Sun Emerging

The fog burned off late in the morning, and it turned into a fine, sunny day, a good pottering Saturday. We cycled into campus in the morning, going to the open house for the new facility housing the UC Davis Herbarium. The herbarium in its old location had run out of space, and the collections were not temperature-controlled, leading to insect damage. The new location is in a brand-new science building on campus, with the collections stored in movable cabinets like they use for compactable shelving in libraries.

After lunch at Ali Baba’s, we went home and enjoyed the sunshine. The bees were out in force, visiting white violets and snapdragons. Pica worked on her calligraphy, and I did a couple of paintings: above is our car Nellie, with the levee to the north.

Hazard

The Western gray squirrel was hit by a car today.

It might not seem like much. This is often the fate of squirrels.

Yet—
riding home at lunchtime I saw him newly dead and almost wept.

Over 1500 birds were brought in as a result of an oil spill whose source they can still not pinpoint in Southern California. Over 70% of those birds—mostly Western grebes—have died. (For every one bird brought in to the rehab center, 10-100 die at sea.) My colleagues are near exhaustion, working 16 and even 20-hour days for the last two weeks. They are discouraged. I saw two of them today, up for a couple of days then back to the bird work.

And the almond tree outside our front door is getting ready to burst into blossom—if we get some good sunshine this weekend it will happen—but since it’s always so much earlier than all the others, it almost never gets pollinated. It’s like a bride, stood up at the altar.

I try not to get into a place of despair, so well described by Butuki, but it’s hard sometimes.

Cousin Hippopotamus

A post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Jean-Renaud Boisserie, and two French colleagues have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences clarifying the evolutionary relationships of the hippopotamus. This morphological study derives the hippopotamus from an extinct group of artiodactyls (the even-toed ungulates, such as cows, pigs and sheep) called the anthracotheres.

Their study indicates that the closest living relatives of the hippos are not pigs as has been commonly thought, but rather whales, as molecular evidence has also suggested. According to the study, cetaceans and hippos appear to have had a common ancestor 50 or 60 million years ago, and phylogenetically whales can be considered members of the artiodactyls.

Walking to Work on a Wednesday

It’s raining and I’m
walking to work
because it’s raining
and my helmet won’t fit over
the rose barrette Nicole made me
which goes with this turtleneck
(but not so much else)
and it’s not raining after all
and I see
my shadow—the merest hint—for the first time in days
and I notice the creek’s flow
is somehow reversed
but I can’t stop to see why
because as usual
I’m late for work

late, but not so late
as not to notice the red-wing’s concoree
or the kew of the flicker
or that the fat western gray squirrel
(not the kind the Brits accuse us
of having introduced there to wipe out
their red squirrels, I observe as I
see a starling overhead,
bane of bluebirds and purple martins
and just one of hundreds
of eurocontaminants here)
is getting ready to mate
but will probably
statistically get run over first
and I kick a lone
black walnut
to the left
and it leaves a trail
of walnut ink
which I’ve been writing in
all morning
and as I cross the road
my heart is singing
because how many people
get to walk to work
in the rain?

Dogblog

A photo essay on San Francisco’s patient canines.

Hill Walk in the Fog

We went for a short walk today up Mix Canyon, which is easily the closest very steep hill for all the hard-core cyclists. (We saw two on their way down.)

It’s also the best place near Davis to see California newts. We did see some, but alas none were alive—they cross the road in the rain in the dark and many get run over. It’s late to be looking for them, but I was hoping. Numenius says he’ll take me to Briones to see them there. Maybe we could have a Bay Area blogger meetup at Briones.

The buckeye seeds that dropped last fall were all germinating. At left is a sketch. We saw the blue sky briefly but mostly walked in the gloom with the scent of California bay piercing the cold, damp air.

The Chlorophyll Mandala

Our friend Karen recently gave Pica a copy of the new book The Earth Path, by Starhawk. Starhawk wrote this book in part because she’s seen that many members of Pagan communities, though professing to a nature-based spiritual practice, actually have had little contact with nature. Much of this book consists of exercises to help ground each of us in nature and place. I love this stuff, and there are many practices described therein that it would do me well to start carrying out. Such as finding a home base, a little nearby natural spot to return to time and time again to hang out and observe. I used to have several such spots, and with the creek nearby, I certainly should have one now.

