30 March 07
Kingbirds Are Back
Today was a holiday and I had lots of pottering opportunities. I went into town for a bit and then late in the afternoon I was out near the garden tinkering with the radio setup. I heard in flight and then later confirmed by sight two western kingbirds, the first I’ve seen this spring. They are very cheery sorts — always singing ‘dah-DEE-didi-dah’.
29 March 07
Alternate Career Universes
I just finished Remember Me by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a sort of update on Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death, not so acerbically anti-funeral industry but with lots of interesting titbits.
I’d make a good funeral director, I realize. These people are now called upon to be events planners as baby boomers age and want personalized sendoffs, not the wake-funeral-interment patterns of the past. Families don’t want ashen-faced purveyors of small kindnesses, they want some creativity to come alive while they are in a state of numbed shock. They want someone to take charge, make something happen that will be a gift to the living and a heartfelt tribute to the dead. They don’t want expensive going-through-the-motions (and the latter can, my friends, be REALLY expensive).
As a former denizen of Mount Auburn Cemetery, I warmed to this project. It’s silly, of course. I will never be a funeral director. But I could: I have the right combination of empathy, organizational skills, zest for throwing parties in other people’s houses, and fascination with, let’s face it, death. There are now death midwives and once-in-a-lifetime marriers (we had one for our own wedding, the Reverend Doctor Nicole Honey). If you need a once-only funeral director, send me an email…
28 March 07
KDRT In Trouble
Our local low-power (all of 83 watts) FM community radio station, KDRT is about to be stomped on by a big and bad commercial station. KMJE, a 6-kilowatt station 73 miles north of here on the same frequency as KDRT, has filed with the FCC to move their station to within 3 miles of Davis, which would annihilate the signal from KDRT and put it off the air.
KDRT has been on the air for a little over two years, and has established a diverse program lineup ranging from Davis gardening (Pica’s favorite show) to Bollywood music. Though modest in power, their signal comes in quite well here, south of town.
The term for such a move is encroachment. Unfortunately, low-power FM stations are second-class citizens on the FM spectrum according to FCC regulations, and even though KMJE clearly would be the bully in this event, it is the low-power station that has to yield to the full-power station. Moreover, a recent change in FCC procedures has reduced the time it takes for a full power station to change its community of license from several years to a couple of months.
KDRT is now looking for support in the form of donations to pay for lawyers and engineers to make their case as well as informal letters of objection to the FCC.
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…