The Not-Santa-Annas

The Not-Santa-Annas

Hot, dusty winds out of the north is what we had all night and morning, making everyone irritable and crotchety. The cats’ fur is on end; the horses in the paddock across from me at work swish at flies with their tails till they’re blue in the face. If I brush my hair I look like Bozo the clown gone gray and wild.

Bad chi, this is, flying around in an unreasonable way.

We’re supposed to get a hugely hot weekend. I read about people sitting in dripping tents and almost weep with longing.

Cat-mandu

Yesterday we met Richard for a summer picnic dinner (the veggie combo from Kathmandu Kitchen) at the Davis Farmers Market Picnic in the Park. He updated us on all his numerous bird sightings, and I did some sketching of the crowd. At right is a drawing of the not-so-good Irish band that was playing then.

Another cat update: this morning we trapped the orange cat that was in the vicinity of Carlos and Blake when we trapped those two kittens last week. The cat turned out to be male—not the kittens’ mother—and Pica took him in to the vet today to be neutered. Debbie, who’s the goddess of Davis homeless cats (she runs the adoption service Feline Lifeline), saw him at the vet and thinks he’s potentially tameable enough to be adoptable. We don’t have the setup to work with him inside, so our plan is to release him outside and try to befriend him with food. He tested negative for FeLV, and they think he’s about 11 months old. Right now he’s the exclusive occupant of our bathroom as he recovers from his surgery overnight.

Bears Prefer Microbrews

From Richard Hall comes a story giving evidence towards the general superiority of microbrews over mass-market beer.

Kitten update: We took Carlos and Blake, the two feral kittens we caught yesterday, to the vet today where they were neutered and both tested negative for FeLV. A co-worker of Pica’s is graciously fostering them temporarily over the weekend.

Da Capo

Where I sit, now, is pretty much where I always sit when I set out to write a blog entry. It’s at a 12” iBook on a white tile counter (cluttered with papers) that separates the kitchen from the living room, and it faces the kitchen window. Through this window I can see an English walnut tree, in full leaf with the fruits coming in, and a wall of corn. The cornfield is now about 11 feet tall. This is the first year they’ve planted corn in this field; before now it’s all been tomatoes, squashes, maybe sorghum that reached a maximum height of about four feet.

I’ve never lived in a jungle but I’m starting to get a sense of green impenetrability, and I don’t relish it all that much. I didn’t before Sunday.

Then, on Sunday:

A light fawn kitten emerged from the cornfield.

There’s only one word for this, really: shit.

Last night we watched as this kitten AND a more orange sibling emerged to eat the food we left out for what we thought was ONE kitten, which we thought we had a chance to catch. We’ve even bought a humane trap to do this. With two, it’s a lot harder.

What do we do? We have one bathroom which, when it’s not being used as a kitten nursery, we tend to use. We have two kittens, now permanently indoors, that have been de-wormed, tested for FHIV and feline leukemia, neutered, treated for intestinal parasites, vaccinated, and are healthy; these two new kittens are so much like them in every way but size I can’t help but think they’re siblings who got left out of our grand roundup back in May and are stunted from a lot less to eat. But for sure they have worms, coccidia, respiratory stuff, the works, most of it contagious and all of it unpleasant. And they’re not sterilised—my biggest priority. We cannot stretch this household further. Quite apart from the fact that if they really are four months old, they’re almost certainly too old to be tamed.

I wish I had the meditation gene.

I guess this feels like enough of a rerun to qualify for the Ecotone Wiki’s RePlace.

Bear Story

One final story from our camping trip. The last two nights we spent on the west side of the Sierra crest. When we arrived at Devils Postpile the first of these nights, we saw that there were hefty bear lockers at each campsite, with elaborate latches you had to stick your hand in to open. Large instructions said to place all food within the locker, the definition of food being expanded to include “anything with a scent” (toiletries, first aid kits, etc. all qualified). The zealous park ranger came around to every camper and repeated the instructions. He explained that the bears had been visiting the Minaret Falls campground (run by the Forest Service) a couple of miles up the canyon, including breaking into one car, but so far there had been no problem at Devils Postpile. We took the instructions seriously, and even took advantage of the substantial size of the bear locker to stow much of our gear in there and try the successful experiment of sleeping in our car.

The next day we headed through Yosemite going over Tioga Pass, and avoided the crowds of the park to camp at a Forest Service campground a few miles outside of the west entrance to Yosemite. Again there were bear lockers, but flimsier and older ones. And the camp host said that bears had been visiting the campground every night. We try not to stress too much about this, but as we were in our tent that evening, the clanking of people emptying their trash into the dumpsters got replaced by impassioned banging about of the dumpsters, including the one about 15 meters from our tent. Shouts and lights, and then the noise moves off. We try to doze some, but maybe an hour later there is even more desperate banging nearby, not to mention audible huffing, as we stayed petrified in our tent. The bear or several (somebody was saying it was a mother and a couple of cubs) didn’t come closer, and gave up trying to undo the latch on the dumpster. We finally got to sleep, and were quite glad to see morning come.

