24 October 03
More Critters Of Fall
A few more wildlife observations for today. I heard pipits in our field for the first time this season. Most likely these were American pipits, but Pica tells me to keep an eye out for wayward red-throated pipits, definitely rarities but that’s how you spot them. Second, from the email grapevine I learned that last week a 30” chinook salmon was seen upstream in Putah Creek. Salmon have been coming into Putah Creek in small numbers since 1997, and I’m glad for that update. Finally, riding my bike home past the railroad tracks this afternoon, I saw a crow wheel above the road and drop a walnut which landed on the pavement and opened with a satisfying crack. They’re clever, the crows.
23 October 03
Fox Sparrows and Peregrines
For all you non-baseball people out there, you will probably be relieved to know that it will all be over one way or the other by the end of Sunday, and we’ll be talking about other things on here than World (i.e. American) Series, RBIs, closers, sluggers, injuries (well, maybe there are still a few more injury tales), irate Yankee coaches, and the like.
Instead, there will be more tales such as this:
A fox sparrow was scratching around in the oleander leaves this morning. Fox sparrows in California are much darker brown than their reddish Eastern counterparts. Some rascal is working hard to split the different races of fox sparrow into three or possibly eight different species. I love the splotches on their chests, their shyness, and their song in spring, which we don’t hear much except in the mountains.
We don’t see peregrine falcons much, either, since they are much more rare than the American kestrel, the more common falcon of these parts. Coming out of Medea Benjamin’s talk on Tuesday, though, a peregrine flew southeast over Environmental Horticulture. It now appears that this is a bird that may be hanging around the Arboretum. Which is great: their favorite food is ducks, and there is no shortage of ducks for them in the Arb!
22 October 03
All Tied Up
Despite running into trouble in the top of the 9th inning, the Florida Marlins won tonight’s World Series game 4-3 with an Alex Gonzalez home run in the bottom of the 12th. This was pitcher Roger Clemens’ last start of his career, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he puts in a relief appearance in game 6 or 7 back in New York. The series is now even up at two games apiece for the Marlins and the Yankees, with one more game to be played in Florida before the series heads back to New York.
Dave Barry meanwhile has an illuminating column about the return of the World Series to Pro Player Stadium in Florida, the “first major stadium ever constructed entirely from recycled Legos.”
21 October 03
The Book Project Turns Pink
The Campus Community Book Project was launched a week ago and so far the response has been great. The wide variety of programs ranging from talks, lectures, and workshops to martial arts demonstrations, a peace picnic, and a performance of Lysistrata means that there’s something for everyone. The visit by the author of Gandhi’s Way, Mark Juergensmeyer, last week was a great success.
Tonight we heard Medea Benjamin, Green Party candidate for Senate in 2000 and one of the founders of Code Pink, explain how U.S. policies have been a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq and how social movements are, in her view, the way to change the world (as opposed merely to the electoral process). Her three visits to Iraq this year and her conversations with people who are having to live through the results of the occupation give her an authority that radiates through her vibrant energy.
The peace movement is demoralized, almost defeated. Today, I felt I got some batteries recharged. It is important to keep going, not to let fatigue and hopelessness stop us. Benjamin sees a lot more than I do to demoralize her, but I have rarely seen so much energy in one person.
We wore pink. Arnold’s going to get a pink delegation on the eve of his inauguration in November. Being silly is a good way for me to stay engaged; it’s certainly more fun than the alternatives.
20 October 03
Serpent In Icicles
Last Friday we by chance discovered that Rivers and Tides was playing downtown. We both wanted to see this documentary so we altered our evening plans a bit to watch this film about the English environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. He is a sculptor who works with found organic objects in nature, assembling these in patterns whose beauty derives from their ephemerality. In one sequence along a frozen Canadian seashore, he constructs an upright serpentine figure out of bits of icicles; its destiny being to shine briefly in the sun before melting into collapse.
The images in the film are quite striking: the pool by the stream filled with leaves in fall colors, sorted to range from yellow to deep red; the monolithic cones Goldsworthy builds from wood, ice, or stone; the snake of leaves laced together by single twigs leaving a pool to float downstream; the half-mile long wall weaving its way through the woods of the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.
His wall will last quite awhile. But even when he works with stone, he is keenly aware of the impermanence of natural beauty, from icicle to stone forming a mere continuum. His is an art that seeks essences in earth, stone, growing things, rivers, and the sea. But doesn’t everyone who ever built a sand castle, or played with mud as a kid, long for such contact with earth once again?
19 October 03
Soup Season Jumpstarted
I was scheduled to lead a beginners’ bird walk for Yolo Audubon this morning. I’m walking better than I was a month ago but I have to confess I was hoping nobody would show up at the meeting place at 8:00 am so I could return to my tea and mellow morning.
But no: a couple rolled up in a BMW. When it became clear they’d be the only customers, I asked them what they’d like to do. Oh, she said, I’d like you to tell me what all the birds are I see and hear in my yard. I’ll make you a cup of tea.
