Blogging For Parrots?

Irene Pepperberg, the animal behaviorist who for twenty-five years has been studying the cognitive abilities of African gray parrots, and is famous for teaching her oldest bird, Alex, how to count as well as the rudiments of reading, has a twenty-month old bird named Arthur who may be getting on the Net soon. Parrots get easily bored and neurotic especially when left alone during day, so Pepperberg’s lab group at MIT came up with the idea of teaching the parrots to surf the web. They ask—“could live interaction with other parrots via the internet relieve stress and boredom caused by social isolation?”

Pica’s sister used to have an African gray parrot named Pavo, short for Pavarotti, who would hang upside down and say “I’m a bat”, and whenever it would snow, he would say “Brrr…it’s penguin weather.”

Honoring the Dead

Butuki posted a beautiful scratchboard drawing of a raccoon skull. I was trying to find a sketch I once did of a female scarlet tanager that had hit the glass door of my office building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just moments before I walked in; it was still warm. I can’t find the sketch just now—I’ll add it if it turns up later. What I remember, though, was sketching quickly to somehow capture the essence of what remained of the bird’s life, of its vitality. This was nothing like the careful, ponderous, holy drawing Butuki did, a raccoon he had killed in mercy and returned a year later to honor in this way; my sketch was a scramble. I also wrote a poem from the bird’s point of view. It was something along the lines of “Who Killed Cock Robin.”

It reminds me that I have not been making time for drawing. It is when I am at my most meditative. It’s a good form of prayer, and I’m grateful to be reminded of this.

The Hazard of Being Other

There’s a partially albino American crow around. Its coloring is very odd and quite beautiful: the tips of its wings are pure white, then darken to buff, then brown, and only its head is a pure black. When I saw it out on the field over the weekend I thought it might be some kind of goose, and rushed for the binoculars.

The other crows go after it murderously. They chase it, dive-bomb it, never let it rest. I’m amazed it’s still alive. Why is the odd one such a threat to the others? Why is its mere presence enough to set them off?

I have no idea why the sight of this persecution makes me so sad. It reminds me, perhaps, that cruelty and intolerance are innate. That no matter what we know, an ugly streak can take over and render us merciless; that it takes very little to set this off: the voice of a demagogue, perhaps, or the fear of the unknown. Mostly, I fear the metaphor of this conflict will be-and is now being-used by the powerful to justify their injustices.

I hope this strange crow somehow manages to pull through. The odds of that do not seem high.

Charting The Rocks

Last week’s trip to Bodega Bay afforded me the chance to start doing some geologizing, namely looking at geologic maps for the route from Davis to Bodega Bay. I didn’t have a chance to seek out paper maps (a good index to California geologic maps being here), but did find a couple digital maps, portions of which I printed out. So I am now much more keenly aware of the Sonoma Volcanics (exposed in bits off of Highway 12 on the way to Napa), and the geologic formations on the road from Petaluma to Bodega Bay (which falls on a very recently produced digital map). The break indicated on the map between the late Tertiary Wilson Grove formation (the hills surrounding Valley Ford) and the graywacke of the Franciscan complex to the west just before entering Bodega Bay was quite enlightening to notice on the ground. Keeping track of geologic formations is a whole new way to travel! So off I go to find more maps.

A Trip to the Zoo

With family visiting from far away, where the snow has already fallen this year, an outing in the sunshine involving elephants and tigers seemed in order (well, to the three-year-old among us, at least). We met up in Berkeley yesterday and went to the Oakland Zoo, which is exactly the right scale for small feet. Highlights included a ride on the train and a ride on the ostrich on the carousel. It was sunny and there was no wind, a splendid day topped off by a splendid dinner at a new Indian restaurant on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, Khana Peena. I returned to Davis on the train in the dark while the others drove back to Bodega Bay.

Zoos seem to be best visited around small children who seem to find the most interesting things first. It’s like learning to see again. I’ve never spent much time around a 5-month old giraffe, but they have beautiful markings.

Visitors and Eggheads

This entry is another collaborative post on the Ecotone Wiki: “How Visitors Affect Your View of Place.” See other posts on this topic here.

Coming back from a trip to the coast this evening to see family we were discussing how visiting a foreign country is a great way to learn to see afresh, since everything is so different. It makes you look at where you live in a different way.

Davis, California is not a tourist destination. There are no Roman ruins, there is no spa, no beach; the the most ancient buildings are just over 100 years old; there isn’t even any wine made here other than for the purposes of study. But there is a large, world-class university, and in fact it is this that accounts for the trips made by most visitors, either directly or indirectly. (The recent runaway success of the University Retirement Community, providing different levels of care for seniors, is almost certainly attributable to its proximity to the campus. These people didn’t move here for the climate.)

Pica’s window at work looks out onto one of the egghead sculptures by Robert Arneson. It is actually the most photographed one in the series; entitled “Eye on Mrak: Fatal Laff,” it is a Janus-faced piece where the second face, pictured at left, is upside-down and laughing. At least three different people pose next to this head every day; sometimes the number is far higher. (Mrak Hall is the main administration building on campus.)