It’s been a tough year for the bears—it’s been quite dry, and it’s been hard for them to find food.

Honeymoon Flat to Lee Vining

I drive, Numenius reads maps and chooses campsites. Our plan for Tuesday—our actual anniversary—was to go to Bodie, the best-preserved ghost town in the United States, and then on to Mono Lake. Bodie is famous for one other reason: it’s the best place in California to see greater sage grouse.

Sage grouse are large but are very good at hiding in the arid country—dominated by sage brush—in which they live. They are drawn to Bodie because it’s just above the water table and they’re able to graze early in the morning before the cars start arriving. The gate opens at eight; our plan is to be there for when the gate opens.

The road up the hill is thirteen miles, the last three miles of which are a dusty washboard. We get to the gate just before eight and behind two other cars. The car in front of us has Oregon plates; the driver gets out, wearing binoculars. Good. I get out and go and talk to him, hoping to coordinate the grouse search. The minivan in front contains speakers of French who know nothing about grouse, but are very interested when I tell them about it.

Just then one, then four, then seven sage grouse amble across the path just in front of us. They are mostly young, but the males already have the black belly-patch that is so characteristic. I call to Mr. Oregon and Numenius, and run back to see if any of the cars behind us have any birders inside (they don’t).

At 8:05 we go through the gates, having seen these incredible birds. From here, we can sightsee. It doesn’t get much better than this. We sketch, we see sage thrashers and mountain bluebirds all over the place. These are real treats for us lowlanders and this is already shaping up to be a splendid day.

At around ten it’s getting hot, so we go back to the car and make our way to the gate. Coming up the hill in the dust is a Rolls Royce open-top. Not just any Rolls Royce; a 1922 Silver Ghost. It’s so funny—a Silver Ghost in a ghost town—I wave. They wave back, grinning. A short way down the hill is another one! It must be a thing, we think, like a weekend get-together.

It’s only when we come to check in to our cottage in the town of Lee Vining after a hot and dusty day wandering around Mono Lake that we see thirteen of these things—pre-1927 Rolls Royces—parked outside. It’s not just a weekend thing at all: they’ve driven all the way from Maryland and are headed to Monterey. That’s over 4,000 miles. A bit later we find out how: they all get out there and take the cars apart, clean them, oil them, and put them back together again. Every single day.

We didn’t get in a Rolls Royce on our wedding day, nor would that have been our style. But being surrounded by them on our anniversary was sort of fun. We sat out on our little stoop and drank tea and watched them wrestle with spoked wheels.

We decided to go to dinner at the best restaurant in town, which is the Mobil Station on the road to Tioga Pass. Getting our minds around this was interesting till we found it was run by high-end hippies of the rock-climbing variety and featured a full trapeze set with participants in shorts and t-shirts. The food was, as advertised, excellent. And, yes, the Rolls crowd showed up, making a grand entrance complete with anemic horn and smiling faces.

A gallery of photos from our trip can be found here.

Eastern Sierra Sketches

We’ve returned from our camping jaunt to the Eastern Sierras relaxed and happy. Pica had never been south of Lake Tahoe in the Sierras so I was able to show her some places I had been to before, though not for a long time. Every night we stayed in a different location and habitat, so we had quite the natural history tour, travelling from the Carson Pass area south to the White Mountains. Here are several sketches and paintings I did during our journey.

At right above is Woods Lake, near Carson Pass, where we stayed the first evening of our trip. This is a small glacial lake at 8250’ elevation in lodgepole pine and red fir forest. Happily they don’t allow motorboats on it, and only a few paddlers were sauntering forth on the lake.

After reaching Highway 395, the highway running along the east side of the Sierras, we turned south, reaching Mono Lake on Tuesday. The area from the Mono Basin south to the town of Bishop has very interesting volcanic geology, there being a series of recent cinder cones, rhyolitic lava flows, and active hot springs. Mono Lake is also known for its tufa towers, which are towers up to ten or fifteen feet tall formed when calcium carbonate precipitates out of spring water flowing from underneath the lake into the alkaline and highly saline lake water. At left is a sketch of some of these tufa towers.

The literal high point of our journey was our trip up into the White Mountains to see the bristlecone pines, the oldest living organisms on Earth, in a grove above 10,000 feet in elevation. Some of these pines have been dated by tree ring analysis to be older than 4,600 years. We stayed at a campground about 1500 feet in elevation below the bristlecone pine forest in pinyon-juniper woodland, which I think is gorgeous landscape. At right is a detail of leaves and berries of Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma), the species of juniper up there.

