Slowly Edging Back Into California

I’ve been slowly uploading some of the sketches I did while in Boston (and on the way there). This may take a little while but there are about six of them here. [Postcript, Thursday May 12: a few more are now loaded, including one of the curious and animated discussion taking place across the courtyard which qB snuck over to listen in on…]

I met my father-in-law for lunch yesterday in Berkeley on the way home. We talked about some wonderful things, including the excellent series on race over at Abdul-Walid of Acerbia. Not content to call it quits on my trip, I continued sketching all the way home on the train.

As someone who tending not to process much but dash about from experience to experience, I’m rather savoring everything that happened over the last week. I’m also fading. I may add to this post in the morning.

Heads-up to Davisites, though: David Neiwert of Orcinus will be speaking in our town about the recent hate crimes here (wot? Davis? NEVER!) on Thursday evening.

Soggy Days

Yesterday was extraordinary, spending time with such congenial people in such congenial places (S&S deli, Gardner museum, Middle East restaurant). I will write more about this when I get back to Davis.

Today I went with my friend Linda to Plum Island by way of Newburyport (blue grosbeak, Nashville warbler), Ipswich (blue heron, which we didn’t see), Rowley (wilson’s phalarope, ditto), and lots of wind and rain.

I’ll be heading out tomorrow to California. I have a lot of sketches to complete on the plane. More then.

Whole Earth Days

The Whole Earth Festival is back on campus this weekend for the 35th year.

Boston

Mount Auburn. The warblers. The stones. The sketchbook. The tower. The children. The sister. The mother. The zoo. The art store. The frigate. The dinner. Mount Auburn. The birders. The editor. The T. The Copley. The library. The ivory-bills. The T. The Coop. The cartridges. The surprise. The friend. The nap. The blogger. The buddhists. The chanting. The crumpling. The saag. The bus.

The bed.

That Was Fast

There’s already a book out on the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. It is entitled The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and it’s by Tim Gallagher, the editor of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s magazine Living Bird who was one of the observers of the woodpecker in the Arkansas swamp a year ago February. Coordinating the release of the news of the rediscovery must have been an interesting feat.

Spring Migration

I’m heading east. In a few hours I will take a train over the Creek Running North, get on a different train that goes under the San Francisco Bay to the airport, not quite take off over (but still see) where naming is knowing and on the other side where words are distilled, fly over where Andi Ditched the Raft just yesterday, over the Middle West, over where Cassandra, Lorianne, Rachel, Leslee and Paula pore over their keyboards just as I’m doing now.

The last time I was in Boston during spring migration was in 1996; I have probably forgotten most of the songs (here in California you learn to tell warblers apart by their call notes, not their songs, since here in the Central Valley they mostly aren’t singing much before they get on territory). I have done no preparation for this avalanche of color and song that awaits me. I hope also to see a few migrants other than birds. Blogging opportunities will be sporadic but Numenius will be here…

Airport Saunter

UC Davis is the only University of California campus with its own airport. It is in West Campus, an area mostly devoted to agricultural research, with many fields and orchards. Usually the airport is off-limits to the general public, but today was its third annual open house. We missed the previous open houses, but we were able to make today’s, so we had a good wander among the planes, the old cars, and ancient bicycles (there was even a 19th-century velocipede on display).

My favorite plane was this Grob G109 motorglider, which has an impossible-to-sketch huge wingspan, not to mention a 30:1 glide ratio.

Birdathon

Today was the Yolo Audubon spring fundraiser, when teams go out and try and see as many species of birds as possible in a 24-hour period, having persuaded family, friends and mostly coworkers whose kids’ Girl Scout cookies we dutifully bought to sponsor them per bird.

I organized a team to do the birdathon today but with a twist: we’d do the entire thing by bike.

It was a beautiful day, calm just before a front comes in. The pockets of migrants were few and far between, but we managed to come up with 76 species. After lunch there were only two of us left and we headed along the levee to the west of the Yolo Bypass. This is not relaxing riding—the gravel on the levees is uneven and difficult, but we discovered that it’s possible to go from our house all the way to the Bypass avoiding asphalt altogether. (That’s about 15 miles round trip.) After a barn owl in the Tremont cemetery I was ready for a nap. (We started out going in the other direction.)

Here’s our bird list for today, which I type before we go in to the compilation (I am VERY tired and will not likely be up for much of anything after we get home). Seen or heard but not countable: peacock and spectacled rubber ducky:

pied-billed grebe
American white pelican
American bittern (!!)
great blue heron
great egret
snowy egret
cattle egret
green-backed heron
black-crowned night heron
white-faced ibis
Canada goose
wood duck
mallard
cinnamon teal
turkey vulture
white-tailed kite
northern harrier
red-shouldered hawk
Swainson’s hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
ring-necked pheasant
common moorhen
American coot
killdeer
ring-billed gull
rock pigeon
mourning dove
barn owl
white-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
downy woodpecker
Pacific-slope flycatcher
black phoebe
ash-throated flycatcher
western kingbird
barn swallow
tree swallow
northern rough-winged swallow
cliff swallow
western scrub-jay
yellow-billed magpie
American crow
bushtit
house wren
marsh wren
western bluebird
Swainson’s thrush
American robin
northern mockingbird
American pipit
cedar waxwing
European starling
warbling vireo
orange-crowned warbler
yellow warbler
black-throated gray warbler
Townsend’s warbler
common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
western tanager
black-headed grosbeak
California towhee
song sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
dark-eyed junco (Oregon)
red-winged blackbird
western meadowlark
brown-headed cowbird
Bullock’s oriole
house finch
American goldfinch
house sparrow

Ivory-billed Hope

Everyone I know, pretty much, sent me notice today of the announcement of the first sightings of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the United States since 1944.

Thank you. All of you. Each time I relived it. I read a lot today about the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Nature Conservancy and efforts to hear the bird but the thing that got me the most was that two ornithologists traveling on the water with Arkansas naturalist Gene Sparling who had seen the bird eariler, and who cried out in unison “ivory billed!” as the huge woodpecker flew out in front of their boat, and who then set about making independent sketches (essential in the absence of any photographs), frantically adding notes till they could do no more, responded by sobbing and silence.

The world’s a mess. All the work I see being done around me every day to study, preserve, explain the natural world seems like a drop in the ocean, given the devastation we are wreaking on the planet. Yet today, all of it—ALL of it—is given new hope.

The paper by Fitzpatrick et al. published today in Science can be downloaded here. The supplementary materials contain the two sketches.

Spring Ripenings

This year the field outside our house is planted in wheat, as are many of the local fields. It’s still quite green, but the wheat heads are fully grown. Closer in to the house, the stone fruits are developing. The plums on the tree here are turning from green to wine-colored.