Predators Too Close

Davis is in an uproar. A number of cats-about 20 or sohave gone missing from North Davis; two or three have been found dead and mutilated. Coyotes have been seen in the area for over a year and they were blamed for the deaths. Two adults were euthanized two days ago; their pups were caughtprobably todayand although the local paper said they’d be “relocated,” the Animal Services director said they had no intention of doing anything other than putting them down (which is probably the humane thing to do in the circumstances-they’re orphans and probably under severe stress at this point).

When we push our urban and suburban bounds into the territories of wild animals, these kinds of encounters are inevitable. Coyotes are naturally wary of humans, but find that our golf courses and overwatered lawns provide an abundance of rabbits and rodents on which to prey, plus all the food humans put out (as garbage, as food to feral cats, as food to coyotes), and they are gradually losing their fear.

The outraged pet owners demand coyote deaths. It’s easy enough to keep cats indoors, though—it’s much better for the ecosystem and much safer for the cats. As long as there’s a constant supply of food, these kinds of stories will continue to hit the news.

Return Of The Corpse Flower

Last year in June, the botanical conservatory at UC Davis was the site of the first “corpse flower” ever to bloom in Northern California. When this plant from Sumatra blooms, an event that happens every decade or so, its huge flower emits a stench like rotting flesh to attract flies as pollinators.

This year, a second one of the conservatory’s corpse flowers will be blooming. The flower, nicknamed “Tabatha the Titan”, is expected to open sometime between August 3 and August 13. The bloom doesn’t last long, the odor peaking over a period of about eight hours, so there’s not much of a window to smell the plant in its full odoriferous glory.

Sacramento Valley Homecoming

We picked our friends Nicole and Mike up from the Sacramento Airport late this afternoon. They have been on a three-and-a-half month long honeymoon—their wedding was in late March—and have been travelling throughout the South Seas, Australia, and New Zealand. They seem very relaxed but are happy to return to these parts. We had them over for dinner for a simple mixed greens salad with bread, cheese, and wine. This worked out well: it’s hard to find good salad fixings in the Pacific and they were craving greens. One fun logbook story: when Nicole was a teenager, she was given a journal from the airlines to record her plane rides, collecting the captain’s signature after each trip. She finally completed it on the last leg of their honeymoon, the flight this afternoon from Los Angeles to Sacramento.

Bird Scheming On Tomales Bay

These past two days I’ve been at a meeting at the Marconi Conference Center on Tomales Bay, near Point Reyes in Marin County. This meeting was about developing a data schema for exchanging bird inventory and monitoring data (one example being Christmas Bird Counts). It’s fun being at a meeting with a bunch of ornithologists. One participant seated at the far end of the room would use his binoculars to read the fine print on projected slides, and discussion came to a halt one time when a Nuttall’s woodpecker called nearby.

I had a bit of time for doing some art before and after the sessions. Above is a sketch I made yesterday looking south towards the landward end of Tomales Bay. This morning I went up to Tower Hill (the former site of a set of radio receiving towers: Marconi, the guy who pioneered the use of radio, had a trans-Pacific station here starting in 1912) and, in the fog, did a sketch and a small painting. One amusing event while sketching was that I heard a goat-like bleating which turned out to be chanting coming from a woman running up the hill. Afterwards I learned that the Motherwave Institute was also having a session at the conference center while we were there. According to their website, “motherwavework opens new multidimensional doorways to the Field that allow it to be perceived not only ‘within’ in some virtual, ‘spiritual’ realm, but in every realm including our bodies, our emotional selves and our outer world.” A very Marin County thing, that.

Birds On The Move

Fall migration appears to be getting underway. We just heard a report of about 50 Swainson’s hawks kettling early in the morning near Dixon and heading south. They’re at least a month or more early. And late this afternoon there was a flock of about several dozen swallows, probably tree, overhead and most likely migrating through. Soon there will be good shorebird action.

Too Many Ducks

There was an article in yesterday’s faculty and staff newspaper, Dateline, about the overpopuation of ducks at the UC Davis Arboretum. Apparently the number of ducks that can be sustained in this body of water is about 2.96, given how much water vegetation there is.

There are, however, probably over 300 ducks instead of three, fed by well-meaning people and also by Guerrilla Girl. They used to catch the ducks with nets. I’m not quite sure what they’re doing these days to control the population, but whatever it is, it’s not working…

Cats And Nooks

This is a note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on secret places.

One of the things that has been amazing to watch while fostering our kittens is how cats have such a wonderful instinct for finding secret nooks. Last week I was clearing some space in one of our bookshelves on the floor, and it took the kittens about fifteen seconds to go across the room and be inside the newly created bookshelf space. And of course closet doors are notorious difficult to open without attracting the attention of a kitty or two. It’s a very different world than ours to explore if you’re about eight inches tall, sleek, and graceful.

Here’s a photo of Charlie retreating under our bed, the space under our bed being a very defensible position.

The Secret Garden

Well, it’s not really so secret: this vaguely illegal garden sits at the corner of J and Second Streets in Davis, right next to the railway lines. It changes with the seasons; it’s bedecked with plastic pumpkins around halloween, which morph into poinsettias in time for Christmas; full of pastels for easter.

This garden is tended by someone who-like Al of the 71-doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of possessions. But he (I’ll call him Arthur, though that’s not his name) is of the world, perhaps more than you or I. Because he just decided, one day, to make this little corner of Davis more beautiful so that a benefactor might be able to see it on his way to work by bike. Just like that. (He waters it copiously with a hose from across the street.)

The garden that started out with a couple of potted plants is growing, and now has a second section to the right of the photo. Nobody can really see it from a moving train, and many people who head down 2nd Street barely give it a thought. There is nowhere in Davis quite so colorful.

Which just goes to show. Our gardener friend is colorblind. (It’s a secret.)

This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Secret Places, for July 15. The wiki has recently been vandalized by spammers; we’re trying to keep it up and running but it’s a bit of a battle.

Refuge From The Heat

Following a trip to the bike store for a new tube and patch kit, I spent some time this afternoon sketching in the Arboretum redwood grove. Over this past year, there has been a major landscaping project in the redwood grove: a whole host of volunteers put in about 20,000 forest floor plants, not to mention redoing the path with bark and mulch so it is no longer so muddy in winter. At left is my painting of one of the new plantings, a sword fern.

Telemetry, Here We Come

When your boss-the big boss-comes in your office and asks if you have your bike here today, to which you respond yes, and then asks whether you’d like to go out with him and test a radio transmitter to be used on corvids, backpack-style, hauling your yagi antenna around on the bike, you say yes, not knowing that he actually means RIGHT NOW. This is what I did at 10:30 am. I found the transmitter he had hidden in the wild grape near the freeway. He showed me how to use the directional antenna, how to alter the controls to get the most efficient pinpointing of sound.

Numenius and I will almost certainly be participating in a study Walter Boyce will be heading up at the Wildlife Health Center focusing on crows, yellow-billed magpies, and West Nile Virus. We’ll be checking in on the birds every day, trying to track them down if they die, which we’ll know because the radio signal will change. It sounds like a lot of fun. And it’s even all in a day’s work.