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.
19 June 04
Gearing Up
We took a jaunt to the Sacramento REI this morning with Richard, who needed to find a replacement hat for the one he borrowed from a colleague for our Salton Sea trip.
REI is like a dream palace for outdoor gearheads. Anything you could possibly want on a backpacking, camping, canoeing, or bicycle trip has been thought through, designed, produced, produced again but smaller and lighter and more expensive, and is available for top dollar on shelves of attractively packaged things. That nobody really needs. Or maybe they do, but they’re easy to make or improvise or really just do without. (Does the world really need twelve different grades of polartec?)
I was REALLY tempted by a cotton-lycra-knit hat-cum-neck-gaiter that, well, I don’t really need, except it was interestingly draped around the cardboard cutout of a woman’s head, well designed and pushing hard. It would take about twenty minutes to make such a piece of clothing, but then what would you use it for? I exercised RESTRAINT.
We settled for some dark chocolate Toblerone that Richard kindly bought and ordered some things online later on in the day from the much more reasonably priced Campmor.
18 June 04
Verticality
The kittens are moving up in the world. This morning Pica found Diego, the biggest of the four, on top of the bathroom counter, the first time any of them have been able to get up there. And they are being increasingly agile at climbing on our tandem bicycle, as Babette at right is demonstrating.
Perhaps we need to build a house for them like this one.
17 June 04
Commencement
For the past four years I’ve been the Graduate Studies Commencement Coordinator. Tonight was this year’s ceremony; I spent the evening at a friend’s house, where she was giving a party for her own graduation as a vet (that ceremony is tomorrow evening). I assume everything went swimmingly.
While I enjoy watching the students receive all the honors that are due to them for their hard work, I must say I’ve really enjoyed my spring, this year.
One of the greatest things I think I can learn as I grow older is that nobody, at all, is indispensible. Certainly not a commencement coordinator. It’s very liberating.
16 June 04
Sounds Of California
The California Library of Natural Sounds, based in the Oakland Museum, has a site that presents a transect of sounds from nature across Central California. The sounds on the website range from coyotes to acorn woodpeckers.
15 June 04
Ecotone, One Year On
On this day last year, a group of us tried to answer the question “How I Started Thinking About Place – And Why I Started Writing About It.” My answer was, then, and remains now, Venice: Venice where Coup de Vent is making all kinds of her own discoveries as I write, she of the interesting camera angle.
Going somewhere SPECIAL triggered in me the impulse to explore place, but what keeps me looking, and sketching, and writing is the mundane, the far more prosaic space around me now. I think it would be a stretch to imagine that I could feel nurtured enough by ANY place to feel moved to write about it in a protracted way (like Beth, I find my mind goes dead in suburbia), but the routine, mundane holds my attention for now, following it through the seasons. Which plant. Which bird. Which pathway.
Which journey, really. There are so many, and we have so few days.
I’d like to thank all the other explorers of place whose sites I read daily for their own part in nurturing this particular journey of mine.