6 June 06
Parakeet Of Putah Creek
This morning when we were out in the yard with the cats we heard a strident ‘keeew’ that I thought was an oriole and Pica thought was a northern flicker. A few minutes later, I spotted the bird: it was a beautiful psittacid, with a long tail and a reddish bill. Pica saw the collar on him, and in Sibley we identified him as a Rose-ringed Parakeet. He flew off over the field towards the creek.
On the way home this afternoon, riding through the Arboretum, a couple of kilometers off from here, I heard a similar call, and had the briefest glimpse of a yellowish bird in flight. Maybe it was our parakeet.
5 June 06
Guano
I went over this afternoon next door to find out exactly when Dave needed his eight copies of the long-ago-finished-but-now-once-again-draft of the California Wildlife Action Plan.
Walter stopped me on the way in. What do you know about Sue Greenwald? Oh. She’s fey. (She’s also our next mayor.) Could I work with her? he asked. Possibly, I said. It depends. She’s been picking up fallen-out-of-the-nest baby herons at Shields Oak Grove in the Arboretum, he said. Oh. That’s illegal…
The heron rookery is sooner or later going to kill a bunch of heritage oak trees in the Arboretum. All kinds of people are concerned about this including our fey mayor-to-be. People seem to take sides.
You on your bike today? he said. Yes. Want to come with me and lay some guano traps? Sure. I have to go to the printer anyway. We biked in the heat of the day over to the Arboretum and laid out what essentially were diapers under oak trees…*
Sampling egret and heron poop for West Nile virus and avian flu is easy, non-invasive, and will perhaps give us some kind of additional input into the problem of ordinary citizens taking heron chicks home.
Even if they are future mayors.
*Just in case you weren’t sure: this is NOT in my job description.
30 May 06
Mallards In The Hay
I’ve been doing the breeding bird atlas survey now for a couple of months, trying to head out to our assigned 5 square kilometer block of farmland just south of here at least once a week. It is turning out to be challenging to come up with confirmations of breeding activity, and so far I’ve only confirmed two species. The first is the ubiquitous red-winged blackbird, where several weeks back I saw a female carrying nesting materials near a wheat field. The second confirmation came yesterday, and wasn’t a species I ordinarily associated with the landscape of wheat and alfalfa fields. Mallards. I scared up a female in an irrigation ditch with a dozen ducklings in tow.
The kites we saw at the outset still haven’t definitively nested. They worried me because I didn’t see them in my visits the prior two weeks. Yesterday they were back, together with an interloper, a third adult.
28 May 06
Packing Up
We went over to Bodega Bay yesterday and this morning where we helped Pica’s Mum pack up the house in anticipation of her great move to Maine. Pending the completion of the house sale, this will happen some time in the middle of June. This probably was my last visit to the place, so I did a few sketches in commemoration.
20 May 06
Truth and Beauty
We returned this morning to Cold Canyon for a journal entry workshop. The person leading it, Ed Dawkins, wanted us to focus on Truth and Beauty. My immediate reaction on seeing the workshop advertised was Keats: a romantic’s view of the universe, but there are worse ones… but Dawkins’ counterpart was Whitehead, talking about half-truths and how truth is impossible without beauty.
The first part we were to focus on the beauty within ourselves, and how that shapes our truths. The second section was dwelling in the moment. I was hearing wrentits and hutton’s vireos and, toward the top of the trail, black-headed grosbeaks but we were encouraged to eschew specificity for general input. It was hard, but it was useful.
My mind kept turning to Abu Ghraib. It was inevitable. What role has beauty there? Or truth, for that matter? How will the people who survive that experience—captors or captive—ever experience either truth or beauty again? When Truth, a half-truth informed by ill-informed religious belief, starts to run the world, we are all in for a nasty shock. And worse, if we are at the butt end of a rifle or cigarette. Evil will reign.
Yet there is something here, something that calls. The gray pine—digger pine, foothill pine, ghost pine, pine of more names than we can utter, most of them unuttered by any human—sits in that canyon and is. Is beauty. Is truth. Our job is to attend to it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors, or dogs in torture chambers.
