7 March 05
Peregrines Nesting
Peregrine falcons hold some kind of mystique… whether it’s because they came so close to extinction during widespread use of DDT, or because they can tuck into a dive reaching almost 200 miles an hour, or because they’re just plain beautiful, these are amazing birds to see.
There’s a pair now nesting at the PG&E Building in San Francisco. This webcam is updated every five seconds.
update, Tuesday, March 8, 2005: there are now three eggs, and the female “Gracie” is predicted to start incubating full-time, but at 2:34 pm PST she’s absent…
5 March 05
Counting Crows, Again
My work buddies have been continuing to catch crows as part of a West Nile virus study. The backpacks with the radio transmitters seem to have held up remarkably well in most cases. There is a large roost site in Davis which most of the crows fly into at dusk, and their beep-beep-beeps alert the folks following along on radios to their presence. (This is, incidentally, a VERY bad place to park your car.)
Last week I spotted a crow with an antenna (well, I spotted the silver tag around its ankle) just outside my window at work. I’ve seen it every day since. This crow, #652, seems to be paired up. It’s almost always with another crow now. (By the way, Coup de Vent, it doesn’t seem at ALL bothered by the weight of the transmitter or the straps or even the antenna, though it had certainly lost the tape off the end…)
We heard 652 this evening at the roost site along with 14 others. We missed four, but we hope the volunteer will find them tomorrow night. All this rain we’ve been having is yielding a bumper crop of mosquitoes, and it won’t be long before the virus hits this region like a sledgehammer.
25 February 05
Spring
Numenius has installed a weather applet (Meteo) on our laptop which means I’m keeping tabs on the weather here, in Maine, in Boston, and in Juneau, where friends and family live. I definitely feel guilty wondering which blossoms to draw when I see everyone else is getting snow today.
Guilty or not, the blossoms here are on their inexorable march; the almond ones have blown away, giving place to the much smaller white plum blossoms. The pale pink nectarine and darker pink peach blossoms are next. We lost a cherry tree four years ago to rot and and the peach might be heading that way (helped along by an overzealous northern flicker), but they’re beautiful while they last.
24 February 05
Daffodil Sunshine
Our landlady keeps a fine garden, and she kindly planted daffodils in back of our house, viewable from our bedroom. They’ve been coming into full bloom right now, warmed by several days of sunshine.
23 February 05
Pica’s Recent Peregrinations
22 February 05
Our Secret Kansas
Yesterday’s pendulous thunderclouds did produce a couple of tornados, it turns out. One of these touched down in the North Sacramento area shortly before two in the afternoon, causing light damage to an apartment complex. Here is a slideshow of some photographs of this tornado.
At the time, we were far away, comfortably ensconsed in the art store in Palo Alto. By the time we got home it was dry, but there were impressive thunderclouds to the west of us, including the storm we had just passed through. At left is a view of the Vaca Mountains from our house at about 5:15 in the afternoon; later on we’d see lightning flashes from those clouds.
(The title of this post is lifted from a chapter of Mike Davis’ book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster: it turns out tornados hit the Los Angeles area much more often than people realize.)
15 February 05
Harm
I have a memory of having buried a bird alive when I was small. My guess is that I believed it was dead, and I probably only put a handful of dirt on it, but it gave me nightmares years later.
My love of birds now is, I believe, not unconnected to this memory.
Much more recently I harmed a garter snake. I was clearing with an axe the rampant growth of California bay sproutings in the cabin we were staying in during the last big El Nio year.
The axe fell on the snake.
I have never howled so much as this, never felt so much a part of snakedom. I was wretched. I have respected and liked snakes ever since—I can’t claim to love them, not the way I love birds, but I have lost my fear of them. I love what they do to a landscape, curling around it.
We called this snake Speranza. Out of harm comes understanding.
Or so I hope…
14 February 05
Bay Area Historical Maps
The Earth Sciences and Map Library at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the USGS, has had a project to scan old topographic maps of the San Francisco Bay Area and make them available online. The collection dates back to 1895, and covers many of the editions of both the 15 minute and 7.5 minute quadrangles.
At left is a map of where I grew up as it appeared in 1895.
13 February 05
Twitchers’ Rehab
It was the perfect antidote to racing up and down the Lower Rio Grande Valley: spending an hour or so watching this owl sitting in a mature tamarisk and sketching it. Numenius rigged up the telescope so that, sitting on the ground, we had a good view to sketch from.
I was able to get about fifteen sketches of the bird done when Richard mentioned he wished he had stuff to sketch with. Here, take this, I said. I have my
So I went back to the car for the paper and then worked on this drawing, which I could never have done if I hadn’t done the warm-up sketches. I think it must be like Lorianne’s 113 early-morning bows or something. The result, in any case, was purely meditative.
12 February 05
Day of the Long-eared Owls
Today we headed south with Sami and Richard to Mercey Hot Springs in Little Panoche Valley to look at long-eared owls, a species neither Pica nor myself have seen. For the past several years, this resort has been the site of a winter roost of these birds, who in daytime hours perch halfway up the interiors of the tamarisk and pine trees. 
The birds couldn’t have been more cooperative. The second one we saw was posed nicely for a sketch, so I went back to the car and got my drawing materials and our scope.
After one full sketch and several details of this bird, I went up the hill to do a quick painting of the Panoche Hills on this beautiful partly cloudy day.