25 January 08
Vaca Dusting
We looked west this morning and saw several thin tracings of snow on top of the Vaca Mountains, which get up to about 2800’ in elevation, and a bit on the Blue Ridge to the north of the Berryessa Gap. It’s always lovely to see snow on the Coast Range mountains. Californians simply like snow — all the population in the state is down at low elevations and never get into any without a bit of travel.
The road up Mix Canyon that we want to climb for our Bigby would get us up into the snow, but it’s a little far to ride at our present level of fitness!
21 January 08
Lake Solano In The Rain
We stuck to our plan for the weekend to go on a Bigby ride out to Lake Solano, having just taken our tandem in for a major tuneup. Our target birds included hooded mergansers, Barrow’s goldeneyes, sapsuckers, and pileated woodpeckers. Our friend Barbara, taking a look at the forecast of a 40% chance of rain and showing more sense than we had, decided at the last minute not to tag along, but we still planned to meet Vance at his office on Putah Creek Road about two-thirds of the way out. Vance works for California Audubon with their landowner stewardship program and is a serious cyclist and sometime bike racer. When we arrived at his office there was a bit of drizzle but after checking the weather radar we thought it would let up soon so we carried on. I put on my raincoat at that point and was definitely happier.
We rode to the south side of the lake by which point it was definitely not letting up. Scanning from there we saw lots of common mergansers, a few hooded mergansers, double-crested cormorants, and Vance saw his first Wilson’s snipe of his Bigby. We pulled in at the boy scout camp at the southwest corner of the lake, where there had been a report earlier of a white-throated sparrow. We walked around there a bit, heard our first acorn woodpecker, and saw a couple of fox sparrows. No white-throated, and by this time it was not letting up even more.
We got back on the road, headed west to circle around the lake and stop in at the campground by the Lake Solano dam where pileated woodpeckers have been seen. No pileateds there. By this point we were wet, chilly, and 22 miles from home, so we took a bit of shelter under the eaves of a campground building while eating lunch of half a peanut butter sandwich and a mandarin orange. We then headed off on the five-mile run to the town of Winters for a chai latte and a hot chocolate at Steady Eddie’s. It actually let up by that point.
Thus warmed we headed east on Putah Creek road home. It wasn’t raining much at all by then, and we were moving at a good clip, but soon the fact we hadn’t ridden that far in quite a while caught up with us, and we limped our way into Davis, laughing our way through the final downpour the last mile. We got in the door at 3 PM after riding about 43.75 miles, and immediately headed for the hot shower.
New Bigby species for me included:
Hooded merganser
Oak titmouse
Wild turkey
Hermit thrush
Fox sparrow
Spotted towhee
Pacific-slope flycatcher
Acorn woodpecker
13 January 08
The Journey Is Half The Fun
The tandem went in for a tune-up today. This Bigbying means we have many miles to cover!
Birding is often not an activity that gets you lots of exercise. Frequently the pattern is to drive for a couple hours, and then only walk several hundred yards away from the car to see the birds. Doing a Bigby reverses that pattern. If we actually manage to get a mountain quail on our Bigby, we will have had to have ridden at least 50 miles round trip and then either cycle or hike up towards the top of the Vaca Mountains. Bird or no, it makes for quite an enjoyable trek.
5 January 08
A Three-Falcon Day
A three-falcon day:
Kestrel, peregrine, merlins
Taking on the storms
4 January 08
Trees Down
The worst of the storm hit this morning, with rain and heavy winds gusting from the south to 45 miles per hour. I didn’t get very far into my day at the office when the lights flickered a tad. The power stayed on, but we lost network connectivity, leaving me aimless for a while. My officemate Jim looked out our window, and noticed that the acacia tree just to the south was swaying in the gusts down to its base. Even its exposed roots were moving a bit.
We got to see the tree fall. About an hour later, the tree was leaning heavily, and Jim had summoned in four other folks from the windowless computer lab across the hall. A gust, and it gently toppled as we all applauded. A brand-new Toyota Prius parked nearby barely escaped damage, as only the leafy bits of the tree landed above it. A campus landscaping crew came by and cleaned up the mess by three in the afternoon.
Pica meanwhile went home for lunch to find that one of the tall black walnuts across the street had fallen and completely blocked the road. By nightfall the Solano County road crew had cleared off the road, and all I saw of the event was lots of logs and cut branches piled on the eastern bank of the road.
2 January 08
Storm on the Way
They say this series of three storms may be as bad as anything since 1995. On Friday it’s predicted to rain 1/2 inch per hour. The question is, how long for? And with what strength winds?
I moved back to California in 1996. I remember huddling in our cabin in Santa Barbara, on the mountainside, as El Niño demolished Route 154 above us. If this is going to be worse, I’m worried.
But there are no mountains to fall on us, or for us to fall down on. It’s just us: the floodplain with levees. The water runs south from here, said the landlord yesterday. If it didn’t, we’d be in trouble…
1 January 08
Bigby By Tandem?
A birder in Québec named Richard Gregson recently came up with the idea of doing a Big Green Big Year, or Bigby for short: that is, seeing as many bird species as possible in a year without driving or flying. There are three categories, the walking Bigby, the self-propelled Bigby (walking, cycling, or canoeing), and the public transport Bigby (also adds travel by bus and rail). Today we took a little 13-mile tandem ride, and seem to have gotten started on a self-propelled Bigby, seeing 32 species over the day.
This will be a good way to get in shape. Significantly different habitats from where we live are a long way off (e.g. twenty-five miles each way to the hills). The ideal town to do this in is probably Santa Barbara, where we used to live many years ago, since it’s only a few miles between the 4200’ high Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That is the reason why the Santa Barbara Christmas Bird Count consistently is one of the top several counts by species numbers.
The public transport option is quite favorable for us, though. The combination of Amtrak train, bike, and bus can get one all over California. It doesn’t end up being very frugal, however.
[Added by Pica, 1/2/08: The running list of our BIGBY is in the sidebar of Bird by Bird . The champion BIGBYs as far as I can tell, so far, are the Yukon-to-Florida-or-bust-by-bike team, Malkolm and his parents Wendy and Ken ]
30 December 07
Doom Of Gophers
As Pica relates, this harrier today grazed our back window, landed a few feet off, and started devouring a gopher which he was carrying after catching it out in the field. It wasn’t looking like a good day to be a gopher — the raptors were out in force today. In the space of a quarter-mile walk, we saw a red-tailed hawk, a harrier, a white-tailed kite, a kestrel, turkey vultures, a Cooper’s hawk, not to mention a great blue heron hunting out in the field.
29 December 07
Bliss of Winter Break
These past three days have technically been work days, though practically everyone at UC Davis takes these as vacation to end up with a 11-day long winter break. Today was sumptious. Chilly, overcast, rain arriving this evening. I took a long walk in the late morning out to West Campus (where clearly somebody was still on duty to feed the campus sheep), and then in the afternoon baked bread and hung out with the kitties. What could be more perfect?
23 December 07
Seven Weeks After the Oil Spill
Shining, the bay. Out to the horizon.
(This is my contribution to Illustration Friday’s theme, Horizon.)