Herman, Fup, Mango, and Chocolate

We just got back from a weekend trip to Portland, where we visited our blogging friends Dale and Susan. They were grand hosts, and they introduced us to Dale’s old buddy Herman the 10-foot sturgeon at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery, Susan’s faun-colored kitty Mango, her affectionate tortoiseshell cat Bit, and her ball-obsessed dog Joey. I also learned that Oregon is a fine state for chocolate, starting with the Moonstruck Chocolate café downtown, and moving south to Dagoba chocolate made in Ashland. At Powell’s, where I spent about three-and-a-half hours all told, they were having the 18th birthday party for Fup, the store cat at the technical bookstore two blocks from the mother ship.

All in all, Portland is a wonderful place.

Wind

There’s a strong southerly breeze at the moment. When the wind’s out of the south, we get much cooler days. The wind will veer north by the weekend and we’ll be in triple digits again. A hot, drying wind that blows topsoil across counties into the Delta.

I don’t have much of a bike commute these days but it’s enough to notice when I have a strong head or tailwind. I notice the sunflowers I planted struggling against it; the squashes are big and heavy enough now to withstand this much but who knows how much else? I’m hoping the tomato cages are sturdy enough.

The mockingbird was singing furiously into it this evening while I filled my final raised bed with soil and compost.

Tom Montag of “The Middlewesterner” often writes haikus about the wind. It must be very much a part of his corner of the world and I find myself nodding in recognition. This, for instance, his lines for July 7 :

Add nothing
to nothing –

you’ve got
the wind.

The Horses are Back

There’s a paddock outside my window at work. It’s been emtpy for nearly a year. A delivery of contaminated sand led to a horrible injury (a horse stepped on a nail, got a bad infection, had to be put down).

The place has been thoroughly combed with metal detectors. There are now horses back in there, a gentle presence when I”m trying to think of a synonym for “part” that isn’t “component” which in my opinion is a word that should only be used in connection with cars.

I like having them back.

Like and Unlike

Botany
keys
yes no one zero
differentiated or opposite
five petals or four
a series of
cancellations

Madrone is not
manzanita
smooth bark
but different leaves
quieter
less showy
hidden in the
chaparral

yes
no

not
a
cancellation,
its bark says
smooth and red
peeled and sheer

me
I’m here
I am
madrone

the sweet smell
in late sun
oak titmice
and ravens
say
oh, sure,
that’s madrone,
not a
nothing
you
blindhuman

afternoon
sun

Madrone

submitted for Festival of the Trees Carnival

Birders Passing In The Night

I don’t think I can count hearing the spotted owl on Saturday’s trip. At dusk we went on a two-mile circuit through this nature preserve in Placer County. Kevin who was leading us was doing his best spotted owl imitation and losing his voice in the process. About halfway through, Kevin was convinced he heard one calling in response, and we continued on, past some very fragrant western azaleas. Finally I heard the bird as well, calling faintly to the left and upslope. We walked quietly through the darkening forest, and I remarked to Kevin that the owl was probably back at the parking lot. We emerged up on the dirt road to hear the owl calling close by. Except when we walked on, it turned out there were two cars in the parking lot, rather than just ours. Outside of the second car was another birder, Stan, who seemed to recognize Kevin. Stan had been, naturally enough, trying to call in the owl himself.

Hiatus

My friend Linda arrived today. We’re going up to the mountains tomorrow morning to escape the fearful heat that seems to have arrived all of a sudden and to look for the Hammond’s flycatcher, a dull brown bird that looks almost exactly like the dusky flycatcher which shares a similar, but not identical, habitat. (Marcel said this evening as we ran into him outside Pluto’s to be very careful to note the primary projections.)

This means I’ll miss most of the Saturday soccer, but I’m hoping to catch at least a bit of Sunday’s…

[Postcript: we saw at least three individual Hammond’s and one Dusky at Yuba Pass. Also a pair of evening grosbeaks flycatching over the parking lot there. No black-backed woodpecker, alas, but a wonderful fleeting glimpse of mountain quail and a nest, with eggs, of a Townsend’s solitaire on Chapman Saddle Road…]

Parakeet Of Putah Creek

This morning when we were out in the yard with the cats we heard a strident ‘keeew’ that I thought was an oriole and Pica thought was a northern flicker. A few minutes later, I spotted the bird: it was a beautiful psittacid, with a long tail and a reddish bill. Pica saw the collar on him, and in Sibley we identified him as a Rose-ringed Parakeet. He flew off over the field towards the creek.

On the way home this afternoon, riding through the Arboretum, a couple of kilometers off from here, I heard a similar call, and had the briefest glimpse of a yellowish bird in flight. Maybe it was our parakeet.

Guano

I went over this afternoon next door to find out exactly when Dave needed his eight copies of the long-ago-finished-but-now-once-again-draft of the California Wildlife Action Plan.

Walter stopped me on the way in. What do you know about Sue Greenwald? Oh. She’s fey. (She’s also our next mayor.) Could I work with her? he asked. Possibly, I said. It depends. She’s been picking up fallen-out-of-the-nest baby herons at Shields Oak Grove in the Arboretum, he said. Oh. That’s illegal…

The heron rookery is sooner or later going to kill a bunch of heritage oak trees in the Arboretum. All kinds of people are concerned about this including our fey mayor-to-be. People seem to take sides.

You on your bike today? he said. Yes. Want to come with me and lay some guano traps? Sure. I have to go to the printer anyway. We biked in the heat of the day over to the Arboretum and laid out what essentially were diapers under oak trees…*

Sampling egret and heron poop for West Nile virus and avian flu is easy, non-invasive, and will perhaps give us some kind of additional input into the problem of ordinary citizens taking heron chicks home.

Even if they are future mayors.

*Just in case you weren’t sure: this is NOT in my job description.

Mallards In The Hay

I’ve been doing the breeding bird atlas survey now for a couple of months, trying to head out to our assigned 5 square kilometer block of farmland just south of here at least once a week. It is turning out to be challenging to come up with confirmations of breeding activity, and so far I’ve only confirmed two species. The first is the ubiquitous red-winged blackbird, where several weeks back I saw a female carrying nesting materials near a wheat field. The second confirmation came yesterday, and wasn’t a species I ordinarily associated with the landscape of wheat and alfalfa fields. Mallards. I scared up a female in an irrigation ditch with a dozen ducklings in tow.

The kites we saw at the outset still haven’t definitively nested. They worried me because I didn’t see them in my visits the prior two weeks. Yesterday they were back, together with an interloper, a third adult.

Packing Up

We went over to Bodega Bay yesterday and this morning where we helped Pica’s Mum pack up the house in anticipation of her great move to Maine. Pending the completion of the house sale, this will happen some time in the middle of June. This probably was my last visit to the place, so I did a few sketches in commemoration.