eBird

I spent some time exploring eBird today and signed up to be able to submit bird observations to them. This site is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. The Cornell Lab has for a long time been interested in citizen science, organizing participatory activities such as feeder counts, the Great Backyard Bird Count (held mid-February), and winter finch studies. What eBird provides is a place to submit bird observations of all North American species at any time and place.

The interface to submit observations works well and at first glance succeeds in striking the balance between simplicity and capturing sufficient information to provide useful data. It distinguishes between casual observations and more formal surveys such as point counts, transects, or area searches. I’m a little less happy about the interface to display observations: there doesn’t seem to be a way to display a data table for an observation locality, nor do I see a way to download portions of the database for research. Presumably improvements to the display of observations will come in time. I think eBird will work well for birders such as us who are hopeless about keeping formal field notes but enjoy doing the occasional full checklist or count.

A Closer Look at Watersheds

We attended a talk at the Yolo Audubon Society on Putah and Cache Creeks, twin watershed systems that flow either side the Blue Ridge on the west side of Yolo County. The speaker, Andrew Fulks, is the manager for the UC Davis riparian reserve along Putah Creek but is also the founder of yolohiker.org, introducing residents of this region to previously inaccessible and little-known areas: blue oak woodland, chamise chaparral, and grasslands, and how they are connected to the creeks that run through them.

This region is under serious population pressure: California is expected to grow by 600,000 inhabitants per year until 2010. Efforts to keep the open lands from development will no doubt increase. There are already at least ten agencies working to protect the waters and adjacent lands of these two watersheds.

Wind and Heat

After a late season of cool weather and rains, summer is descending upon the Central Valley. We’ve had clear skies for over a week-and-a-half, and this past weekend there were strong north winds in the morning, caused by a high pressure cell building over the northern Great Basin. Today it hit about 90. We will soon get in the pattern where we will have headwinds both ways on our bike commutes—the north wind in the morning, and late in the afternoon the Delta breeze from the south, mercifully cooling things off. But summer weather means it’s time to set up the solar cooker.

We “bloggers of place” have our own section on this week’s edition of the collaborative Carnival of the Vanities. The section on place blogging is at the end of the listing of posts. Thanks to Fred of Fragments from Floyd for suggesting this, and Susanna of cut on the bias for graciously agreeing to host us.

Trains

Last week at the Whole Earth Festival there was a table set up for the Train Riders Association of California, a group that is working to promote passenger rail service in California. We were definitely interested in their work, since we very much enjoy travelling moderate distances by train. It is quite convenient to take the train to the Bay Area from Davis, since the Amtrak Capitol Corridor line, running from Sacramento to San Jose, has proven quite successful, there now being 12 trains running each direction on weekdays. There is a great deal of interest in California in building a high-speed rail system between the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Southern California, and there will be an important bond measure on the November 2004 ballot to fund this.

Though our interest in trains is mostly as a mode of transportation, the Sacramento area is also an excellent place to be a rail buff. The California State Railroad Museum is nearby in Old Sacramento and every eight years hosts a rail fair gathering train fans, and indeed trains, from several continents. Yesterday we went to a wedding at Hagen Community Park in Rancho Cordova, and discovered that the park was also the home of the Sacramento Valley Live Steamers. They were having a meet that day, with kids and older rail geeks riding tiny steam trains around on 7 1/2” track.

But the rail buffs know a way into the past, into the landscape of the transportation networks of 75 or 100 years ago. An eight-mile bike ride away from here lies the abandoned right-of-way of the Sacramento Northern Railway, an electric interurban railway that opened in 1913, running eventually from Sacramento to San Francisco. The mail box at right commemorates the stop at Saxon, now known mostly as the name of a USGS quadrangle map.

Snakes Around the House

A fear of snakes seems to be almost universal, a function perhaps of our having evolved on the savannah… a fear we share with most mammals. One of my earliest memories is of my father trying to dispatch one (a harmless garter?) with a pitchfork over the neighbor’s fence, the dog barking madly. Whether learned or innate, this fear is reinforced from an early age.

Not seeing many others growing up, other than the odd water snake in Spain or even, occasionally, a viper (Vipera aspis), few indeed considering how much wildcamping we did and how wide open my eyes were for birds, I retained a vague but not very realistic fear of snakes. It wasn’t until we lived in a cabin in the mountains above Santa Barbara during a big El Nio year-which brought a surge of rodents-that I truly learned to appreciate them.

There are no rattlesnakes in this flood plain where we now live which, though tamed and leveed and corralled is still a prime target for a 100-year flood event. There are, however, gopher snakes and even king snakes. We regularly shunt the gopher snakes off the road or bike path where they are sunning themselves after a cool, wet winter. At right is a young king snake (Lampropeltis getulis) just outside our back door, moving toward my bicycle wheel.

