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.
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.