8 June 04
Ground Squirrel Babies
The California ground squirrel babies have emerged from their burrows outside my work window, eyes and ears opened, fur intact. There are at least eight or nine though with several connected burrows I’m not sure which ones belong to which litter.
I’m not sure it matters much: these animals are quite altruistic and look out for each other. The young ones are certainly fully alert; the slightest noise or shadow of a crow overhead is enough to send them scurrying back underground.
It’s hard to get a sense of scale from this photo; their mother is more than twice this size.
7 June 04
Evening With The Dementors
We just went with a group of 11 to see the new Harry Potter movie. I think it’s better than the first two movies; there’s a different director who’s less inclined towards a saccharine by-the-book portrayal of life at Hogwarts. Buckbeak the hippogriff is suitably sympathetic, but Crookshanks is not the scrappy feline we’d wish for. And the werewolf…Sergeant Angua is much more pleasing.
6 June 04
Place Getting Smaller
They planted corn in the field outside our back door last month (Numenius did a sketch this afternoon; see left). Every year the crop changes: one year it was tomatoes, another sorghum, another squashes. The land is leased to Campbell’s Soup and they are doing experimental, or seed, growing: the harvest will not make its way into over-salted, over-carageenaned cans per se. Maybe indirectly, but there ends up being a lot of waste. Since this crop, whatever it is, is always heavily (experimentally?) sprayed, we don’t avail ourselves of the bounty.
Corn-maize-as a crop is very imposing; it’s like planting a fast-growing forest. I can no longer see the levee that separates us from Putah Creek as I write this, the levee that would fail to save us if Monticello Dam burst some twenty miles upstream. I like it that Sam and Frodo’s first fright on their journey from the Shire takes place in the overbearing height of a cornfield.
The corn will attract many rodents between now and October; let’s hope the mother of our kittens hasn’t lost her taste for them…
5 June 04
Invasive Weed Saunter
The floodplain east of the bridge over Putah Creek where the stream burst its banks this winter has been for weeks now covered with a tall, white-flowering weed. I ventured down the bank to collect a specimen and took it back to the house to identify and sketch. It turns out the plant is perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium), which is a nasty weed invasive in wetlands and riparian areas.
On a brighter note, I saw a sloughed-off snake skin (probably a gopher snake) on the grasses by the bank, and I heard a ring-necked pheasant calling.
4 June 04
Kitten Typography
Disclaimer: I am NOT a cat person…. but Numenius says we’re working on me.
I took the kittens into work today at the request of my coworkers. (Also at work today were a riparian brush rabbit and a wood rat, but no dogs, unlike most days.) The kittens are tired out after a long day of playing.
We have fenced them into the bathroom so we could go in and out without their escaping. They figured out how to climb the fence within, oh, about five minutes (see right). This business of keeping them enclosed is pointless.
My head is full of photo captions to shots I wasn’t able to take: kitten on tandem. Kitten in telescope. Kitten under rocking chair. Kitten in Kinko’s box. Kitten on algebra book with tampon. Kitten(s) in, or on, REI paper bag. Kitten wrestling with clean laundry. Kitten looking longingly outside through the screen before being pounced on by sibling.
I think we’ve found homes for them, or at the very least, backup homes in case they’re unclaimed. I’m feeling optimistic.
3 June 04
In Search Of Snouters
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on imaginary places.
On an island in the remote and unexplored South Seas archipelago of Hy-yi-yi, a fleeing Swedish prisoner-of-war in 1941 made a discovery that startled the zoological world. This was the existence of an entirely unknown order of mammals, the Rhinogradentia. This group of about 150 species is remarkable for the adaptations of the snout, the nose being modified to serve an amazing variety of functions ranging from fishing lures to aerial locomotion.
Unfortunately, the entire archipelago was destroyed in 1957 in an earthquake accidentally set off by an atomic test some 125 miles distant. The only surviving record of the rhinogrades was a publication by a scientist, Harald Stmpke, also lost in the earthquake, entitled Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (republished as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, 1981, U. Chicago Press).
Happily, a recent expedition to the deep forests and caves of Slovenia produced evidence that members of this order still survive, taking a remarkable photograph in July of 1999.
2 June 04
Imagined Places
Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Earthsea. Wonderland. Middle Earth. Eden. Imaginary places have shaped our culture since before it was a culture. Idyllic or otherwise, imagining a place with specific topography and characteristics allows writers to tell stories that couldn’t be told if they were set, say, in Watford.
For a time I was hooked on Star Trek, where a different imaginary world appeared each week. How will this new place affect our heroes? Sometimes the places were there only by inference-the Borg collective is more of a psychogrouping than a physical locale-but every new setting allows the writers to play creator of the universe, week after week after week.
