25 August 05
Monster At The Door
I’ve just finished reading The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a new book by urban critic Mike Davis. It’s a quick, excellent, and terrifying read. I think it’s the first popular book to focus specifically on the threat of the H5N1 flu virus. A quote that’s a good synopsis of his view:
In the face of the peril of avian influenza, as with HIV/AIDS earlier, world public health resources are organized rather like the lifeboats were on the Titanic: many of the first-class passengers and even some of the crew will drown because of the company’s skinflint lack of foresight; the poor Paddies in steerage, however, do not even have a single lifeboat between them, and thus, they are all doomed to swim in the icy waters.
18 August 05
Squeam
When my sister was about 11, she was bitten in the left leg by a neighbor’s German Shepherd as she dove into a swimming pool. (The dog was trying to “save” her and ripped a nice gash all down her calf muscle.) My mother, superb in any emergency, lashed her leg with a silk dressing gown and drove her to the hospital with a white hanky flying from the window.
I went along a few weeks later to watch them take out the stitches. I fainted dead away. The doctors all left the stitch-removal table and lifted my legs high over my head. I was mortified, of course: I was twelve.
Last night I got a call from the landlady that there was a “sick” magpie in their yard. I went over there with gloves, a box, and a towel, and got the magpie out of the dog-filled yard and over to the Wildlife Health Center.
Magpies have been dying in their hundreds, probably thousands, with this year’s West Nile virus outbreak. My colleague Yvette was still working at 6:30. She wanted to take some samples of the bird before it died. These will help with identifying not just the exact reason for death (it could, after all, have been poisoned) but also can give us important genetic data about this endemic species.
Getting blood from a bird so close to death, where dehydration is a given and there is almost no blood pressure, was a challenge. I held the bird while she tried to draw blood from the jugular, then the leg, then finally the wing.
The wing part did it. Sweat was pouring down my back and although I couldn’t see my face in the mirror I knew I was pale as a ghost.
Guess I didn’t grow out of that one, then. I buried my head between my knees and gave thanks for the life of the magpie (Yvette euthanized it at this point).
18 August 05
Balloon Invasion
While walking the cats this morning, we saw a flotilla of four balloons moving southwards quite nearby. One floated almost overhead on the way to a landing in the field to the south. Alas the propane burners did frighten the kitties: Charlie doesn’t spook easily but he did this time. All four balloons landed within a kilometer of the house.
14 August 05
Waterfall Lost, Waterfall Found
Who’s to say that the era of exploration is over? A 120 meter waterfall was recently brought to light in a remote corner of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California.
12 August 05
Soundscape
Karen of Not Native Fruit has come up with ten sounds from her immediate surroundings.
Here are some from here, at this time of year:
1) Crickets. Fewer than other years, because they’ve disced the field recently. At least two species, as I’m hearing them now.
2) A train across the field: a freight, a commuter, a first-class freight. They all sound different, have different whistles.
3) Coyotes howling, almost always at the train, always at night.
4) The sound of lightly pouring water. This is the cats’ drinking fountain.
5) The screech of a barn owl, eerie, ghoulish. It makes my heart sing every time, though.
6) The clatter of a trailer-truck laden with tomatoes as it gears down to get over the tiny bridge over the creek.
7) The snuffling of a raccoon outside. He’s taken to sitting in the walnut tree.
8) The chatter of cyclists as they barrel down from the bridge, faster than the truck went up. (Both these sounds make the cats growl, or at least look.)
9) The sound of the landlord lovingly chastising his dogs.
10) The hum of the fridge, omnipresent, unoticeable till it stops.
8 August 05
Lunchtime
Riding home at lunch, which is absurd since it’s really only a seven minute walk, doesn’t give me time for much musing or anything else; occasionally a three-line poem will flash into my head and the key then is to make sure I remember it when I get to where I’m going.
On Friday, though, I rode into campus. It was very hot. The smell of the California bay trees mixed with warm pine needles. It’s so intoxicating I almost forget where I’m going and keep on the bike path that will give me more of this.
A juvenile ground squirrel darts in front of me, tail high in a warning banner. The horses in the field are clustered in the shade of the lone cottonwood. The wild grapes are opulent lime green this year. Four plum tomatoes, spilled from a truck that was taking the corner too fast, lie in the bike path like poison easter-eggs. The slow freight train creaks over the tracks, in less of a hurry than I. The smell of trains—wood and oil and smoke and timber and—what—iron? rust?—clatters southwest.
I see fewer magpies now.
1 August 05
Refuge By The Sea
I’ve been down at a conference at Asilomar near Monterey the past couple of days. It’s been blessedly foggy here, following the days of 100 degree heat in Davis. Asilomar is a famous lovely conference site, started almost a hundred years ago amidst a native Monterey pine forest just upslope from sand dunes, a white sandy beach, and the Pacific Ocean. In terms of wildlife, I’ve seen a fawn outside my room window, a young deer with antlers just outside the dining hall, Heermann’s gulls on the beach, acorn woodpeckers, and raccoons. They say a there’s a local mountain lion with Asilomar on his beat as well. The big meeting room in which I’m writing this was built in 1915, designed by Bay Area architect Julia Morgan and is an exemplar of Arts and Crafts style, complete with lettering in versals on the horizontal beams halfway up to the ceiling.
Very nice. Let’s not forget my favorite sound here—the bell rung from the top of the social hall announcing meal times!
31 July 05
28 July 05
Long Road Out of the Cabinets
There is a huge amount of information in the world’s natural history museums that is languishing in drawers and cabinets which are rarely seen. Slowly some of this material is being made accessible via the Web, but it’s a long haul, especially with current funding priorities. Here is a story about the hopes of the Florida Museum of Natural History to create a national butterfly database out of their immense collection of some 3.5 million specimens.
22 July 05
Charles Darwin Has A Posse
The author of this sticker concedes that as an effort to increase awareness of science and reason it is probably completely futile, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try.
For those of you who have no idea what the text is referring to, see here.