?) all about Liberia and Guinea Bissau, and what is Western Sahara? And how did I miss Congo separating out from Congo Democratic Republic? Oh dear.

My poor father is probably turning in his grave.

Edited to add this, in case you’re interested in taking a quiz…

Walking In Walkabout

This year, at the suggestion of one of our colleagues in the Yolo Audubon Society, we are doing a Big Green Birding Year on foot, rather than by bicycle. That is, we are attempting to see as many species of birds as possible solely by walking from home. I live just close enough to work (2.3 miles each way) that it’s feasible to walk in if I get sufficiently organized in the morning and leave at a reasonable time. This can be a challenge but last week I managed to do this twice and hope to continue this pattern. It’s a wonderful habit to get into plus it’s a good way to get birds on the Walkabout list!

Yard Coop

Last week I was taking Charlie Cat out for a stroll in the yard when he noticed a lot of sparrow activity about the stacks of bee box stuff. I saw that he wasn’t the only one fascinated by the sparrows: there was a smallish Cooper’s Hawk very intently perched on top of Pica’s cherry tomato stands. I eventually took Charlie back inside, returned to work on sketching the hawk, who after a while flew down to the ground to catch a sparrow, and then flew over the building with it.

Yesterday I returned from an overnight trip to see lots of black phoebe feathers scattered near the carport and around the bend of the path. A little while later I saw the Cooper’s Hawk fly in and perch on the lattice outside our front windows, and I had a chance for another sketch. I saw the black phoebe still about though, so I think he must have had a close escape.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pica got me out of bed this morning to announce that our neighborhood turkey was in fact in our front yard. I’m sure he would be thankful to know that our feast this evening consisted of dal and rice.

Round The Gyre

In the early 1970s Davis was a happening place environmentally. The city was a pioneer in designing transportation infrastructure for bicycles. And over in west Davis, architect and developer Mike Corbett built Village Homes, an ecologically sensitive development with lots of interior green space, solar design, community gardens, edible landscaping, and natural drainages. The 70s came and went. The flourishing of environmental ideas at that time gave way to the growth of the 80s (Reagan removing the solar panels Carter had put up on the White House perhaps being a good symbol of this). Village Homes was much admired but never really emulated.

We spent the day at a Green Summit meeting held up in Woodland, about 10 miles north of here. A number of local environmental groups helped put this event on, including our own favorite, the Yolo Audubon Society (in her capacity as YAS president, Pica got drawn into being on the event steering committee). Despite the weather being spectacular today, the event drew over 230 people. The event was organized as a symposium with about four different concurrent sessions. Topics included habitat issues, water issues, land use and urban design, and outreach.

I settled into going to the urban design sessions, followed by one in the afternoon on youth and the outdoors. The first speaker led off with a bit of Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) to set off the theme of sprawl versus infill for the Sacramento region and beyond. I agree very much with the premise of these urban planners that infill and compact growth are the key to preserving habitat by keeping development out of the wilder places of our landscape.

Sprawl and infill are not new issues for urban planners. But have we perhaps circled back around to the insights of the 1970s? (Though adapted to the 2010s — Mike Corbett today in response to a question about the non-adoption of the Village Homes model, said that what he would take from that model would be the elements, but not the design itself: we need far higher densities now.) I was heartened by the presentation of Mike McKeever, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) who talked a lot about their blueprint planning process which through a massive effort to elicit citizen input came up with a compact growth plan for the region. Happily to date, people may be acting on this plan — e.g. vehicle miles traveled are down in the region.

Here are the key factors now in this region. 1) The population in the Sacramento area is expected to grow substantially, probably by well over a million by the year 2050. 2) The region is being hit hard now by the housing crash, and the worst-off areas are the newest, most sprawling developments. 3) Responding to global warming is becoming much more of a political imperative, especially in California where the state has taken a lead on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 4) People are starting to recognize that cheap energy isn’t always to be counted on. For instance, solar housing design is now a good selling point.

So having looped around this way before in the 1970s, are we now about to set off down the track towards sustainable design for real? We hope so.

Return to Bodega Bay

My mother’s been visiting. She had some business to do in Bodega Bay, the fishing village she left two years ago to move to Maine. I went with her. She was pleased to be back but worried that there were no boats coming in and out of the harbor (we later learned that the collapse of the salmon fishery had put a lot of the fishermen out of business). The exception was this sloop that had run aground eighteen months ago and had just been left there — nobody can come up with the thousands of dollars it would cost to salvage it at this point. So it sits.

We went up to Bodega Head, the clifftop Mum walked daily when she lived here, and where she sent my father’s ashes into the wind. Say hi Dad, she said. Hi Dad, I said. Nearly nine years…

What was most astonishing was this long-tailed weasel, a mammal I’ve never seen before, popping out of his various holes to check us out. They are a gorgeous two-tone of cinnamon and caramel. He didn’t show us his teeth but those little jaws were evidence enough of a fierce predator. Of pocket gophers. Don’t think I didn’t want to bring one or two home with me…

PS: I finished this, too:

First Rain

The first storm of the season has come through today, producing some sprinkles this afternoon and evening, with more rain expected tomorrow. Sunday it should be clear, which is good because we are scheduled to help out with radio support for a bicycle event along the American River Parkway in Sacramento that day.

Looking at the local National Weather Service web page, they are highlighting the CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network) program, which is a citizen science effort to collect precipitation data all across the United States. California has just entered this program this month, which first got started with a pilot effort in Colorado in 1998 and is now taking place in 36 states. All one needs to participate is a standardized low-cost rain gauge and the commitment to measure it every morning.