Imagined Places

Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Earthsea. Wonderland. Middle Earth. Eden. Imaginary places have shaped our culture since before it was a culture. Idyllic or otherwise, imagining a place with specific topography and characteristics allows writers to tell stories that couldn’t be told if they were set, say, in Watford.

For a time I was hooked on Star Trek, where a different imaginary world appeared each week. How will this new place affect our heroes? Sometimes the places were there only by inference-the Borg collective is more of a psychogrouping than a physical locale-but every new setting allows the writers to play creator of the universe, week after week after week.

Stomping around the Salton Sea this weekend, where the salt and heavy metal smell combines with the pink algae that can only survive in such extreme conditions, put me in mind of Mordor (or its comical offspring, Terry Pratchett’s city of Ankh Morpork). For some reason it’s easy enough to imagine dystopias; it’s having the courage to imagine a future where there’s no poverty, no environmental crises, no hatred that seems really tough.

Why is this? And, more to the point, what happens if we can’t?

This is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic of Imaginary Places

Gulls in the Heat

We’re back from our short group birding trip to Southern California. Highlights: singing gray vireos; tricolored blackbirds in Jackson Pines near Hemet Lake; a gorgeous common king snake this morning; a heron rookery last night with over 15,000 birds, still flying in as we left for dinner; a date shake at lunch today in Mecca; a tantalizing split-second look at what was likely an anhinga, which has been reported as overwintering; and a ruddy ground-dove over the cleanest pigsty I’ve ever seen.

Lowlights: the salt-crusted muck around the Salton Sea which has a unique, um, aroma; the smog in the valley from Ontario Airport to Indio; and the cattle fattening station near Finney and Ramer lakes.

Numenius will post some of his many sketches tomorrow. Richard will be posting lots of photos of birds on A Brit Abroad tomorrow also [update, June 1: Richard’s account of Day One can be found here; Day Two is here, Day Three here, Day Four here.]. For now we’re pretty tired, having collected four fat, spoiled kittens who now all seem to have names: Babette, Charlie, Louis, and Diego.

Gull identification is not for the faint of heart, but we had incredible looks (after a lot of hard slog) at three yellow-footed gulls, normally found in Mexico and points south.

Classics Of California Natural History

It’s nice when one finds seminal publications online. Here are links to scans of a couple of classic publications of California natural history.

First, a PDF of Joseph Grinnell and Alden Miller’s 1944 book The Distribution of the Birds of California is available here (warning: 40 Mb download). This site has scans of a number of other publications of Pacific Coast ornithological interest, including Jean Linsdale’s 1937 The Natural History of Magpies.

Second, Willis Linn Jepson’s multi-volume but never completed A Flora of California (1909 onwards) is available as GIF scans through a collaboration between the University & Jepson Herbaria and the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project.

Carnivores

In the ongoing saga of the California ground squirrels outside my office window, I can report that the wounded male is recovering somewhat. His mate is now lactating and can be seen frantically gathering dried grasses which she hurries down into the burrow, presumably to shore up the bedding for the young.

I have been watching this female pick up what looks like a large seed pod and gnaw on it for a while… but she never seems to make much headway. So finally, yesterday, I went out to see what it was.

I was utterly aghast.

It’s the skull of a small mammal—one with a warmer shade of coat, perhaps a rabbit. Truly dessicated. Squirrel pemmican.

So much for the herbivore theory of ground squirrels.

In other carnivorous news, we discovered yesterday that a feral cat has made its home in the beekeeping equipment out back and has at least two kittens. Now it’s a race against time to catch the kittens, socialize them, get them spayed or neutered, and get them adopted out. Catching the mother will be much harder and her fate is unclear, but at the very least will include preventing her from reproducing any more.

It’s estimated that cats-any cats, house cats, not just feral cats-kill at least 30 birds per year per cat. Unfortunately, they don’t restrict themselves to invasive exotics like starlings. Mostly, of course, the birds aren’t eaten: they’re killed because cats are just brilliantly effective killing machines. They’re great: indoors.

