Magpies In The Morning

There is a little ditch that separates us from the field to the north. A couple of wooden planks serve as a bridge; I just crossed it to toss the kitchen leavings out in the fallow field (the ants were starting to sell tickets to the apple core from our dessert this evening).

We’ve just starting putting these leavings a few meters over to the east, where they can be seen easily from the kitchen window. For birds that are so raucous, yellow-billed magpies are surprisingly flittish, but the windows work well as blinds.

The other day we tossed out on the field some stale, undercooked white rice. The magpies descended upon it the next morning, flying off with chunks so their neighbor bird wouldn’t be tempted to snag their particular chunk.

One is for sorrow, two is for joy. A solitary magpie is indeed a sad thing—they like their social lives after all!

Living Among Jackrabbits

jackrabbit wakes

jackrabbit peers jackrabbit hops jackrabbit hears jackrabbit leaps jackrabbit flies jackrabbit loves jackrabbit sighs jackrabbit flees jackrabbit hides jackrabbit sees jackrabbit’s alive

Sketching at the Raptor Center

This morning we went to the California Raptor Center to do some sketching. The Raptor Center is a rehab facility operated by the veterinary school here at UC Davis that treats orphaned and injured birds of prey for re-release. Some of the birds are too injured to return to the wild and become long-term denizens of the center, often getting taken out on educational tours.

It’s a great place to sketch birds, and why we don’t go there more often, seeing as how it’s just up the road from us, is a bit of a mystery. Today when we got there two of the volunteers had taken a ferruginous hawk and a Harris’ hawk out of their cages, and both birds were posing nicely for us. A little down the path, they were hosing out the cage with the turkey vultures, who seemed none too pleased about such activities. The two turkey vultures are named Balzac and Juliet. Juliet used to be called Romeo, but a year ago last summer she laid an egg. Determining the sex of birds can be a challenge.

Above is my sketch of their barred owl.

Hijacking a Birder

This morning we spent a good hour with the scissor-tailed flycatcher outside Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus. I did some sketches; Numenius took a lot of photos (one of which is here) and also managed to catch a short video clip (844 kb, Quicktime) with the digital camera during which the flycatcher regurgitated one of the magnolia fruits it had been eating.

A theoretical ecology postdoc arrived last week from Cambridge University. He was introduced to us as “a British birder.” This is the very best kind: a knowledgeable and highly skilled birder who has nevertheless never seen our common sparrows, much less megararities (such as the flycatcher). So people have been adopting him all week. He had managed to get to 83 new birds this morning by bike alone.

Thinking a nice round number like 100 was probably preferable, some birders hauled him off in a CAR: we joined them for part of the day and saw cinammon teal, marsh wren, song sparrow, and snow geese. Poor guy hasn’t opened a bank account yet or done any laundry since his arrival. Blame the birds, and blame the abducting birders.

Richard introduced us to a British birding term: “papped.” The scissor-tailed flycatcher got papped this morning (from “papparazzied,” photographed to excess).

A Very Lost Bird

I was looking out my office window yesterday morning when a gray bird, about the size of a small thrush, flew into the large valley oak to the north. It looked like a northern mockingbird.

But: no white flashes. None.

The bird was a scissor-tailed flycatcher. They nest in Oklahoma and Texas; usually they spend the winter in Central America. This one apparently is happy to be in Davis. Sylvia Wright first spotted it on December 12, when it was seen only by her and one other person, though she did manage to get a good photo.

I called a few birding friends, and within twenty minutes about twelve people were there. The provost came down to look for it. We had all kinds of people asking whether we were conducting a psychology experiment!

Postscript, Monday, January 19, 2004: We saw the flycatcher well for over an hour this morning. Numenius took lots of photos, one of which can be seen at left.

Waves Coming and Going

An entry for the Ecotone topic on Coming and Going

It’s been a week of playing with sound. On the laptop that is, where it’s easy to take a recording from a CD (the sound sampled at 44,100 times per second) and open the file in a sound editor and look at the waveforms. If you zoom down far enough, to ever shorter and shorter periods of time, you see the individual sample points, approximating the continuous sound wave. (Dogs must find CD recordings dreadfully lo-fi, being unable to render the upper octaves of their hearing.) That we perceive these pressure waves coming and going as sounds of different frequencies is a marvel.

Outside, a Pacific tree frog, by far the commonly encountered frog around here, is going ‘crickle, crickle’. This is their time in the cycle of the year—plenty of water around to keep them happy and able to wander about freely. At left there is a plot of the sound spectrogram of their call (time is on the x-axis, frequency is the y-axis). Their call pattern is strikingly periodic: a two-part ‘crickle’ every second or so.