The other reason for our stay in the White Mountains was to see the Perseid meteor shower. There were a number of other amateur astronomers already staying at our campsite, giving the night a bit of a flavor of a star party. It was a calm and warm night, and we quite enjoyed sleeping out under the stars and meteors.

Crow Catching

My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center are gearing up for a big corvid study. They plan to catch 60 crows and perhaps 30 yellow-billed magpies, equip them with radio-backpacks, and monitor them as West Nile Virus sweeps through this part of the country. It’s here now; there was a dead crow in Dixon, the next town down, which tested positive for West Nile over the weekend.

I was quietly finishing up my work day this afternoon (read: I was vaguely comatose following an unbelievably tedious series of web edits) when a huge bang woke me up. Picture two vets, one vet tech, and two hangers-on contemplating the effects of a net gun. They will fire this remotely over a baited meadow in an attempt to capture as many corvids as possible. You only get one shot, though: crows are smart and won’t allow themselves to be duped twice.

Perhaps not so smart as all THAT: one method of removing a huge colony of roosting crows in Davis was to play a tape of a crow being throttled. The colony left that spot and didn’t return for a couple of years.

The Sundowner

An entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on weather and place.

Art, Lynn, and their two kids passed through Davis today. We had a picnic lunch at the Village Homes green—Art wanted to tour and photograph the development—before they continued their trip north. Art is an ecological designer and on this trip was headed to a workshop on cob building techniques. It was fun seeing them today; it’s been several years.

During 1997-1998, while I was still in grad school at UC Santa Barbara, we rented their house out while they spent a year living in Mexico. Their house is a funky cabin located in a canyon at an elevation about 1200 feet above the city of Santa Barbara in a small community called the Trout Club. Their house has about 40 different types of fruit trees in their yard, solar hot water heating, and grey water irrigation. It was a magical place to live for a while.

We took advantage of the commute. It is 9 miles each way to the UCSB campus, and the way back involves a climb of about 1400 feet. Considering this a challenge, we rode our bikes to and from campus about three days each week. The ride up the hill (Old San Marcos Road) is long and steep in parts but it became a type of meditation.

Some days it would be a lot harder than others because of the strong sundowner winds that set up late in the afternoon occasionally in the region. These are fierce, hot, downslope winds that blow down the canyons of the Santa Ynez range, in part associated with a high-pressure cell over the Great Basin. The steepest bit of the ride, near the top, involves a set of hairpin turns. If there was a sundowner, we’d be in the lee of the hill until we left the final hairpin, at which point we’d almost be blown off our bikes!

Over There

The year after I finished my degree in England I went to work in Paris for a year. I had done a short secretarial course in Cambridge, England, which in those days invariably involved learning shorthand, which I got good at quite fast and then taught myself shorthand in French. (I can still remember the contraction for “Dans l’expression de mes sentiments distingus,” the equivalent of which is “Sincerely yours” in American business English.) I got a job in a French insurance agency. This was my first, and only, corporate job, apart from a translation gig in college for a Spanish agricultural engineering firm.

The unit I worked in at Faugre et Jutheau was reinsurance: a big game where the insurance companies themselves are insured by others. Lots of money; it’s like corporate Vegas. Anyway, many of the “jobs” the company reinsured were in the United States. And many of the US “jobs” that needed reinsuring were because of the weather. Why? L bas, c’est pas une blague, le temps. (The weather over there is no joke.)

Hurricanes and tornadoes. Hailstones the size of canteloupes. Freezing temperatures that would glue your hand to your car door if you were stupid enough to leave your gloves inside. Heat that rivals anything, most anywhere, including the Sahara.

For all this unjoking weather, I’ve fetched up in the California Central Valley, close enough to the Sacramento River Delta that we get a cooling breeze each night in summer, so that even if it’s been well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit—over 40 centigrade—during the day, it almost always cools down at night. (We’ve lived here five years or so and have never turned on the air conditioner.) In winter occasionally it freezes but mostly we have to contend with the local version of purgatory, the Tule Fog, where you can barely see your hand if you stretch it out in front of you.

Subtle, this version of weather, once you weather it a bit. (We don’t even really get earthquakes here, which are what other Americans claim keeps them from moving to California—though they seem perfectly happy to live in tornado country and the like).

I imagine the first inhabitants of the Sacramento Valley used all of this weather to help them survive. The fog is a powerful blind to a hunter; compelling thirst would drive prey to water. Lots of food grows in this climate. It was probably close to someone’s version of paradise, long ago.

This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Weather and Place.