Pica’s Recent Peregrinations

... as requested by Jenny.

Our Secret Kansas

Yesterday’s pendulous thunderclouds did produce a couple of tornados, it turns out. One of these touched down in the North Sacramento area shortly before two in the afternoon, causing light damage to an apartment complex. Here is a slideshow of some photographs of this tornado.

At the time, we were far away, comfortably ensconsed in the art store in Palo Alto. By the time we got home it was dry, but there were impressive thunderclouds to the west of us, including the storm we had just passed through. At left is a view of the Vaca Mountains from our house at about 5:15 in the afternoon; later on we’d see lightning flashes from those clouds.

(The title of this post is lifted from a chapter of Mike Davis’ book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster: it turns out tornados hit the Los Angeles area much more often than people realize.)

Harm

I have a memory of having buried a bird alive when I was small. My guess is that I believed it was dead, and I probably only put a handful of dirt on it, but it gave me nightmares years later.

My love of birds now is, I believe, not unconnected to this memory.

Much more recently I harmed a garter snake. I was clearing with an axe the rampant growth of California bay sproutings in the cabin we were staying in during the last big El Nio year.

The axe fell on the snake.

I have never howled so much as this, never felt so much a part of snakedom. I was wretched. I have respected and liked snakes ever since—I can’t claim to love them, not the way I love birds, but I have lost my fear of them. I love what they do to a landscape, curling around it.

We called this snake Speranza. Out of harm comes understanding.

Or so I hope…

Bay Area Historical Maps

The Earth Sciences and Map Library at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the USGS, has had a project to scan old topographic maps of the San Francisco Bay Area and make them available online. The collection dates back to 1895, and covers many of the editions of both the 15 minute and 7.5 minute quadrangles.

At left is a map of where I grew up as it appeared in 1895.

Twitchers’ Rehab

It was the perfect antidote to racing up and down the Lower Rio Grande Valley: spending an hour or so watching this owl sitting in a mature tamarisk and sketching it. Numenius rigged up the telescope so that, sitting on the ground, we had a good view to sketch from.

I was able to get about fifteen sketches of the bird done when Richard mentioned he wished he had stuff to sketch with. Here, take this, I said. I have my Canson paper. (This was Richard’s first sketch of a live animal and it was very good—we think he should do more of it.)

So I went back to the car for the paper and then worked on this drawing, which I could never have done if I hadn’t done the warm-up sketches. I think it must be like Lorianne’s 113 early-morning bows or something. The result, in any case, was purely meditative.

Day of the Long-eared Owls

Today we headed south with Sami and Richard to Mercey Hot Springs in Little Panoche Valley to look at long-eared owls, a species neither Pica nor myself have seen. For the past several years, this resort has been the site of a winter roost of these birds, who in daytime hours perch halfway up the interiors of the tamarisk and pine trees.

The birds couldn’t have been more cooperative. The second one we saw was posed nicely for a sketch, so I went back to the car and got my drawing materials and our scope.

After one full sketch and several details of this bird, I went up the hill to do a quick painting of the Panoche Hills on this beautiful partly cloudy day.

Almond Blossoms—Retry

After last night’s hijacking of my sprig of blossoms, I went out and got another. Here’s a drawing done on one of my new sheets of Canson Mi-Teintes. I realize using colored pencils on this paper can’t quite work the same way, so I think next time I’ll do the entire drawing in white tempera before I start adding color.

These blossoms smell intensely like honey. It’s a wonderful thing to have them out your back door. (Except in our case it’s our front door, but we’re at the back of the other house.)

On Again, Off Again

Readers of Feathers of Hope will notice that Numenius and I take turns posting. This works for us: daily posts would seem like an ordeal, but it’s possible to write or draw something for posting every other day, which may or may not have anything to do with what one of us posted the day before.

So Numenius posted three consecutive days, and people are wondering where I was.

It has to do with birds, and here’s a very partial list:

Plain chachalaca
Crimson-collared grosbeak
Elegant trogon
Golden-crowned warbler
Groove-billed ani
Black-throated green warbler
White-tipped dove
Cactus wren
Muscovy duck
Great-tailed grackle
Blue bunting
Roadside hawk
Rose-throated becard…

Portage

Picture a highway bridge over a small river in central Wisconsin. The land is flat, mostly open, marshy in bits; on one side up a slope is an old farmhouse. The only clue to anything unusual about the vicinity is that it has perhaps more than its fair share of historical markers. Two of these commemorate Fort Winnebago, formerly on the site of the farmhouse. The second one is a small monument in red granite, erected around 1925 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The wording on the copper plaques is terse; on one side there is a list of officers who served at the fort. To the modern viewer, all the names on the plaque are likely to be unfamiliar except for one, a Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.

So began the environmental historian William Cronon last night in a talk he gave in the Alumni Center on campus. He was reading from the first chapter of a book he has been working on for ten years, and is likely to be published in three, a local history of a town named Portage. “This is a place with ghosts”, he said. Three of these ghosts are important figures in American environmental history who spent formative years near the spot: Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.

And once upon a time the spot was a major transportation nexus. Due to an accident of physical geography, the Fox River, over which the bridge passes, here lies only 1.28 miles from the Wisconsin River. The Fox drains into the Great Lakes and hence is connected to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Wisconsin drains into the Mississippi and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. In the era when canoes reigned, when waterways were the chief means of transportation into the interior, this portage spot, at the border of two great watersheds, was key.

There are many stories to be told about this place. But that is so about all places. The process of placemaking, Cronon contends, is the process of storytelling.

Signs of Spring

In honor of the holiday of Brigid, celebrating awakening from winter’s deep, yesterday after work I went to the cooperatively-run Experimental Garden on campus to find and sketch a newly-blooming flower. I ended up drawing this lavender. While sitting in the garden, I heard a familiar metallic ping—ping—ping. Baseball practice! The UCD baseball field is nearby, and the baseball team was practicing in their batting cages. Their season begins next Tuesday. Signs of spring indeed—the weather is beautiful as well.