Long Way Off

Yesterday the Huygens space probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. The image it took of the surface is one of the most tantalizing things I’ve seen. The probe was not intended to survive long on the surface and I don’t think any more images from the surface are forthcoming. So this narrow view of a field of flat rocks is the farthest close-up surface look of a celestial body we will have for some time.

Phylogenetic Rambles

At my meeting in Baltimore I learned about a wonderful online encyclopedia, aimed largely at college students, about animal diversity. This is the Animal Diversity Web, which was developed by the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. The species accounts, of which there are several thousand at the site, are written by students, and the descriptions of higher-level taxa are written by professional biologists.

Here is the species account of one of our favorite critters, the turkey vulture.

Not in Kansas Anymore Dept.

So yesterday I was just minding my business on my way to the bathroom at work which is in another building the one that’s connected to the lab and I’m thinking how nice it is that the sun’s finally shining after all this rain and it’s a little chilly but not bad really and I open the lab door and take the first left into the women’s room and what’s in there but two women with samples all over the floor I mean not just a few but ALL OVER looking frantically for a pair of Island Fox lung specimens so I tiptoe over their cooler and all the plastic sample bags after asking permission and go into the single stall and think how mundane the women’s room used to be in Mrak Hall where people would gather and talk about what TV shows they saw last night or what they were cooking for dinner and I’ll tell you what it wasn’t fox lungs.

Sheets of Clouds

Yesterday I flew to Baltimore for a meeting. There wasn’t much to look at out the window though; it seemed like there was a solid sheet of clouds stretching from the Four Corners states all the way to Maryland. The neatest bit cloudwise however flying at 41,000 feet above the thick layer of altostratus, with blue sky all around us, but then a thin layer of cirrus clouds just above us. So we were above the clouds, but not quite completely.

Cats & Dogs

While I was having dinner this evening with a friend at Thai Nakorn it started pouring. California has been getting lots of rain—dangerous amounts in Southern California.

Numenius has gone to Baltimore for a meeting about the semantic web, so I’m watching cats and rain.

Flight of Cranes

There was a break in the rain this morning and we took the cats outside for a sniff around. It’s a comical sight, each of us with a cat on a tether. Once there they have very different ideas about what constitutes outside activities, but at length Diego knew he was done.

I was taking him inside when I heard the cranes.

Sandhill cranes winter in the Central Valley but we rarely see or hear them just here; there are thousands about twenty miles south of us, throughout the delta where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet. Having them fly over your house feels like a visitation, a blessing beyond blessings. There were over twenty-five, flying in a loose V.

To approximate the sound made by these birds, round your mouth as though you’re saying “ooooh,” and while your mouth is thus rounded roll an r, Spanish-style. It’s an eerie sound, and the standard term “bugling” doesn’t really capture it for me. It sounds like something muffled in the fog, which of course the birds often are, as are all creatures that spend any time here in the winter.

If this sound had a color it would be a rich magenta edging to gray…

Indoors Drying Day

We’ve had 0.8” of rain in the past day, with a lot more expected this weekend. Not a day for hanging laundry outside—our wooden clothes rack is comfortably ensconsed in our warm bedroom.

River High

Some time between when I went to work and when Pica came home for lunch, Putah Creek burst its banks by the Old Davis Road bridge, starting to flood the field to the southeast. There’s been lots of rain lately.

I found this page with graphs of the last 24 hours of flow of Putah Creek. The peak occurred about 3 AM this morning, measured at a station about 18 miles to the west. This site, run by the California Department of Water Resources, gives current river conditions for the major streams in California.

Saunter With Ducks

The new year always enters with a bit of lurch. I’m happy to see the solstice, can do without Christmas, but after two weeks off I don’t really want to think about obligations, let alone resolutions, for January and beyond. There is of course one remedy for this: go for a walk. So Pica and I trooped off to the Arboretum for a saunter.

As we returned toward our starting point a stern-looking woman wearing a blue coat and hood bicycled towards and past us. A few paces beyond, a gaggle of mallards swarmed around like ants around the remains of an ice cream cone. Yes, this was
Guerrilla Girl. We wondered what proportion of the Arboretum duck overpopulation problem she was directly responsible for. New year or not, places have their recurrent patterns.

Out of Touch

Not only do I feel out of touch with the landscape in which I now find myself, I feel a little cut off from the world, the world that is obsessing over TV images of tragedy in the Indian Ocean. I obsess a little myself, watching hourly death figures increase on the BBC website, but I’m out of my element here, and we don’t discuss things in quite the same way in front of impressionable children. All my sister’s friends have kids, and they all speak in code, in a move to protect their young from the unspeakable.

But you can’t always do that, as these images, precisely, are showing.

Tomorrow we’re heading south to Boston, a place in which I find myself much more at home. From there I head west again. Dislocating oneself is a useful exercise every once in a while, but I’m hankering for my creek and the oaks I know. Even though it seems we’ve had a lot of water in our neck of the woods too.