Martin City

Yesterday we went to the monthly meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society where there was a talk about purple martin colonies in Sacramento. It’s a fascinating story of adaptation of wildlife to the human landscape. The population of purple martins in the Central Valley of California crashed in the 1960s concomitant with the invasion of the European starling into the state. (Starlings were first introduced into the United States in 1890 by the most misguided Shakespeare fan ever: out of desire to see all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays this person released 100 starlings into Central Park in New York. The rest is ecological history.) Purple martins are cavity-nesters, as are starlings, and the starlings are able to aggressively boot the martins out of nest sites.

The population of purple martins in Sacramento hung on, however. Prior to the starling range expansion, the martins were already nesting in curved roof tiles on the top of various city buildings. What the martins then did was to start nesting in holes on the undersides of elevated highway structures. These weep holes lead to hollow chambers inside these long highway bridges where the martins build their nests. Martins are much better flyers than starlings and have an easier time flying up into these weep holes so the martins have ended up with a refuge where they can raise their chicks.

Sacramento is now the only place in the Central Valley where purple martins breed. The population in the city is increasing very slowly and is now at about 150 pairs. Whether the birds will be able to expand their range outside of Sacramento by nesting under highways isn’t known, though last year a pair did nest here in Davis at a road overpass near the Sudwerks Brew Pub on the east side of town.

Back From the Desert

DocRoc and I left the Doc’s mother’s house this morning at 5:20 and drove for far too long into a headwind and a traffic jam. I did just catch my plane, running to the gate in my stocking feet (“do I have time to run to the bathroom [my tea was catching up with me]?” “I don’t know how long you need,” as I hopped from foot to foot…). Through some fluke of carelessness on both our parts, I left the Doc’s with no reading material, and some inconsiderate person had finished the crossword in the in-flight magazine, so I had to play scrabble with my PDA (it ALWAYS thrashes me) for an hour as I flew north to Sacramento.

What stays with me: the sound of a pair of ash-throated flycatchers from this blooming smoketree (Psorothamnus spinosus) at 7:45 am; the booming bass of Peter Gomes’ audiofed voice as he announced yesterday morning on Harvard radio, from Harvard Memorial Church, that he’d be performing a wedding today: that of two men, the State of Massachusetts having legalized gay marriage (I burst into tears); the Doc’s irritation with poorly finished hems as she set one of mine to rights; her ministrations to my utterly unreasonable tea needs in the wee hours; the realization that having a girlfriend like this is a blessing many people never get.

Who, for example, could you give a pedicure to and they’d give you one back? (This is not something men often experience, I think.) Or put up with questions like “What exactly did you write your dissertation on?” at six in the morning, after she had answered this same question probably eight times previously?

(Thanks Doc.)

As Time Goes By

I’m visiting DocRoc at the famous Tin Chateau this weekend. On the way down here I mapped out our friendship: meeting at MLA in San Francisco one year, where she read a book I had made about a trip to Venice; her moving to Cambridge, Mass, where I lived at the time; her supporting my move to Santa Barbara; her own move to Idyllwild nearby and then Los Angeles; our move north to Davis; her move out here to the Lower Sonora Desert.

Timing is everything, they say. Maybe it isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. And it gets locked into place. Venice, or Cambridge, or Davis. And in the TC.

For the Ecotone Wiki’s Time and Place entry

Timing Planetary Light Shows

A post for the Ecotone Wiki topic on time and place.

When you think about it, we don’t need to know the exact time for the vast majority of events. If you have a 10 AM meeting, it’s okay if you enter at 10 o’clock and 47 seconds. Baseball games never begin exactly at 7:05 PM in the evening (make it 7:06 or even 7:11), and movies always have trailers when they begin. Oddly, the class of events that I’ve encountered in the course of my life that requires the most precise time lies not in human affairs, but in nature.

