26 March 07
A Love Affair with Gloves
I’ve been shoveling a lot of manure over the past two weeks; if I didn’t wear gloves, I’d have some serious blisters. My gardening gloves are alternately sopping wet or crusty-dry. I wear gloves to drive, to bike (let’s hear it for terrycloth), to walk; to do calligraphy (a jerryrigged military dress glove with the thumb, forefinger and middle fingers cut out — the idea is to avoid putting grease from your hands onto the paper); I have gloves in the pockets of all my jackets. I have lots of leather gloves mostly bought in Spain (a pair my father brought me back from his last trip there, for instance). When Numenius isn’t looking, I use them to clean my binoculars on rainy days. There’s a box of vinyl gloves under the bathroom sink. (These come in handy for when you have to move a dead magpie to the freezer in the women’s room at work.)
I don’t think there’s an oven mitt in the house, so I burn my hands on the few occasions I fetch something out of the oven; and even though I own a pair of rubber gloves, I rarely use them.
The best gloves I’ve ever worn, though, are temporary: paraffin dip. Heat, moisture, perfect fit…
26 March 07
Three Year Oaks
This evening I walked down to the creek to check on a few of the valley oaks my neighbor Jim planted as part of a restoration effort. Some are doing well, like the one at left; others didn’t make it.
Meanwhile, some wasps have taken up residence in one of the planting tubes. The oak here hasn’t flourished but is still hanging in there.
24 March 07
Another Bicycling Contraption
When you live in a town as sopped in bicycle culture as this one, you run into a lot of contraptions. (Lila was one of these, getting me through a tough spot when I’d had my Achilles reattachment surgery.)
Today at the Coop we saw a tricycle that had five 12-volt batteries apparently powered by a battery charger that was attached to the wheel rotation up front. (Like Lila, this trike had two wheels in front, one behind.) The owner came out while we were admiring his bike: he had just returned two kegs from a party the night before. The bike was his master’s thesis. He was in the department of Mechanical Engineering but had a lot of help from the Technology and Transportation folks.
I had no camera with me but happened to have a sketchbook in my pocket. It gives no sense of the multiple electrical cables or the perspex divider between the front and cargo section which doubles up as a tandem spot. (Our young friend said there was also a roof which wasn’t attached because it was 75 degrees today, sorry those of you in chilly climes.)
23 March 07
Mustering Of The Orclets
We were having a reprieve from the kitchen invasion of Argentine ants ( Linepithema humile ) but they may be on the rise again. They seem to head into the house in large numbers when it is either very wet outside or it is hot. The weather has been beautiful these past several days but it may start getting very warm soon. Not so good for us ant-wise.
At left two of the ants are mobilizing for the next moves on chez Magpienest.
22 March 07
Fighting for Treetops
As Numenius said, the Swainson’s hawks have been coming in — over the next few weeks they’ll be nestbuilding all over Northern California. (There were reports yesterday morning of a record-breaking migration over the Anza Borrego desert in Southern California, about 1,300 birds.) As I left the house this morning, there was a gal by the driveway with a clipboard, watching the Swainson’s that was perched in a walnut tree.
The white-tailed kites have been nesting for nearly a month, now, outside my office. I watched them courting; the male then started his solitary courtship flights, toes extended, a barely perceptible hovering glide showing his striking wings to best advantage, around the pine tree where the female was presumably incubating, returning often with rodents; and now, he has taken up attacking any bird larger than a starling that comes near the tree.
Yesterday, it was a Swainson’s. There are fewer and fewer trees in this part of the world that are tall enough and with enough cover for these larger buteos. This one seems taken. The kite, a third of the size but far more agile, went after it again and again until the Swainson’s got so high it was barely visible from the ground. Is it worth expending this much energy? The kite obviously thinks so.
Postscript, Friday, 23 March: I’m adding a photo of the Borrego hawks, taken by Grace Clark. They counted 1365 hawks that all roosted overnight and left between 0900 and 0945 on Wednesday… Paul Jorgensen says in an email “it was one of the greatest natural spectacles I have ever witnessed.”