Stomping around the Salton Sea this weekend, where the salt and heavy metal smell combines with the pink algae that can only survive in such extreme conditions, put me in mind of Mordor (or its comical offspring, Terry Pratchett’s city of Ankh Morpork). For some reason it’s easy enough to imagine dystopias; it’s having the courage to imagine a future where there’s no poverty, no environmental crises, no hatred that seems really tough.
Why is this? And, more to the point, what happens if we can’t?
This is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic of Imaginary Places
1 June 04
Sketching On The Run
Our first stop on this past weekend’s birding trip was the Big Morongo Preserve, a riparian oasis in the transition zone between the Mojave and Colorado deserts. I hadn’t adapted yet to the routine of 6 AM morning starts, but Morongo Valley is good for brightly-colored birds, and a spectacular view of a yellow-breasted chat woke me up. Richard quickly went into digiscoping mode, and other trip companions got out their telephoto lenses. I wanted to record the bird too, so I reached for my journal and sketchbook. This got me started doing a fair amount of sketching this weekend.
At the entrance to the preserve there is a set of bird feeders with many different types of food. At right is a sketch of a ladder-backed woodpecker at one of the sugar water feeders normally used by the hummingbirds.
I’m pretty happy with my sketching materials right now. All these sketches were done with a fine size Gelly Roll pen with the color added using Derwent watercolour pencils. Dabbing water on the sketch adds a bit of a wash to the color pencil, and the ink of the Gelly Roll pens is waterproof and doesn’t smear. The landscape at left is looking across the Salton Sea to mountains in the east.
A characteristic of sketching while birding is that one needs to work fast. The group is always moving on to find the next bird, leaving scarcely any time for detail in the sketch. The combination of waterproof pen and colored pencil seems about as efficient as possible for rendering line and color. One can also add color or dab in some water for a wash a little later, such as riding in the car proceeding to the next stop.
My subjects were mostly landscapes, birds, and plants. At right is leaves and fruit of Rhus trilobata, a chaparral shrub in the cashew family which we found in our journey up the Santa Rosa Mountains on the west side of the Coachella Valley.
Carrying around my journal with one hand all the time while birding gets tedious, so today I bought from a local nature gift store a nifty field guide tote that I can put my journal in, as well as a set of pencils and a pen.
31 May 04
Gulls in the Heat
We’re back from our short group birding trip to Southern California. Highlights: singing gray vireos; tricolored blackbirds in Jackson Pines near Hemet Lake; a gorgeous common king snake this morning; a heron rookery last night with over 15,000 birds, still flying in as we left for dinner; a date shake at lunch today in Mecca; a tantalizing split-second look at what was likely an anhinga, which has been reported as overwintering; and a ruddy ground-dove over the cleanest pigsty I’ve ever seen. 
Lowlights: the salt-crusted muck around the Salton Sea which has a unique, um, aroma; the smog in the valley from Ontario Airport to Indio; and the cattle fattening station near Finney and Ramer lakes.
Numenius will post some of his many sketches tomorrow. Richard will be posting lots of photos of birds on A Brit Abroad tomorrow also [update, June 1: Richard’s account of Day One can be found here; Day Two is here, Day Three here, Day Four here.]. For now we’re pretty tired, having collected four fat, spoiled kittens who now all seem to have names: Babette, Charlie, Louis, and Diego.
Gull identification is not for the faint of heart, but we had incredible looks (after a lot of hard slog) at three yellow-footed gulls, normally found in Mexico and points south.
26 May 04
Cuatro Gatitos
Our adventures in kitty fosterhood went well today. John our landlord graciously took the mother cat still in the have-a-heart trap to the vet to be spayed; he likes the idea of having a cat around to deal with the rodents (who indeed get plentiful at times. There’s a crop of corn growing now which will shelter lots of rats.) Pica caught another of the kittens this morning, and it turned out there were two kittens, not one, in the trap. So all four kittens were accounted for and came to spend the afternoon and evening in the kitty nursery a.k.a. our bathroom. It looks like the kittens are about five weeks old.
We have lots of thanks for people. Virginia for kindly hosting the kittens over the weekend while we go birding around the Salton Sea; John for the trip to the vet with the mother; and Deanna, Sue, Carrie and other coworkers of Pica’s for providing lots of veterinary advice.
In the fine tradition of cat blogging (alas one of its finest practitioners , Kevin Drum, in February gave up the practice to move on to loftier blogging digs), here’s a photo of the two orange kitties.