Marking the Sprint

I was cycling the other day past the Tremont Cemetery when I noticed a series of pavement markings every 100 meters: “400…300…200…100…Finish”. And after that, the marking depicted at right, followed by “Nice Job”.

Somebody’s doing time trials out on Tremont Road. The local racers have in the past done Wednesday evening time trials out on Putah Creek Road, along the usual bicycling route between Davis and Winters, where there is a similar series of markings. But the markings on Tremont are new—perhaps they’ve changed location, or it’s a different group of cyclists.

Cycling is, needless to say, an ideal way to explore the landscape. But not when you’ve got your nose to the bike stem in the last 100 meters of a time trial sprint!

New York Songlines

Jim Naureckas offers a set of New York Songlines, pathways through the city annotated with stories for each block. The name, made famous in a book by Bruce Chatwin, comes from the elaborate mythological song cycles Australian aborigines would learn to enable them to navigate across a harsh landscape.

He feels that in their hurry to get to their destinations without noticing what lies between, New Yorkers have lost their sense of place, and writes:

[This] is a shame, because New York has its own giants, heroes and monsters who left their marks and their names on the land around us. If we learn their stories which are written on our streets and avenues, we’ll have a much better chance of knowing where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Does thinking of a landscape as narrative, rather than as cartography, increase one’s sense of place?

Duck Days in Davis

On my way home from work tonight along the Arboretum, a fat and slightly dingy Norway rat ran in front of my bicycle wheel. I often see them around but I can never quite get used to it. They are superb swimmers, highly adaptable, and they have an inexhaustible supply of food from the well-meaning duck-feeders. They are here to stay.

The duck-feeders fall into three basic types: most common are families with young children who come to the lake at the Arb, sit on the very well-fertilized grass, and toss bags and bags of bread to the ducks, mostly mallards with every possible intergrade hybridity imaginable (an untidy bunch). Second are the sporadic “dotties”—folks, normally older, who talk to themselves as often as the ducks, and are mostly tolerated as benign, not-quite-there, members of supervised-care facilities.

The third type is the most frightening. I’ll call her Guerrilla Girl. She rides her bike up and down the length of the Arboretum daily with a black carrier sack full of grain, which she deposits in strategic locations where “her” ducks know her and fight over themselves to start gobbling before the rats can get to it (a futile gesture, of course). Her eyes are glassy and her jaw is set in a square grimace, a defiant warning to the world not to jeopardize her Right To Feed the Ducks. She reminds me of early 1970s Trotskyites or Roger Clemens—the expressions are identical.

I did make the mistake once of gently pointing out to Guerrilla Girl that she was feeding the rats more than the ducks; that the ducks had plenty of food anyway; that their overpopulation in this artificial oxbow lake was raising the fecal coliform count to lethal levels; that they were becoming vectors of all kinds of disease which they would pass along to other ducks (not to mention other birds). I was told in among the tirade of invective that the University could only get rid of the rats by poisoning them, and that she knew these ducks, she followed their movements throughout the seasons, and that they had their own patterns (I could hardly disagree with this: they start drooling when they see Guerrilla Girl’s black bag from half a mile away). She nearly killed us last week by squealing her bike dementedly into a right-angle so we wouldn’t hit a heavily gravid female that was heading down to the water.

I’ve never, unlike bsag, been mugged by a duck, so I don’t feel a personal hostility toward these avian misfits. In fact, I’m kind of impressed they’ve managed to win such an ardent champion to their cause. Laughing all the way to their holes are the rats, who emerge at dusk to reap the rewards of this crusade.

Watering Valley Oaks

Our neighbor Jim has taken the initiative to start a valley oak restoration project along the UC Davis Putah Creek Riparian Reserve. For several months he has turned his carport into an oak nursery—collecting and germinating acorns, and growing the seedlings in pairs of half-gallon juice cartons duct-taped end-to-end together. Then with the help of a few volunteers and somebody to assist with the two-person auger, he planted about 80 or 90 seedlings along the north side of Putah Creek, in two locations.

Summer is upon us—it was well in the nineties today, and we don’t expect to see rain again until at least October, so the plan is to water the seedlings every couple of weeks over the summer. This, it turns out, is a major project. Today was the kickoff watering session, and about a dozen volunteers showed up. Each oak seedling got five gallons of water, hauled in buckets quite laboriously from the creek. I’ll estimate we shifted about a ton-and-a-half of water in our three-hour long effort. We also engaged in a bit of weed-whacking, trying to keep the mulched circle around each seedling clear of star thistle and other nasties. At right is a photo of the bucket brigade.

A Place Blog from Pinole Creek

We’re happy to learn that we’ve inspired Chris Clarke, of the online magazine Faultline, to start his own blog about place, Creek Running North. He writes about Pinole Creek, Contra Costa County, finding a bit of wildness in a rapidly urbanizing environment near San Francisco Bay.

The Alluring Scent of Barn Owls

According to a particularly well-travelled birding friend of ours, Davis is perhaps one of the best places in the country to easily see barn owls. It is a rare night that we don’t hear the ‘click-click-click-click-click’ of a barn owl cruising over the house.

