31 December 05
Floods
When we got up this morning water was sloshing at the back door with the rain still pouring, howling gales. The field was a lake. This house is pretty watertight but there were drips near the door… I got a yoghurt container under three of them and sat and waited. We had both electricity and a phone line. In these circumstances they’re normally both out.
I’ve been doing well with losing weight and have begun to increase the amount of activity I’m doing to help in this and general health. So when the rain stopped and the sun came out I decided to go out for a bike ride. South… maybe to the church on Tremont, maybe around through South Davis.
A six-inch flood about a half-mile down the road turned me north. The creek had overflowed all the way to the levees, swirling eddies of blood-red water. I headed to West Campus and saw flooding everywhere: in the cow pasture, in the sheep field… and of course the creek wherever I went by it. Heading north up Olive Drive, pinging hundreds of unripe olives that had been blown down in the night, I once again got stopped by a torrent of water going across the road from west to east.
I’ve never lived by a really BIG river. It must be a terrifying thing when something like the Mississippi bursts its banks…
We will not be going to Berkeley tomorrow. I-80 was closed most of today between Vacaville and Fairfield, and we didn’t hear a train all morning. Hunkering seems called for.
18 December 05
Christmas Bird Count + 2.35 Inches of Rain = Soggy People
You sort of knew it was going to be one of those kinds of days when the only conceivable footwear was your Bean Boots that had been outside all summer collecting whatever was out there (including, it turned out, a black widow spider I thought was dead but resurrected itself in the sink). The tarps over Johnny’s beekeeping stuff were swirling wildly in the gales. Oh well. At least we didn’t have owling duty. (The folks who did got there at 3 am with howling gales, horizontal rain, and no owls.)
Our portion of the count was actually fairly easy: count all the birds along Putah Creek Road from the diversion dam to Winters, a distance of only about three miles. It was fine when we were walking. When we stopped we all got frozen. One of the walkie-talkies shorted out and started buzzing and carrying on in Numenius’ backpack. We counted surprisingly high numbers of birds considering the weather and the fact that most of the walnut groves were lakes by the end of our stint, including a fox sparrow and a red-breasted sapsucker, as well as a merlin later in the day.
We ended our count at the Putah Creek Cafe, dripping puddles of water all over the floor and removing wallets, binoculars, gloves, and anything else we could wring out or attempt to wring out…
11 December 05
Sketchcrawl Sunday
We had good weather today for our first group SketchCrawl—it wasn’t as sunny as yesterday, but no threat of rain. Alas, the day started out with a bit of a calamity. Poor Diego fell out of a tree he had just bounded up during his morning walk! He hurt his rear leg, not very seriously though. (Happily, Pica’s vet coworker Deana very kindly stopped by and checked him out before she settled into a day of office work just up the road from us.) But he doesn’t get to go outside for a little while.
While I was home waiting for Deana, Pica met the sketchcrawlers, about 10 in total, at Mishka’s Café in town and sketched there for a while. She returned home, and after we concluded Diego would be fine we headed out and met up with the sketchcrawlers in the Arboretum. A few had already dispersed, and we ended strolling through campus with just two others, Mike who had come up from Walnut Creek, and Emma who had organized this Davis event.
I did about a dozen sketches total, ranging from one of the egghead sculptures to the impossible angles of the Death Star. Above is a sketch of an acacia in the Arboretum, as well as a bridge over the Arboretum waterway.
Thanks to Emma for organizing this—it was great fun and I’m glad the sketchcrawls are turning into something of a bimonthly event!
10 December 05
Birding and a Potluck
Richard of A Brit Abroad is coming to the end of his two-year postdoc here at UC Davis, and decided to organize a birding trip followed by a potluck at his house. He is unquestionably the person who has seen most birds in Yolo County in the space of two years without knowing how to drive a car, and managed to hit 250 such species this morning with an Eastern Phoebe we all saw along Putah Creek. (Later in the day he finally caught up with a swamp sparrow, but by that point we had come home to make couscous for the potluck.)
Richard then shared some slides of birds he’d seen this year, which ran like some kind of advertisement for the airline industry: UK to Davis to British Columbia to Texas to Australia to Ontario to UK to Oregon to Arizona, etc. (I’m sure I have these in the wrong order but you get the idea.)
