Ecotone, One Year On

On this day last year, a group of us tried to answer the question “How I Started Thinking About Place – And Why I Started Writing About It.” My answer was, then, and remains now, Venice: Venice where Coup de Vent is making all kinds of her own discoveries as I write, she of the interesting camera angle.

Going somewhere SPECIAL triggered in me the impulse to explore place, but what keeps me looking, and sketching, and writing is the mundane, the far more prosaic space around me now. I think it would be a stretch to imagine that I could feel nurtured enough by ANY place to feel moved to write about it in a protracted way (like Beth, I find my mind goes dead in suburbia), but the routine, mundane holds my attention for now, following it through the seasons. Which plant. Which bird. Which pathway.

Which journey, really. There are so many, and we have so few days.

I’d like to thank all the other explorers of place whose sites I read daily for their own part in nurturing this particular journey of mine.

Botanical Book Shopping

Doing whirlwind expeditions like our Sierra birding jaunt this past weekend always makes me yearn to pick up yet another field guide. I don’t get up to the Sierra often enough to remember all the dominant plants I learned in my class on the California flora a dozen or so years ago, so this afternoon I picked up a copy of John Stuart and John Sawyer’s Trees and Shrubs of California, which is a field guide to all of the trees and many of the important shrubs. It came out three years ago, and would have been great for my class.

I have so far resisted buying a copy of the Jepson Manual, the current standard flora for California. It is a huge book (1400 pages), not easy to carry in the field, and we don’t have room for it on our bookshelves. My coworkers have always had a copy handy as well. It was published in 1993, and a project to revise it is underway, So I’m kind of holding out for the release of the second edition, due out in 2008 (at which point botanists get to relearn many, many names). But just for fun this evening I checked out a copy of Jepson from our public library.

Looking now at the web pages for the UC Press California Natural History Guide series, I am delighted to see that they are about to issue a revised version of Storer and Usinger’s Sierra Nevada Natural History. This is a classic field guide describing over 750 species ranging from fungi to mammals living in the Sierras. It was published in 1963, so it is quite dated (birder trivia question: ever heard of a Tolmie warbler?), and just yesterday I was hoping somebody would step up to the task of revising it.

Back From the Sierra

Yolo Audubon organizes a trip to the high Sierra Nevada and Sierra Valley each year. We decided to go along for day one of the trip and spend the night up at Yuba Pass, just under 7000 ft in elevation. We were joined by Richard and Karen, both of whom had been on the Salton Sea trip a couple of weeks ago.

There were no amenities in the campsite at all-not even water-but we came prepared and had a wonderful time. It’s been a while since we’ve been camping and I’d forgotten just how much I love it. More to come, I hope, this summer! There’s nothing like waking up to the sound of a hermit warbler and—sorry Linda—Hammond’s flycatcher while you contemplate whether it’s warm enough to get up and make tea yet.

Richard is getting good at whipping out his camera and stuffing its lens into his Leica telescope eyepiece; see here for the first round of birds from yesterday [the second day’s photos are here].

Above is a sketch I made just as we were about to join highway 49 from Gold Lake. I did all the driving this trip so I couldn’t sketch as much as Numenius did but I certainly enjoyed what little I was able to get in.

Lerps On The Loose

Yesterday after dinner I went for a walk along the creek, came to a eucalyptus with a fallen branch big to serve as a bench, sat down and noted that it had a heavy lerp infestation. Lerps are the whitish scaly secretions produced by a number of psyllid bugs native to Australia. In my sketch, the lerps are on the uppermost leaves. The species here, Glycaspis brimblecombei, the red gum lerp psyllid, is a new arrival to California, first being discovered in Los Angeles County in 1998 and spreading to 40 out of 58 counties in the state by June of 2000. They can cause heavy leaf drop among the eucalyptus species affected by it. The lerp secretions are sweet, similar to honeydew, and interestingly California insectivorous birds have taken to feeding on the infestations where they occur.

