Zoo Happenings

Numenius’ brother and nephew are visiting from Indiana, so today we went to the Bay Area and went to the Oakland Zoo with them and Numenius’ sister and boyfriend. A few of us took the short cable-car ride over the lions up the hill, which is how we managed to get the angle into the giraffe enclosure.

This is a zoo where many languages are spoken. Middle-class anglos are definitely in the minority, which was fun. We wondered how the demographic might be different at, say, the San Francisco Zoo, which is much larger.

The Luxury of Taking the Train

We live in a place where we see a lot of trains each day (I can also see them now from my new office). The Amtrak Capitol Corridor run from San Jose to Sacramento has been successfully augmented; it’s our favorite way to get to the Bay Area. There are fast freights and slow freights. And then there are the two long-distance passenger trains: the Coast Starlight, that goes from Seattle to Los Angeles, one of the most beautiful journeys in the world, and the California Zephyr, which goes from Chicago to Emeryville, just beyond Berkeley.

We just met someone this evening who has come to Davis for a wedding from Virginia: by train. He got the train from Washington to Chicago and caught the Zephyr, three days ago. He has done this round trip five or six times; it’s his favorite way of travelling across country.

What I didn’t know, though, is that there are people—writers, showbiz folks, executives—who take the trans-continental train precisely to relax. Writers can get their books written; people can escape from phones, tv, email, and the like. Sounds like a great recipe for mellowness to me.

I’ve never taken this trip across the U.S., but I often took the train from London to Madrid in my younger days—Folkstone or Dover to Calais or Le Havre, Paris, St. Jean de Luz, Madrid, the different gauges of Spanish and French trains a quaint leftover from the Napoleonic invasion and the consequent 3 am lifting of the whole train off its wheels for a new set at the border. The Puerta del Sol was an institution. It’s been replaced by faster trains, but in general on the train I wasn’t in a hurry.

Spiders Of The Sea

It’s been a while since I’ve studied any marine biology, but this Ecotone wiki topic on spiders and place makes me think of pycnogonids. The Pycnogonida are a group of marine arthropods related to the arachnids such as spiders, scorpions, mites, and ticks. Another name for the group is the Pantopoda, meaning “all legs”, which is pretty much a description of what they look like.

I don’t know whether I’ve seen one live, but they’re to be found on the Pacific coast. One list gives nine species for the San Francisco Bay. Around Bodega Bay (home of the Bodega Marine Laboratory), one species Pycnogonum stearnsi is listed as uncommon under rocks (given the locality, I think this means the rocks of the breakwater). Members of its genus feed on coelenterates, especially sea anemones. To quote from Ricketts et al. book Between Pacific Tides:

A border design of these grotesque yet picturesque animals might surround the pen-and-ink representation of a nightmare. Most sea spiders spend part of their tender youth in close juxtaposition to a coelenterate—the larvae, in fact, usually feed on the juices of their hydroid or anemone host…It is especially common among the caves and crevices of Tomales Bluff, Marin County; sometimes half a dozen occur on a single anemone.

So. The Spiders.

Seamus Heaney’s masterful translation of Beowulf launches the epic thus: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by… Makes you think you’re around a fire, about to hear a jolly good yarn, and yes, you get one.

So, the spiders. We have spiders here, in Davis, lots of spiders. Spiders that spin webs everywhere, even in places you’d think a spider could never get.

Mostly they’re the long-legged, tiny-bodied “daddy long-legs” which Numenius tells me are harvestmen and technically not spiders, but we’re going to ignore that for now. They are fierce fly hunters and occasionally they eat each other. They are very tolerated by us until I have fit of cleaning up where they are the first casualties.

Garden spiders in the garden or yard, or more like woodpile, where they are fodder for the house wren or wintering rock wren.

The spiders that everyone thinks of when they think of California, though, are the black widows, the shiny black spiders with a red hourglass warning sign on the belly. They can hurt you worse than a rattlesnake.

Black widows are easy to tell even if you can’t see them because their untidy yet contained webs have a single, verticle strand that leads to another untidy, contained web below. They are most active on hot summer evenings.

Lactrodectus species have the stickiest of all spider webs and are surely the inspiration for the sticky cobwebs on funfair ghost trains.

We leave them alone, too, as long as they don’t decide to move inside. By the fire. To listen to the stories.

This is an Ecotone entry for Spiders and Place.

