12 May 03
The Passage of Tanagers
Yesterday I was cycling through the countryside southeast of Davis, riding south on Mace, just across from Yolo Grasslands Regional Park, when I saw a brilliantly colored male western tanager in the lowest branches of one of the walnut trees lining the road. He flew ahead of me from tree to tree as I cycled on, and then flew across the road to land on the fence adjoining the grasslands.
Spring migration in the Davis area is an inconspicuous event, but still noticeable to the open eye and ear. I heard the soft warbling of a Swainson’s thrush in the yard this morning, as well as the chip of a Wilson’s warbler. And a grosbeak has in recent days been singing in the yard. The tanager, the thrush, the warbler, as well as most of the grosbeaks, will be moving on to the forests of the Sierras. I love the sounds of the Swainson’s thrushes and the black-headed grosbeaks—in the little canyon below the house just north of Berkeley where I grew up, their songs would resonate splendidly.
11 May 03
Whole Earth Festival
A good deal of today was spent wandering around and just sitting sketching—here’s a composite of some of my sketches with wash. The festival seems far more politically engaged this year—as a friend said yesterday, “nothing like a war to get people to come out of hiding.” There was lots of music and also a good deal of talking by veterans of the peace and environmental movements. Davis gets transformed each year by this festival. The University has apparently been trying to get rid of it for years…
In no particular order, favorites include the bicycle-driven yellow submarine, the geodesic tent, the indian flute stall, the drummers (I don’t think they stopped for over 48 hours), the jewelry-from-spoons stall, Lydia’s Luscious Foods, and the massage therapist suspended from overhead bars. Three sound stages made scheduling difficult but sketching is best done in one spot anyway—there’s no shortage of material! Sketching people in movement is tough and forces economies of line and gesture. It’s a great exercise.
10 May 03
Our Daily Visitors
What got me out of bed this morning was the declamation of geese. There’s a pair of Canada geese that have been visiting the field outside our house for many weeks now. Usually they come by in the morning, but sometimes they will stop by in the afternoon as well: on Monday afternoon they stayed in one spot nearby in the field for several hours! Obviously they’re still finding something to eat, even though the field, which is rented out by Campbell Soup for crop experiments, was recently plowed and is pretty dry now.
In March at a meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society, we went to hear a performance of the local children’s songwriter Linda Book. Her songs are all about environmental themes, and she has quite a following among the younger set in Davis. The experience of being chased by geese at the Arboretum led her to write a tongue-in-cheek song about geese, one lyric being “There nothing nice about a goose, my friends”! There’s no shortage of Canada geese in Davis.
9 May 03
Goat and Loquats
It’s Whole Earth Festival time here on the UC Davis Quad again—three days of alternative living, music, food, energy, and people. I passed one of these people on my bikeride to work this morning. She was parked just over Putah Creek by the side of the road. On top of her van was a goat eating its breakfast: loquats out of a box.
I saw the goat again at lunchtime and at dinnertime on the Quad, eating whatever came its way—it was last seen eating one of the straw bales that is supposed to function as a chair.
8 May 03
The Pleasures of a Good Bookstore
Lance Knobel of the excellent Davos Newbies (which I just discovered because I followed the little red light on Geoblog) tells of an exciting new bookstore opening near the British Museum in London by none other than the London Review of Books. I’m envious.
Here in Davis, though, we are lucky enough to have three independent bookstores alongside the UC Davis Bookstore: Avid Reader, Bogey’s Books, and Sweetbriar, the latter two dealing mostly in used books. Just up the road in Woodland there’s the Next Chapter. All this despite the inevitable appearance of Borders, for which I politely decline to provide a link. While Borders, which started out as a nice little independent in Ann Arbor, does understand the importance of making browsers feel comfortable and provides them with chairs and a coffee shop, it is now just too big for its boots.
I overcame my usual knee-jerk Borcott and went in last weekend, looking for a book on Photoshop and a DVD. On my previous three or four visits, I had gone in because no other bookstore in Davis had what I was looking for. On each occasion, I looked on the shelf, failed to find the book, waited at the information desk, and was told by a pleasant young salesperson (different each time) that according to the computer the book was in stock, but wasn’t it on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Each time there followed a sort of tortuous and progressively more frantic attempt by the saleseperson to locate the book—always to no avail.
