Methuselah the Date Sapling

Two years ago Dr. Elaine Soloway germinated a 2000-year date seed found at Masada in Israel. This was the oldest seed ever to germinate. The seedling survived, and now Dr. Soloway is planning to transplant it. If the sapling, named Methuselah, continues to flourish and is female, in several years time we may find what the dates of Judea tasted like — according to Pliny the Elder they were renowned for their succulence and sweetness.

Snow Day

Dedicated to all my friends and family in chilly, snowy climes: hang in there, spring’s on its way!

Also check out the launch of the new Madrid wiki, Madripedia. (via Puerta del Sol Blog )

Now Indexing The Universe

No longer content to gulp all this world’s textual materials into its maw, Google is turning its eyes heavenward and partnering with 16 universities to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The 8.4 meter aperture LSST features a 3 gigapixel camera and will make a complete scan of the sky over Cerro Pachón, Chile, every three nights. Soon we’ll be able to read blogs from Epsilon Eridani b.

Five Years, 135 Blocks

We at the Yolo Audubon Society are planning to start a breeding bird atlas project for Yolo County, commencing in 2008. A breeding bird atlas is a set of maps that show the distribution of where every bird species nests, in this case in a set of grid cells across a single county. A breeding bird atlas project takes place over several years, often five — the idea is to confirm the breeding status of each species across the entire time period. A standard grid cell size is 5 × 5 kilometers, which works out to about 135 grid cells across the county. At about 15-20 hours of effort per grid cell, we will have our work cut out for us!

Valley Oak Potting Party

Jim (pictured at left) says that even though it’s an El Niño year, it was a very bad year for acorns. He had to go beyond Lake Berryessa to find a stand of oaks with a lot of acorns. But once he did, he collected about 1,000.

He delivered about 250 to Tree Woodland; another 250 to the Audubon Farms program. That has left him with about 500 to plant. Oaks put out fearsome taproots that require a lot of length in a pot. Gallon milk cartons are ideal. Jim collects these from the cafes all over town, gets donations of compost.

Today we were transplanting the germinated oaks into their milk carton+compost homes. Jim’s kitchen is now a nursery. But this rate of success is high: about 5% loss at each stage. Better, though, by far, than just plonking acorns in the ground and hoping they grow (about 5% survival rate, there).

Davis Flyby

It’s not an event that can be predicted to the precision of a lunar occultation, but sometime between 1:52 and 2:20 PM on February 20 the cyclists racing Stage 2 of the Amgen Tour of California will be entering Davis on the way to the finish in Sacramento. This 115-mile stage starts out in Santa Rosa and makes a couple of difficult climbs across the Coast Range mountains before descending into the Central Valley for the 45-mile flat run to the state capitol building in Sacramento. Some of the world’s top teams are in this year’s race — Credit Agricole, CSC, Rabobank, T-Mobile, Discovery, Quick Step — all passing within several hundred yards of where I work. I just better not blink!

Loss Of A Topiarist

If one takes a hard look at the hedges on the far side of a campus parking lot bordering 1st Street here in Davis, one will notice that they have form. One is a dragon, another a whale. There are other topiaries scattered around Davis — a locomotive, an elephant, and others.

Sadly, the landscape artist who created these topiaries, George Sommerdorf Jr., just died Friday in an ice-skating accident up at Donner Lake in the Sierras, breaking through thin ice. Davis will miss his sense of whimsy.

Smew

If birding were always so easy…Today we went to see the smew that’s been hanging out at an exurban park pond near Sonora, about 2 1/2 hours from Davis. The smew is a vagrant species of duck from Eurasia that only shows up in California every few years. This particular bird was sighted a couple weeks ago and has been seen at the pond almost every day since. The one exception was yesterday, when it never showed, which made today’s trek a little more exciting than otherwise. But when we got up there and joined the crowd of several dozen birders, we saw the smew within 20 seconds!

Rumi in the Chaparral

Today was the final session in my Cold Canyon docent training . The final three presentations concerned plant adaptation, Patwin uses of the native plants, and a selection of Farsi poetry. Iraj read us some of the poetry in Farsi.

There is a strong tradition of Persian nature poetry, with Rumi and Omar Khayyam perhaps the best known in the West. I visited Shiraz in the 1970s, home of the poet Hafez. These poets were all revered in their time, though marginal socially and politically.

The great find of the day for me was Sohram Sepehri, a twentieth-century Iranian poet who started out as a painter and who chanced upon an eccentric patron who offered to buy all his paintings if he would travel for some time to Japan and India. His art inspired his poetry and vice-versa.

The poem I read was called Water. The first two stanzas:

Let’s not muddy the water:
somewhere down the stream a pigeon may be drinking,
or in a distant wood, a goldfinch may be washing her feathers.
Or in a village a jar may be filling.

Let us not muddy the water:
Perhaps the current passes by a poplar,
washing sorrow from a lonely heart.
Perhaps a dervish has dipped his dry bread in it.

—

I have some books to look for in the library… oh. And let’s not muddy the water.

Native Plant Links

I sometimes wonder where one might find a particular native plant for Pica’s garden. The California Native Plant Link Exchange figures to be a good resource here — among other things one can query it by species to find out what nurseries stock that plant.