Bioblitz 2008

This weekend I went out to the spot I surveyed in last year’s bioblitz nearby along Putah Creek and did another species tally. As before except for the birds I can’t comprehensively identify the species I see, but here’s a species list:

Birds:

• Black phoebe
• House wren
• Turkey vulture
• Red-shouldered hawk
• Red-tailed hawk
• Scrub jay
• Nuttall’s woodpecker
• American kestrel
• Yellow-rumped warbler

Butterflies

• Acmon blue (Plebejus acmon)
• Orange sulphur (Colias eurytheme)
• Cabbage white (Pieris rapae)

Other insect:

• Praying mantis (Mantidae) (gravid: she looked at me inquisitively)

Plants:

• Narrowleaf willow (Salix exigua)
• Oregon ash (Fraxinus latifolia)
• Eucalyptus sp.
• Black mustard (Brassica nigra)
• Wild oats (Avena fatua)
• Ryegrass (Lolium perenne)
• Milk thistle (Silybium marianum)
• Yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis)
• Curly dock (Rumex crispus)
• Rough cocklebur (Xanthium strurmarium)
• Western flat-topped goldenrod (Euthamia occidentalis)
• Annual fireweed (Epilobium brachycarpum)
• Chicory (Chicorium intybus)

Blogger Bioblitz 2

The second annual Blogger Bioblitz is coming up! The idea is for ecobloggers to head to a favorite spot and count all the species of living things they see there, post this information to their blog, and preferably participate in a data gathering exercise. Last year I went to Putah Creek: I will return to that spot this time too. The bioblitz runs from Sept. 20 to Sept. 28: leave a comment here if you’re interested in playing.

More Spillage

The bees outside our door have been working on the nectar that’s been spilled by the guys working on a huge operation to get their winter food source bottled up. This is many gallons of sweet stuff that gets all over the driveway and everything else. Not so many flowers for them now, and they are going to get fewer as the fall comes in…

Tomato Corner

It’s the time of year when tomato trucks are traveling the country roads of Yolo and Solano counties. Some of them gather their wares from the fields just east of here, and then make the right-hand turn from the levee road onto the main road by our house. Some tomatoes inevitably spill out of the overfilled bins of the trucks.

When the first rains come in a month or two, the reconstituted tomato mush on the road surface is very slippery to travel on — be careful.

Out Geary Street

I took the day off and went on a expedition to San Francisco today, heading down by train and then taking the 38 Geary bus to the Outer Richmond district whereupon I walked up to the Legion of Honor museum. I don’t think I’ve been to that art museum in 35 years or so. And they gave me two dollars off admission since I took the bus.

The main exhibition was a show of four women impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, and Mary Cassatt. I particularly liked Morisot’s work. Also at the museum was a small show of Israeli antiquities, including a couple of Dead Sea Scroll fragments and some 5000 year old pottery.

It’s a very pleasant trip to make, an outing to San Francisco for a one-day vacation. I should do it more often.

Mystery Plant

This plant recently sprouted and grew quickly in one of Pica’s garden plots, which has since been heavily mulched. If anybody has any idea what it is, do let us know.

Solar Castle

This residence just southeast of Davis on a favorite bike loop of mine intrigues me. On the south side of the residence, one sees a series of 10 massive solar panels mounted on pylons, the panels rotating to track the sun. The residence itself is partly obscured behind some recently planted trees, but one gets a better view of it in its full glory a little further down the road.

Ostentatious? To be sure. How about contradictory? In solar building design, isn’t it the first principle to start with a structure that is small and efficient, just to give yourself a fighting chance to balance a much more limited energy budget?

Or you can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of photovoltaics at your McSolarMansion, I suppose, never mind about efficiency.

Murk

It will be a long summer. Today it got to 106° F here with only a couple of miles of visibility, the skies still hazy with smoke as it has been for much of the past several weeks. There are still 18 fire complexes burning throughout Northern California, 10 of these in the mountains rimming the Sacramento Valley.

The current air quality is a lot better here than what it is today where we used to live. There is a major wildfire in the Santa Barbara area, in the mountains north of Goleta and UC Santa Barbara. The fire started on July 1, and has burnt about 10,000 acres. The eastern perimeter of the fire got very close to the little enclave in the mountains where we spent a year-and-a-half, the San Marcos Trout Club, but the fire was held at the ridge just above and to the west. For now the Trout Club seems okay: the residents had been evacuated but have been allowed to return to their homes as of this afternoon. And typical Santa Barbara summer weather is now helping there — evening and morning fog, highs in the low 70s.

Wilderness Arising

I can’t sincerely call this pessimism, being of the bicycle commuting elitist class, but I believe that the high fuel prices we are seeing now are here to stay and to get even higher. The price increase just seems too structural — there haven’t been any evident major shocks to the market to account for it. Lately, I’ve reading a good bit from The Oil Drum, a joint blog about energy and the future. A couple of linked tidbits:

This article describes how high fuel prices are calamitous for isolated rural towns. These levels of fuel prices are causing a lot of suffering in the short term — people simply cannot change their livelihoods in the near term. Speculating about the long term is fascinating — what will happen in say the twenty-five year span.? My guess is that a lot of these rural communities will simply cease to exist — they are too dependent on people being able to afford to make long-distance supply runs. Swaths of the countryside then revert to wilderness.

On another note, here is an interesting post about peak oil, technical societies, and learning from amateur radio, from somebody who just dived in and passed all three of the FCC amateur radio licensing exams.

Smoke

I just got a copy from the library of Richard Hamblyn’s new The Cloud Book, a well-illustrated cloud identification guide published by the UK Met Office. What we’ve been seeing these past few days isn’t described there. Smoke, persistent smoke, filling the Central Valley and then some. The visibility this afternoon was about 2 miles. According to the CAL FIRE site, as of this evening there were 28 active fire complexes burning throughout Northern California covering 165,000 acres. This set of fire complexes originated when a dry lightning storm moved through the northern half of the state on Saturday. That it has been a very dry spring didn’t help matters.

According to the weather service, some relief from the smoke may happen on Saturday, when the upper-level flow turns southerly with the northward migration of a low off the coast. But with so many fires everywhere, and with the possibility of more mountain thunderstorms, I don’t think it’s going to get very clear for quite some time.