7 February 07
Five Years, 135 Blocks
We at the Yolo Audubon Society are planning to start a breeding bird atlas project for Yolo County, commencing in 2008. A breeding bird atlas is a set of maps that show the distribution of where every bird species nests, in this case in a set of grid cells across a single county. A breeding bird atlas project takes place over several years, often five — the idea is to confirm the breeding status of each species across the entire time period. A standard grid cell size is 5 × 5 kilometers, which works out to about 135 grid cells across the county. At about 15-20 hours of effort per grid cell, we will have our work cut out for us!
6 February 07
Valley Oak Potting Party
Jim (pictured at left) says that even though it’s an El Niño year, it was a very bad year for acorns. He had to go beyond Lake Berryessa to find a stand of oaks with a lot of acorns. But once he did, he collected about 1,000.
He delivered about 250 to Tree Woodland; another 250 to the Audubon Farms program. That has left him with about 500 to plant. Oaks put out fearsome taproots that require a lot of length in a pot. Gallon milk cartons are ideal. Jim collects these from the cafes all over town, gets donations of compost.
Today we were transplanting the germinated oaks into their milk carton+compost homes. Jim’s kitchen is now a nursery. But this rate of success is high: about 5% loss at each stage. Better, though, by far, than just plonking acorns in the ground and hoping they grow (about 5% survival rate, there).
4 February 07
Davis Flyby
It’s not an event that can be predicted to the precision of a lunar occultation, but sometime between 1:52 and 2:20 PM on February 20 the cyclists racing Stage 2 of the Amgen Tour of California will be entering Davis on the way to the finish in Sacramento. This 115-mile stage starts out in Santa Rosa and makes a couple of difficult climbs across the Coast Range mountains before descending into the Central Valley for the 45-mile flat run to the state capitol building in Sacramento. Some of the world’s top teams are in this year’s race — Credit Agricole, CSC, Rabobank, T-Mobile, Discovery, Quick Step — all passing within several hundred yards of where I work. I just better not blink!
3 February 07
Further Adventures in Colored Pencils
My Derwent Coloursofts arrived this week. A beautiful set of 72. I decided to avoid intermediate quantities based on reviews by Bob and Katherine.
I’m quite familiar with how Prismacolors function. There are some super-creamy ones, such as Indigo, Canary Yellow and Tuscan Red, that glisten off the pencil onto the page; others, such as Vermilion Red, seem to have been made with micah and won’t leave a trace on the paper without a lot of effort, without almost scrubbing the color into the paper.
The Coloursofts are, in general, much chalkier than Prismacolors, but are very smooth. Their waxy bloom is slower to grow. The result is a little brighter (see apple on left as opposed to right).
I tried working at the Farmers’ Market this morning. A drawing of this size takes a long time, and people were constantly moving in and out of view, barring the cooperative gentleman in the black vest. It’s better to have an obvious sitter or obvious photograph to work from.
The cats, on the other hand, spend a long time in each position. I was able to do this drawing this morning, in Prismacolor. Black cats are hard to draw and this black was a combination of indigo and tuscan red with a little burnt sienna thrown in. (The warm colors are on top as the cat was close to me, not further away, in which case I’d have done the routine the other way around.)
This sort of discussion seems so arcane when most people around me are talking about megapixels, digital Nikon lenses, and the need to buy external hard drives. I am pondering relative softness of leads and the long, slow, buildup of layers. It’s a different world.
(Note: all the paper used for these drawings was Canson Mi-Teintes, wrong side.)
1 February 07
First Morse Code Contact
It was hardly to New Zealand or some other far-off place, but we have to start somewhere. Yesterday evening I set up the radio and antenna on the 40 meter band and began my routine. The two simplest ways to make a contact are tune around and listen for somebody calling CQ — that is, announcing to the world you’re seeking a contact — and reply to them, or to call CQ yourself and hope somebody replies to your own call. I had been doing a good mix of both when I put out yet another “CQ CQ CQ DE KG6KDJ KG6KDJ K”. And I’m gobsmacked when somebody comes back — loud. I don’t quite catch his call sign but reply in kind, very nervously and with lots of mistakes. He slows way down to accommodate me. The first thing I say to him is that he’s my first HF (high-frequency bands) contact, before getting to the basics of name, location, and signal report.
