Alfalfa Bales

Rows of hay bales in the fields here are an ephemeral sight. The hay baler, equipped with powerful headlights, does its work at night, and the bale harvester, shown at left, gets right to the task straight away in the morning.

They’re getting many crops of alfalfa this season out of this field south of our house. Alfalfa seems like an easy crop to grow: once you cut it, it comes right back for another crop. It just takes lots of water from parched groundtables.

Children and Trees

On August 1 a group of us collaborated on a joint post about trees and place at the Ecotone Wiki. I was tempted, as I have often been on these joint posts, to write about childhood memories. I resisted, since I didn’t want every entry to make it seem as though the place blogging exercise was a narrative of lost childhood, yet this seems to be something that recurs quite a lot with this group.

Trees are something that children seem drawn to naturally, but there are other places too, miniature houses, secret gardens. They are all places of safety that seem to affirm the child’s individuality.

One secret place I went to often with my friend Jennifer was what we called “our little woods.” This was a stand of a few spindly locust-type trees-ten or twelve, maybe-that was bravely holding out against suburban expansion north of Madrid. We buried little treasures there, hoped to find bigger ones.

The copse was almost druidically circular which must have been a lot of its appeal. The magic of the place contained us. Even when our parents were nearby, eating picnics on ground that has been built on for over thirty years now, we had our secret connection to those trees.

Jennifer now lives in a land that is almost entirely magic-southern Sweden. The lore of trees and the creatures that live in them, and around them, and under them, make this a good place for children to discover secret places. Jennifer’s red wooden house is flanked by trees, kept at bay through lots of sweat. The geese honk in the morning and the common cranes feed in the field west of the house. Everythingapart from the spruces-seems almost diminutive, cowed by the immense forest. And magical.

Sometimes when I’m hot and dusty, coming home into the delta breeze, I remember our little woods, sparse and circular, and I think of Jennifer’s vast expanse of northern woods. Different choices have led us on different journeys, to different trees.

Place Bloggers on the Radio

Numenius and I just got back from Point Reyes where, together with Lisa from Field Notes and Chris from Creek Running North, we were interviewed on KWMR (a community radio station for west Marin County) about Blogs of Place. I daresay this is the first radio show in the world to feature place blogs. I have no idea how many people heard the show, which will be repeated on Thursday—or whether any of them knew what a weblog was. We are going to get hold of a tape and try and make it available as an audio file somehow.

The main topics we discussed were how the Web, not a place, is enabling a redefinition of place; about nature and place versus urban place; and about children and their sense of the landscape. It was a wonderful conversation which we four continued over dinner, and now it’s late—I’m turning into a pumpkin.

Unexpected Light Show

Yesterday in the early evening I took a little walk and when I reached the levee at Putah Creek and looked between the trees at the horizon towards the northwest, I saw a massive mountain-sized cloud, with a flat bit trailing off towards the north, and illuminated by occasional flashes. Since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky here at Davis, I wondered if this was smoke from a fire up in the mountains overlooking Cache Creek, up in the northwest corner of Yolo County. I returned to the house to get my binoculars, and walked out on the levee to get a better look.

The flashes illuminating the cloud were vivid orange, and one bolt stretching across the cloud proved that this was a lightning storm. I still wondered if there might be a fire associated with the storm, and certainly wanted to know where it was located, so I went back home to check online. Looked at the weather radar, I was amazed to discover that the storm was over the Trinity Alps and Scott Mountains, at least 200 miles from here. For all I know I was looking at a 50,000 foot cloud, and saw an eight-mile long lightning bolt.

It didn’t seem to cause any fires, at least according the fire incident sites I was able to find, such as this one from the USGS.

