Mountain Lion Week

There have been three events in Davis this week focusing on Puma concolor, the large cat of North America. It’s California’s last large predator, the wolf and grizzly having been extirpated.

Walter Boyce of the Wildlife Health Center gave a talk on Tuesday to a general audience; there was a showing of Counting Sheep (an independent film about bighorn sheep and mountain lions) last night where he answered questions at the end, and then a summit meeting today that involved agency folks, scientists, non-profits, and a host of other interested parties.

I’m quite tired—I took notes for the duration of this five-hour meeting—so I will go to bed and hope to dream about this beautiful animal that is holding its own in the state (for now).

Eyas

— an unfledged or nestling hawk (WordNet)

All four of Gracie’s eggs have hatched! She is the peregrine falcon nesting on top of the PG & E building that we have been watching excitedly through the webcam set up by the good folks at the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group. The chicks are difficult to see in the webcam since the adults brood them almost constantly to keep them warm, but there are pictures of them here in the nest diary.

Grokking Grids

Thumbnails; sketches; writing; paintings: the grids we devised yesterday got a workout today. We studied the different gestures made by leaves, branches, treetrunks; the geometric space of irises; the greens in a redwood grove and how they change in the dapple light.

At left is the last exercise we worked on this afternoon in the South African section of the Arboretum: zoom in, zoom out then pick a sketch and work it up a little more.

My mind is racing with possibility. I am ENTHUSIASTIC. (See Blaugustine on this topic for April 8.)

Chart of Stones

For those of you with an interest in barrows, henges, stone circles, and ancient trackways, or who, like Terry Pratchett, want to upgrade to a 33-megalith processor, there is now an interactive map of the megaliths of Europe at the Megalithic Portal.

Green Roofs

My officemate, continuing his jet-setting life, was up at Oregon State last week, and on the way back he stopped off at Powell’s in Portland — lucky him! He brought back a spectacularly designed new book entitled Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction. This book illustrates some forty case studies of green roof architecture around the world.

For a primer on green roof architecture see Greenroofs 101.

Cache Creek Outing

We got a late invitation from our landlord la to go for a hike today along a ridge over Bear Creek and Cache Creek in the upper northwest corner of Yolo County, crossing over into Colusa County. It was predicted to be a beautiful day so we said yes, the first time we’ve accepted one of his invitations like this. (We agree on almost no political, social, or environmental issues at all, though we could all agree that the poor Pope was probably best off being allowed to go quietly, no heroics.)

This didn’t leave much in the way of conversation topics over 3 hours of driving or 5.5 miles of hiking, but we seemed to manage. We saw five tule elk; a prairie falcon (possibly two, though it might have been the same bird); a perfectly splendid wildflower assortment including larkspur that was intoxicating in its purpleness, much yellow and white, and of course the green bursting through blue oaks and the hillsides.

I’m sore from this, being well out of shape for this kind of thing, with my usual crop of three or so blisters, so I rounded out my day by finishing the account of the Red Sox 2004 season, in plenty of time for Opening Day tomorrow.

Painted Ladies On The Move

We’re in the midst of a massive migration of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui). My officemate alerted me to this late this morning, and when I went over to the Memorial Union for my lunch there were dozens passing by each second, moving determinedly northwest at a good clip — 15 MPH perhaps? — against a headwind. Pica went home for lunch and saw thousands while she was crossing the bridge, swirling around traffic like a tornado. (Not all of them made it across, and Pica retrieved a fallen one for me to sketch.)

The butterflies are in the middle of a three-day trek from the desert by the Mexican border to the Central Valley and the foothills of the Coast Ranges. The impressive turnout this year is probably due to the heavy rains and subsequent plant growth in the desert this past winter.

March Farmers’ Market

This morning I went to the Davis Farmers’ Market to have a go at sketching the crowd. In a week-and-a-half the Wednesday evening Picnic-in-the-Park starts up, but for now the farmers’ market is only on Saturday mornings. But Saturday brings the usual medley of kettle corn, fiddlers, strawberries, and rescue Labrador retrievers — a delightful stroll.

Downshifting Amid Butterflies

While DocRoc was off up the mountain to do Shakespeare with a bunch of brainy teenagers of different ages, I headed south to Anza Borrego to meet up with a friend from Boston and do some botanizing.

This friend is my best birding buddy, and we’re definitely out of our element looking at things that don’t fly off at the slightest provocation. Before I got to the visitor center she had found a black-tailed gnatcatcher; I pulled the car in under the nest of an incubating Costa’s hummingbird. But we were there to look at flowers, so we armed ourselves with lists, maps, directions, and a bag of Fritos.

North of Borrego Springs was a carpet of yellow stretching all the way up the canyon. This was desert sunflowers, primarily, interspersed with magenta sand verbena and white evening primroses. There were thousands and THOUSANDS of butterflies: painted ladies, they were called, and they were wafting through the morning while the huge caterpillars of some striped moth methodically chomped through primrose petals.

We headed south on our way to ocotillos and Yaqui Wells, but stopped as the colors shifted abruptly from yellow to white. What you do is you get out of the car and see the white flower (desert chicory, in this case). Then next to it you notice another large plant with a white flower which you hadn’t seen from the car (Fremont’s pincushion), but below that is one you couldn’t possibly have seen from the road, and underneath that is a diminutive white five-pointed flower (4mm diameter) I couldn’t find in any of the materials we had and will have to look it up in Jepson, scary though that prospect is.

It’s like Russian dolls. This just isn’t what happens when you bird.

We found our ocotillos. We also found blooming barrel cactus, blooming smoketree, blooming millions of DYA’s (damn yellow asters). And Lawrence’s goldfinches, singing, on territory, busily getting on with spring before summer hits and everything dies out.

I’ll post photos of some of these when I get back to Davis…

Creek Overfloweth

We had 1.05 inches of rain overnight, and sometime mid-morning the creek burst its banks on the stretch near where we live, in particular flooding the field (alas since last season covered with perennial pepperweed) southeast of the bridge up to the levee. Word has it that the Glory Hole is spilling over as well.