Our Daily Visitors

What got me out of bed this morning was the declamation of geese. There’s a pair of Canada geese that have been visiting the field outside our house for many weeks now. Usually they come by in the morning, but sometimes they will stop by in the afternoon as well: on Monday afternoon they stayed in one spot nearby in the field for several hours! Obviously they’re still finding something to eat, even though the field, which is rented out by Campbell Soup for crop experiments, was recently plowed and is pretty dry now.

In March at a meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society, we went to hear a performance of the local children’s songwriter Linda Book. Her songs are all about environmental themes, and she has quite a following among the younger set in Davis. The experience of being chased by geese at the Arboretum led her to write a tongue-in-cheek song about geese, one lyric being “There nothing nice about a goose, my friends”! There’s no shortage of Canada geese in Davis.

Goat and Loquats

It’s Whole Earth Festival time here on the UC Davis Quad again—three days of alternative living, music, food, energy, and people. I passed one of these people on my bikeride to work this morning. She was parked just over Putah Creek by the side of the road. On top of her van was a goat eating its breakfast: loquats out of a box.

I saw the goat again at lunchtime and at dinnertime on the Quad, eating whatever came its way—it was last seen eating one of the straw bales that is supposed to function as a chair.

The Ghost of Emmett Reid Dunn

The following is inspired by the recent discussion at
Field
Notes and Fragments from Floyd about a troubling tourism poster from the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

In the summer of 1986, in the interregnum of my life between college and graduate school, I went off to the mountains of North Carolina to take a field biology course on plethodontid salamanders. This is the largest family of salamanders in the world, and a major center of diversity for the group lies in the Southern Appalachians, with about 29 species currently described from the North Carolina mountains. My interest in the group came from taking href=”http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/wake/”>David Wake’s evolutionary biology course at UC Berkeley, he being an authority on the Plethodontidae.

In our first field trip for the course we went to Great Smokies National Park, and there on the road to Clingmans Dome, we were asked to imagine what it would have been like for the young herpetologist Emmett Reid Dunn (1894-1956) to explore the fauna of these mountains for his first time in the early 1900s. When he was eighteen the naturalist Leonhard Stejneger of the Smithsonian encouraged him to take up the study of salamanders, and that study was to occupy much of his career. A note in this brief biography of him says that in 1917 he “failed for a commission in the army, because his week-end pursuit of snakes and salamanders was unbecoming to an officer candidate.” It was around this time he began his explorations of the Southern Appalachians, which would result in his discovering or describing four or five new species of salamanders. He writes of his 1916 discovery of Plethodon yonahlossee in his eloquent foreward to his 1926 monograph on the Plethodontidae: “And I remember…how, on the slopes of the Grandfather, some chance-turned log disclosed the red band on the back of yonahlossee, and I knew that an unknown species was before me.” Later in our class we went to Grandfather Mountain where we too saw this strikingly-colored species.

We step forward in time to the poster from the North Carolina tourism office,
where a marquee reading “Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds” has been dropped into the view from a mountaintop bald, which according to Fred of Fragments is likely Bald Mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The disconnect between the world view of Emmett Reid Dunn, and that of the tourist office and their target audience, is total. It is not surprising that 7 of 11 posters in the series are devoted to golf. The vast majority of tourists pass through the mountains unaware of the diversity Dunn, or for that matter we 1980s field biology students, came to study. At best they will see the display in the park visitors’ center describing the numbers of amphibians, and move on to the postcards.

Yet I am not entirely convinced that the gap between Dunn and his peers who went off to war is narrower than the disconnect between today’s naturalists and our tourists. As Fred points out, natural history curricula are disappearing from
universities in favor of the gene-splicers and the computational biologists. But
to some extent this is ameliorated by the naturalists in academia shifting over
to more applied departments, or realizing they have to tie their studies to the
latest fads in ecology, evolution, or conservation biology. More significantly, I think the locus of natural history knowledge in this society has shifted away from academia. The good naturalists these days don’t find careers in academia, but instead often become biological consultants, many working on environmental impact reports. And as birders will tell you, amateur natural history is quite vibrant today. It’s significant that UC Press is continuing to
publish new natural history guides in these desperate times for university presses. There’s a market for this stuff.