Plucky Denizens Of Bee Boxes

California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) may not be the most charismatic of rodents to look at, but they are certainly interesting: social mammals often post sentries, and these are no exception. The alarm calls are different depending on whether the danger is in the air or on the ground, so when a squirrel is screeching at a certain pitch we know to look up for a raptor.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about these creatures is that over millennia they have developed an immunity to rattlenesake venom. We’ve seen footage of a mother squirrel actually parrying a strike by a rattler intent on making lunch of one of her offspring, who presumably are more vulnerable. Donald Owings, of the UC Davis Psychology Department, has studied these animals and their communication systems for some time.

We have our own colony here out back living among all the beekeeping equipment. Last year we saw not one but two albino ground squirrels, an obvious target for predators.

The Aging Of Neighborhoods

This is a post on trees for the biweekly discussions of the Ecotone wiki.

If one looks at satellite imagery of Davis, two neighborhoods show up as being heavily wooded, the College Park area north of campus, and a tract north of Montgomery Street in South Davis. Both are quite desirable and expensive places to live, owing in part to the large trees there. Though there are a few valley oaks amongst the trees, most of these trees are not native to the site, and were planted when the tracts were laid out.

The time it takes trees to mature exceeds the planning horizons of most developers and city workers by a good bit. When I travel through new developments like Mace Ranch shown above, a place with a very low tree canopy to rooftop area ratio, a place where the garages dominate the houses which dominate their lots, I wonder if it will ever appear as forested as College Park. Somehow I doubt it.

Little Apple

This entry is another Ecotone collaborative blog on place, which this time looks at trees.

Some trees are meant to be touched.

I think it’s the manzanita’s bark. Warm copper-red and smooth, smoother by far than eucalyptus whose bark has shredded off in shaggy, untidy strips. The manzanita’s shredding is subtle and delicate, waxy rolls curling like planed metal or even plastic. But there is none of the coldness of metal or lifelessness of plastic. This is a warm tree with a warm heart.

I first saw manzanitas in Napa Valley, in the hills above Calistoga. I couldn’t stop stroking their trunks. Madrones have a similar bark-both these trees are in the Ericaceae, same family as blueberriesbut with their larger, more imposing bulk and leaves, seem less inviting to touch. Many manzanitas rarely grow taller than eight feet, qualifying more as shrubs than treesperhaps it’s the scale, as well as the irresistible bark, that draws me. The same is true of Brancusi’s sculpture of a seal in the Pompidou Museum in Paristhe combination of scale and smoothness-that makes touching it irrestistible (a headache for museum staff).

Ursula K. LeGuinn set her utopian anthropological novel Always Coming Home in a Napa Valley with a different future than the one it seems to be embarking on… the characters share a strong kinship with the land they inhabit, share a lot with the Native Americans who lived there over 200 years ago. They greet all the living things they encounter with a “heya” as if they were meeting a friend on the road.

Heya madrone, heya coyote, heya jackrabbit. Heya foothills. Heya northern chaparral.

Heya, manzanita, I still say, even if sometimes not out loud. This one is never a stretch for me. It is a tree with a warm heart. Touch me, it says.

Gobbler on Putah Creek

I was pedalling into work this morning-had just completed my one hill, which I attacked not quite like the riders on the Col du Galibier, but definitely went at with gusto-when I noticed, on the south side of the creek, an enormous bird looking up at me. It was so large I thought it might be an escaped emu, but it turned its head and I saw the prominent trailing neck feathers of a tom turkey.

These birds have been increasing rapidly in the foothills, where they terrorize the local dogs. It’s exciting to see one here in the valley. I have mixed feelings about turkeys-they are very good at finding acorns and they aren’t native to the West-but it was a real thrill to see one so close to home.

A Break From The Heat

It was overcast and humid much of the day, which is unusual weather for summertime Davis. It never got around to raining, but with no direct sun it thankfully wasn’t as hot as it’s been. We went to the Davis Farmers Market, now our Wednesday afternoon habit, and met Fernanda for a picnic. She has family visiting—at our picnic her niece Julia was making these good luck charms from the lawn.

Haiku for a Hot Evening

Barn owl’s love-screeching:
crickets sing to the blackness.
The train bisects night.