Moon Emerging From Shadow

We watched the total lunar eclipse last night from our house. Sunset here yesterday was at 8:10 PM PDT, and the moon entered totality at 8:14 PM, so the moon was already dark when it was first rising and took a long time to become visible through the dust and murk of Sacramento Valley air. The image at left was taken about 10 minutes after the end of totality.

On Designing Bike Lanes

Peter Merholz has a post (warning, big images) about the phenomenon, common on university campuses, of people turning lawns into dirt paths where they actually want to walk, and how they will blithely ignore barriers in this process. In a similar vein, I am looking with dismay at the bike lane construction project just outside our house. As far as I can tell, they are building the bike path so that it veers to the right off of the road where it descends from the levee on the south side of Putah Creek. Why any cyclist going over 10 MPH will opt to take the bike path rather than picking up a little speed continuing straight down the road is beyond me. Time for some civil engineers to read A Pattern Language, perhaps?

Pondering on Place

Discussion has been growing between Fred of Fragments From Floyd, Lisa from Field Notes, and ourselves about what blogging about place might mean in a larger context than simply one’s own interaction with a geographical location in which one finds oneself (by choice or need). I say “ourselves” but I have been quite silent so far in the discussion. This is an attempt to explore what place means for myself, Pica, as opposed to Numenius.

Both Lisa and Fred live in places that are ordinarily described as “picturesque” by the majority of us. We don’t. We live in Davis, which is a college town (more like a city, now) of about 65,000 people in the Central Valley of California. I used to joke to friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Barbara-the previous two places I had lived-that Davis was like a cross between Berkeley and North Dakota.

Agricultural land surrounds the house we rent, the guest house of a ranch house. Our landlord owns 40 acres of prime agricultural land which he leases to Campbell’s Soup. The wind blows all March and April; once the fields get plowed, that translates into a lot of dirt blowing around. The field immediately to our south is owned, somehow, by the Shriners, who have no compunction about getting it sprayed. Spraying, in this context, means application of pesticides by small plane, usually very early in the morning.

Yet Davis also has its progressive side, with one of the best food Co-ops in the country, a City Council that passed a dark-sky ordinance in addition to building a tunnel for migrating toads, and a well-educated, vocal, politically active (if predominantly white) population.

I do love living here, though, despite the dust and the pesticides. I love being able to ride my bicycle to work; my two-mile route takes me over Putah Creek, along some horse pens, through the Arboretum (always good for birds) and fetching up at the core of UC Davis, with its huge aged oaks. I love being able to live car-free (we do own a car for heavy shopping and short trips, but it’s still my first, and I’m 43 years old). Over 100 miles of bikeways in a town this size make it a haven for bike nuts—we qualify, owning six bikes between the two of us; the tandem cost three times as much as the car.

The Putah-Cache Creek Bioregion Project is exploring in greater depth the appeal of this “less picturesque” landscape. Spring migration in the Central Valley is muted compared to the outrageous excesses of Cambridge or even Santa Barbara, yet we have come to feel much more bonded to the birds around us here—our resident barn owls, the Swainson’s hawks, the meadowlarks and Zonotrichia sparrows in winter, the blue grosbeaks and loggerhead shrikes in summer, the ever-present, ever-raucous yellow-billed mapgies. These birds ground me, organize my understanding of the seasons. They reinforce my sense of place.

The Passage of Tanagers

Yesterday I was cycling through the countryside southeast of Davis, riding south on Mace, just across from Yolo Grasslands Regional Park, when I saw a brilliantly colored male western tanager in the lowest branches of one of the walnut trees lining the road. He flew ahead of me from tree to tree as I cycled on, and then flew across the road to land on the fence adjoining the grasslands.

Spring migration in the Davis area is an inconspicuous event, but still noticeable to the open eye and ear. I heard the soft warbling of a Swainson’s thrush in the yard this morning, as well as the chip of a Wilson’s warbler. And a grosbeak has in recent days been singing in the yard. The tanager, the thrush, the warbler, as well as most of the grosbeaks, will be moving on to the forests of the Sierras. I love the sounds of the Swainson’s thrushes and the black-headed grosbeaks—in the little canyon below the house just north of Berkeley where I grew up, their songs would resonate splendidly.

Whole Earth Festival

A good deal of today was spent wandering around and just sitting sketching—here’s a composite of some of my sketches with wash. The festival seems far more politically engaged this year—as a friend said yesterday, “nothing like a war to get people to come out of hiding.” There was lots of music and also a good deal of talking by veterans of the peace and environmental movements. Davis gets transformed each year by this festival. The University has apparently been trying to get rid of it for years…

In no particular order, favorites include the bicycle-driven yellow submarine, the geodesic tent, the indian flute stall, the drummers (I don’t think they stopped for over 48 hours), the jewelry-from-spoons stall, Lydia’s Luscious Foods, and the massage therapist suspended from overhead bars. Three sound stages made scheduling difficult but sketching is best done in one spot anyway—there’s no shortage of material! Sketching people in movement is tough and forces economies of line and gesture. It’s a great exercise.