From but she’s a girl…, we learn another reason to appreciate barn owls—they have a lovely scent! And, according to the Guardian, crested auklets smell like tangerines.

Hmm, maybe scent-listing will be the next challenge for elite birders. :)

On Compiling Bird Lists

I got interested in birds early, growing up in Franco’s Spain with rollers and hoopoes to whet the appetite of young eyes staring out the car window on long trips—actually, anything large enough to identify from a moving Triumph station wagon was pretty exciting. I carried my interest to England where I studied. It wasn’t until 1989 when I got to Massachusetts, home of the Brookline Bird Club, that I started keeping a list.

A trip to Texas with this group who adopted me, a new and eager birder reeling from a divorce, and urged me to record every bird until I had reached over ninety new ones (“life birds”), cheering on each milestone, got me hooked on listing. I plunged into Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in spring, immersing myself in warbler song and color and this community that gathered every morning at six with binoculars. I wrote them all down. I remember my first cerulean warbler, my first hooded warbler, my first Kentucky warbler, rarities all. I learned the zoo-zee-zee-zoo-zee of the black-throated green warbler. I gasped in unison with a hundred other people at a rose-breasted grosbeak, at a scarlet tanager, at a Baltimore oriole. I started entering the birds in a home-made Filemaker database.

American birders are a community and once you get beyond a certain point with your list you enter an unnamed, undescribed race (with yourself) for the most lifers. In North America, lifers is often grafted onto the description “birds you have seen for the first time in North America which includes Canada and Alaska but excludes Mexico and Hawai’i, they being outside the North American bioregion as defined in the American Birding Association (ABA).” My list reached 350 (out of a possible 800) very quickly. The next hundred was almost as fast. Trips to Florida, Alaska, and the upper Midwest, swelled the list to over 500. A trip to Arizona in 1995 put me over 600 with hummingbirds, owls, and the elegant trogon.

Meanwhile, I had started an email correspondence with a man in California who, like me, liked birds. He spoke about the canyons in the East Bay and the song of the black-headed, rather than rose-breasted, grosbeak. Like me, he had an awesome respect for shorebirds and sparrows, the hard ones. His voice, through the screen, sang loud and clear and I was drawn west, a migration back to my birthplace.

I still keep a life list but I don’t fly anywhere special in an attempt to make it grow: I am content, these days, to watch the birds as they return each year, on their way to the Sierra or staying here for a season. I keep a list of the birds I see on the way to work. I keep a list of birds I’ve seen in dreams (the most spectacular was a yellow ptarmigan-type creature). We keep a joint list of the birds we’ve seen or heard from the house.

My ABA-area list stands at 667 (I was stuck on 666 for an awfully long while, which didn’t feel like a good place to be stuck). I don’t anticipate getting to 700 any time soon, to join that elite group known as the 700 club. My focus has changed. But the report of a rarity within 100 miles does get my blood going again!

Beavers in the Neighborhood

Last night I walked east out the levee road, just past the raptor center, when I looked across Putah Creek where I saw a critter just out of the water on the opposite bank. He got back to swimming in the creek, and I then saw his distinctive tail. The beavers were back.

Maybe they never left. Pica and I first saw beavers in this stretch of Putah Creek on a late-afternoon walk last December 31st. I came back the following day with the scope and digicam and took some pictures, one of which is at left. But I didn’t see them after that evening. Still, it’s quite possible they’re the same beavers I saw last night.

I returned this evening to try to photograph them. No luck on the photography, but I did see one. It’s a treat having beavers a five-minute walk from our house, in the middle of the Central Valley!

Vernal Pool Expedition

This morning Numenius and I met some friends to look for reported grasshopper sparrows in the old Glide Tule Ranch, which was recently bought by the California Department of Fish and Game and adds 12,000 acres to the 4,000 preserved wildlife wetland area just to the east and south of here.

Furtive and easily overlooked, grasshopper sparrows have rarely been reported in Yolo County. However, it looks as though there may be some breeding pairs in this one section; at least four, and possibly five, males were singing their little buzzy insect-like song. Because the plants are still short, they emerged onto taller dock stalks to “sing,” an unusual treat for so secretive a bird.

Around them were depressions in the cow pasture, a different color green than the rest. These are the dried-up vernal pools, which this year, because of the late and profuse rains, have been spectacular in their blooms. At right is a photo of Pogogyne douglasii, which stayed put longer than the sparrows.

A Trip to Napa Valley

Last week we met my mother and some visiting English friends at Copia in the town of Napa. Copia is part culinary institute, part restaurant, part museum, part garden. Mostly it is making the only affordable place to live in Napa Valley out of reach of working folks. We balked at paying $12.50 as an entry fee-we were going to be buying LUNCH, after all-and though the herb gardens were interesting and inventive, and though the lunch was excellent, the museum was totally sterile.

It’s really quite a feat to make food dull (even if you aren’t a foodie) but PowerPoint can do that do anything! Julia Child’s copper pots from the 60s were kind of fun, though.

We opted to drive back over the ridge instead of on I-80, filling up with Tahoe-bound traffic, and stopped to see the Glory Hole still spilling over on Lake Berryessa. I’m sure after seven days of heat and wind that’s over—possibly till the next El Nio.