30 April 04
Barred Mystery
We were restless this morning at 4 AM and so were the livestock in the ranch across the street. One of the animals trailed off into what sounded like an impersonation of a barred owl — low hooting usually transcribed “Who cooks for you?” — but I thought how could it be that? and stayed snuggled under the covers. We heard it again, and Pica startled. It was definitely the call of a barred owl. We heard it one more time, and Pica got up and threw some clothes on to go look for it.
The Central Valley of California is not the place one would expect to find a barred owl. I recalled that they occur in the Pacific Northwest forests, but we’re hardly surrounded by forests here. Pica came up with another possibility before she went outside: maybe it was the barred owl in captivity at the California Raptor Center, located about 650 meters from us across Putah Creek and over two levees. On the other hand, she said, the eagles there call all the time during the day, and we never hear them from our house. But that’s during daytime, and it was now a quiet, still cool night. Who knows how well the atmospherics would carry the sound?
Pica heard the bird a total of five times, but not outside. She walked to the bridge over the creek and from there could barely hear the mockingbird calling in our yard, so she didn’t think she’d be able to hear an owl at the Raptor Center.
Consulting the nearest reference source in the morning — Arnold Small’s book California Birds: Their Status and Distribution — it turns out that barred owls are quite recent arrivals in California, their first sighting being in 1981. Their range has been expanding rapidly throughout the Pacific Northwest, and moreover there is concern that the barred owl will compete with and/or hybridize with the endangered spotted owl.
One of my coworkers volunteers at the Raptor Center. She told me today that she has never heard their barred owl vocalize. But four in the morning isn’t the time she would be over there.
A mystery then, with two remote possibilities coming to mind. Through some fluke of atmospheric conditions and perhaps change in bird behavior, did we hear the barred owl at the Raptor Center, even though we’ve been in our house five years and have never heard anything resembling it before? Or was it a wild barred owl, perhaps a subadult leading its species’ dispersal into new points south in California?
29 April 04
Adventures In Spanish
Tuesdays and Thursdays are long days on campus for me. My Spanish class starts at 6:30 in the evening and runs till 8:20. I grab dinner at the campus eatery before heading on over to class. Next Tuesday I have both a test and an oral presentation, and will accordingly be busy studying this weekend. My presentation will be on our trip to Spain: fortunately we’ve gotten as far as the preterite of ser and ir so I will be able to use the correct tense when describing the trip. I don’t know that they’ll be able to figure out the word bautismo though, so that one is going up on the chalkboard for them.
28 April 04
Wyrded Out
I have just had a rollicking introduction to Terry Pratchett. Numenius got the Wryd Systers, a hilarious rewrite of Macbeth, out of the library on Sunday and I started-and finished it-this evening.
There’s many more where this one came from. I feel a May and June full of silliness coming on.
27 April 04
April Heat
We’re having a heat wave this week, with the temperature in the mid-90s, and record temperatures being reported from all over California. But when I returned this evening from my Spanish class, it was a lot cooler outside than inside, so for the first time this year it was back to our summertime pattern of opening the screened doors to cool the house down. (We pride ourselves on never running the air conditioner.)
Despite the summertime weather, spring migrants are still passing through. Yesterday I heard a black-headed grosbeak outside our house, and Pica today had a grosbeak singing outside her office all morning long.
26 April 04
From the Window at Work
I’ve been in my new job for two months now. The warblers are coming through; today I heard a Wilson’s for the first time. The jackrabbits, cottontails, and ground squirrels have an uneasy sharing of the green grass which, if this heat continues, won’t be green much longer. The horses have been drooping their heads in the heat, looking for the shade, waiting for the man in the truck at 2:40 to bring their hay.
One thing about working with a posse of wildlife vets is that offhand comments are no longer offhand. I mentioned that the ground squirrels seemed to have finished their elaborate tail-thrashing courtships, assuming the females all to be pregnant.
“Did you know that the California ground squirrel has the largest testicles-per-pound of any mammal?” was the reply.
I didn’t know this. Now I do. Such are my window musings.
25 April 04
Sunday Potterings
We had a mellow day today following yesterday’s jaunt up to Shasta County. There was not a cloud in the sky and it’s gotten very warm — it reached 90 today — so we decided it was time for the solar cooker. This is a contraption that we got from Solar Cookers International where you place a black-painted aluminum cooking pot inside a oven roasting bag, and rest this outside in the sun on top of an aluminized cardboard half-box. A picture of the setup is at right. We cooked beans and rice today, ready by the time we got home after an excursion into town on our bikes this afternoon.
