31 May 03
Foiled by Critters
Earlier this week I was making paper. I enjoy taking old shredded ledger sheets from work and turning them into something beautiful. Actually this was more in the category of paper casting; I was trying to make an impression of a bird’s primary flight feather in paper. This needs a lot of pulp (which takes a while to dry, even here where we’re expected to reach 100 degrees by Monday). Patience, and a dry climate, are very helpful.
So I duly put my pulp-loaded screen outside the front door, hoping it might dry by the morning. Unfortunately, a small rodent—mouse? rat? ran across the wet pulp, leaving its muddy prints on my masterpiece. The alfalfa field just to our south got flooded last weekend providing a smorgasbord of delights for the local herons, egrets, and Swainson’s hawks. I think this rodent was heading north away from their beady eyes, under cover of darkness.
There are other hunters at nighttime around here, though, so who knows what its ultimate fate was. The fate of my paper casting was for me to cover the tracks in colored pencil…
30 May 03
The Movie Star from Davis
We had dinner this evening at Thai Nakorn, an excellent new restaurant next to the Signature Theatre on G Street in downtown Davis. There was much commotion in front of the movie theatre, including a TV cameraman filming people. It turns out that the supervising animator of “Finding Nemo”, Dylan Brown, is from Davis, and he was there for a theatre party for friends and family being given in his honor by his mom.
Our local movie critic, Derrick Bang, whose opinions we generally agree with, gave “Finding Nemo” five stars, so I think it just got added to our “to-see” list.
30 May 03
A Place Blog from Pinole Creek
We’re happy to learn that we’ve inspired Chris Clarke, of the online magazine Faultline, to start his own blog about place, Creek Running North. He writes about Pinole Creek, Contra Costa County, finding a bit of wildness in a rapidly urbanizing environment near San Francisco Bay.
29 May 03
Code Pink
Last night I attended my first Code Pink vigil and singalong. Recently launched in Davis by the indefatigable Cindy and Patricia who, unlike me, have refused to be silenced by the triumphalism and smirking that is ubiquitous since the “cessation of hostilities” in Iraq, it’s a bi-monthly gathering of women (and men and children) for an hour in the evening in the E-Street Plaza, in front of the hot-pink Baskin Robbins sign. Pink signs, pink poppies, and pink scarves were in abundance. I felt embraced by the whackiness of it all.
“Wear pink, Pink, PINK” were the instructions and I duly stopped in at the SPCA thrift store on Third Street at lunchtime to try and find something hot pink to wear. I came away with a pair of bluish-pink pants, a reddish-pink blouse, and a baby pink necklace, all for $6.50, figuring the ensemble was sort of hot pink. I was rewarded for my outrageousness with a pot, some (pink) zinnia seeds, and a bag of potting soil with instructions to return with it to the gathering once it had bloomed. (I couldn’t carry this home on my bicycle so I donated it to a likely-looking gardener.)
They say the wings of a butterfly, though imperceptible locally, can cause a storm far away…
28 May 03
The Alluring Scent of Barn Owls
According to a particularly well-travelled birding friend of ours, Davis is perhaps one of the best places in the country to easily see barn owls. It is a rare night that we don’t hear the ‘click-click-click-click-click’ of a barn owl cruising over the house.
From but she’s a girl…, we learn another reason to appreciate barn owls—they have a lovely scent! And, according to the Guardian, crested auklets smell like tangerines.
Hmm, maybe scent-listing will be the next challenge for elite birders. :)
27 May 03
On Compiling Bird Lists
I got interested in birds early, growing up in Franco’s Spain with rollers and hoopoes to whet the appetite of young eyes staring out the car window on long trips—actually, anything large enough to identify from a moving Triumph station wagon was pretty exciting. I carried my interest to England where I studied. It wasn’t until 1989 when I got to Massachusetts, home of the Brookline Bird Club, that I started keeping a list.
A trip to Texas with this group who adopted me, a new and eager birder reeling from a divorce, and urged me to record every bird until I had reached over ninety new ones (“life birds”), cheering on each milestone, got me hooked on listing. I plunged into Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in spring, immersing myself in warbler song and color and this community that gathered every morning at six with binoculars. I wrote them all down. I remember my first cerulean warbler, my first hooded warbler, my first Kentucky warbler, rarities all. I learned the zoo-zee-zee-zoo-zee of the black-throated green warbler. I gasped in unison with a hundred other people at a rose-breasted grosbeak, at a scarlet tanager, at a Baltimore oriole. I started entering the birds in a home-made Filemaker database.
American birders are a community and once you get beyond a certain point with your list you enter an unnamed, undescribed race (with yourself) for the most lifers. In North America, lifers is often grafted onto the description “birds you have seen for the first time in North America which includes Canada and Alaska but excludes Mexico and Hawai’i, they being outside the North American bioregion as defined in the American Birding Association (ABA).” My list reached 350 (out of a possible 800) very quickly. The next hundred was almost as fast. Trips to Florida, Alaska, and the upper Midwest, swelled the list to over 500. A trip to Arizona in 1995 put me over 600 with hummingbirds, owls, and the elegant trogon.