The egghead is not a sight we bother to show our visitors. Rather, we make sure our visitors see the significant landmarks in our daily round: the Davis Food Co-op, the Davis Farmers Market if they’re here on the right day of the week, and of course the cows right next to the main road loop through campus. Architecturally inclined visitors get to see the 1970s era ecotopian Village Homes, the contemporary McMansion wasteland known as Mace Ranch, and the monolithic edifice the Mondavi Center. Those who stay a little longer with some interest in birds get to see the California Raptor Center.

If Numenius were a visitor, not a resident, there is one place not mentioned above that he’d be sure to head to—Shields Library. If the university is at the heart of this town, the main campus library is surely the heart of any university. How better to get a sense of what the town has to offer?

Where I’m From

Both Fred and DocRock have inspired me to try a “Where I’m from” exercise… Others have responded to Fred’s initial call. It was a lot of fun.

I come from the fog, from the fog round the bridge. I could see from the sink that the bridge peeped out, orange.

From the place where the dog caught the snake, a bright garter.

From the lounge of a ship, singing into a mike.

From grandma’s sickbed that we reached in a bus, where a Lancashire gray steady rain plinked on down.

From the car driving south, French appendicitis.

From my polio calligraphy-scratch in Madrid by the doctor. He spoke in a language we couldn’t make out.

From my first day at Numont, alone and afraid. From the tree in the garden, on my branch, hidden well.

Up the street in bare feet, a cement-diamoned sidewalk. For popsicles we learned to call “polos”; for comics.

From the market that smelled, called “The Smelly Market.” Where Mum went to buy “escabeche” and lemons: we sat in the Valiant, our noses assailed.

From paintings on white paper bordered in black. Entitled “Dibujo,” there was lots of white space.

From Jennifer’s pool, holding swirled Pepsi bottles. Grownups smoked and drank beer and drank gin and drank scotch.

From the playhouse we made, from our dreams of true love; from the secrets we shared, like the hamsters that mated.

From the cartoons in Spanish. A kindly bus driver. Past the guards wearing three-cornered hats, bearing guns.

From the restaurants we ate at, where I ordered, in charge. Where we kids had our food on our table, apart. Where the children around us were well-dressed, cologned; where we ran—tolerated—rambunctiously foreign.

From the black market goodies, American food. St. George’s on Sunday, and chocolate cake.

From the red bike Dad brought on his trip back from London.

From our first trip alone on the metro downtown. I don’t think we told them we’d gone. Well, we did.

Assembling California

I quite enjoyed yesterday’s lunchtime reunion between writer John McPhee and UC Davis geologist Eldridge Moores, who is the main protagonist in McPhee’s account of California geologic history, Assembling California. We have a long plane ride ahead of us soon and, needing a long book to read, I may choose McPhee’s Annals of the Former World which is really five books in one, three of which I’ve read. But that was a long time ago, and I certainly could fancy rereading Assembling California. It’s a brillliant narrative that made me wish I could take my own journey across the length and breadth of California with a professional geologist near at hand to interpret the terrain outside.

Alas, professionally-led geologic field trips are not in my near future, but it would be fun to learn more about local geology. My formal geologic training is limited to one course in geology and another in geomorphology way back in college, so I have a lot to catch up on. Alt and Hyndman’s Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California is a good lay guidebook to the vicinity, but when one inevitably seeks more local detail, for the most part one has to jump the gulf into the professional literature. At least there’s a long tradition in geology of field trip guidebooks with milepost-by-milepost annotations.

There are certainly easier places to study geology than coastal California. It’s not without reason that many rock units around here are termed mlanges.

John McPhee at UC Davis

John McPhee has been in Davis for the last few days. I caught his panel discussion this afternoon with two other writers of place, Gary Snyder and Robert Haas. Although none of these writers thinks of himself as primarily an “environmental” or “nature” writer, they all allow place to suffuse their work. And, as Gary Snyder put it, part of his project in writing is to confront the failure of our culture to realize that we live in a physical world.

I haven’t read John McPhee’s Assembling California, but Numenius went to a lunchtime talk where McPhee revisited some of the geological discussions he had with Eldridge Moores, a geology professor here at UC Davis and a long-time friend of McPhee’s.

It was an interesting day of pondering why it’s important to continue thinking hard about landscape and what lives in it, including us. Robert Haas explained about the River of Words project where children are encouraged to write poems about their local watersheds, in the United States and across the world. As he says, if these children can’t think imaginatively about the world they’ll inherit, nobody will.

Gossamer Afternoon

We both had the day off today, so after running an errand in town, and an excursion over to Sacramento to the Crocker Art Museum, we returned home for lunch and then sat outside on a very pleasant warm afternoon where we heard pipits in the field and a red-shouldered hawk calling from the trees by Putah Creek. And floating across the field we’d see occasional strands of gossamer. The spiders are dispersing.

I don’t know anything about what spiders make gossamer strands and googling wasn’t a whole lot of help, though this page from the nearby Stebbins Cold Canyon Natural Reserve suggests that these were orb-weaving spiders, of the family Araneidae. Time for a trip to the library for some arachnid research. At any rate, as Fred reminded us last year, it’s a pleasure to be conversant with the gossamer ways of spiders.