19 May 06
Conservation Commons
I heard a seminar today by Tom Moritz, who is a librarian who has been at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to that the California Academy of Science and has just taken up a position at the Getty Research Institute. Tom is a great proponent of the Conservation Commons, the purpose of which “is to ensure open access and fair use of data, information, knowledge, and expertise on the conservation of biodiversity for the benefit of the global conservation community and beyond.” The idea of the Conservation Commons has grown out of the Creative Commons movement, the idea of the latter being to give creators a spectrum of possibilities to license their work between full copyright and the public domain, “a some rights reserved” notion of copyright. There have been many endorsers of the Conservation Commons to date, but the idea of open access to data is still a difficult one for a lot of folks to work with.
17 May 06
Slow Road Home
A copy of Fred First’s book arrived today. A Blue Ridge Book of Days. This book has been a long time coming and it’s a thrill to see it finally bound and delivered—a book we’ve been watching happen through Fragments From Floyd.
When you write a blog, daily, you do write in fragments. Yet how well this transition—from screen to page—seems to have gone, especially since there are almost no photographs, a surprise for me. Fred’s writing is always at his best, I think, when he allows humor to punctuate his deep and often quite moving observations about place, his place, his nook in Floyd County where the county seat has only one traffic light (we’ve seen it).
And then there’s this:
“This was a pasture where cattle grazed. Before that, virgin hemlock and oak and white pines tall as ships’ masts grew in dark forests seldom visited. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could see it fifty years from now when it will have begun to seem like healthy forest once again. But I only have today—a fixed point in the succession from past to future; and I’ll try to do a better job of living in the land and in the time I have here.”
John Elder couldn’t put it better…
13 May 06
Losing The Heart Of Berkeley
We heard the bad news from Ron. Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing as of July 10. This store has been in its present location for as long as I have been alive and has always been the flagship bookstore in Berkeley and the East Bay.
The press release blames a 15-year decline in sales in the Telegraph Avenue location, together with a loss of sales from the Internet. The store has two other locations—one on the highly yuppified 4th Street in Berkeley, and another that just opened in the past year or so on Stockton in San Francisco. I have always found the 4th Street Cody’s to have a fairly paltry selection, and have never been to the San Francisco store.
Probably this decision has been in the works for some time. In my last several visits to the Telegraph store I’ve noticed that the selection of books has been getting poorer. And the recent opening of the San Francisco store worried me.
I grew up near Berkeley, and I have a routine I often follow when I return for a visit. I’ll start off at the Berkeley BART station, walk through campus visiting a few shops along the way, and then head south several blocks for a good browse in Cody’s. It’s very sad that this is no longer to be.
7 May 06
Yolo Loam
Pica rented the rototiller and had it overnight. It’s nice soil, Yolo loam I remembered from perusing the soil survey for Solano County. Or to be more specific, assuming the map is accurate, Yolo loam with a clay substratum at a depth of 40-60 inches.
My colleagues over in soil science across the road from my office have put together a very nice web mapping application describing the soils of California, Arizona, and Nevada. So if you’re curious about the soil type where you’re trying to garden, zoom on in and have a look.
29 April 06
Birdathon
Today Numenius and I did a birdathon by bicycle to raise funds for Yolo Audubon Society. We went in different directions: he headed south to do the breeding bird atlas survey I birded along Putah Creek with a friend and colleague on the Audubon Board, headed into west Davis, down to the Arboretum, east to the Yolo Bypass, south to the Yolo Grasslands and Tremont Street Cemetery, and finally home.
We tallied 80 species between us by bicycle, great considering the day started out gray and a bit cold and ended up hot and windy and the flooding is still extensive. Not quite the total someone like Richard might have put together on a day like this, but respectable.
If you’d like to make a contribution of any size—a total amount or an amount per bird—you can mail it to
Yolo Audubon Society (Birdathon)
P.O. Box 886
Davis, CA 95617