Endings and Beginnings

Teju Cole comes offline tomorrow, having lasted just the month of January. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, don’t wait a minute longer. Lagos is your destination. You will rarely see better writing than this.

Meanwhile, the white-tailed kites outside my office have built a nest in the tall pine just above the railway track. The female is incubating by now, I think. It doesn’t stop the male from mating with her, though. He “kip, kip, kips” about with his wings in a steep dihedral, almost unable to stay airborne—the merest hover. They are some of the most beautiful birds on the planet. I’ll try and sketch some of this.

Coyote Corridor

We went over to REI in Sacramento today to hunt for a pair of hiking boots for Pica that don’t give her blisters. We brought our bikes along and afterwards went for a little ride along the American River Parkway. On the parkway there is a bike trail that runs along the river about 32 miles one way from Sacramento up to Folsom. We’ve been quite remiss in never having ridden on it the almost seven years we’ve been up in Davis. Conveniently, REI offers easy access to the parkway so we rode from its parking lot up along the trail up to Cal State Sacramento and back. Just when we were returning and on the other side of the levee from REI, we heard, perhaps howling at a train passing by, two coyotes! This sort of thing makes one a believer in wildlife corridors.

Monday, Monday

The first almond blossom of
the first tree that blossoms here:
doomed to sterility

The white of egrets
fussing in receding floodwaters
bright white on mud

The Canada geese
watching the egrets
cryptic on cryptic

The mallards
ignoring them all
sexsexsexsexsex

The blue, blue sky
no hint of clouds
with this north wind

I ride into it.
The north wind.
The day.

Ivory-Billed Tale

We just got from the presentation at this month’s meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society. John Trochet, a Sacramento area birder and a meticulous field surveyor, gave a riveting account of how he came to see the recently rediscovered Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. He has been a long-time explorer of the swamps of the Southeast and an occasional ivory-billed searcher. Last April, he went on his own little expedition into the Arkansas swamps with another ivory-billed seeker. After running into the official Cornell Lab and Nature Conservancy search teams and dancing around the question of what they were both doing in the woods, they were invited to the private home of one of the researchers, made to sign non-disclosure agreements (this was before the public announcement of the resighting), and were told the whole tale. Two days later, John and his two companions, now coordinating with the Cornell/TNC folks, had the great good fortune to get a three-second glimpse of an ivory-billed, not far from where they put in with the canoe that day.

Davis Walkabout

There’s a story in the Davis Enterprise today about Robert Faber, a 79-year old Davis man who has walked every street, land, and path in town. He started this project after a quadruple bypass surgery in 2001, and has logged about 4000 miles total. “An animal lover, he is regularly greeted by the dogs and cats of Davis. Many cats recognize him, running from half a block away to greet him.”

Off To The Hindu Kush

I am now on a reading-about-Central Asia kick, and have just finished Eric Newby’s account of misadventures in Nuristan, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. It all started with reading Peter Hopkirk’s book The Great Game. Next I have to figure out just what Alexander the Great was doing in those parts, but not before finishing Hogfather! (UP GOUGER! UP ROOTER! UP TUSKER! UP SNOUTER!).

Floods

When we got up this morning water was sloshing at the back door with the rain still pouring, howling gales. The field was a lake. This house is pretty watertight but there were drips near the door… I got a yoghurt container under three of them and sat and waited. We had both electricity and a phone line. In these circumstances they’re normally both out.

I’ve been doing well with losing weight and have begun to increase the amount of activity I’m doing to help in this and general health. So when the rain stopped and the sun came out I decided to go out for a bike ride. South… maybe to the church on Tremont, maybe around through South Davis.

A six-inch flood about a half-mile down the road turned me north. The creek had overflowed all the way to the levees, swirling eddies of blood-red water. I headed to West Campus and saw flooding everywhere: in the cow pasture, in the sheep field… and of course the creek wherever I went by it. Heading north up Olive Drive, pinging hundreds of unripe olives that had been blown down in the night, I once again got stopped by a torrent of water going across the road from west to east.

I’ve never lived by a really BIG river. It must be a terrifying thing when something like the Mississippi bursts its banks…

We will not be going to Berkeley tomorrow. I-80 was closed most of today between Vacaville and Fairfield, and we didn’t hear a train all morning. Hunkering seems called for.

Christmas Bird Count + 2.35 Inches of Rain = Soggy People

You sort of knew it was going to be one of those kinds of days when the only conceivable footwear was your Bean Boots that had been outside all summer collecting whatever was out there (including, it turned out, a black widow spider I thought was dead but resurrected itself in the sink). The tarps over Johnny’s beekeeping stuff were swirling wildly in the gales. Oh well. At least we didn’t have owling duty. (The folks who did got there at 3 am with howling gales, horizontal rain, and no owls.)

Our portion of the count was actually fairly easy: count all the birds along Putah Creek Road from the diversion dam to Winters, a distance of only about three miles. It was fine when we were walking. When we stopped we all got frozen. One of the walkie-talkies shorted out and started buzzing and carrying on in Numenius’ backpack. We counted surprisingly high numbers of birds considering the weather and the fact that most of the walnut groves were lakes by the end of our stint, including a fox sparrow and a red-breasted sapsucker, as well as a merlin later in the day.

We ended our count at the Putah Creek Cafe, dripping puddles of water all over the floor and removing wallets, binoculars, gloves, and anything else we could wring out or attempt to wring out…

Sketchcrawl Sunday

We had good weather today for our first group SketchCrawl—it wasn’t as sunny as yesterday, but no threat of rain. Alas, the day started out with a bit of a calamity. Poor Diego fell out of a tree he had just bounded up during his morning walk! He hurt his rear leg, not very seriously though. (Happily, Pica’s vet coworker Deana very kindly stopped by and checked him out before she settled into a day of office work just up the road from us.) But he doesn’t get to go outside for a little while.

While I was home waiting for Deana, Pica met the sketchcrawlers, about 10 in total, at Mishka’s Café in town and sketched there for a while. She returned home, and after we concluded Diego would be fine we headed out and met up with the sketchcrawlers in the Arboretum. A few had already dispersed, and we ended strolling through campus with just two others, Mike who had come up from Walnut Creek, and Emma who had organized this Davis event.

I did about a dozen sketches total, ranging from one of the egghead sculptures to the impossible angles of the Death Star. Above is a sketch of an acacia in the Arboretum, as well as a bridge over the Arboretum waterway.

Thanks to Emma for organizing this—it was great fun and I’m glad the sketchcrawls are turning into something of a bimonthly event!

Birding and a Potluck

Richard of A Brit Abroad is coming to the end of his two-year postdoc here at UC Davis, and decided to organize a birding trip followed by a potluck at his house. He is unquestionably the person who has seen most birds in Yolo County in the space of two years without knowing how to drive a car, and managed to hit 250 such species this morning with an Eastern Phoebe we all saw along Putah Creek. (Later in the day he finally caught up with a swamp sparrow, but by that point we had come home to make couscous for the potluck.)

Richard then shared some slides of birds he’d seen this year, which ran like some kind of advertisement for the airline industry: UK to Davis to British Columbia to Texas to Australia to Ontario to UK to Oregon to Arizona, etc. (I’m sure I have these in the wrong order but you get the idea.)

He’s been wonderful to have around these past two years. The first bird we shared was the scissor-tailed flycatcher, seen within a week or two of his arrival in Davis; the commotion around that bird slotted him straight into the birding zeitgeist here and it’s going to be tough when he finally heads off to Paris later this month…