29 June 04
More Thoughts on Field Notes
Thanks to those who have been encouraging us to keep better field notes. In the week or so I’ve been tallying corvids from my bike I’ve been noticing much more than what I’m supposed to be counting: the direction of the flying cattle egrets; whether the Swainson’s hawk I see (there’s almost always one) is north or south of the creek (there are two pairs); whether the magpies are out and about or hidden in the thick of the walnut trees.
Dave of Via Negativa says that his mother, after thirty years of notes from an acre at the top of a hill, has made many unique observations of birds and mammals. I’m sure this is true. Observation of behavior seems to be a dying art among the biological sciences, supplanted by the much more prestigious genomics… I’m happy to buck the trend in however tiny a way.
Kitten footnote: Babette went to her new home yesterday; I had no idea it would be this wrenching. And then there were three.
28 June 04
Monocot Forest
The corn field outside our house is now well over eight feet tall, screening our view of the hills, the rail line, the levee and just about everything else. This sketch was made with a bamboo pen (I love working with these though it’s hard to carry the ink around on field outings) and our new Derwent Signature watercolour pencils, lightfast and with rich pigments.
27 June 04
To Learn, and Learn, and Learn
Coup de Vent at London and the North has just written about our feelings of loss as the little comfortable corner of the blogosphere we’ve settled into shifts, much as a kitten on a sunny nook of tile floor discovers that the source of heat has moved on.
I’ve been pondering this all day. Yesterday we bought a copy of Peter Steinhart’s The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (Knopf, 2004). Although I’m not very far along in this, the startling truth is that life drawing classes are chock-a-block full of people who show up with compulsive regularity, not to produce ART, but simply to get better. Maybe one day.
As Steinhart relates of Hokusai, at the age of seventy-three: “From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”
While this kind of timetable can become a little depressing, it also argues, I think, for showing up every day and TRYING. I think this can extend to the blog as well as drawing. While there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are blogs, I wonder whether some of us aren’t tempted by the lure of the immediate success, the instant masterpiece; this is what our culture (Western, Butuki, but I’m not sure Japan is immune) is pushing us towards.
I hope, one day, to do a drawing that’s a little bit good. I hope also, one day, to write a piece, here or elsewhere, that’s a little bit good. Until then, I’m grateful to people who read here and either refrain from pointing out my shortcomings or are actually positively encouraging. I am so grateful, basically, for this community.
Incidentally, Michael Moore feels a bit more urgency than some of us might, and so I’m also grateful he has put Fahrenheit 9/11 out there for all of us. Not just the choir he was palpably preaching to in the theatre we saw it in yesterday; all of us. See it if you get the chance.
26 June 04
Lone Mountain Ascent
Overlooking the Big Sky ski resort is the 11,166 foot Lone Mountain. I like mountains; they inspire to head up. Living at 45’ elevation in the flat Central Valley doesn’t give me much opportunity for hill-climbing, so I made the most of it during my trip, going on hikes after the sessions were over in the afternoons. (If I had realized the conference was in the mountains, I would have remembered my hiking boots.)
Reaching the peak itself was beyond my available time and ability, but I longed to hike up to the bowl of the cirque some 1500’ above the resort. After things wound up on Thursday I started hiking, bringing my sketchbook, not sure how far I’d get.
I had gone a quarter-mile from my room, climbing maybe 100’, when an obstacle presented itself. There was a bear grazing just off the trail a hundred meters up. So much for heading up that trail, so I sat, sketched, and even managed a photo through my binoculars.
Hungry by this point, I made a foray to the resort grocery store, then started hiking up the slope below the gondola, stopping at one of the pylons to sketch the view at left of the mountains to the northeast, constantly bedeviled by mosquitoes (forgot the insect repellent as well).
At 8700’, in the rocky slope below the cirque, there was a field of these beautiful lilies (illustrated at right) standing about 15 cm tall. I don’t have any Rocky Mountain flower books and don’t know what they are. I wasn’t sure how much farther I wanted to go up, but I was hearing odd bird calls from above (ptarmigan???), so I kept going, and reached the bowl.
The barren walls of the cirque were impressive, and there was quite a rush of meltwater draining from the remaining snowpacks above. The bird call turned out to be a raven, and though there was interesting birding to be done (were there rosy finches around?), I had to turn around before it got dark, a sign on one of the ski structures reading 9067’ elevation.
