9 February 05
Almond Blossoms—Retry
After last night’s hijacking of my sprig of blossoms, I went out and got another. Here’s a drawing done on one of my new sheets of Canson Mi-Teintes. I realize using colored pencils on this paper can’t quite work the same way, so I think next time I’ll do the entire drawing in white tempera before I start adding color.
These blossoms smell intensely like honey. It’s a wonderful thing to have them out your back door. (Except in our case it’s our front door, but we’re at the back of the other house.)
7 February 05
On Again, Off Again
Readers of Feathers of Hope will notice that Numenius and I take turns posting. This works for us: daily posts would seem like an ordeal, but it’s possible to write or draw something for posting every other day, which may or may not have anything to do with what one of us posted the day before.
So Numenius posted three consecutive days, and people are wondering where I was.
It has to do with birds, and here’s a very partial list:
Plain chachalaca
Crimson-collared grosbeak
Elegant trogon
Golden-crowned warbler
Groove-billed ani
Black-throated green warbler
White-tipped dove
Cactus wren
Muscovy duck
Great-tailed grackle
Blue bunting
Roadside hawk
Rose-throated becard…
4 February 05
Portage
Picture a highway bridge over a small river in central Wisconsin. The land is flat, mostly open, marshy in bits; on one side up a slope is an old farmhouse. The only clue to anything unusual about the vicinity is that it has perhaps more than its fair share of historical markers. Two of these commemorate Fort Winnebago, formerly on the site of the farmhouse. The second one is a small monument in red granite, erected around 1925 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The wording on the copper plaques is terse; on one side there is a list of officers who served at the fort. To the modern viewer, all the names on the plaque are likely to be unfamiliar except for one, a Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
So began the environmental historian William Cronon last night in a talk he gave in the Alumni Center on campus. He was reading from the first chapter of a book he has been working on for ten years, and is likely to be published in three, a local history of a town named Portage. “This is a place with ghosts”, he said. Three of these ghosts are important figures in American environmental history who spent formative years near the spot: Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.
And once upon a time the spot was a major transportation nexus. Due to an accident of physical geography, the Fox River, over which the bridge passes, here lies only 1.28 miles from the Wisconsin River. The Fox drains into the Great Lakes and hence is connected to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Wisconsin drains into the Mississippi and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. In the era when canoes reigned, when waterways were the chief means of transportation into the interior, this portage spot, at the border of two great watersheds, was key.
There are many stories to be told about this place. But that is so about all places. The process of placemaking, Cronon contends, is the process of storytelling.
2 February 05
Signs of Spring
In honor of the holiday of Brigid, celebrating awakening from winter’s deep, yesterday after work I went to the cooperatively-run Experimental Garden on campus to find and sketch a newly-blooming flower. I ended up drawing this lavender. While sitting in the garden, I heard a familiar metallic ping—ping—ping. Baseball practice! The UCD baseball field is nearby, and the baseball team was practicing in their batting cages. Their season begins next Tuesday. Signs of spring indeed—the weather is beautiful as well.
29 January 05
Sun Emerging
The fog burned off late in the morning, and it turned into a fine, sunny day, a good pottering Saturday. We cycled into campus in the morning, going to the open house for the new facility housing the UC Davis Herbarium. The herbarium in its old location had run out of space, and the collections were not temperature-controlled, leading to insect damage. The new location is in a brand-new science building on campus, with the collections stored in movable cabinets like they use for compactable shelving in libraries.
After lunch at Ali Baba’s, we went home and enjoyed the sunshine. The bees were out in force, visiting white violets and snapdragons. Pica worked on her calligraphy, and I did a couple of paintings: above is our car Nellie, with the levee to the north.
28 January 05
Hazard
The Western gray squirrel was hit by a car today.
It might not seem like much. This is often the fate of squirrels.
Yet—
riding home at lunchtime I saw him newly dead and almost wept.
Over 1500 birds were brought in as a result of an oil spill whose source they can still not pinpoint in Southern California. Over 70% of those birds—mostly Western grebes—have died. (For every one bird brought in to the rehab center, 10-100 die at sea.) My colleagues are near exhaustion, working 16 and even 20-hour days for the last two weeks. They are discouraged. I saw two of them today, up for a couple of days then back to the bird work.
And the almond tree outside our front door is getting ready to burst into blossom—if we get some good sunshine this weekend it will happen—but since it’s always so much earlier than all the others, it almost never gets pollinated. It’s like a bride, stood up at the altar.
I try not to get into a place of despair, so well described by Butuki, but it’s hard sometimes.
27 January 05
Cousin Hippopotamus
A post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Jean-Renaud Boisserie, and two French colleagues have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences clarifying the evolutionary relationships of the hippopotamus. This morphological study derives the hippopotamus from an extinct group of artiodactyls (the even-toed ungulates, such as cows, pigs and sheep) called the anthracotheres.
Their study indicates that the closest living relatives of the hippos are not pigs as has been commonly thought, but rather whales, as molecular evidence has also suggested. According to the study, cetaceans and hippos appear to have had a common ancestor 50 or 60 million years ago, and phylogenetically whales can be considered members of the artiodactyls.
26 January 05
Walking to Work on a Wednesday
It’s raining and I’m
walking to work
because it’s raining
and my helmet won’t fit over
the rose barrette Nicole made me
which goes with this turtleneck
(but not so much else)
and it’s not raining after all
and I see
my shadow—the merest hint—for the first time in days
and I notice the creek’s flow
is somehow reversed
but I can’t stop to see why
because as usual
I’m late for work
late, but not so late
as not to notice the red-wing’s concoree
or the kew of the flicker
or that the fat western gray squirrel
(not the kind the Brits accuse us
of having introduced there to wipe out
their red squirrels, I observe as I
see a starling overhead,
bane of bluebirds and purple martins
and just one of hundreds
of eurocontaminants here)
is getting ready to mate
but will probably
statistically get run over first
and I kick a lone
black walnut
to the left
and it leaves a trail
of walnut ink
which I’ve been writing in
all morning
and as I cross the road
my heart is singing
because how many people
get to walk to work
in the rain?
23 January 05
Dogblog
A photo essay on San Francisco’s patient canines.
22 January 05
Hill Walk in the Fog
We went for a short walk today up Mix Canyon, which is easily the closest very steep hill for all the hard-core cyclists. (We saw two on their way down.)
It’s also the best place near Davis to see California newts. We did see some, but alas none were alive—they cross the road in the rain in the dark and many get run over. It’s late to be looking for them, but I was hoping. Numenius says he’ll take me to Briones to see them there. Maybe we could have a Bay Area blogger meetup at Briones.
The buckeye seeds that dropped last fall were all germinating. At left is a sketch. We saw the blue sky briefly but mostly walked in the gloom with the scent of California bay piercing the cold, damp air.