Riding the Ferry

As Numenius says in his post from yesterday, we took the ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco and got deposited right at the ballpark rather than at the Ferry Building owing to some crisis or another. It gave us ample time to wander around SBC Park, enjoying what has to be one of the great sports arenas of the world.

When you go to a city by ferry rather than by driving there over a bridge, your whole perspective of the city changes. Obviously, you’re looking at the city from below rather than from above, with all the literal and metaphorical implications; but there is somehow this shared sense among fellow ferry-riders that we’re ON to something: we share a secret.

Cities are formed by arteries and what’s between them; organs, if you like. Arriving by ferry deposits you plonk in the middle of an organ. You bypass the bloodstream, go straight for the heart. It’s a good way to travel.

It’s also what my father used to do in the early 1960s; take the ferry from Tiburon to the Ferry Building. I always feel a connection with him when I do this. The ferries, the buildings, the city have changed, but not, I think, that essence.

Interactive Online Keying

One of the problems with using a traditional dichotomous key such as found in most floras to identify an organism is that it’s easy to get stuck if you can’t determine which choice of the key is correct, especially at the topmost levels of the key. What you really need is an identification tool that lets you enter the characteristics of the specimen you do recognize, and narrows down your choices accordingly.

Such a tool is difficult to create in the pages of a book (though I have seen punch card examples), but is straightforward to build on a computer. At last week’s NBII meeting, I was reminded of the IDnature guides that are being produced at the Discover Life project at the University of Georgia. These are a set of online interactive keys to many different taxa ranging from dung beetles to liverworts. It’s a very promising approach to helping non-experts identify critters.

More Thoughts on Field Notes

Thanks to those who have been encouraging us to keep better field notes. In the week or so I’ve been tallying corvids from my bike I’ve been noticing much more than what I’m supposed to be counting: the direction of the flying cattle egrets; whether the Swainson’s hawk I see (there’s almost always one) is north or south of the creek (there are two pairs); whether the magpies are out and about or hidden in the thick of the walnut trees.

Dave of Via Negativa says that his mother, after thirty years of notes from an acre at the top of a hill, has made many unique observations of birds and mammals. I’m sure this is true. Observation of behavior seems to be a dying art among the biological sciences, supplanted by the much more prestigious genomics… I’m happy to buck the trend in however tiny a way.

Kitten footnote: Babette went to her new home yesterday; I had no idea it would be this wrenching. And then there were three.

Monocot Forest

The corn field outside our house is now well over eight feet tall, screening our view of the hills, the rail line, the levee and just about everything else. This sketch was made with a bamboo pen (I love working with these though it’s hard to carry the ink around on field outings) and our new Derwent Signature watercolour pencils, lightfast and with rich pigments.

Lone Mountain Ascent

Overlooking the Big Sky ski resort is the 11,166 foot Lone Mountain. I like mountains; they inspire to head up. Living at 45’ elevation in the flat Central Valley doesn’t give me much opportunity for hill-climbing, so I made the most of it during my trip, going on hikes after the sessions were over in the afternoons. (If I had realized the conference was in the mountains, I would have remembered my hiking boots.)

Reaching the peak itself was beyond my available time and ability, but I longed to hike up to the bowl of the cirque some 1500’ above the resort. After things wound up on Thursday I started hiking, bringing my sketchbook, not sure how far I’d get.

I had gone a quarter-mile from my room, climbing maybe 100’, when an obstacle presented itself. There was a bear grazing just off the trail a hundred meters up. So much for heading up that trail, so I sat, sketched, and even managed a photo through my binoculars.

Hungry by this point, I made a foray to the resort grocery store, then started hiking up the slope below the gondola, stopping at one of the pylons to sketch the view at left of the mountains to the northeast, constantly bedeviled by mosquitoes (forgot the insect repellent as well).