This time, it was even worse. The DVD in question (Bull Durham, Extended Edition,) was indeed in stock, but it was in the back, and nobody currently in the store was authorized to open the box it was in. The pleasant young salesperson was unable to predict when such a box might be opened: it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks.
That’s it. No more Borders for me. Not for anything. I like to support Powells in Portland and browse in the Avid Reader, despite the suspect politics of its owner. I can probably wait till next Tuesday for the book I want. And on trips to Berkeley we immerse ourselves in Cody’s, Black Oak, and occasionally Diesel and Pegasus.
7 May 03
The Ghost of Emmett Reid Dunn
The following is inspired by the recent discussion at
Field
Notes and Fragments from Floyd about a troubling tourism poster from the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
In the summer of 1986, in the interregnum of my life between college and graduate school, I went off to the mountains of North Carolina to take a field biology course on plethodontid salamanders. This is the largest family of salamanders in the world, and a major center of diversity for the group lies in the Southern Appalachians, with about 29 species currently described from the North Carolina mountains. My interest in the group came from taking
In our first field trip for the course we went to Great Smokies National Park, and there on the road to Clingmans Dome, we were asked to imagine what it would have been like for the young herpetologist Emmett Reid Dunn (1894-1956) to explore the fauna of these mountains for his first time in the early 1900s. When he was eighteen the naturalist Leonhard Stejneger of the Smithsonian encouraged him to take up the study of salamanders, and that study was to occupy much of his career. A note in this brief biography of him says that in 1917 he “failed for a commission in the army, because his week-end pursuit of snakes and salamanders was unbecoming to an officer candidate.” It was around this time he began his explorations of the Southern Appalachians, which would result in his discovering or describing four or five new species of salamanders. He writes of his 1916 discovery of Plethodon yonahlossee in his eloquent foreward to his 1926 monograph on the Plethodontidae: “And I remember…how, on the slopes of the Grandfather, some chance-turned log disclosed the red band on the back of yonahlossee, and I knew that an unknown species was before me.” Later in our class we went to Grandfather Mountain where we too saw this strikingly-colored species.
We step forward in time to the poster from the North Carolina tourism office,
where a marquee reading “Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds” has been dropped into the view from a mountaintop bald, which according to Fred of Fragments is likely Bald Mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The disconnect between the world view of Emmett Reid Dunn, and that of the tourist office and their target audience, is total. It is not surprising that 7 of 11 posters in the series are devoted to golf. The vast majority of tourists pass through the mountains unaware of the diversity Dunn, or for that matter we 1980s field biology students, came to study. At best they will see the display in the park visitors’ center describing the numbers of amphibians, and move on to the postcards.
Yet I am not entirely convinced that the gap between Dunn and his peers who went off to war is narrower than the disconnect between today’s naturalists and our tourists. As Fred points out, natural history curricula are disappearing from
universities in favor of the gene-splicers and the computational biologists. But
to some extent this is ameliorated by the naturalists in academia shifting over
to more applied departments, or realizing they have to tie their studies to the
latest fads in ecology, evolution, or conservation biology. More significantly, I think the locus of natural history knowledge in this society has shifted away from academia. The good naturalists these days don’t find careers in academia, but instead often become biological consultants, many working on environmental impact reports. And as birders will tell you, amateur natural history is quite vibrant today. It’s significant that UC Press is continuing to
publish new natural history guides in these desperate times for university presses. There’s a market for this stuff.
That said, the chasm between the naturalists and mass culture remains, and is deeply troubling.
6 May 03
Mother Tongue?
It’s been just over fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S. from England (and previously Spain). It’s hard to remember the sense of dislocation—primarily linguistic—that I know I felt at the time. Within two weeks of my arrival, though, I had picked up Paul Fussell’s Class which provided a crash course in decoding the quite complex but often ignored American class system.