It’s cloudy, and I don’t know what the phase of the moon is. But I do know that 29.5306 days from now, it will be at the same phase. Such is the periodicity of this universe.

Coming and Going

There is a Hebrew blessing for everything, just about, and there is certainly one for entering and leaving your house. I’ve seen several translations of this but the one I like best is “blessed are you in your comings and goings.” For a culture that has spent much of its history on the move, at least mythologically, it’s a good blessing, focusing on the present and the inevitable but bringing “home” into it. It’s packed with resonance yet wholesome. Blessed are you in your comings and goings.

I come and go all the time; I’ve lived in four countries. USA-Spain-UK-France-UK-USA. The years I spent in Boston I moved seven or eight times in as many years. You keep your pack light; you get restless; you move on. (Sometimes you are made to move on because of circumstances outside your control, but part of me believes there’s more control available here than I’d like to think.)

I’d like a blessing, instead, for staying put, something I seem to find almost impossible. Blessed are you in your sitting down. Blessed are you in your emptying your head of shopping lists. Blessed are you in your quiet time, in the quiet time you seem to shove aside as though you feared it.

Blessed are you in the fog and the moonlight and the breath you take to enfold them. Blessed are you in your breathing. Blessed are you—in your place.

(Ecotone Wiki joint post on Coming and Going)

Orclets In The Kitchen

Every now and then, our kitchen gets overrun with ants. This seems to happen either in the middle of winter, when the ground is saturated and they may have to move above ground, or in the dead of summer, when I think they come inside looking for water. Right now one is crawling across an envelope next to the laptop bearing a fallen comrade.

These are gourmet ants. They excel at finding bits of asiago cheese and morsels from lemon-apricot bars. I expect them soon to develop a taste for our favorite Chilean merlot, and to walk off with a vat of soup carrying the pot.

We show them no mercy. These are invasive Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) that arrived in California about 100 years ago, spreading up the coast and in urban regions. They have displaced native species of ants and have thus been linked to the decline of the coast horned lizard in Southern California. These ants in California are remarkable in that they have very little genetic variation, much less than the native population back in Argentina. In effect, the entire California branch of this ant species forms a giant supercolony. By now they’ve probably created a large database of our eating habits, and have shared it with the NSA.

Sweet Auburn

Another joint blogging entry for the Ecotone Wiki on Cemeteries and Place.

DocRock has written about the fun involved in wandering around cemeteries, mostly in connection with the stories that are told-and made-in these places. My own passion for cemeteries originated in a passion for birds, which are often found in profusion in cemeteries, where there are often trees and water, just the thing for a 2-ounce warbler exhausted by the northward migration. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is full to bursting with birders in May, but since they mostly arrive at 6:00 am and leave to go to work by 8:00, they don’t get in the way too much of mourners.

Hanging around gravestones for this long was bound to have an effect on me, though, and like it or not, the stories started coming. Here’s one I haven’t finished telling, yet. Lizzie died in 1869. Her stone bears the inscription “Lizzie.” (period at the end) with a garland of flowers. On the back of the stone is more information: Lizzie died a few days after giving birth to a son, Matthew; he died a month later and is buried with her. Her husband and parents lie nearby; also Lizzie’s sisters, and her husband’s new wife.

So my made-up add-on to this rather sad tale (her father’s memoirs are in the Law Library here at Davis, he being a Somewhat Important Person, yet he never mentions her at all) is that, in fact, she didn’t really love the man she married; she was torn between two brothers, who are buried up the hill where I saw my first ever Cape May warbler, and who both got killed (really, not fictionally) in the Civil War. At left is a drawing of the effigy of their dog, a sculpture encased in glass. The dog has no name; the inscription simply reads “Their favorite.” Period. It’s hard from three thousand miles away, but someday I mean to finish this novel.

For now, though, the verb “to Lizzie” means to wander around a cemetery, usually Mount Auburn, where the focus is NOT birds. (I peek anyway.)

Virtual Cemeteries

This is an entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic on Cemeteries and Place.

Not far from where we live, down the road past fields and out to the east, is the Tremont Street Cemetery, an idyllic little rural cemetery with the interments starting from the 1870s. It’s a good destination for a short bicycle ride from here. None of our ancestors are buried there. In idle moments, we entertain the thought of transcribing the gravestones there so that genealogists from elsewhere might be able to look up information about deceased relatives online.

We dabble in genealogy and too have benefited from online cemetery transcription projects. In virtual explorations of my ancestral roots in Lorain County, Ohio, I came across this page of Lorain County cemetery transcriptions, and found maybe a dozen relatives listed in the publication. It’s not as gratifying as making a gravestone rubbing, but visiting an ancestor’s virtual cemetery is still a form of homage.