I also went through my bike basket, in the spirit of Pica’s archeology of the car. Items therein:
- 1 clear plastic bag
- 1 bike lock
- a scrunched up paper napkin
- a paper on the economic geography of talent, author Richard Florida
- the roster and program for the UC Davis vs. Cal State San Bernardino baseball game on Picnic Day
- the Picnic Day program from the Cal Aggie paper
- a clothes label saying “I am reversible”
- a printout from March 8 of books on loan from the Davis Public Library, namely The Boy’s Crusade, by Paul Fussell, Monsoon Diary, by Shoba Narayan, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Worms, by Amy Stewart, The Book of Wi-Fi, by John Ross, and Voices from the Pagan Census, by Helen Berger
- a couple of printouts of local geocaches
- 5 pencils in various states of unsharpenedness
- 1 Pilot pen
- 1 empty fountain pen ink cartridge
- and a type specimen sheet for the typeface Gentium
24 April 04
Blue Grouse Day
We went north to Trinity Mountain via Redding, which is about a 2.5 hour drive from Davis. Our friend Dennis said there were grouse booming out beyond French Gulch. I’ve never seen a blue grouse, and it’s been ages and ages since we’ve seen Dennis, and he back so fresh and sprightly after running the killer Boston Marathon on Monday…
We got up into the grouse area just in time to see a very loud chainsaw, aka motorcycle, barrelling down the logging road. Oh well. No grouse is likely to be within a 3-mile radius of that racket, we thought. We split up, enjoying singing Nashville and hermit warblers and almost resolved to return to Davis with no grouse sightings but at least a wonderful new spot to bird in!
Well, Dennis and Numenius soon heard the grouse booming further uphill. Sprightly Dennis came racing down the mountain to get me and I struggled up, winded, eager to hear it but still not expecting to see it. We looked for the bird for about an hour—the booming never wavered, but it’s so ventriloqual that we were disoriented. We all forgot, though, to look up: we expected this grouse to be on a favorite log.
The bird was about 80 feet up in a Douglas fir and just peeping out.
It’s really hard to write about seeing a bird without it being a variation of the classic “I rounded the corner and there, on a branch, was a __.” The thrill is recognized by other birders and it’s possible to experience it vicariously, which is why so many of us enjoy showing new birds to other people. Birding is, after all, a collector’s activity-you collect names rather than stamps or coins-but sometimes a combination of circumstances makes the experience stand out. I had waited a long time to see this bird; we got faked out by its strange sound; and it had no problem with our thrashing around in the pine needles and poison oak 80 feet below. But mostly, I enjoy sharing birds with good friends. Thanks for this one, Dennis.
23 April 04
Night At The River Cats
We just came back from a baseball game, going to watch the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A team for the Oakland A’s, play the Salt Lake Stingers. The River Cats played well and won 5-1 in a game that was over quickly. It was UC Davis group night and we ended up sitting near one of Pica’s coworkers. The Cal Aggie Marching Band-Uh came and performed too, a few of them still wearing their customary sunglasses.
At left we see Dinger, the River Cats’ mascot, known for getting into lots of mischief.
22 April 04
Wind Change
We awoke this morning to a strong north wind. Around here that means it’s going to get hot, and, sure enough, it was about twenty degrees warmer than yesterday.
The field in front of our house has been irrigated for the past 36 hours. They have dug deep furrows to allow the water to spread from where they’re pumping it out of the ground right along to the road. I’m not sure what they’re planting this year: possibly sorghum?
There are lots of reasons why irrigating like this is a bad idea in this part of the world but now there’s a new one: West Nile virus. There are puddles of water everywhere, providing the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
But the poppies are blooming bright orange and the kingbirds are nesting…
21 April 04
Lunchtime Interlude
It’s nice to find familiar music in unexpected places. I went into the eatery at the Memorial Union on campus at noon today, my usual lunch stop, and heard somebody playing Beethoven on the old and usually ignored upright piano there. This was the Waldstein sonata (Op. 53, in C major) — my brother used to practice it when I was growing up. The pianist was a good bit better than the piano he was playing on: perhaps in his life as UCD student he doesn’t have much access to an instrument to practice on, but still needed his fix of Beethoven. He didn’t stay too long, picking up his score and leaving after the first movement.