Meanwhile, I had started an email correspondence with a man in California who, like me, liked birds. He spoke about the canyons in the East Bay and the song of the black-headed, rather than rose-breasted, grosbeak. Like me, he had an awesome respect for shorebirds and sparrows, the hard ones. His voice, through the screen, sang loud and clear and I was drawn west, a migration back to my birthplace.
I still keep a life list but I don’t fly anywhere special in an attempt to make it grow: I am content, these days, to watch the birds as they return each year, on their way to the Sierra or staying here for a season. I keep a list of the birds I see on the way to work. I keep a list of birds I’ve seen in dreams (the most spectacular was a yellow ptarmigan-type creature). We keep a joint list of the birds we’ve seen or heard from the house.
My ABA-area list stands at 667 (I was stuck on 666 for an awfully long while, which didn’t feel like a good place to be stuck). I don’t anticipate getting to 700 any time soon, to join that elite group known as the 700 club. My focus has changed. But the report of a rarity within 100 miles does get my blood going again!
26 May 03
Beavers in the Neighborhood
Last night I walked east out the levee road, just past the raptor center, when I looked across Putah Creek where I saw a critter just out of the water on the opposite bank. He got back to swimming in the creek, and I then saw his distinctive tail. The beavers were back.
Maybe they never left. Pica and I first saw beavers in this stretch of Putah Creek on a late-afternoon walk last December 31st. I came back the following day with the scope and digicam and took some pictures, one of which is at left. But I didn’t see them after that evening. Still, it’s quite possible they’re the same beavers I saw last night.
I returned this evening to try to photograph them. No luck on the photography, but I did see one. It’s a treat having beavers a five-minute walk from our house, in the middle of the Central Valley!
25 May 03
Vernal Pool Expedition
This morning Numenius and I met some friends to look for reported grasshopper sparrows in the old Glide Tule Ranch, which was recently bought by the California Department of Fish and Game and adds 12,000 acres to the 4,000 preserved wildlife wetland area just to the east and south of here.
Furtive and easily overlooked, grasshopper sparrows have rarely been reported in Yolo County. However, it looks as though there may be some breeding pairs in this one section; at least four, and possibly five, males were singing their little buzzy insect-like song. Because the plants are still short, they emerged onto taller dock stalks to “sing,” an unusual treat for so secretive a bird.
Around them were depressions in the cow pasture, a different color green than the rest. These are the dried-up vernal pools, which this year, because of the late and profuse rains, have been spectacular in their blooms. At right is a photo of Pogogyne douglasii, which stayed put longer than the sparrows.
24 May 03
The Dark Arts of Color Management
Getting one’s inkjet printer to faithfully render a digital camera image up on screen is an arcane art, not to be undertaken without the proper incantations. Color management is complicated enough so that it is actually something of a cottage industry: consultants make their living helping clients get the colors of their glossy mail-order catalogues right at the printer’s, and there is a whole armamentarium of software and hardware instruments to help with the problem.
All of which seems overkill for the amateur digital photographer. Entry-level color calibration software packages, such as MonacoEZColor, are still relatively expensive; that is, it seems a bit profligate to spend $300 on software to calibrate a $120 Epson C80 inkjet printer. What then is the poor digital photographer to do?
Searching hither and yon on the web I came across a guide to printer profiling on the cheap. In this technique, you start out with a color target. (Not happening to have a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker chart handy, I made my own, shown above, using watercolor and gouache. Anyway, I know well the color and tints of ultramarine and burnt sienna.) You then print the target out and compare it with the image on screen. Then in Photoshop, you create a curves adjustment layer, and tweak the color curves so that the screen image matches the print. You then invert the curves and apply them, so that the next trial print should be pretty close to the image. Repeat the process to fine-tune. Basically, this technique creates a printer-and-paper-specific adjustment layer that you swap in at the end of your Photoshop work in lieu of an accurately-calibrated ICC printer profile.
I found trying to get the hues to come out right by manipulating the curves pretty difficult so my main emendation to the technique is to use the hue/saturation controls rather than the curves control. My prints are coming out pretty well now, but there is a lot of fine-tuning left to do.
It’s still a dark art, after all.
23 May 03
A Trip to Napa Valley
Last week we met my mother and some visiting English friends at Copia in the town of Napa. Copia is part culinary institute, part restaurant, part museum, part garden. Mostly it is making the only affordable place to live in Napa Valley out of reach of working folks. We balked at paying $12.50 as an entry fee-we were going to be buying LUNCH, after all-and though the herb gardens were interesting and inventive, and though the lunch was excellent, the museum was totally sterile.
It’s really quite a feat to make food dull (even if you aren’t a foodie) but PowerPoint can do that do anything! Julia Child’s copper pots from the 60s were kind of fun, though.
We opted to drive back over the ridge instead of on I-80, filling up with Tahoe-bound traffic, and stopped to see the Glory Hole still spilling over on Lake Berryessa. I’m sure after seven days of heat and wind that’s over—possibly till the next El Nio.