That said, the chasm between the naturalists and mass culture remains, and is deeply troubling.

The Cooperative Swainson’s Hawk

When I returned home after work today, I did my rounds around the place to see if there were any birds about that I might try to photograph with the spotting scope. I thought there was a bird on one of the walnut trees left remaining south of the house after the lamentable road-widening project. I ran inside and got my binoculars. Yes, it’s a Swainson’s hawk! I ran back and got the digicam and spotting scope, already set up for digiscoping, and took a few pictures.

I then realized the hawk was staying put for a bit, and was perfectly positioned to bring out the Dob. I have a 7” Dobsonian reflecting telescope that is great for visual astronomy, and has much better optics than any spotting scope, but far, far too unwieldly to be useful for birding. Unless one is very lucky that is, and I was! I ran to the house, got and set up the Dob, and took a series of photos: the one at left shows him calling.

Swainson’s hawks are threatened in California, largely due to the loss, especially in the Central Valley, of trees suitable for nesting. Still, the Davis area is a good place to see these birds after they return from migration to Central and South America (especially western Mexico and Argentina) early in spring. These birds like to forage in farmlands and nest in riparian trees, and there is enough of this habitat combination in Yolo and eastern Solano county so that a reasonable breeding population still remains here.

In other birding news, in my lunchtime browse through through the bookstore I discovered that David Sibley has written yet another pair of bird books. The Sibley Guide to Birds, published three years ago, is now considered the standard advanced bird identification guide, but it is a bit of a tome to carry about. The books by Sibley that were just published are a pair of field guides to the birds of western and eastern North America — that is, they actually fit in one’s pocket! Our bookshelves are groaning already at the thought…

Ice Cream With a New Friend

The world of the weblog just got smaller-about five inches wide on this monitor, to be precise. In the Flash-animated World as a Blog, launched recently, you can watch little red lights pop up with the first couple of lines of the latest blog entry from someone in Finland, Australia, Seattle, or Davis. You need to enter your geographic coordinates correctlylittle red lights way north of Siberia are undoubtedly errors-but it’s fun to watch this almost real-time unfolding of newly coordinated bloggers.

A Brazilian neighbor spotted us in just this way: sent us a quick note saying “it says here you’re zero miles away! Do you live in Aggie Village?” The Chatterbox, Fernanda’s blog, has been going for 2-1/2 years now. It’s in Portuguese—I was pleased that I could understand so much of it with my Spanish.

Fernanda, Numenius and I all met at Ben and Jerry’s yesterday afternoon during several torrential rainstorms. It was fun to hear from someone who’s been doing this so much longer and faced the early heartbreaks of unstable blogging software. Plus it’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends who are so far away.

Someone asked me earlier in the day what the difference was between a blog and a website. I gave the “frequent entries, links to other sites and blogs” answer, but I think the real answer is this: a website is not necessarily an invitation to community; a blog really is.

We’re going to try to identify other Davis bloggers!

Putah Creek Spilleth its Banks

We’ve been getting a fair amount of late-season rain—in the past day we’ve had about 0.90” of rain here. Upstream, Lake Berryessa is at capacity, at which point overflow water spills down through the Glory Hole, an event that started this season in the middle of March. So there is much water in the creek now. Just east of Old Davis Road, there is a lot of ponding, inspiring thoughts of wetlands restoration work. And the water birds are definitely having a good time.

Museums and Memories

I went on a half-day trip to Berkeley today for a meeting of informatics folks of the Berkeley Natural History Museums. The meeting was in the Grinnell-Miller library of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Berkeley is where I grew up and went to school as an undergrad studying zoology. I don’t think I’ve been inside MVZ for almost twenty years. Much, much has changed there, most notably the complete rebuilding of the interior of the Life Sciences Building in the early 1990s. MVZ is now on the third floor in the center of the building, now near the University and Jepson Herbaria and the Museum of Paleontology, the latter having a T. rex skeleton mounted in the building’s exact center.

