6 June 06
Parakeet Of Putah Creek
This morning when we were out in the yard with the cats we heard a strident ‘keeew’ that I thought was an oriole and Pica thought was a northern flicker. A few minutes later, I spotted the bird: it was a beautiful psittacid, with a long tail and a reddish bill. Pica saw the collar on him, and in Sibley we identified him as a Rose-ringed Parakeet. He flew off over the field towards the creek.
On the way home this afternoon, riding through the Arboretum, a couple of kilometers off from here, I heard a similar call, and had the briefest glimpse of a yellowish bird in flight. Maybe it was our parakeet.
5 June 06
Guano
I went over this afternoon next door to find out exactly when Dave needed his eight copies of the long-ago-finished-but-now-once-again-draft of the California Wildlife Action Plan.
Walter stopped me on the way in. What do you know about Sue Greenwald? Oh. She’s fey. (She’s also our next mayor.) Could I work with her? he asked. Possibly, I said. It depends. She’s been picking up fallen-out-of-the-nest baby herons at Shields Oak Grove in the Arboretum, he said. Oh. That’s illegal…
The heron rookery is sooner or later going to kill a bunch of heritage oak trees in the Arboretum. All kinds of people are concerned about this including our fey mayor-to-be. People seem to take sides.
You on your bike today? he said. Yes. Want to come with me and lay some guano traps? Sure. I have to go to the printer anyway. We biked in the heat of the day over to the Arboretum and laid out what essentially were diapers under oak trees…*
Sampling egret and heron poop for West Nile virus and avian flu is easy, non-invasive, and will perhaps give us some kind of additional input into the problem of ordinary citizens taking heron chicks home.
Even if they are future mayors.
*Just in case you weren’t sure: this is NOT in my job description.
4 June 06
The Letter G, The Number 5
I’m a little bit more than halfway through the project of learning the 43 main characters in the Morse code set. I’m now working on adding the number 5. In the Koch method which I’m using, you add a character at a time to the set you already know and practice with the new set until you reach an accuracy of 90%. It’s interesting how adding just a single character causes my overall accuracy to drop and I have to go through a whole new round of practice, rewiring a few neurons.
It is now worthwhile for me to listen to and try to copy real live Morse code conversations. It has to be pretty slow code for me to have any success at all, and since I have many more characters to learn I expect a lot of trouble. It is good practice though. Today on 10 meters I was hearing a couple of operators having a good long ragchew sending slow code. It was heartening—they must both be beginners.
2 June 06
Tomato Flashback
Back in the early 1980s I got a job in the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University. It was on the top floor of the History Faculty building, one of James Stirling’s better-known flops. It was an L-shaped building with a half pyramid of glass leading up to my office door—single-paned glass, in a part of the world that was damp and cold in winter but whose gardeners could grow prize cucumbers in greenhouses in summer. (Air conditioning was not on anyone’s radar in those days.) We froze in winter but in summer I grew tomatoes outside my office on the south-facing windowsill.
I had no idea what I was doing so I asked one of the library assistants, a great gardener, for help. (The Centre at the time was a hotbed of Marxism and Phil was a Thatcherite, through-and-through; it made for interesting interactions.) Phil suggested a Growbag. This was a bag of peat you simply cut into and planted your tomatoes. Pick off the growth at leaf intersections, he said; tie the plants to canes; and pinch out all growth past the fourth set of flowers.
Tomatoes in this hemisphere seem to be grown much more anarchically. You encourage multiple, out-of-control, growths at leaf intersections. No canes, here: cages. Tame the anarchic beasts. I’ve been told to plant them in VERY deep holes because tomatoes put out deep, deep roots.