20 March 07
Fiddleneck
These fiddlenecks ( Amsinkia menziesii var. intermedia) are now in bloom on the south side of the alfalfa field by our house. They are a native flower found often in disturbed areas at lower elevations in California. This past Sunday we went to a picnic at a friend’s place on the top of a hill west of Winters, in the eastern foothills of the Coast Range. The fiddlenecks there are much further along and are starting to go to seed. Many of the other wildflowers there seem to blooming early this year as well.
19 March 07
West African French
Preparing a set of training materials on avian flu for a workshop in Djibouti starting on Thursday has had me dusting off my rusty French. I can now say, with complete conviction, IAHP, influenza aviaire hautement pathogène; have been gently rehearsing my plural possessives.
One of the veterinarians who will be teaching this course is Senegalese. His plane tickets to Djibouti via Nairobi got all messed up. His English is rudimentary. He was frantic. I took a deep breath and called him on his cellphone in Dakar; he calmed down.
It comes back: The words, the intonation, the oddly puzzled expression necessary for these morphemes, the different facial musculature. Now Nicole’s gone east, I’ve not had much chance to speak in French at all, and it’s a shame.
Yesterday, up the hill in Winters, we heard a crackle on the radio. Cameroun??— I said. It wasn’t: it was Côte d’Ivoire, but I had the accent quite close. He was talking on the radio to a man from the Midi who was on a sailing trip (?) somewhere in the Caribbean. When they switched frequencies we lost the Africa portion but continued to hear the twice-repeated phrases from Guadeloupe or wherever it was.
I would LOVE to get on the radio in French. And Spanish. There are possibilities looming, here…
19 March 07
Return Of The Swainson's Hawks
Yesterday we thought we heard and saw one, but today it was clear — the Swainson’s hawks have returned to the vicinity. At noon time there were two birds circling fairly high overhead and calling, and then late in the afternoon we saw two Swainson’s flying at a fairly low height calling and chasing a red-tailed hawk. The dynamics between the two species are interesting. The redtails are down on the Sacramento Valley floor where we are during the wintertime. In the mornings we’ve regularly seen one perched on the power pole 100 meters southwest of the house. Once the Swainson’s hawks show up, the redtails get displaced, presumably moving up to the foothills.
17 March 07
Four Years
Today was one of those days where so many things were planned a little triage was called for… picked up some ceanothus and monkey flower at the Arboretum Plant Sale, rushed home, went in to the Farmers’ Market on my bike for the 13th Worldwide Sketchcrawl. I had planned to go to the one in Sacramento but decided to pull a last-minute event together in Davis. It was so last-minute I was the only participant, but that was fine. I sketched for an hour, had lunch with Numenius, bought a new sketchbook, and then went over to the Code Pink demonstration marking the fourth year of the war in Iraq.
There were probably 100 pairs of shoes, each labelled with the name of a civilian killed in Iraq. This baby I drew, for instance: her father has come back from Iraq, is now on the circuit as an Iraq Veteran for Peace. There was a pair of shoes there that could have fit her.
I returned this evening for a candelight vigil, poetry reading, singing. We’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives…
16 March 07
Ghost Owl
We walked this evening up from the house to Pica’s office and immediately heard the click-click-click-click of a barn owl, and saw it flying low over the house. A little further along, we heard another barn owl to the north over the alfalfa field, perhaps hunting along the newly plowed edge of the field. Near Pica’s office, we saw another barn owl — we believe there are two nesting pairs along the half-mile stretch between home and office.
A particularly well-travelled birding friend of ours thinks Davis may be the most reliable place in the country to find barn owls. There are several nest boxes over parking lots downtown, and certainly a number of pairs down this way. It’s either feast or famine with barn owls — they’re a hard bird to find in Massachusetts.
Many folks believe they are the origins of ghost myths. Cosmopolitan birds, all white underneath, making creepy-scary noises at night.