A clerical job with an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, immersed me in the world of young, hip Tufts-educated musicians needing a day job and slightly older and more sophisticated urban architects—and the American English they spoke. Within a few weeks I had learned the correct usage of the words “like” and “totally” in addition to being able to quote Harvard architecture guru Jorge Silvetti (“Jess, but it is very very ogly”).
My mother, a Philadelphia native, returned to American shores from Spain a few years later with my father. Unlike me, she did not have exposure to the rapid office banter of my young colleagues. Life in Bodega Bay was much less edgy, but her re-entry into the American linguistic arena has consequently taken a lot longer and been fraught with perplexing neologisms and, worse, re-introduced words and expressions.
During our recent trip to Bodega Bay she showed us her ongoing lexicon: a notebook with strange, unfamiliar, and interesting uses of American English with which she is able to navigate this morphing of her mother tongue. She subsequently shared her discovery of the online version of this: Wordspy. Today’s word: Upshifter. I suspect she will politely decline.
5 May 03
The Cooperative Swainson’s Hawk
When I returned home after work today, I did my rounds around the place to see if there were any birds about that I might try to photograph with the spotting scope. I thought there was a bird on one of the walnut trees left remaining south of the house after the lamentable road-widening project. I ran inside and got my binoculars. Yes, it’s a Swainson’s hawk! I ran back and got the digicam and spotting scope, already set up for digiscoping, and took a few pictures.
I then realized the hawk was staying put for a bit, and was perfectly positioned to bring out the Dob. I have a 7” Dobsonian reflecting telescope that is great for visual astronomy, and has much better optics than any spotting scope, but far, far too unwieldly to be useful for birding. Unless one is very lucky that is, and I was! I ran to the house, got and set up the Dob, and took a series of photos: the one at left shows him calling.
Swainson’s hawks are threatened in California, largely due to the loss, especially in the Central Valley, of trees suitable for nesting. Still, the Davis area is a good place to see these birds after they return from migration to Central and South America (especially western Mexico and Argentina) early in spring. These birds like to forage in farmlands and nest in riparian trees, and there is enough of this habitat combination in Yolo and eastern Solano county so that a reasonable breeding population still remains here.
In other birding news, in my lunchtime browse through through the bookstore I discovered that David Sibley has written yet another pair of bird books. The Sibley Guide to Birds, published three years ago, is now considered the standard advanced bird identification guide, but it is a bit of a tome to carry about. The books by Sibley that were just published are a pair of field guides to the birds of western and eastern North America — that is, they actually fit in one’s pocket! Our bookshelves are groaning already at the thought…
4 May 03
Ice Cream With a New Friend
The world of the weblog just got smaller-about five inches wide on this monitor, to be precise. In the Flash-animated World as a Blog, launched recently, you can watch little red lights pop up with the first couple of lines of the latest blog entry from someone in Finland, Australia, Seattle, or Davis. You need to enter your geographic coordinates correctlylittle red lights way north of Siberia are undoubtedly errors-but it’s fun to watch this almost real-time unfolding of newly coordinated bloggers.
A Brazilian neighbor spotted us in just this way: sent us a quick note saying “it says here you’re zero miles away! Do you live in Aggie Village?” The Chatterbox, Fernanda’s blog, has been going for 2-1/2 years now. It’s in Portuguese—I was pleased that I could understand so much of it with my Spanish.
Fernanda, Numenius and I all met at Ben and Jerry’s yesterday afternoon during several torrential rainstorms. It was fun to hear from someone who’s been doing this so much longer and faced the early heartbreaks of unstable blogging software. Plus it’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends who are so far away.
Someone asked me earlier in the day what the difference was between a blog and a website. I gave the “frequent entries, links to other sites and blogs” answer, but I think the real answer is this: a website is not necessarily an invitation to community; a blog really is.
We’re going to try to identify other Davis bloggers!
3 May 03
Putah Creek Spilleth its Banks
We’ve been getting a fair amount of late-season rain—in the past day we’ve had about 0.90” of rain here. Upstream, Lake Berryessa is at capacity, at which point overflow water spills down through the Glory Hole, an event that started this season in the middle of March. So there is much water in the creek now. Just east of Old Davis Road, there is a lot of ponding, inspiring thoughts of wetlands restoration work. And the water birds are definitely having a good time.