25 May 04
Catching Cats
This evening as I came home I saw that the feral cat had not two but four kittens—two black and two light ginger, everyone hanging out in the carport. The mother raced off and I was able to pick up one of the black kittens by the scruff. It’s now in our bathroom, complete with the litter I ran out to get and kitten food.
I set the have-a-heart trap for one, I hoped, or more of the other kittens. They’re easily seduced by tuna. Not ten minutes later, a big ruckus took Numenius outside. We’ve caught the mother and another one of her kittens.
I called my vet friend who said to cover the trap and wait till morning. No sense in getting clawed to pieces trying to get the kitten out of there. Then the key is to round up the other two.
I have to say this has all been a bit more stressful than I would have liked. We’re getting ready to go on a birding trip to Southern California this weekend and I find myself suddenly in charge of five cats…
24 May 04
Independent Learning
The final in my Spanish class is tomorrow evening. I’ve put in a few hours studying both yesterday and today. I definitely know a lot more Spanish than when I began, but it’s a slow process, learning a language. I plan to take the next two semesters of Spanish as well, but the next class doesn’t begin until fall (end of August, actually).
It’s been interesting to get back into the habit of studying. Back in grad school, ages ago, we were encouraged to get done with our coursework fairly quickly, so it’s probably been ten years since I’ve had a final exam. And grad school coursework was always very focused on providing background skills for research. General study wasn’t part of the picture.
My independent studies these days include Spanish and statistics. I’ve started working through a somewhat mathematical (translation: a bit hard for me, but hopefully not too) new text on statistics (All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, by Larry Wasserman) that starts with basics of probability and ends reaching some quite recently developed techniques. It will take me a few months to work through the book. But as with learning Spanish, I appreciate that many studies simply take a long time, and the best approach is to keep plugging away.
23 May 04
Lunchtime Forays
On Friday at lunchtime I went with two of my work buddies on a sketching jaunt. We walked to the California Raptor Center. Greg drew the barred owl, Andrea concentrated on the Swainson’s hawk. I did a lot of very quick sketches of different birds. At left is the head of a turkey vulture whose name is Balzac.
It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, for me: simply putting pen or pencil to paper sort of scrubs out the inside of my head and is better than almost anything for making me feel in tune with the world.
I’m hoping we can do more of these outings on Fridays at lunch…
22 May 04
Classics Of California Natural History
It’s nice when one finds seminal publications online. Here are links to scans of a couple of classic publications of California natural history.
First, a PDF of Joseph Grinnell and Alden Miller’s 1944 book The Distribution of the Birds of California is available here (warning: 40 Mb download). This site has scans of a number of other publications of Pacific Coast ornithological interest, including Jean Linsdale’s 1937 The Natural History of Magpies.
Second, Willis Linn Jepson’s multi-volume but never completed A Flora of California (1909 onwards) is available as GIF scans through a collaboration between the University & Jepson Herbaria and the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project.
21 May 04
Carnivores
In the ongoing saga of the California ground squirrels outside my office window, I can report that the wounded male is recovering somewhat. His mate is now lactating and can be seen frantically gathering dried grasses which she hurries down into the burrow, presumably to shore up the bedding for the young.
I have been watching this female pick up what looks like a large seed pod and gnaw on it for a while… but she never seems to make much headway. So finally, yesterday, I went out to see what it was.
I was utterly aghast.
It’s the skull of a small mammal—one with a warmer shade of coat, perhaps a rabbit. Truly dessicated. Squirrel pemmican.
So much for the herbivore theory of ground squirrels.
In other carnivorous news, we discovered yesterday that a feral cat has made its home in the beekeeping equipment out back and has at least two kittens. Now it’s a race against time to catch the kittens, socialize them, get them spayed or neutered, and get them adopted out. Catching the mother will be much harder and her fate is unclear, but at the very least will include preventing her from reproducing any more.
It’s estimated that cats-any cats, house cats, not just feral cats-kill at least 30 birds per year per cat. Unfortunately, they don’t restrict themselves to invasive exotics like starlings. Mostly, of course, the birds aren’t eaten: they’re killed because cats are just brilliantly effective killing machines. They’re great: indoors.
20 May 04
Martin City
Yesterday we went to the monthly meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society where there was a talk about purple martin colonies in Sacramento. It’s a fascinating story of adaptation of wildlife to the human landscape. The population of purple martins in the Central Valley of California crashed in the 1960s concomitant with the invasion of the European starling into the state. (Starlings were first introduced into the United States in 1890 by the most misguided Shakespeare fan ever: out of desire to see all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays this person released 100 starlings into Central Park in New York. The rest is ecological history.) Purple martins are cavity-nesters, as are starlings, and the starlings are able to aggressively boot the martins out of nest sites.