Some of my planted tomatoes have their first flowers now. I’ve never done the anarchic thing before, tomato-wise, but Johnny the Beekeeper says it’s really hard to kill tomatoes, especially in this climate…
30 May 06
Mallards In The Hay
I’ve been doing the breeding bird atlas survey now for a couple of months, trying to head out to our assigned 5 square kilometer block of farmland just south of here at least once a week. It is turning out to be challenging to come up with confirmations of breeding activity, and so far I’ve only confirmed two species. The first is the ubiquitous red-winged blackbird, where several weeks back I saw a female carrying nesting materials near a wheat field. The second confirmation came yesterday, and wasn’t a species I ordinarily associated with the landscape of wheat and alfalfa fields. Mallards. I scared up a female in an irrigation ditch with a dozen ducklings in tow.
The kites we saw at the outset still haven’t definitively nested. They worried me because I didn’t see them in my visits the prior two weeks. Yesterday they were back, together with an interloper, a third adult.
29 May 06
The Story of Baseball is the Story of America. Discuss.
A story on the BBC this week looked at the induction of 17 black players in the Hall of Fame from back when baseball was segregated. Buck O’Neil, who is now 94, was offended by the suggestion that baseball was merely a “game.” The story of baseball is the story of America, he insisted. He lived through segregation and the negro leagues and narrowly missed a spot in the Hall of Fame. Buck O’Neil is the consummate player and gentleman.
Okay.
If the teens gave us the frontier spirit, Ty Cobb, and the best pitcher possibly of all time getting poisoned by gas on the Western Front, the twenties gave us the excesses of Babe Ruth and the flappers, if the thirties gave us soup kitchens and Lou Gehrig, if the forties gave us Ted Williams and war, and the fifties ditto and the dominance of the Yankees and the rise of the West Coast, if the sixties gave us an expanded strike zone and a scramble and Haight Ashbury and the seventies Pete Rose and expansions and Watergate, if the eighties gave us Reagan and free agency, the nineties gave us the fall of the alternate superpower and the rise of the big sluggers—McGwire, Bonds, Sosa—what does our current decade augur for the fate of the United States?
Overpaid players juiced on steroids. Megalomaniacal baseball commissioners. Parents screaming when Little League kids miss ground balls. Sound familiar, anyone? And who gets to call a time out?
28 May 06
Packing Up
We went over to Bodega Bay yesterday and this morning where we helped Pica’s Mum pack up the house in anticipation of her great move to Maine. Pending the completion of the house sale, this will happen some time in the middle of June. This probably was my last visit to the place, so I did a few sketches in commemoration.
27 May 06
Little League Game
My friend Donna invited us along to see one of the Little League playoff games this week. Her husband coaches the Texas Rangers. They started off pitching well but were let down by fielding errors. We left when the score was 15-2 or something dreadful…
The talent in these teams is quite uneven and I think the challenge is to raise the general level of skill but not lose heart when every single infielder pulls a Bill Buckner through-the-legs routine. Unfortunately that’s very, very difficult.
Helps when you have Indian takeout, though. (And yes, that is a Pawtucket Red Sox cap in her hand.)
25 May 06
New Use For Health Plan Documents
They make good pads for Morse code practice. At least the blank bits do—Section 400 of this one (Eligibility, Enrollment, and Termination) has 12 pages of dense text and I can only squeeze in one row of practice groups at the bottom. I wonder how many of these 90 page documents go straight to the recycling bin.
24 May 06
A Way of Being in the World
I co-taught a class yesterday on Culturally Inclusive and Non-violent Language as part of the Diversity Awareness Series here at UC Davis (and also the Communications Series).
It’s the third time Karen and I have taught this together, and every time we get a new surprise. It’s very powerful to have a group of people brainstorm a huge list of expressions that are loaded in some way but that are such a part of everyday speech we rarely question them or even, in some cases, know what they meant originally (a good example here is “rule of thumb,” which refers to the girth of a stick with which it used to be permissible to beat one’s wife—if it was thicker than a thumb, presumably a man’s, it was illegal).
To raise our awareness of how our speech affects others and transforms the world is one of the things addressed in a post by Rana over at Frogs and Ravens. She draws the distinction between Political and political. It’s a good post. Please read it.