He’s been wonderful to have around these past two years. The first bird we shared was the scissor-tailed flycatcher, seen within a week or two of his arrival in Davis; the commotion around that bird slotted him straight into the birding zeitgeist here and it’s going to be tough when he finally heads off to Paris later this month…
3 December 05
Champagne Valley
I’m finding discussion of the housing bubble to be quite entertaining. While practically everybody on two feet in California and many other parts of the country has been scheming to get rich through buying a house (or two or three…), we’re happily renting contrarians who think these boom times will not last. A favorite blog of mine nowadays is The Housing Bubble 2, full of housing bear talk.
Nowadays I’ve been looking at housing prices more systematically. A good data source is the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight House Price Index. Above is a graph I made showing the value of this index for the Sacramento metropolitan area. Note how things were comfortably trundling along at a 5% growth rate until the year 2000, at which point house prices take off in this area at about a 15% appreciation rate. To my eye, this looks completely unsustainable and likely to fall back to the historical line of increase.
It is interesting to compare appreciation rates over the past 30 years to recent growth rates, say since 1999. At right is a map I made that depicts this. What is plotted is the growth rate since 1999 divided by the historical growth rate (since 1975). Red is high, a ratio of 3 or above, bright green is a low ratio (between 0 and 1). What was a bit surprising is that the frothiest region in California (by this definition of froth) is not the Bay Area, is not Los Angeles or San Diego, but is in fact the Central Valley. Welcome to my home.
29 November 05
Epsilon
This year’s record Atlantic hurricane season comes to a close with yes, yet another storm. Tropical Storm Epsilon is the 26th named storm of this season, the most ever recorded. It is in the mid-Atlantic and not expected to reach land, unlike Tropical Storm Delta, which last night slammed into the Canary Islands.
25 November 05
Lost In The Rain
We had a nature and culture outing today in Davis and Sacramento with Pica’s mom. Our plan was to go birding in the morning with a field trip starting in southeast Davis at 7:45 AM, and then split off from the trip to go to the Crocker Art Museum and then to a movie. The field trip didn’t quite go as planned. We met the folks at the start of the field trip, headed out of the shopping mall parking lot, and promptly didn’t know who to follow. We thus ended up setting a new record in getting lost during a field trip.
What we had heard was that several folks were interested in going to Slide Hill Park in Davis to look for a stray mountain chickadee. We thought that was where the group was headed, so we birded there for a little bit, with no sign of the group or the chickadee. The most interesting creature there was a small furry dog that looked like a pig. We then went our own way to the Yolo Bypass wildlife refuge.
The shorebirds and waterfowl were quite happy in the rain there. We saw 4 American bitterns there, maybe 20 common snipe, and had a good look at two lovely long-billed curlews. Then we went over the bypass to the Crocker, where there was a exhibition of paintings by the early 20th century American artist Marsden Hartley.
At the end of the day we went to see Good Night, and Good Luck, playing back in Davis. It’s an excellent movie, a focused little vignette on a episode in history I didn’t know much about. But I remembered that I had heard of Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly as a kid because we had several record albums from their Hear It Now radio series—the recording of the radio announcer describing the Hindenberg disaster stands out in my mind.
23 November 05
Little Apples
Every now and then I get to make pretty maps at work. My new computer worked hard today—in a 3 1/2 hour run it produced over 7800 maps of plant species in California. After that I summed together a few of these to make species richness maps for a few favorite genera in the state. This is a map of the number of manzanita species in different parts of the state. Blue is zero species, red is high (about 10 species), and yellow is in between.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and don’t eat like these folks.
19 November 05
Long Before GIS
People were still making maps. News of the discovery of the oldest map in the Western world was just announced. This map is on a bit of a terracotta vase found in an archeological dig about two years ago in southern Italy. The fragment depicts the region of Apulia, and dates from about 500 BC. The script on it is ancient Greek, and it is the first ancient Greek map predating the Romans that has ever been found.
18 November 05
So Frail a Thing
I heard a scream from my office this morning. A bird had flown into our building. It’s been unseasonably warm and we work with the doors open despite the flies…
I don’t know why some people scream when there is a bird indoors: I think more people have bird phobias than you’d imagine. The screamer was hiding under the desk.
I moved over to the window and easily caught the yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon’s) in my hands; took it out; released it. It flew up in to the pine, scolding loudly.
My hands throbbed, remembering that frenzied frail heartbeat.