Celestial mechanics is one of those amazing triumphs of science, and the ability to precisely predict where solar system bodies will be when is what makes solar system observational astronomy a lot of fun. Is tonight the night when three of Jupiter’s moons will be eclipsing the giant planet? Time to set up the telescope then. And solar eclipse chasers know exactly when to book their special cruise ship on the other side of the world. But there is a solar system observational game that though a bit more obscure, is quite entertaining in its own right.

I refer to occultations. An occultation occurs when a solar system body moves through the line directly between an observer on Earth and another solar system body or a star. The easiest of these to observe is a lunar occultation. As the moon orbits, it changes its position with respect to the fixed stars. Sometimes it even moves directly in front of a fairly bright star.

It’s an amazing event to watch through a telescope, especially if the side of the moon that eclipses the star is not illuminated at the time. The moon slowly, but as steady as anything, creeps up on the star. The moon gets closer and closer to the star, then all of a sudden, within a tenth of a second or so, the star just winks out.

Not all occultations are as quite as dramatic, and these call for more effort on the part of the observer. Sometimes an asteroid invisible in a small telescope will occult a faint star. What happens then is that the star will dim measurably for a bit, and then return to full brightness.

It turns there’s good amateur science to be done here, because with precise measurements of exactly when these occultations take place, we can improve our knowledge of the orbits of these solar system bodies. The International Occultation Timing Association coordinates the activities of the relatively small band of amateurs interested in this activity. By precise I mean on the order of 0.1 to 0.01 seconds, but this is achievable with a camcorder and a precise time signal.

And where does one get this precise time signal? The easiest way is via shortwave radio. In the U.S., the station WWV broadcasts time signals on frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 Mhz 24 hours a day.

Earth Snapshot Of The Day

The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor, aboard two satellites orbiting our planet at an altitude of 700 km, has been taking images of the Earth at 250 meter resolution since the end of 1999. The MODIS Image of the Day page is a gallery of interesting events in the past week observable from moderate Earth orbit. The current set of views includes an erupting volcano in Kamchatka, fires in Southern California, a dust storm in the Chinese desert, as well as a view of Japan.

For those who hearken for vast quantities of satellite imagery, and have bandwidth to match, the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland has the largest collection anywhere of Landsat satellite imagery available for free download. Their collection consists of 8,727 scenes at 30 meter resolution covering every land surface on Earth except the Arctic and Antarctic. But after a few downloads, one might end up needing one of these.

More On Ground Squirrels

Some of the California ground squirrels I see outside my window at work are now wounded. Only the males can be seen above ground; the females are all in their burrows, presumably with young.

The male nearest my window has some pretty serious injuries. They seem sequential, and also seem to have been the result of fighting, I’m imagining with other males. I have now seen quite serious lacerations to his neck, thigh, face, and now, today, a new one to the left hip.

There is quite a lot of research on ground squirrel communication, but from what I can tell it’s mostly on their calls. It’s an altruistic system: whoever’s on guard tells everyone else if there’s an aerial predator (a single, high call) or a ground one like a cat (a lower, multiple syllable one). Everyone wins in this system: if I save you today, you might save me tomorrow.

I wonder, though, whether there’s been much study of ground squirrel tail movement as communication. There’s clearly a significance in courtship-a waving tail means come hither by a female, essentially-but I’ve also noticed the males use their tails when threatening, and then abruptly turn to GROOMING their tails when they somehow both decide that this fight’s not worth it. (Owings does have a picture at the above link of side-to-side tail movement of squirrels approaching a rattlenesnake, and says this movement is restricted to this particular situation; we went to a fascinating talk where he explained how ground squirrels had developed an immunity to rattlesnake venom.)

Whatever the game might be, the male nearest my window is clearly losing; I think he might soon become food for Swainson’s hawk babies. One of the Wildlife Health Center vets took a look at his face through my binoculars yesterday (her diagnosis: “ooh, that’s gross”) and said she didn’t normally interfere when it seemed like natural behavior. She did say the wound was probably infected.

I watch him scratch the earth and rub the wound in it, worry it with his paws.

Migration’s almost over; I saw a warbling vireo yesterday, but no migrants today.