Poor Pluto

At least for the time being, poor Pluto has been demoted from planethood, though not without controversy—there is evidently a large contingent of astronomers that believe that the vote a couple days ago at the International Astronomical Union was “hijacked”. I understand well the classification difficulties the astronomers are getting into, but the demotion is still a bit sad. I’ve never seen Pluto—it’s a 14th-magnitude speck that though well within reach of my 7” telescope, I think I would have to be in a lot better skies than in the soupy air of living at 45 feet elevation in the Sacramento Valley to do so. Planet or not, I’d still like to see that speck someday.

Fall Migration

We’ll be hitting Sweden at a good time. I’m not sure how many birds I’ll be able to identify without my Leica Duovids, which have gone off to be repaired (cracked right eyepice), but I’m taking a small pair of Minoltas that work just fine.

I’m hoping for common choughs outside the Alcázar in Segovia, plus perhaps a black redstart. Maybe long-tailed tits in El Pardo plus green woodpecker and hoopoe. And who knows what on the train to Segovia. The ever-elusive capercaillie will probably not need binoculars, however good or bad.

Travelling with hand-luggage only means severely restricting the number of books that come along, particularly bird books. I picke dup the Pocket Naturalist card of Birds of Britain today. No good for hoopoes or common choughs but some kind of reference for birds we might see on our travels.

City Notebook

I have yet to become a member of the cult of Moleskine, but Pica has been looking into these notebooks as a possibility for a journal. On their site today she noticed an upcoming product of theirs that will be very neat. This is their line of City Notebooks. They describe this as “the guidebook you write yourself.” Each of these notebooks has an overview map and a set of street maps together with many blank pages, tabs, and overlays to allow you to write out your own notes about a city. Their line of European city notebooks will be out in the fall, with the United States ones to follow in Spring of 2007.

Farmers Market Bounty

We don’t go often enough to the Davis Farmers Market, which is on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Yesterday we did though, and returned with maitake mushrooms, white peaches, challah with raisins, yellow tomatoes, cumin gouda cheese, and these very sumptious grapes at left.

Waterproof Rice

I guess it’s a day for the limelight. Not only did a picture of Pica’s boss make page one of the Davis Enterprise (for his little study about effects of the mosquito spraying on other insects), but a story about a UC Davis research project is now highlighted on the front page of the BBC web site. Scientists at UC Davis together with those at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have identified a gene that can allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged for up to two weeks. This is of global importance because it can potentially provide rice crops with protection from catastrophic flooding.

Chasing Dragonflies

Tonight they are spraying mosquitoes in Davis and Woodland to try and halt the spread of West Nile virus. I went out today with some colleagues to try and catch dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders to put in target spraying areas and outside them as a control. It was different than my normal day: running around after insects. They are delicate yet feisty, the dragonflies: one seemed to get a good look at me while I was waving a net around and left….

[Postscript, Wednesday, 9 August, 1:30 pm: All the dragonflies, all the spiders, and all but two of the sulfur butterflies flew off this morning in apparent good health. The butterflies were victims of the City’s exuberant watering system.

It also looks as though about 75% of the resident mosquitoes were killed from trap evidence.

A second spraying is supposed to happen tonight. This time, we’ll be seeing how honeybees fare.]

Return -- of a Kind

When I was in boarding school (late 19th century progressive) in the East Midlands in the 70s, and my siblings in boarding school (Quaker) in Cumbria, my father joined a London club in Sloane Square so we could rendezvous before catching a flight out of Heathrow to Madrid the following day. It wasn’t very London-clublike, whatever that is, and it wasn’t very hotel-like, and we were definitely fish out of water in that Laura Ashley dining room, but we managed to establish a London beat. It included the National Gallery and Selfridges and John Lewis and good off-beat theatre but never, I’m ashamed to say, the British Museum or the V&A.

My focus after boarding school was definitely the Midlands. I’ve neglected London for a long time. So much has changed since 1979: there is good food, and lots of varieties of it; entire areas that were then pretty rough are now London’s pride and joy; and my tastes have changed too.

So in early September, after a jaunt to Madrid for a wedding and a jaunt to rural Sweden to recover from it, I’m getting ready to rediscover London. This rediscovery will not include Harrod’s or Selfridges. It has been a complete blast to tell certain people about this and have them tell me what I absolutely shouldn’t miss (in five days). Ha.

But go ahead: why not suggest your own unmissable London haunts? At some point I’ll publish a compilation. It will say a lot about my friends, that they suggest these things to us…

Rhode Island Reds and Governors Mansions

With DocRock visiting I took the day off today (well, I needed to make up for Avian Flu hours from last weekend, dang). After a leisurely morning we ambled to Vacaville on a fruitless expedition for shorts, to Higby’s the feed store in Dixon (26 Rhode Island Red chicks were for sale) for three straw bales for mulch for my garden; and to Sacramento where we took a tour of the Old Governors’ mansion.

1950s formica mixed with 1880s velvet. Water balloons hoisted on trick-or-treaters mixed with First Lady teas. Dynamite attacks in the pantry mixed with claw-foot bathtubs. No wonder the Reagans decided to abandon the mansion, originally in the “country” but now on a truck route, for a ranch-style house that could accommodate adequate Cold War security. It was wacky. The weirdest thing was Maria Shriver narrating the tour on the video in the gift shop, showing footage of her uncle John F. visiting the mansion, with no mention of where she and the current governor live.

Sacramento has its charms. I tend not to look into them much, but am glad of the opportunity of an interested visitor to explore.

Epidemic

West Nile virus is back in full swing here. For awhile it looked like we’d be spared a bad season. It was very wet early in the spring—lots of spots for the mosquitos—but in May it quickly dried out, and of course we’ve had our heat wave in July. But birds are dying now, and a few people are falling sick. In town they are planning to spray for mosquitos, which predictably for Davis is drawing protests from a small but ardent crowd that is constitutionally incapable of doing risk-benefit calculations. Around our house these past several days we’ve had two dead crows, and more sadly this evening, we saw a fledgling Swainson’s hawk in the field to the south who was lacking the energy to get airborne, though not for lack of trying.

Layer of Fog

Looking to the south this morning, we saw Mt. Diablo poking out of a layer of fog in the interior of the East Bay. This is wonderful to see after our heat wave since it means we’re back to the normal summer weather pattern here. The fog comes in during the late afternoon in the Bay Area, and at the same time the Delta breeze comes up from south here, cooling us off rapidly. We have a good breeze tonight, and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees F by now from today’s high of 91 degrees F.