4 June 03
Gandhi’s Way
The UC Davis campus embarked on an ambitious but very successful project last year, namely, to have students, staff, faculty, and the community read the same book and then talk about it. The chosen book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Dozens of events were organized around this book in Fall 2002, culminating in the visit to Davis by the author and some of the protagonists of her book.
This was always going to be a hard act to follow, but in the end Gandhi’s Way, by Mark Juergensmeyer, a UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology, was selected as the project for Fall 2003. Published over 15 years ago, it calls itself a “handbook of non-violent conflict resolution”—a book whose time has surely come. We are hoping it will help campus and community members learn to welcome, instead of avoid, conflict, and think creatively about ways to bring about change that works for both parties. The Davis Enterprise ran a nice write-up about this project on Sunday.
3 June 03
New York Songlines
Jim Naureckas offers a set of New York Songlines, pathways through the city annotated with stories for each block. The name, made famous in a book by Bruce Chatwin, comes from the elaborate mythological song cycles Australian aborigines would learn to enable them to navigate across a harsh landscape.
He feels that in their hurry to get to their destinations without noticing what lies between, New Yorkers have lost their sense of place, and writes:
[This] is a shame, because New York has its own giants, heroes and monsters who left their marks and their names on the land around us. If we learn their stories which are written on our streets and avenues, we’ll have a much better chance of knowing where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
Does thinking of a landscape as narrative, rather than as cartography, increase one’s sense of place?
2 June 03
Duck Days in Davis
On my way home from work tonight along the Arboretum, a fat and slightly dingy Norway rat ran in front of my bicycle wheel. I often see them around but I can never quite get used to it. They are superb swimmers, highly adaptable, and they have an inexhaustible supply of food from the well-meaning duck-feeders. They are here to stay.
The duck-feeders fall into three basic types: most common are families with young children who come to the lake at the Arb, sit on the very well-fertilized grass, and toss bags and bags of bread to the ducks, mostly mallards with every possible intergrade hybridity imaginable (an untidy bunch). Second are the sporadic “dotties”—folks, normally older, who talk to themselves as often as the ducks, and are mostly tolerated as benign, not-quite-there, members of supervised-care facilities.
The third type is the most frightening. I’ll call her Guerrilla Girl. She rides her bike up and down the length of the Arboretum daily with a black carrier sack full of grain, which she deposits in strategic locations where “her” ducks know her and fight over themselves to start gobbling before the rats can get to it (a futile gesture, of course). Her eyes are glassy and her jaw is set in a square grimace, a defiant warning to the world not to jeopardize her Right To Feed the Ducks. She reminds me of early 1970s Trotskyites or Roger Clemens—the expressions are identical.
I did make the mistake once of gently pointing out to Guerrilla Girl that she was feeding the rats more than the ducks; that the ducks had plenty of food anyway; that their overpopulation in this artificial oxbow lake was raising the fecal coliform count to lethal levels; that they were becoming vectors of all kinds of disease which they would pass along to other ducks (not to mention other birds). I was told in among the tirade of invective that the University could only get rid of the rats by poisoning them, and that she knew these ducks, she followed their movements throughout the seasons, and that they had their own patterns (I could hardly disagree with this: they start drooling when they see Guerrilla Girl’s black bag from half a mile away). She nearly killed us last week by squealing her bike dementedly into a right-angle so we wouldn’t hit a heavily gravid female that was heading down to the water.
I’ve never, unlike bsag, been mugged by a duck, so I don’t feel a personal hostility toward these avian misfits. In fact, I’m kind of impressed they’ve managed to win such an ardent champion to their cause. Laughing all the way to their holes are the rats, who emerge at dusk to reap the rewards of this crusade.
1 June 03
Watering Valley Oaks
Our neighbor Jim has taken the initiative to start a valley oak restoration project along the UC Davis Putah Creek Riparian Reserve. For several months he has turned his carport into an oak nursery—collecting and germinating acorns, and growing the seedlings in pairs of half-gallon juice cartons duct-taped end-to-end together. Then with the help of a few volunteers and somebody to assist with the two-person auger, he planted about 80 or 90 seedlings along the north side of Putah Creek, in two locations.
Summer is upon us—it was well in the nineties today, and we don’t expect to see rain again until at least October, so the plan is to water the seedlings every couple of weeks over the summer. This, it turns out, is a major project. Today was the kickoff watering session, and about a dozen volunteers showed up. Each oak seedling got five gallons of water, hauled in buckets quite laboriously from the creek. I’ll estimate we shifted about a ton-and-a-half of water in our three-hour long effort. We also engaged in a bit of weed-whacking, trying to keep the mulched circle around each seedling clear of star thistle and other nasties. At right is a photo of the bucket brigade.
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!