Peaches on the Tree

Although where we live in Davis is nothing like the sub-tropical fruit-laden paradise of our cabin in Santa Barbara (which we admittedly involuntarily shared with lots of other creatures—mammals, reptiles, insects, and birds), there are several fruit trees here. The peach tree outside our kitchen window is almost cracking with the weight of fruit. It’s been hacked rather than pruned over the years but it still keeps on going, and this year is a bumper crop.

I made a peach and rhubarb crumble this evening, calling my sister ONCE AGAIN for the correct proportions of sugar to flour and butter. There was no answer, so I just did equal of each. Seemed to work just fine. I got no complaints, that’s for sure.

Heads up: the Ecotone Wiki celebrates its first year of joint blogs about place this June 15. The topic is Anniversary Place: feel free to join in!

Joining The Board

I went to my first planning meeting as a member of the board of the Yolo Audubon Society. Pica has been on the board for several years, now serving as their newsletter editor, and she talked me into serving on their board as the organization webmaster.

At the meeting this evening we talked a lot about the role and mission of our local chapter, and arrived at the theme of integrating birdwatching and conservation education. There are a number of local conservation organizations that have a strong place-based identity, (e.g. the Yolo Basin Foundation, the Putah Creek Council, and the Cache Creek Conservancy) but we’re known more in the eyes of the public as the local birdwatching group, so that is what we should build upon.

Ground Squirrel Babies

The California ground squirrel babies have emerged from their burrows outside my work window, eyes and ears opened, fur intact. There are at least eight or nine though with several connected burrows I’m not sure which ones belong to which litter.

I’m not sure it matters much: these animals are quite altruistic and look out for each other. The young ones are certainly fully alert; the slightest noise or shadow of a crow overhead is enough to send them scurrying back underground.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale from this photo; their mother is more than twice this size.

Place Getting Smaller

They planted corn in the field outside our back door last month (Numenius did a sketch this afternoon; see left). Every year the crop changes: one year it was tomatoes, another sorghum, another squashes. The land is leased to Campbell’s Soup and they are doing experimental, or seed, growing: the harvest will not make its way into over-salted, over-carageenaned cans per se. Maybe indirectly, but there ends up being a lot of waste. Since this crop, whatever it is, is always heavily (experimentally?) sprayed, we don’t avail ourselves of the bounty.

Corn-maize-as a crop is very imposing; it’s like planting a fast-growing forest. I can no longer see the levee that separates us from Putah Creek as I write this, the levee that would fail to save us if Monticello Dam burst some twenty miles upstream. I like it that Sam and Frodo’s first fright on their journey from the Shire takes place in the overbearing height of a cornfield.

The corn will attract many rodents between now and October; let’s hope the mother of our kittens hasn’t lost her taste for them…

Invasive Weed Saunter

The floodplain east of the bridge over Putah Creek where the stream burst its banks this winter has been for weeks now covered with a tall, white-flowering weed. I ventured down the bank to collect a specimen and took it back to the house to identify and sketch. It turns out the plant is perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium), which is a nasty weed invasive in wetlands and riparian areas.

On a brighter note, I saw a sloughed-off snake skin (probably a gopher snake) on the grasses by the bank, and I heard a ring-necked pheasant calling.

In Search Of Snouters

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on imaginary places.

On an island in the remote and unexplored South Seas archipelago of Hy-yi-yi, a fleeing Swedish prisoner-of-war in 1941 made a discovery that startled the zoological world. This was the existence of an entirely unknown order of mammals, the Rhinogradentia. This group of about 150 species is remarkable for the adaptations of the snout, the nose being modified to serve an amazing variety of functions ranging from fishing lures to aerial locomotion.

Unfortunately, the entire archipelago was destroyed in 1957 in an earthquake accidentally set off by an atomic test some 125 miles distant. The only surviving record of the rhinogrades was a publication by a scientist, Harald Stmpke, also lost in the earthquake, entitled Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (republished as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, 1981, U. Chicago Press).

Happily, a recent expedition to the deep forests and caves of Slovenia produced evidence that members of this order still survive, taking a remarkable photograph in July of 1999.