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.
22 May 03
eBird
I spent some time exploring eBird today and signed up to be able to submit bird observations to them. This site is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. The Cornell Lab has for a long time been interested in citizen science, organizing participatory activities such as feeder counts, the Great Backyard Bird Count (held mid-February), and winter finch studies. What eBird provides is a place to submit bird observations of all North American species at any time and place.
The interface to submit observations works well and at first glance succeeds in striking the balance between simplicity and capturing sufficient information to provide useful data. It distinguishes between casual observations and more formal surveys such as point counts, transects, or area searches. I’m a little less happy about the interface to display observations: there doesn’t seem to be a way to display a data table for an observation locality, nor do I see a way to download portions of the database for research. Presumably improvements to the display of observations will come in time. I think eBird will work well for birders such as us who are hopeless about keeping formal field notes but enjoy doing the occasional full checklist or count.
21 May 03
A Closer Look at Watersheds
We attended a talk at the Yolo Audubon Society on Putah and Cache Creeks, twin watershed systems that flow either side the Blue Ridge on the west side of Yolo County. The speaker, Andrew Fulks, is the manager for the UC Davis riparian reserve along Putah Creek but is also the founder of yolohiker.org, introducing residents of this region to previously inaccessible and little-known areas: blue oak woodland, chamise chaparral, and grasslands, and how they are connected to the creeks that run through them.
This region is under serious population pressure: California is expected to grow by 600,000 inhabitants per year until 2010. Efforts to keep the open lands from development will no doubt increase. There are already at least ten agencies working to protect the waters and adjacent lands of these two watersheds.
20 May 03
Wind and Heat
After a late season of cool weather and rains, summer is descending upon the Central Valley. We’ve had clear skies for over a week-and-a-half, and this past weekend there were strong north winds in the morning, caused by a high pressure cell building over the northern Great Basin. Today it hit about 90. We will soon get in the pattern where we will have headwinds both ways on our bike commutes—the north wind in the morning, and late in the afternoon the Delta breeze from the south, mercifully cooling things off. But summer weather means it’s time to set up the solar cooker.
We “bloggers of place” have our own section on this week’s edition of the collaborative Carnival of the Vanities. The section on place blogging is at the end of the listing of posts. Thanks to Fred of Fragments from Floyd for suggesting this, and Susanna of cut on the bias for graciously agreeing to host us.
19 May 03
Baseball in May
Well, the Red Sox just lost to the Yankees at Fenway… They finally managed to tie the Yanks for first place yesterday but I guess they don’t want us getting our hopes up too much. The Giants, who have been in a rough patch over the last week, seem to be beating the Diamondbacks. It’s hard when they’re BOTH doing badly. At least the A’s are playing well.
Interesting play last week: Barry Bonds hit a popup just in front of home plate in a game against the Expos. The Infield Fly Rule was called, only apparently the Expos players don’t really understand the rule, because Perez snuck home behind the catcher, leading to a lot of shouting on the part of the manager at his players. It made me feel better: I don’t really know the rule either.
The UC Davis baseball team has made it to the national tournament—after the second shutout in two days, upsetting Sonoma State. This is the Aggies’ last year in Division II so hopes are high. Meanwhile, the UC Davis softball team clinched the national championship yesterday in Salem, Oregon.
18 May 03
Trains
Last week at the Whole Earth Festival there was a table set up for the Train Riders Association of California, a group that is working to promote passenger rail service in California. We were definitely interested in their work, since we very much enjoy travelling moderate distances by train. It is quite convenient to take the train to the Bay Area from Davis, since the Amtrak Capitol Corridor line, running from Sacramento to San Jose, has proven quite successful, there now being 12 trains running each direction on weekdays. There is a great deal of interest in California in building a high-speed rail system between the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Southern California, and there will be an important bond measure on the November 2004 ballot to fund this.
Though our interest in trains is mostly as a mode of transportation, the Sacramento area is also an excellent place to be a rail buff. The California State Railroad Museum is nearby in Old Sacramento and every eight years hosts a rail fair gathering train fans, and indeed trains, from several continents. Yesterday we went to a wedding at Hagen Community Park in Rancho Cordova, and discovered that the park was also the home of the Sacramento Valley Live Steamers. They were having a meet that day, with kids and older rail geeks riding tiny steam trains around on 7 1/2” track.
But the rail buffs know a way into the past, into the landscape of the transportation networks of 75 or 100 years ago. An eight-mile bike ride away from here lies the abandoned right-of-way of the Sacramento Northern Railway, an electric interurban railway that opened in 1913, running eventually from Sacramento to San Francisco. The mail box at right commemorates the stop at Saxon, now known mostly as the name of a USGS quadrangle map.
17 May 03
Snakes Around the House
A fear of snakes seems to be almost universal, a function perhaps of our having evolved on the savannah… a fear we share with most mammals. One of my earliest memories is of my father trying to dispatch one (a harmless garter?) with a pitchfork over the neighbor’s fence, the dog barking madly. Whether learned or innate, this fear is reinforced from an early age.
Not seeing many others growing up, other than the odd water snake in Spain or even, occasionally, a viper (Vipera aspis), few indeed considering how much wildcamping we did and how wide open my eyes were for birds, I retained a vague but not very realistic fear of snakes. It wasn’t until we lived in a cabin in the mountains above Santa Barbara during a big El Nio year-which brought a surge of rodents-that I truly learned to appreciate them.
There are no rattlesnakes in this flood plain where we now live which, though tamed and leveed and corralled is still a prime target for a 100-year flood event. There are, however, gopher snakes and even king snakes. We regularly shunt the gopher snakes off the road or bike path where they are sunning themselves after a cool, wet winter. At right is a young king snake (Lampropeltis getulis) just outside our back door, moving toward my bicycle wheel.