The population of purple martins in Sacramento hung on, however. Prior to the starling range expansion, the martins were already nesting in curved roof tiles on the top of various city buildings. What the martins then did was to start nesting in holes on the undersides of elevated highway structures. These weep holes lead to hollow chambers inside these long highway bridges where the martins build their nests. Martins are much better flyers than starlings and have an easier time flying up into these weep holes so the martins have ended up with a refuge where they can raise their chicks.
Sacramento is now the only place in the Central Valley where purple martins breed. The population in the city is increasing very slowly and is now at about 150 pairs. Whether the birds will be able to expand their range outside of Sacramento by nesting under highways isn’t known, though last year a pair did nest here in Davis at a road overpass near the Sudwerks Brew Pub on the east side of town.
19 May 04
Perfection
I’ve always been a bit curious about the term “perfect” when applied to a pitched game—”no hitter” is much more descriptive and, well, gritty sounding. For all you non-baseball fans, a perfect game is when the pitcher allows no hits, no walks, nobody at all to get on base. In any way. A no-hitter can include walks, errors, and all kinds of fumbling.
Randy Johnson was the oldest (40) player to pitch a perfect game in the major leagues last night for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’s a gangly, 7-ft character whose nickname is the Big Unit, he doesn’t say much, doesn’t smile much. But he was smiling last night. He joins only 14 others who have accomplished this feat in 100 years. Congratulations Randy Johnson. Now will ya go and join your buddy Curt Schilling over at the Red Sox??
——
In non-baseball news, there’s a great new place blog to explore: The Where Project by Boston College graduate student Tim Lindgren. As the Ecotone Wiki approaches its first anniversary as a collaborative exploration of place in the blogosphere, it’s heartening to see the arrival of newcomers such as Tim. Stop on by!
18 May 04
Good Tidings From Massachusetts
We learned today that my stepsister Jennifer and her partner Amy who live near Boston applied for their marriage license and will be having a marriage ceremony in their backyard this upcoming Friday. I’m thrilled to hear this and by the fact that Massachusetts has leapt onwards to legalize same-sex marriage. Jennifer and Amy’s commitment ceremony was 11 years ago this summer, on a narrow spit of sand near Woods Hole, though it doesn’t seem very long ago!
Here’s a link to a Massachusetts wedding album slideshow that a friend just sent to us.
17 May 04
Back From the Desert
DocRoc and I left the Doc’s mother’s house this morning at 5:20 and drove for far too long into a headwind and a traffic jam. I did just catch my plane, running to the gate in my stocking feet (“do I have time to run to the bathroom [my tea was catching up with me]?” “I don’t know how long you need,” as I hopped from foot to foot…). Through some fluke of carelessness on both our parts, I left the Doc’s with no reading material, and some inconsiderate person had finished the crossword in the in-flight magazine, so I had to play scrabble with my PDA (it ALWAYS thrashes me) for an hour as I flew north to Sacramento.
What stays with me: the sound of a pair of ash-throated flycatchers from this blooming smoketree (Psorothamnus spinosus) at 7:45 am; the booming bass of Peter Gomes’ audiofed voice as he announced yesterday morning on Harvard radio, from Harvard Memorial Church, that he’d be performing a wedding today: that of two men, the State of Massachusetts having legalized gay marriage (I burst into tears); the Doc’s irritation with poorly finished hems as she set one of mine to rights; her ministrations to my utterly unreasonable tea needs in the wee hours; the realization that having a girlfriend like this is a blessing many people never get.
Who, for example, could you give a pedicure to and they’d give you one back? (This is not something men often experience, I think.) Or put up with questions like “What exactly did you write your dissertation on?” at six in the morning, after she had answered this same question probably eight times previously?
(Thanks Doc.)
16 May 04
Paper Inconveniences
There was a lengthy Slashdot thread last Friday about metric paper sizes such as the A4 standard, it referring to a text that gives everything one might ever possibly want to know about international paper sizes.
I guess Americans aren’t much into folding things. Once one learns about the essential property of metric paper sizes—that when cut in half on the longer side of the piece of paper, one gets the next paper size down (i.e. an A4 piece of paper cut in half becomes two A5 notepad-sized sheets of paper), thanks to the longer side being the square root of two times the length of the shorter side, one starts finding the U.S. letter-sized 8 1/2×11 inch to be annoyingly inconvenient. According to the above site, this was an arbitrary choice of paper size, apparently “just a commercial compromise at the time [1921] to reduce inventory requirements without requiring significant changes to existing production equipment.”
The U.S. letter size also seems difficult to work with in terms of laying out text aesthetically on a sheet of paper. Alas A4 paper is hard to find in this country. Maybe it’s time to special-order some.