NEAT Thing In Sky

I just had my first look at Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) which is now visible in the southwestern evening sky in north temperate latitudes. It’s a good little comet: in our 4.5 magnitude skies here, it is barely visible naked-eye but it has a nice tail in 10×50 binoculars. It is currently a few degrees southeast of Procyon, and will be climbing higher in the sky daily as well as growing dimmer. Like many comets these days, Comet NEAT was discovered by an automated sky survey, in this case the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program, hence the acronym.

Tangled Banks

There’s a new collaborative blogging exercise in town, similar in concept to the weekly Carnival of the Vanities. This is The Tangled Bank, and it is a compendium of weblog entries on biology, medicine, or natural history. (The name “Tangled Bank” comes from a famous metaphor by Darwin.) The second Tangled Bank collection just came out; I submitted my entry about the barred owl to it. From this collection I learned that this will be a 17-year cicada year for folks in the Eastern U.S!

The Sound of Home

A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on sound of place.

This morning there was a black-headed grosbeak singing in the yard from the treetops, and a Swainson’s thrush singing from lower down. Both species are migrating through the Central Valley, and won’t be here in the summertime. The song of the grosbeak is bright, cheery, and resonant. The Swainson’s thrush has a beautiful flute-like song that cascades up through the octaves.

They remind me of home. There is a little canyon below the house where I grew up, just north of Berkeley. Both species nest in the canyon, and their songs would resonate through the canyon splendidly. I’d occasionally see the grosbeaks in nearby treetops, but the thrushes would always be singing from the bottom of the canyon, far out of sight.

The Sound of Here

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Sound of Place

As Numenius pointed out, yesterday at 4:00 am I got up trying to locate a calling barred owl.

I am not normally walking about at that time of day. Scorpius was rising in the south and the air was still. No barred owl. Lowing cattle—polled herefords, mostly. I don’t know why they do this some of the time and not others; it seems unrelated to when they get fed or the time of day. There it was, though: the drone of I-80. At four in the morning.

I write this at dusk and we just walked out and took more or less the same route. There were quite a few cars about, disturbing the frantic chattering of the Western kingbirds. But most of the other birds had stopped apart from a lone mockingbird—and a lone great-horned owl who was just waking up.

I yearn to hear all this sometime without human sound competing with it all, obliterating it. These days you have to go a long, long way to find that. Farther, I think, than the range of the Western kingbird.

Barred Mystery

We were restless this morning at 4 AM and so were the livestock in the ranch across the street. One of the animals trailed off into what sounded like an impersonation of a barred owl — low hooting usually transcribed “Who cooks for you?” — but I thought how could it be that? and stayed snuggled under the covers. We heard it again, and Pica startled. It was definitely the call of a barred owl. We heard it one more time, and Pica got up and threw some clothes on to go look for it.

The Central Valley of California is not the place one would expect to find a barred owl. I recalled that they occur in the Pacific Northwest forests, but we’re hardly surrounded by forests here. Pica came up with another possibility before she went outside: maybe it was the barred owl in captivity at the California Raptor Center, located about 650 meters from us across Putah Creek and over two levees. On the other hand, she said, the eagles there call all the time during the day, and we never hear them from our house. But that’s during daytime, and it was now a quiet, still cool night. Who knows how well the atmospherics would carry the sound?

Pica heard the bird a total of five times, but not outside. She walked to the bridge over the creek and from there could barely hear the mockingbird calling in our yard, so she didn’t think she’d be able to hear an owl at the Raptor Center.

Consulting the nearest reference source in the morning — Arnold Small’s book California Birds: Their Status and Distribution — it turns out that barred owls are quite recent arrivals in California, their first sighting being in 1981. Their range has been expanding rapidly throughout the Pacific Northwest, and moreover there is concern that the barred owl will compete with and/or hybridize with the endangered spotted owl.

One of my coworkers volunteers at the Raptor Center. She told me today that she has never heard their barred owl vocalize. But four in the morning isn’t the time she would be over there.

A mystery then, with two remote possibilities coming to mind. Through some fluke of atmospheric conditions and perhaps change in bird behavior, did we hear the barred owl at the Raptor Center, even though we’ve been in our house five years and have never heard anything resembling it before? Or was it a wild barred owl, perhaps a subadult leading its species’ dispersal into new points south in California?