Well, this is what we did, and saw a number of birds and Karen’s spectacular garden. She learned a lot of birds, and I got a huge bag full of apples, peppers, tomatoes, basil, and sage. Such a deal! I made pesto and we had the tomatoes for lunch. I have since made a large pot of soup, which is what we live on in winter—it has cooled down enough for long simmering.
Since this was the first soup, there was no stock for it, giving it a “shallow” taste. But all the veggies—cuttings, leavings, ends—have ended up in the freezer for next week’s stock.
18 October 03
Place Name Blunders
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on place names.
An ongoing project in many of the world’s natural history museums is to digitize their collections. In this modern era, typewritten herbarium specimen labels, handwritten field notes, and labels dangling from the feet of taxidermied mice are much more useful to people if they’re captured in a database, and, ideally, placed online.
One attribute that is very important to record digitally is the locality of the specimen, needed to make any sort of map of the critter’s distribution. Nowadays we all run around with GPS units which means that it’s easy to record the exact latitude and longitude of a specimen, but the naturalists of yore didn’t have such luck. Usually they would record localities in a telegraphic description such as “Sonoma Mt. Road, 4.2 miles E Adobe Rd., Sonoma Co., Calif.” It is possible, with a large supply of undergraduate laborers and a good map collection, to convert these text localities into lat-long coordinates, and many museums are now diving into this tedious process.
Alas, some of these localities are a bit more cryptic than one would prefer. Lake of Boys???
17 October 03
Playoffs Haiku
I wrote the following two years ago after the AL playoffs. It seems appropriate now.
Our summertime dreams.
16 October 03
Californian Place Names
This post is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Place Names.
The European colonization of California was at first northward expansion, from New Spain (Mexico), of Franciscan Missions. The tribes encountered by the friars already had names for the places they lived in, paddled to, the rivers they fished from, the woodlands whose acorns they ate. A lot of these names still survive-near here, for example, Napa, Sonoma, and Petaluma are all indigenous namesbut for the most part California as far north as Sonoma, which is where the northernmost mission is located, is a quilt of Spanishand often Catholic-place names. San Francisco. Santa Maria. [Sagrado] Sacramento. [Nuestra Seora de] Los Angeles, the largest city in the world dedicated to Our Lady.
Above Sonoma there are another 300 miles of California, and along the coast, where there were Russian outpost colonies in the eighteenth century, we have the interesting juxtaposition of Sebastopol next to Santa Rosa.
Then the Gold Rush ushered in the new waves of English, Germans, French, Spanish, and other Europeans, who turned to farming when the gold was gone. The small farming communities around here have mostly English names. Davis, originally Davisville, was named after a prominent farmer here in the late 19th century. (Vacaville, the most absurd place name I can think of in the vicinity-literally, “cow town” in Spanish then French-was named after a Mr. Vaca.) Arranged on a neat, orderly grid, Davis streets were named First, Second, and Third, with the cross streets the logical A, B, and C, and so on, which allow for expansion as needed, at least as far as the twenty-sixth letter.
New housing developments, however, eschew this pleasant logic and instead impose an arbitrary conglomeration of theme names, Disney-fashion. Thus, in Davis, we have the “college” neighborhood (Rutgers, Villanova, Radcliffe); the “painters” neighborhood (Picasso, Gaugin, Manet); the “bird” neighborhood (Mockingbird, Sandpiper, Pintail); and the “golf” neighborhood (Fairway, Country Club, Greenview). You get extra points for figuring out the relative socioeconomic status of the inhabitants.
There is one Davis neighborhood, however, whose street names are on a theme I find quite tickling. Village Homes, where we stayed back in spring for a couple of weeks, has street names straight out of Lord of the Rings. Imagine having an address like “420 Rivendell.” You’d pay a lot for it: two-bedroom houses in this little progressive utopia sell for nearly $450,000 these days.
15 October 03
In-Flight Entertainment
On my trip back east, I discovered one thing I like about flying United—that if you turn to channel 9 of the in-flight audio system, they often pipe in the primary transceiver from the flight deck. It’s neat to hear ground saying “United 701, turn to heading 210” “210, United 701” and watch the plane start turning. But they can also pipe other radio signals, and on the flight out they put on the Cubs game straight from the Chicago radio station WGN.
On my return trip yesterday I changed flights in Denver, and waiting for the next plane, I wandered over to watch the Cubs in the terminal bar and grill. Mark Prior was pitching an excellent game, and the Cubs were up 1-nothing, which became 2-nothing after a Dontrelle Willis wild pitch. All was looking bright, and the Cubbies were six outs away from their first pennant in 58 years, at which point I left to catch my plane.
Once aboard, I tried to see if they were broadcasting the game like they did earlier over channel 9. I couldn’t get any audio feed at first, due to a faulty headset plug, but 45 minutes later I got the thing to work, and tuned into a cockpit-ground conversation where the controllers on the ground were saying the Marlins won 8-3—they scored 8 runs in the 8th. Oh god, I thought. The poor Cubs.
And as we now know the Cubs would lose the series in today’s 7th game. It’s a sad day. And channel 9 notwithstanding, I still prefer flying Southwest to United.