We had a little tour of MVZ and the herbaria after our meeting. Our guide pulled out all sorts of specimens for us, including resplendently-colored tanagers and, at my request, the long-billed curlews. Much of our knowledge of the California biota has come from work at the MVZ and these herbaria.

My trips to Berkeley now are always very focused and precise. Either to visit family, to visit a store or restaurant, or to pass through on the way to other places in the Bay Area. I know Berkeley well but in no sense do I live there. I note the changing storefronts there, not the events and issues of daily life.

Where the bike path turns south to leave the Arboretum, returning home this evening I heard and saw a western tanager in one of the oaks. Spring migration is underway!

Shower-dodging

A spring cold front blew through the area today, and we were dodging showers all day. When I left for work in the morning, there were blue skies overhead, a very low-to-the-horizon, almost flat rainbow to the northwest, and a big rain cloud to the south. I didn’t outrun the rain cloud, and got wet on my bike halfway to work. More showers at lunchtime, including some hail; I waited at the Memorial Union for it to pass and thus gave the bookstore some business.
Some sprinkles on the way home, but not enough to get me wet.

While running errands downtown at dusk today, we saw a flight of several hundred Vaux’s swifts circling low over a house! And another observer independently confirmed them. They are migrants, and were no doubt looking for a place to roost for the evening.

Coastal Migrations

We went to Bodega Bay this weekend to visit Pica’s Mum. We got there too late in the afternoon yesterday to do much in the way of exploring, but this morning we did our usual poke around the Bay. We weren’t birding very intensively, as Pica and I were more interested in doing some sketching and digiscoping. The tide was very high, so our first stop was Doran Pond, on the east side of the bay. There were a few peep in there, lots of dunlin, some dowitchers, and a couple of egrets. At right is Pica’s painting of one of the egrets.

I meanwhile worked on photographing the shorebirds. The light was very good, but digiscoping is still very much a challenge! The biggest difficulty I was having was focusing—how to get the autofocus to behave through the scope. Next time I will experiment with manual focusing. At left is one of my dunlin images.

While walking on Doran Beach, Mum meanwhile found washed up many translucent sails from small jellyfishes. She asked another beach walker about them, and he said they were called by-the-wind sailors, or Velella velella. When dried out, the sails open flat making a perfect heart shape.

We then went up to Bodega Head where we did a couple more quick paintings. And looking down on one of the rocks, we saw a black turnstone in breeding plumage.

A Small Rural Cemetery

The Tremont Street Cemetery lies about five miles southeast of Davis in the middle of the farmlands that grow wheat all winter and tomatoes all summer. It’s the burial ground for the Presbyterian church in that same spot. The church is no longer used but is well cared-for, as is the tiny cemetery.

Mostly German names are listed on the stones. There was a significant German migration to this part of California in the late nineteenth century. After the opening of the trans-continental railroad in 1869 which obviated the need for covered wagons or perilous trips round the Horn, California must once again have seemed a land of gold, though the gold rush was long over

Walking through a cemetery allows me to picture family life a hundred years ago—these people worked hard, were modest in their aspirations and lives, and often lost many members to illness or hardship—at a young age. It seems they were not untouched by the flu epidemic of 1918. Though this cemetery is small, it is a lovely place to sit in the heat of the summer with its mature, tall trees providing a good nesting site for red-shouldered hawks and great-horned owls as well as blue grosbeaks and northern mockingbirds.

I have a secret hankering to live in a cemetery, to be a “caretaker.” I find them restful places of memory, not morbid or frightening—and the birds are almost always in abundance. My hopes were raised when the caretakers’ trailer was moved from this cemetery recently, but it’s been replaced by a new one.

We’re considering doing a census of this cemetery for the online genealogy project so that relatives of the people buried here but perhaps living far away can get the data they need to find a “missing link,” the eureka moment of every genealogist.