I like Starhawk’s imagination. One of her ideas is take twenty-five or more friends, and make a mandala of the chlorophyll molecule, with people forming the atoms. As she says:

If we had a Gaian Goddess temple, the chlorophyll molecule would make a lovely stained-glass window or floor mosaic. But, in the spirit of not taking ourselves too seriously, here’s a story and directions for making a chlorophyll molecule—an enterprise that can be done with a minimum of twenty-five children or childlike adults.

I also think it’s also time for me to start observing the seasonal holidays of the Celtic year, on the solstices, equinoxes, and midpoints between. Why, Brigid, or Imbolc, is coming right up on 1 February. Along these lines, I’ll point interested listeners to a wonderful Paganish CD entitled The Almanac: Time and the Turning Wheel, featuring the fiddler Shira Kammen. The very Wiccan song “The Wheel of the Year” on the album is quite apropos. (It may be legally downloaded from the not-evil record distributor Magnatune on this page, as well as other tracks from the album.)

Under The Fog

I’ve been having fun with weather applets of late, having installed Meteorologist for Mac OS X on this laptop and KWeather on my computer at work. So I ought not complain about the weather here, since they tell me that in Norway, Maine (home of Pica’s sister) it is now 12 degrees F, and expected to drop to a low of -12 degrees F on Friday. Still, we’re into a chilly pattern here, in the low forties with 100% humidity. There’s a fog layer that’s sitting several hundred feet above the ground surface. Get above the fog, and it’s sunny and warm: in Placerville today, at 1800 feet elevation in the Sierra foothills, it was 69 degrees today. Here under the fog, it’s gloves and furry hat time for cycling.

How To Be A Birdwatcher

From the Guardian Unlimited’s The digested read (“The must-read books in just 400 words”) comes a summary of How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes.

Sample paragraph:

Birdwatching is not at all like trainspotting. That’s an activity for dull geeks. Birdwatching is for very exciting geeks who like clamping a pair of binoculars to their forehead for hours on end on the off chance a dodo will come back from the dead. Birds are alive. Now I know dogs are alive, too, but dogwatching isn’t much fun.

Snow on Salt Water

I just got in from a trip to Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to meet up with some birding friends from Massachusetts and also from here. We did go looking for the rare birds reported and saw them all—the redwing, the Baikal teal, the falcated duck, and the McKay’s bunting. We also took an overnight trip from Vancouver to Victoria to look at the resident skylarks. I’ve seen both the skylark and the redwing in Europe but never in North America; it was a fabulous experience to go on Canadian ferries and to navigate the various islands with conifers looming right down to the water.

Halfway across yesterday it started to snow. It became horizontal quickly. An inch or two is quite severe weather for Vancouver Island and we hunkered down in the inn we found called the Waddling Dog. Everyone-from the guy in the customs booth to people on the jetty we walked out for the McKay’s bunting to the helpful receptionist at the Waddling Dog-sounds like me. It was an extraordinary experience, like echoes of a former life; the inn reminded me of a restaurant in Uttoxeter where my father used to take me when he was visiting me in boarding school. I smelled the roast beef and yorkshire pudding right away…

Chris Corrigan lives across the sound on Bowen Island. I’m not able to see from the map whether the ferry takes him to the mainland or just over to Vancouver Island. I have enjoyed his descriptions of ferries and ferry trips and see now that it’s very much part of life in these parts.

As we left Sidney on the ferry this morning six marine foraging river otters cavorted around the boat. We saw Pacific loons and a rhinoceros auklet, pigeon guillemots and common murres, pelagic cormorants and mew gulls in among the glaucous-winged. It was this morning. I can still feel the cold air on my cheeks as we stood in the bow trying to turn driftwood into alcids. I’m many hundreds of miles away now, many degrees warmer.