At 8700’, in the rocky slope below the cirque, there was a field of these beautiful lilies (illustrated at right) standing about 15 cm tall. I don’t have any Rocky Mountain flower books and don’t know what they are. I wasn’t sure how much farther I wanted to go up, but I was hearing odd bird calls from above (ptarmigan???), so I kept going, and reached the bowl.

The barren walls of the cirque were impressive, and there was quite a rush of meltwater draining from the remaining snowpacks above. The bird call turned out to be a raven, and though there was interesting birding to be done (were there rosy finches around?), I had to turn around before it got dark, a sign on one of the ski structures reading 9067’ elevation.

Lodgepole National Monument

Yesterday’s field trip to Yellowstone was a lot of fun, with good views of wildlife and geothermal features. Our bus tour guide was Don Despain, who is a plant ecologist who has been working in and about Yellowstone since 1971. He says the park should be renamed Lodgepole National Monument, since 60% of the plant cover (80% of the forest cover) is lodgepole pine forest, in many cases it being the sole tree in the forest. (A lot of the soil is sandy and derived from rhyolitic lava, and the spruces and Douglas firs can’t grow on it.) We learned a lot about fire ecology, with large areas of the park reforesting very well following the big fires in 1988.

We did the tour of the geysers and fumeroles as well, arriving in time to see the Old Faithful geyser erupt late in the afternoon. Notable wildlife included elk, sandhill cranes, a bear, moose (seen by the other side of the bus, not me), and a bison who was grazing happily near the Old Faithful Inn, thereby posing nicely for a few sketches.

Countin’ Crows

One of the big advantages of working at the Wildlife Health Center is that I now get to hear about all the research that’s being done on local wildlife. I have just signed up to participate in the Bicycle Bird Biologist program being run out of Wildlife and Ecological Genetics by Holly Ernest; she is trying to build a comprehensive census of Davis birds, particularly corvids and raptors, and she’s trying to get as large a participation as possible by bike and pedestrian commuters. The purpose is to track the effects of West Nile Virus on local populations.

This comes at a good time for me, as I’m pondering the scope and format of a field notes journal. Keeping track of four or five species over the course of months will be a great way to start, I feel, and I’m encouraged that someone will actually use this information.

This morning on my way in I counted thirteen American crows and four yellow-billed magpies. I also, by way of a huge diversion, saw thirteen wild turkey chicks with four adult females, “swimming” through the long grass toward the creek (sketched from memory, above). Guess the turkeys we saw earlier in the spring have successfully colonized this area.

Big Sky Visit

I am spending much of this week in Big Sky, Montana, attending the all-nodes meeting of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. Big Sky is a ski resort at 7500’ elevation, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Happily, we’re taking a field trip tomorrow afternoon to Yellowstone National Park; otherwise I fear that most of the scenery I will see will be the ceiling of the conference rooms. We drove up from the Bozeman airport in the middle of the night: the looming mountain slopes were impressive but it’s hard to do much in the way of windshield botanizing and geographizing in the dark of the night.

I did manage a short stroll at lunch, a longer one in the break before the poster session, and even got in a quick sketch of Lone Mountain (elev. 11,166 feet). The dark skies are impressive here, and hopefully I’ll be able to get away from the lights of the resort later this evening.

Of Field Notes

We’ve been talking about how to keep better field notes for birding. Neither of us is very systematic: at best we’ll record a list of species for each birding trip, but since our usual birding field trips cover a whole lot of road miles, that produces a list more for fun than of any objective value. Geographer that I am, I like to have good locality information at the very least, but GPS units make it very easy to provide this. Pica is quite interested in using a field notebook to get better at sketching birds.

Back in college, I was taught a system for field notes developed by Joseph Grinnell, the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. I think this method is too rigorous for the likes of us but it’s definitely a standard to look up to.

Sounds Of California

The California Library of Natural Sounds, based in the Oakland Museum, has a site that presents a transect of sounds from nature across Central California. The sounds on the website range from coyotes to acorn woodpeckers.