Redbud Days

The western redbud (Cercis occidentalis) is one of the first native trees to come into flower in our local foothills, even before it leafs out. On my ride into campus along the arboretum, the ones planted there are greeting me very happily right now.

Pondering Waypoints

Since I’ve become interested in geocaching, I’m realizing that there is a large set of people who are going around waypointing places with their recreational-level GPSs. Most of these points are geocaches which they are setting up, but there is no reason this energy couldn’t be turned into citizen-produced maps of favorite places and points. There are signs this could be starting to happen: for instance Travel By GPS is a site with a number of sightseeing and outdoor recreation routes and points of interest available for download. Another promising development is the emergence of a standard interchange format for the routes, tracks, and waypoints stored by recreational GPSs.

A culinary application comes to mind. I’d like to see such efforts tied in with restaurant recommendations that people post to websites, their own or others. Compiling such recommendations is a favorite example of how the semantic web might work. Perhaps the day when one can go to a website, read through an aggregated set of comments on Thai restaurants in the East Bay, check off the ones that sound good, and then download these as waypoints for one’s GPS isn’t that far off.

Fox and Geese

We’re having a heat wave. (Sorry, all you east coasters with snow and whatnot to contend with.) Riding home tonight, I was just about to cross the creek and looked up. A perfect V of geese was flying north-northeast. I’m not sure what kind of goose—the moon wasn’t up yet and they weren’t calling. They’re in a hurry, though: it will be hotter tomorrrow.

Other side of the creek, my bike light caught a couple of eyes. I was pretty sure it was a skunk, but it turned out to be a fox. It turned its head and watched me as I rode past. No hint at all of running away.

We’ve been enjoying a CD by a young California-based bluegrass band, Nickel Creek. They’ve arranged a traditional song about a fox that goes off looking for geese…

The Fox went out on a chilly night
He prayed for the moon to give him light
For he’d many a mile to go that night
Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o
He’d many a mile to go that night, before he reached the town-o

Treasure Hunting

Spring has arrived here with a vengeance, all the fruit trees are in bloom (such as the row of plums north of my office building, which today harbored a couple of acorn woodpeckers), so it’s time for trying new outdoor hobbies, namely geocaching. Geocaching is a pastime where people hide caches (often plastic kitchen containers, or sometimes 35mm film containers to make it more challenging) with a logbook and a few treasure items inside, and then publish the coordinates of the cache on the web. Others then go out equipped with a GPS and try to find the cache, and if so, sign the logbook and take and leave an item. Geocaching got started in May 2000, just after they stopped degrading the accuracy of GPS for non-military users (my favorite decision that Clinton ever made), and has grown tremendously since then: there are now close to 90,000 caches on all continents.

This evening we found our first cache, after a few unsuccessful tries this weekend. It can be quite a challenge to spot the cache. The GPS unit will usually get you to within 10 or so meters of the cache, but there can be a lot of hiding spots within that circle, especially if there’s thick ground cover.

We’re also interested in letterboxing, another treasure hunting hobby which predates GPSs by a good bit. In letterboxing you are given traditional treasure-hunting clues to find the letterbox. In the letterbox there is a rubber stamp (preferably created by hand) and a notebook, and you arrive with your own stamp and notebook. When you arrive at the letterbox, you stamp your own notebook with the stamp in the letterbox, and stamp the notebook in the box with your own stamp.

Returns

On my way to work this morning, I noticed two wood ducks flying out of a box in a eucalyptus tree above the still-flooded creek. I didn’t know that was a wood duck box. I’m thrilled.

At around three this afternoon I saw my first Swainson’s hawk of the year. They’ll be arriving in some numbers in the next few days, working on getting their nests in order. Spring will be accelerating now. These birds need to get working on their broods: it’s far too hot to raise young in summer here, which starts in mid- to late- May.

On our way home this evening from dinner, a barn owl clicked its way around the temporary buildings next to my new office.

Secrets Of The Deep

A note for the Ecotone Wiki’s entry on Ocean and Sea.

There’s an excellent gallery of fishes and other creatures from the deep sea here. Do not view if you’re prone to nightmares. (From Metafilter).

Closer to the littoral zone, giant crabs are invading Norwegian coastal waters. These crabs were originally from the Bering sea and Kamchatka and were introduced in the 1930s into the Barents Sea for food production. Following a population explosion in the 1990s, these crabs rapidly moving down the Norwegian coast, eating every fish in sight.