His location turns out to be Davis also, about three miles from here. We get into a good long ‘rag chew’, at the raging pace of about 5 words per minute. He is incredibly patient with me, despite my keying going to pot due to nerves. I definitely did better with my listening than sending. After an hour or so we say our goodbyes — 73s in ham lingo — and I go off the air. The experience was fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. And it gets easier from this point on.
31 January 07
Raising Hell for Molly
Molly Ivins is dead after a long fight with cancer. In her final syndicated column, Stand Up Against the Surge, dictated because she could no longer write, she reminds us: “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”
Her editor Anthony Zurcher has written a moving tribute here.
What will I do? What will you do? What will we do for her memory, and the memory of the dead in Iraq, and the memory of those who died, recently or long ago, risking their lives or at least their comfort to do what was right?
I write this as a beautiful set of colored pencils sits on the counter, waiting for me to use. Time for some more subversive calligraphy, methinks… last time I did that on Feathers of Hope, the blog was put under military surveillance. Ha. Go ahead, guys, you’re welcome here…
30 January 07
Loss Of A Topiarist
If one takes a hard look at the hedges on the far side of a campus parking lot bordering 1st Street here in Davis, one will notice that they have form. One is a dragon, another a whale. There are other topiaries scattered around Davis — a locomotive, an elephant, and others.
Sadly, the landscape artist who created these topiaries, George Sommerdorf Jr., just died Friday in an ice-skating accident up at Donner Lake in the Sierras, breaking through thin ice. Davis will miss his sense of whimsy.
29 January 07
Davis Food Bloggers
Spending the day with Sid, Rick, and Carol yesterday going for the smew meant we didn’t pick up the paper until quite late on in the afternoon. There was an article in there about Davis bloggers, specifically the subset of Davis food bloggers.
Our friend Fernanda has been blogging continuously since 2000. She’s one of the first wave of Brazilian bloggers and is well-known in the Brazilian blogging community. Her main blog is the Chatterbox, but she shares a blog about film, and about a year ago started a blog about food, Chucrute Com Salsicha.
And there she was, in the paper, shopping at the Farmers’ Market! It was a great piece about this subset community of bloggers, who love to cook, share food, photograph it, eat it, and write about it.
The article is unfortunately not online. But unlike most print articles about blogging that still just don’t get it, this one was sensitively written (and researched: Claire St. John visited Fernanda at her home and was fed lunch by her, f’rinstance).
Other Davis food blogs covered in the article were Crumpet Attack, Something in Season, Vanilla Garlic, and What Did You Eat?
This is an exceptional part of the world in which to grow good food. Fun to see people enjoying it on a new level.
28 January 07
Smew
If birding were always so easy…Today we went to see the smew that’s been hanging out at an exurban park pond near Sonora, about 2 1/2 hours from Davis. The smew is a vagrant species of duck from Eurasia that only shows up in California every few years. This particular bird was sighted a couple weeks ago and has been seen at the pond almost every day since. The one exception was yesterday, when it never showed, which made today’s trek a little more exciting than otherwise. But when we got up there and joined the crowd of several dozen birders, we saw the smew within 20 seconds!
27 January 07
Rumi in the Chaparral
Today was the final session in my Cold Canyon docent training . The final three presentations concerned plant adaptation, Patwin uses of the native plants, and a selection of Farsi poetry. Iraj read us some of the poetry in Farsi.
There is a strong tradition of Persian nature poetry, with Rumi and Omar Khayyam perhaps the best known in the West. I visited Shiraz in the 1970s, home of the poet Hafez. These poets were all revered in their time, though marginal socially and politically.
The great find of the day for me was Sohram Sepehri, a twentieth-century Iranian poet who started out as a painter and who chanced upon an eccentric patron who offered to buy all his paintings if he would travel for some time to Japan and India. His art inspired his poetry and vice-versa.
The poem I read was called Water. The first two stanzas:
Let’s not muddy the water:
somewhere down the stream a pigeon may be drinking,
or in a distant wood, a goldfinch may be washing her feathers.
Or in a village a jar may be filling.
Let us not muddy the water:
Perhaps the current passes by a poplar,
washing sorrow from a lonely heart.
Perhaps a dervish has dipped his dry bread in it.
—
I have some books to look for in the library… oh. And let’s not muddy the water.