Trees Down

The worst of the storm hit this morning, with rain and heavy winds gusting from the south to 45 miles per hour. I didn’t get very far into my day at the office when the lights flickered a tad. The power stayed on, but we lost network connectivity, leaving me aimless for a while. My officemate Jim looked out our window, and noticed that the acacia tree just to the south was swaying in the gusts down to its base. Even its exposed roots were moving a bit.

We got to see the tree fall. About an hour later, the tree was leaning heavily, and Jim had summoned in four other folks from the windowless computer lab across the hall. A gust, and it gently toppled as we all applauded. A brand-new Toyota Prius parked nearby barely escaped damage, as only the leafy bits of the tree landed above it. A campus landscaping crew came by and cleaned up the mess by three in the afternoon.

Pica meanwhile went home for lunch to find that one of the tall black walnuts across the street had fallen and completely blocked the road. By nightfall the Solano County road crew had cleared off the road, and all I saw of the event was lots of logs and cut branches piled on the eastern bank of the road.

Storm on the Way

They say this series of three storms may be as bad as anything since 1995. On Friday it’s predicted to rain 1/2 inch per hour. The question is, how long for? And with what strength winds?

I moved back to California in 1996. I remember huddling in our cabin in Santa Barbara, on the mountainside, as El Niño demolished Route 154 above us. If this is going to be worse, I’m worried.

But there are no mountains to fall on us, or for us to fall down on. It’s just us: the floodplain with levees. The water runs south from here, said the landlord yesterday. If it didn’t, we’d be in trouble…

Bigby By Tandem?

A birder in Québec named Richard Gregson recently came up with the idea of doing a Big Green Big Year, or Bigby for short: that is, seeing as many bird species as possible in a year without driving or flying. There are three categories, the walking Bigby, the self-propelled Bigby (walking, cycling, or canoeing), and the public transport Bigby (also adds travel by bus and rail). Today we took a little 13-mile tandem ride, and seem to have gotten started on a self-propelled Bigby, seeing 32 species over the day.

This will be a good way to get in shape. Significantly different habitats from where we live are a long way off (e.g. twenty-five miles each way to the hills). The ideal town to do this in is probably Santa Barbara, where we used to live many years ago, since it’s only a few miles between the 4200’ high Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That is the reason why the Santa Barbara Christmas Bird Count consistently is one of the top several counts by species numbers.

The public transport option is quite favorable for us, though. The combination of Amtrak train, bike, and bus can get one all over California. It doesn’t end up being very frugal, however.

[Added by Pica, 1/2/08: The running list of our BIGBY is in the sidebar of Bird by Bird . The champion BIGBYs as far as I can tell, so far, are the Yukon-to-Florida-or-bust-by-bike team, Malkolm and his parents Wendy and Ken ]

Doom Of Gophers

As Pica relates, this harrier today grazed our back window, landed a few feet off, and started devouring a gopher which he was carrying after catching it out in the field. It wasn’t looking like a good day to be a gopher — the raptors were out in force today. In the space of a quarter-mile walk, we saw a red-tailed hawk, a harrier, a white-tailed kite, a kestrel, turkey vultures, a Cooper’s hawk, not to mention a great blue heron hunting out in the field.

Bliss of Winter Break

These past three days have technically been work days, though practically everyone at UC Davis takes these as vacation to end up with a 11-day long winter break. Today was sumptious. Chilly, overcast, rain arriving this evening. I took a long walk in the late morning out to West Campus (where clearly somebody was still on duty to feed the campus sheep), and then in the afternoon baked bread and hung out with the kitties. What could be more perfect?

Seven Weeks After the Oil Spill

Shining, the bay. Out to the horizon.

(This is my contribution to Illustration Friday’s theme, Horizon.)

But When Should Be The Holiday?

UC Davis researchers have calculated that the solar system is 4.568 billion years old, give or take about a million years or so. They established this figure in a study of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, comparing ratios of chromium-53 to manganese. They do not report the day of the week it all began.

Christmas Bird Count

Too too tired to post this last night… Yesterday Numenius and I hiked Thompson Canyon, northeast of Lake Berryessa, to the ridge and back, spending most of the day in oak woodland and about an hour and a half in chaparral, where we failed to find our target bird, sage sparrow (though it was blowing cold and hard up at the ridge by the time we got there).

My feet are not good hikers and I decided to sit out the side trip up to the spring, armed with a handy-talkie and my tangerines and a sketchbook. I had a close encounter with a pair of wrentits that kept emerging from a brush pile, swishing their long tails this way and that. I’ll post sketches later on Bird by Bird.

It was a beautiful place to hike. Too bad we had the company of some dirt bikers and guys with chain saws cutting up wood (makes hearing bushtits somewhat challenging) but were rewarded at the end by a beautiful varied thrush, one of only two seen the entire day.

We were both weary but had thought to bring along some of the Xocolatl that Linda sent; definitely the best way to revive flagging energies!

Hoping For A Goshawk

This afternoon we went a little hike up the ridge east of Cold Canyon. In part this was to allow us to look up Thompson Canyon on the opposite side of Putah Creek, where we will be doing our Christmas Bird Count a week from tomorrow. It is evident it will be quite a hike next week. Our target birds include sage sparrow and pileated woodpecker. On the way back we stopped at the co-op, ran into Laura D. who said that one year a while back when she did Thompson Canyon they saw a goshawk. Maybe we’ll have similar luck.

Bane of Rhythms

By now most Americans have realized that daylight saving time here ended last Sunday morning, a week later than what has traditionally been the date for the turnover. Not soon enough for me — I view daylight saving time as, to quote Terry Pratchett, an abomination unto Nuggan. Thankfully there is now scientific evidence to support such a view: a recent study indicates that the twice-annual time shift disrupts human circadian rhythms for many weeks after each event.