April Heat

We’re having a heat wave this week, with the temperature in the mid-90s, and record temperatures being reported from all over California. But when I returned this evening from my Spanish class, it was a lot cooler outside than inside, so for the first time this year it was back to our summertime pattern of opening the screened doors to cool the house down. (We pride ourselves on never running the air conditioner.)

Despite the summertime weather, spring migrants are still passing through. Yesterday I heard a black-headed grosbeak outside our house, and Pica today had a grosbeak singing outside her office all morning long.

From the Window at Work

I’ve been in my new job for two months now. The warblers are coming through; today I heard a Wilson’s for the first time. The jackrabbits, cottontails, and ground squirrels have an uneasy sharing of the green grass which, if this heat continues, won’t be green much longer. The horses have been drooping their heads in the heat, looking for the shade, waiting for the man in the truck at 2:40 to bring their hay.

One thing about working with a posse of wildlife vets is that offhand comments are no longer offhand. I mentioned that the ground squirrels seemed to have finished their elaborate tail-thrashing courtships, assuming the females all to be pregnant.

“Did you know that the California ground squirrel has the largest testicles-per-pound of any mammal?” was the reply.

I didn’t know this. Now I do. Such are my window musings.

Blue Grouse Day

We went north to Trinity Mountain via Redding, which is about a 2.5 hour drive from Davis. Our friend Dennis said there were grouse booming out beyond French Gulch. I’ve never seen a blue grouse, and it’s been ages and ages since we’ve seen Dennis, and he back so fresh and sprightly after running the killer Boston Marathon on Monday…

We got up into the grouse area just in time to see a very loud chainsaw, aka motorcycle, barrelling down the logging road. Oh well. No grouse is likely to be within a 3-mile radius of that racket, we thought. We split up, enjoying singing Nashville and hermit warblers and almost resolved to return to Davis with no grouse sightings but at least a wonderful new spot to bird in!

Well, Dennis and Numenius soon heard the grouse booming further uphill. Sprightly Dennis came racing down the mountain to get me and I struggled up, winded, eager to hear it but still not expecting to see it. We looked for the bird for about an hour—the booming never wavered, but it’s so ventriloqual that we were disoriented. We all forgot, though, to look up: we expected this grouse to be on a favorite log.

The bird was about 80 feet up in a Douglas fir and just peeping out.

It’s really hard to write about seeing a bird without it being a variation of the classic “I rounded the corner and there, on a branch, was a __.” The thrill is recognized by other birders and it’s possible to experience it vicariously, which is why so many of us enjoy showing new birds to other people. Birding is, after all, a collector’s activity-you collect names rather than stamps or coins-but sometimes a combination of circumstances makes the experience stand out. I had waited a long time to see this bird; we got faked out by its strange sound; and it had no problem with our thrashing around in the pine needles and poison oak 80 feet below. But mostly, I enjoy sharing birds with good friends. Thanks for this one, Dennis.

Wind Change

We awoke this morning to a strong north wind. Around here that means it’s going to get hot, and, sure enough, it was about twenty degrees warmer than yesterday.

The field in front of our house has been irrigated for the past 36 hours. They have dug deep furrows to allow the water to spread from where they’re pumping it out of the ground right along to the road. I’m not sure what they’re planting this year: possibly sorghum?

There are lots of reasons why irrigating like this is a bad idea in this part of the world but now there’s a new one: West Nile virus. There are puddles of water everywhere, providing the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.

But the poppies are blooming bright orange and the kingbirds are nesting…

Clouds In April

It’s been an overcast day today with a bit of precipitation: not much however (0.02” today). The weather forecast indicates that it’s going to turn partly cloudy and then sunny later in the week, and we wonder if 90-degree days are soon to come.

Favorite critters these days on the way to work: Swainson’s hawks, perched or calling overhead. The rough-winged swallows that build nests in the circular openings under the freeway, and go foraging with low “peent” calls over the nearby field. The donkey in the glade next to the Arboretum. And the western kingbirds with their lemon-yellowy bellies perched up on fenceposts and wires.