25 June 04
Worse for me than thee
I took the kittens in this morning to be spayed and neutered… from starving them to the fear that Babette wasn’t quite big enough, through their yowling all the way there in the car, I was a basket case by the time I got to the vet’s… I got chastised for having them in boxes not carriers, which didn’t help much.
All day I worried about them… I was told not to come back until 5-6. I called, at around 3:00pm, to check up, but there was no answer. I had to content myself with watching a juvenile Swainson’s hawk nail, and then eat, a juvenile California ground squirrel. So it goes.
Got the kittens home, cringing all the way (different yowls this time, yowls of pain?) and first thing they did when they got out of their containers was basically purr up a storm. Purr around food, purr around each other, purr around the blanket I had put down for them. They were purring when Numenius walked through the door from Bozeman. They’re fine, leaping about in an unseemly fashion. Purring.
Now, I can get some sleep.
24 June 04
Lodgepole National Monument
Yesterday’s field trip to Yellowstone was a lot of fun, with good views of wildlife and geothermal features. Our bus tour guide was Don Despain, who is a plant ecologist who has been working in and about Yellowstone since 1971. He says the park should be renamed Lodgepole National Monument, since 60% of the plant cover (80% of the forest cover) is lodgepole pine forest, in many cases it being the sole tree in the forest. (A lot of the soil is sandy and derived from rhyolitic lava, and the spruces and Douglas firs can’t grow on it.) We learned a lot about fire ecology, with large areas of the park reforesting very well following the big fires in 1988.
We did the tour of the geysers and fumeroles as well, arriving in time to see the Old Faithful geyser erupt late in the afternoon. Notable wildlife included elk, sandhill cranes, a bear, moose (seen by the other side of the bus, not me), and a bison who was grazing happily near the Old Faithful Inn, thereby posing nicely for a few sketches.
23 June 04
Countin’ Crows
One of the big advantages of working at the Wildlife Health Center is that I now get to hear about all the research that’s being done on local wildlife. I have just signed up to participate in the Bicycle Bird Biologist program being run out of Wildlife and Ecological Genetics by Holly Ernest; she is trying to build a comprehensive census of Davis birds, particularly corvids and raptors, and she’s trying to get as large a participation as possible by bike and pedestrian commuters. The purpose is to track the effects of West Nile Virus on local populations.
This comes at a good time for me, as I’m pondering the scope and format of a field notes journal. Keeping track of four or five species over the course of months will be a great way to start, I feel, and I’m encouraged that someone will actually use this information.
This morning on my way in I counted thirteen American crows and four yellow-billed magpies. I also, by way of a huge diversion, saw thirteen wild turkey chicks with four adult females, “swimming” through the long grass toward the creek (sketched from memory, above). Guess the turkeys we saw earlier in the spring have successfully colonized this area.
22 June 04
Big Sky Visit
I am spending much of this week in Big Sky, Montana, attending the all-nodes meeting of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. Big Sky is a ski resort at 7500’ elevation, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Happily, we’re taking a field trip tomorrow afternoon to Yellowstone National Park; otherwise I fear that most of the scenery I will see will be the ceiling of the conference rooms. We drove up from the Bozeman airport in the middle of the night: the looming mountain slopes were impressive but it’s hard to do much in the way of windshield botanizing and geographizing in the dark of the night.
I did manage a short stroll at lunch, a longer one in the break before the poster session, and even got in a quick sketch of Lone Mountain (elev. 11,166 feet). The dark skies are impressive here, and hopefully I’ll be able to get away from the lights of the resort later this evening.
21 June 04
Another Goodbye
This time, Denny’s hanging up Book of Life to devote himself full-time to writing his book. We’ll miss his quiet wisdom, his delight in creatures (especially birds), Kathleen’s photos. Stop by and leave a comment if you feel so moved, but get in there before June 30… the blog goes offline then.
For the cat people out there (and Denny’s definitely one of them), I posted some kitten photos today here.
20 June 04
Of Field Notes
We’ve been talking about how to keep better field notes for birding. Neither of us is very systematic: at best we’ll record a list of species for each birding trip, but since our usual birding field trips cover a whole lot of road miles, that produces a list more for fun than of any objective value. Geographer that I am, I like to have good locality information at the very least, but GPS units make it very easy to provide this. Pica is quite interested in using a field notebook to get better at sketching birds.
Back in college, I was taught a system for field notes developed by Joseph Grinnell, the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. I think this method is too rigorous for the likes of us but it’s definitely a standard to look up to.