1 May 05
Airport Saunter
UC Davis is the only University of California campus with its own airport. It is in West Campus, an area mostly devoted to agricultural research, with many fields and orchards. Usually the airport is off-limits to the general public, but today was its third annual open house. We missed the previous open houses, but we were able to make today’s, so we had a good wander among the planes, the old cars, and ancient bicycles (there was even a 19th-century velocipede on display).
My favorite plane was this Grob G109 motorglider, which has an impossible-to-sketch huge wingspan, not to mention a 30:1 glide ratio.
30 April 05
Birdathon
Today was the Yolo Audubon spring fundraiser, when teams go out and try and see as many species of birds as possible in a 24-hour period, having persuaded family, friends and mostly coworkers whose kids’ Girl Scout cookies we dutifully bought to sponsor them per bird.
I organized a team to do the birdathon today but with a twist: we’d do the entire thing by bike.
It was a beautiful day, calm just before a front comes in. The pockets of migrants were few and far between, but we managed to come up with 76 species. After lunch there were only two of us left and we headed along the levee to the west of the Yolo Bypass. This is not relaxing riding—the gravel on the levees is uneven and difficult, but we discovered that it’s possible to go from our house all the way to the Bypass avoiding asphalt altogether. (That’s about 15 miles round trip.) After a barn owl in the Tremont cemetery I was ready for a nap. (We started out going in the other direction.)
Here’s our bird list for today, which I type before we go in to the compilation (I am VERY tired and will not likely be up for much of anything after we get home). Seen or heard but not countable: peacock and spectacled rubber ducky:
pied-billed grebe
American white pelican
American bittern (!!)
great blue heron
great egret
snowy egret
cattle egret
green-backed heron
black-crowned night heron
white-faced ibis
Canada goose
wood duck
mallard
cinnamon teal
turkey vulture
white-tailed kite
northern harrier
red-shouldered hawk
Swainson’s hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
ring-necked pheasant
common moorhen
American coot
killdeer
ring-billed gull
rock pigeon
mourning dove
barn owl
white-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
downy woodpecker
Pacific-slope flycatcher
black phoebe
ash-throated flycatcher
western kingbird
barn swallow
tree swallow
northern rough-winged swallow
cliff swallow
western scrub-jay
yellow-billed magpie
American crow
bushtit
house wren
marsh wren
western bluebird
Swainson’s thrush
American robin
northern mockingbird
American pipit
cedar waxwing
European starling
warbling vireo
orange-crowned warbler
yellow warbler
black-throated gray warbler
Townsend’s warbler
common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
western tanager
black-headed grosbeak
California towhee
song sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
dark-eyed junco (Oregon)
red-winged blackbird
western meadowlark
brown-headed cowbird
Bullock’s oriole
house finch
American goldfinch
house sparrow
28 April 05
Ivory-billed Hope
Everyone I know, pretty much, sent me notice today of the announcement of the first sightings of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the United States since 1944.
Thank you. All of you. Each time I relived it. I read a lot today about the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Nature Conservancy and efforts to hear the bird but the thing that got me the most was that two ornithologists traveling on the water with Arkansas naturalist Gene Sparling who had seen the bird eariler, and who cried out in unison “ivory billed!” as the huge woodpecker flew out in front of their boat, and who then set about making independent sketches (essential in the absence of any photographs), frantically adding notes till they could do no more, responded by sobbing and silence.
The world’s a mess. All the work I see being done around me every day to study, preserve, explain the natural world seems like a drop in the ocean, given the devastation we are wreaking on the planet. Yet today, all of it—ALL of it—is given new hope.
The paper by Fitzpatrick et al. published today in Science can be downloaded here. The supplementary materials contain the two sketches.
25 April 05
Spring Ripenings
This year the field outside our house is planted in wheat, as are many of the local fields. It’s still quite green, but the wheat heads are fully grown. Closer in to the house, the stone fruits are developing. The plums on the tree here are turning from green to wine-colored. 
22 April 05
Mountain Lion Week
There have been three events in Davis this week focusing on Puma concolor, the large cat of North America. It’s California’s last large predator, the wolf and grizzly having been extirpated.
Walter Boyce of the Wildlife Health Center gave a talk on Tuesday to a general audience; there was a showing of Counting Sheep (an independent film about bighorn sheep and mountain lions) last night where he answered questions at the end, and then a summit meeting today that involved agency folks, scientists, non-profits, and a host of other interested parties.
I’m quite tired—I took notes for the duration of this five-hour meeting—so I will go to bed and hope to dream about this beautiful animal that is holding its own in the state (for now).
13 April 05
Eyas
— an unfledged or nestling hawk (WordNet)
All four of Gracie’s eggs have hatched! She is the peregrine falcon nesting on top of the PG & E building that we have been watching excitedly through the webcam set up by the good folks at the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group. The chicks are difficult to see in the webcam since the adults brood them almost constantly to keep them warm, but there are pictures of them here in the nest diary.
10 April 05
Grokking Grids
Thumbnails; sketches; writing; paintings: the grids we devised yesterday got a workout today. We studied the different gestures made by leaves, branches, treetrunks; the geometric space of irises; the greens in a redwood grove and how they change in the dapple light.
At left is the last exercise we worked on this afternoon in the South African section of the Arboretum: zoom in, zoom out then pick a sketch and work it up a little more.
My mind is racing with possibility. I am ENTHUSIASTIC. (See Blaugustine on this topic for April 8.)
7 April 05
Chart of Stones
For those of you with an interest in barrows, henges, stone circles, and ancient trackways, or who, like Terry Pratchett, want to upgrade to a 33-megalith processor, there is now an interactive map of the megaliths of Europe at the Megalithic Portal.
5 April 05
Green Roofs
My officemate, continuing his jet-setting life, was up at Oregon State last week, and on the way back he stopped off at Powell’s in Portland — lucky him! He brought back a spectacularly designed new book entitled Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction. This book illustrates some forty case studies of green roof architecture around the world.
For a primer on green roof architecture see Greenroofs 101.
2 April 05
Cache Creek Outing
We got a late invitation from our landlord la to go for a hike today along a ridge over Bear Creek and Cache Creek in the upper northwest corner of Yolo County, crossing over into Colusa County. It was predicted to be a beautiful day so we said yes, the first time we’ve accepted one of his invitations like this. (We agree on almost no political, social, or environmental issues at all, though we could all agree that the poor Pope was probably best off being allowed to go quietly, no heroics.)
This didn’t leave much in the way of conversation topics over 3 hours of driving or 5.5 miles of hiking, but we seemed to manage. We saw five tule elk; a prairie falcon (possibly two, though it might have been the same bird); a perfectly splendid wildflower assortment including larkspur that was intoxicating in its purpleness, much yellow and white, and of course the green bursting through blue oaks and the hillsides.
I’m sore from this, being well out of shape for this kind of thing, with my usual crop of three or so blisters, so I rounded out my day by finishing the account of the Red Sox 2004 season, in plenty of time for Opening Day tomorrow.