Soundscape

Karen of Not Native Fruit has come up with ten sounds from her immediate surroundings.

Here are some from here, at this time of year:

1) Crickets. Fewer than other years, because they’ve disced the field recently. At least two species, as I’m hearing them now.

2) A train across the field: a freight, a commuter, a first-class freight. They all sound different, have different whistles.

3) Coyotes howling, almost always at the train, always at night.

4) The sound of lightly pouring water. This is the cats’ drinking fountain.

5) The screech of a barn owl, eerie, ghoulish. It makes my heart sing every time, though.

6) The clatter of a trailer-truck laden with tomatoes as it gears down to get over the tiny bridge over the creek.

7) The snuffling of a raccoon outside. He’s taken to sitting in the walnut tree.

8) The chatter of cyclists as they barrel down from the bridge, faster than the truck went up. (Both these sounds make the cats growl, or at least look.)

9) The sound of the landlord lovingly chastising his dogs.

10) The hum of the fridge, omnipresent, unoticeable till it stops.

Lunchtime

Riding home at lunch, which is absurd since it’s really only a seven minute walk, doesn’t give me time for much musing or anything else; occasionally a three-line poem will flash into my head and the key then is to make sure I remember it when I get to where I’m going.

On Friday, though, I rode into campus. It was very hot. The smell of the California bay trees mixed with warm pine needles. It’s so intoxicating I almost forget where I’m going and keep on the bike path that will give me more of this.

A juvenile ground squirrel darts in front of me, tail high in a warning banner. The horses in the field are clustered in the shade of the lone cottonwood. The wild grapes are opulent lime green this year. Four plum tomatoes, spilled from a truck that was taking the corner too fast, lie in the bike path like poison easter-eggs. The slow freight train creaks over the tracks, in less of a hurry than I. The smell of trains—wood and oil and smoke and timber and—what—iron? rust?—clatters southwest.

I see fewer magpies now.

Refuge By The Sea

I’ve been down at a conference at Asilomar near Monterey the past couple of days. It’s been blessedly foggy here, following the days of 100 degree heat in Davis. Asilomar is a famous lovely conference site, started almost a hundred years ago amidst a native Monterey pine forest just upslope from sand dunes, a white sandy beach, and the Pacific Ocean. In terms of wildlife, I’ve seen a fawn outside my room window, a young deer with antlers just outside the dining hall, Heermann’s gulls on the beach, acorn woodpeckers, and raccoons. They say a there’s a local mountain lion with Asilomar on his beat as well. The big meeting room in which I’m writing this was built in 1915, designed by Bay Area architect Julia Morgan and is an exemplar of Arts and Crafts style, complete with lettering in versals on the horizontal beams halfway up to the ceiling.

Very nice. Let’s not forget my favorite sound here—the bell rung from the top of the social hall announcing meal times!

Plenitude

Long Road Out of the Cabinets

There is a huge amount of information in the world’s natural history museums that is languishing in drawers and cabinets which are rarely seen. Slowly some of this material is being made accessible via the Web, but it’s a long haul, especially with current funding priorities. Here is a story about the hopes of the Florida Museum of Natural History to create a national butterfly database out of their immense collection of some 3.5 million specimens.

Charles Darwin Has A Posse

The author of this sticker concedes that as an effort to increase awareness of science and reason it is probably completely futile, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try.

For those of you who have no idea what the text is referring to, see here.

Catching Up

Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.

Morning Balloons

On calm clear mornings here we sometimes see hot air balloons off to the west floating above the Central Valley floor. Usually these are 10 or 20 miles off, but yesterday three were fairly close. The one at left was landing in fields about a mile south of our house. The peak in the distance is Mount Diablo.

Luring Them In With WiFi

I like the following idea for encouraging people to use mass transit: the East Bay bus system, AC Transit, is planning to equip about half their transbay fleet with free wireless. So bring your laptop on the bus to San Francisco starting this fall. This project is being pushed by the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency with funding coming from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

(From Beast Blog.)

Summertime Bales

The wheat in the field outside our house was harvested a week ago Saturday, and a couple of days ago they went through and made straw bales out of the stubble. It’s a very pleasing thing, a field full of straw bales. Makes you want to build a house from them.