1 May 05
Airport Saunter
UC Davis is the only University of California campus with its own airport. It is in West Campus, an area mostly devoted to agricultural research, with many fields and orchards. Usually the airport is off-limits to the general public, but today was its third annual open house. We missed the previous open houses, but we were able to make today’s, so we had a good wander among the planes, the old cars, and ancient bicycles (there was even a 19th-century velocipede on display).
My favorite plane was this Grob G109 motorglider, which has an impossible-to-sketch huge wingspan, not to mention a 30:1 glide ratio.
30 April 05
Birdathon
Today was the Yolo Audubon spring fundraiser, when teams go out and try and see as many species of birds as possible in a 24-hour period, having persuaded family, friends and mostly coworkers whose kids’ Girl Scout cookies we dutifully bought to sponsor them per bird.
I organized a team to do the birdathon today but with a twist: we’d do the entire thing by bike.
It was a beautiful day, calm just before a front comes in. The pockets of migrants were few and far between, but we managed to come up with 76 species. After lunch there were only two of us left and we headed along the levee to the west of the Yolo Bypass. This is not relaxing riding—the gravel on the levees is uneven and difficult, but we discovered that it’s possible to go from our house all the way to the Bypass avoiding asphalt altogether. (That’s about 15 miles round trip.) After a barn owl in the Tremont cemetery I was ready for a nap. (We started out going in the other direction.)
Here’s our bird list for today, which I type before we go in to the compilation (I am VERY tired and will not likely be up for much of anything after we get home). Seen or heard but not countable: peacock and spectacled rubber ducky:
pied-billed grebe
American white pelican
American bittern (!!)
great blue heron
great egret
snowy egret
cattle egret
green-backed heron
black-crowned night heron
white-faced ibis
Canada goose
wood duck
mallard
cinnamon teal
turkey vulture
white-tailed kite
northern harrier
red-shouldered hawk
Swainson’s hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
ring-necked pheasant
common moorhen
American coot
killdeer
ring-billed gull
rock pigeon
mourning dove
barn owl
white-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
downy woodpecker
Pacific-slope flycatcher
black phoebe
ash-throated flycatcher
western kingbird
barn swallow
tree swallow
northern rough-winged swallow
cliff swallow
western scrub-jay
yellow-billed magpie
American crow
bushtit
house wren
marsh wren
western bluebird
Swainson’s thrush
American robin
northern mockingbird
American pipit
cedar waxwing
European starling
warbling vireo
orange-crowned warbler
yellow warbler
black-throated gray warbler
Townsend’s warbler
common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
western tanager
black-headed grosbeak
California towhee
song sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
dark-eyed junco (Oregon)
red-winged blackbird
western meadowlark
brown-headed cowbird
Bullock’s oriole
house finch
American goldfinch
house sparrow
29 April 05
Windowsill Kitty
A month or so ago, Charlie figured out the leap from the bathroom countertop to the windowsill without having to ask for help. (Diego has been able to leap up there for a long time now.) We were quite proud of him for this, and now gazing out resplendently at the garden, field, and levee to the north is one of his favorite activities.
28 April 05
Ivory-billed Hope
Everyone I know, pretty much, sent me notice today of the announcement of the first sightings of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the United States since 1944.
Thank you. All of you. Each time I relived it. I read a lot today about the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Nature Conservancy and efforts to hear the bird but the thing that got me the most was that two ornithologists traveling on the water with Arkansas naturalist Gene Sparling who had seen the bird eariler, and who cried out in unison “ivory billed!” as the huge woodpecker flew out in front of their boat, and who then set about making independent sketches (essential in the absence of any photographs), frantically adding notes till they could do no more, responded by sobbing and silence.
The world’s a mess. All the work I see being done around me every day to study, preserve, explain the natural world seems like a drop in the ocean, given the devastation we are wreaking on the planet. Yet today, all of it—ALL of it—is given new hope.
The paper by Fitzpatrick et al. published today in Science can be downloaded here. The supplementary materials contain the two sketches.
27 April 05
Ban Comic Sans
A campaign to rid the world of that design perfidy spawned by Microsoft, complete with stickers, flyers, and t-shirts.
26 April 05
Enthusiasm
Today, I was enthused—
By the California poppies blooming like mad
By a cat that purred while I woke and another that hid under the sheets while we changed the bed
By a new black horse, sleek and shiny, in a paddock on my way to work
By the singing blue grosbeak
By the displaying Swainson’s hawk
By the hot tofu at the Coffee House
By the hot, sweaty sex scent emanating from a flower whose name I don’t know
By the pair of Western bluebirds and the pair of Western kingbirds outside my window at work and by the brush rabbits and jackrabbits jumping vertically in lagomorph ecstasy
By the prospect of a load of paper being shipped my way from John Neal Books in North Carolina
By my new Enthusiasm Tshirt designed by the fabulous Natalie
And
In spite of the fact that my bike chain needs oil and the fridge is still not clean.
25 April 05
Spring Ripenings
This year the field outside our house is planted in wheat, as are many of the local fields. It’s still quite green, but the wheat heads are fully grown. Closer in to the house, the stone fruits are developing. The plums on the tree here are turning from green to wine-colored. 
24 April 05
Sundancing
Numenius and I took another class today, this one five minutes from home rather than two hours. Robert Regis Dvorak led a full-day workshop on travel sketching. Rather than have us wander around Davis, sketchbooks in hand, he encouraged us to try a full range of techniques in the classroom—pen, watercolor, dry brush—in a specially-made drawing pad. The subject was mostly Greece.
This pad contains 80 lb Sundance text paper. It works well with all the above media and takes a calligraphic line very well despite the texture. I’m thinking of getting larger sheets and binding my own sketchbooks so they open flat (it’s a bit of a gripe of mine when they don’t).
Here’s my first attempt at dry brush (the wash is laid in afterwards).
23 April 05
Our Dinner With The Katzes
Our friend Virginia invited us over this evening to the seder she and her partner Ben were hosting for his family this year. The Katz clan is large — almost thirty people were at the seder — the patriarch being ninety-year-old Joseph, seated across the table and several seats down from me, with a wonderful portrait of him hanging from the dining room wall.
It was probably the rowdiest seder I’ve ever been to: the centerpoint of it was the family taking turns telling the story of the Exodus all from memory. And we were delighted to find that Virginia was using the Velveteen Rabbi’s haggadah for the service!
No sign of Elijah this evening. But Virginia’s kitty Eloise made fleeting appearances throughout, wondering why in a tale that began with seven years of famine and diminishing grain stores, cats have gotten left out of the telling.
22 April 05
Mountain Lion Week
There have been three events in Davis this week focusing on Puma concolor, the large cat of North America. It’s California’s last large predator, the wolf and grizzly having been extirpated.
Walter Boyce of the Wildlife Health Center gave a talk on Tuesday to a general audience; there was a showing of Counting Sheep (an independent film about bighorn sheep and mountain lions) last night where he answered questions at the end, and then a summit meeting today that involved agency folks, scientists, non-profits, and a host of other interested parties.
I’m quite tired—I took notes for the duration of this five-hour meeting—so I will go to bed and hope to dream about this beautiful animal that is holding its own in the state (for now).