12 January 08
A BIGBY Gull Jaunt
With all the reports of multiple gull species at the Yolo County Landfill/Oxidation Ponds, we rode our bikes up there to try and see some for our Big Green Birding Year (BIGBY). We ran into Marcel and friends and he was merciful enough to point out the distinctions between the various species and their various states of plumage, always confusing. A better-than-hoped-for gull tally: Bonaparte’s, ring-billed, California, herring, Thayer’s, glaucous-winged, glaucous (gorgeous white adult). We missed the lone Western but may go back for it tomorrow. (We also missed the ferruginous and rough-legged hawks, as well as the prairie falcon, nearby, which is more of an incentive to go back.)
While we were looking for the Western we ran into Roger who was out in his new Ford Escape Hybrid, looking for the same birds we were. He got so inspired he drove home and came back on his bike. Go Roger! Be careful! This is a cult!
Today’s bird list from our bikes (singles; the tandem’s having shifting problems):
Greater white-fronted goose
Snow goose
Ross’s goose
Canada goose
Cackling goose
Tundra swan
Wood duck
Gadwall
American wigeon
Mallard
Cinammon teal
Norther shoveler
Green-winged teal
Canvasback
Ring-necked duck
Lesser scaup
Bufflehead
Common goldeneye
Common merganser
Ruddy duck
Ring-necked pheasant
Pied-billed grebe
Eared grebe
American white pelican
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
White-tailed kite (doing talon-grabbing display)
Northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Red-shouldered hawk
American kestrel
American coot
Sandhill crane
Killdeer
Black-necked stilt
Greater yellowlegs
Long-billed curlew
Least sandpiper
Ring-billed gull
California gull
Herring gull
Thayer’s gull
Glaucous-winged gull
Glaucous gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Burrowing owl
White-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
Northern flicker
Black phoebe
Say’s phoebe
Western scrub-jay
Yellow-billed magpie
American crow
Common raven
Bushtit
Marsh wren
American robin
Northern mockingbird
European starling
American pipit
Cedar waxwing
Yellow-rumped warbler
Savannah sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
Brewer’s blackbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow
Just to note: some people are doing a BIGBY in currently frozen temperatures, just on foot, and they are happy to find twelve species. It’s humbling to be able to go out mid-January on our bikes in light jackets and get a list like this, and there is NO EXCUSE not to when we live somewhere with so benign a climate….
12 January 08
From the Back of the Yards
Answer: Saul Alinsky.
Question: What mid-century radical activist and community organizer deeply affected the early political education of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton?
This is a story I just learned a couple days ago, though it has been chronicled in various places, for instance this report on “All Things Considered” last May.
A year after Barack Obama finished college at Columbia, he took a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and thereby fell in with with several old-time Chicago activists who taught Obama the ways and tactics of community organizing. These old-timers had in turn been mentored by Saul Alinsky, who had started off his career as an organizer in the Back of the Yards district in Chicago in the 1930s.
Obama has never left his identity as a community organizer behind. After his U.S. Senate win his wife Michelle said “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” To which he later responded “I take that observation as a compliment.”
The interesting twist is that a decade-and-a-half earlier, Hillary Rodham studied and came to know Alinsky. Rodham started off at Wellesley College as a Goldwater Republican, and ended up a supporter of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy. When she was scouting around for a senior thesis topic, her professor suggested Alinsky, whom she had met earlier on a youth church outing to inner-city Chicago. Her senior thesis was titled “ ‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”
Rodham was quite taken by Alinsky himself, calling him “a man of exceptional charm”, but in the end felt that Alinsky-style actions were too small-scale to lead to widespread change, and instead believed one could effectively change the system from inside. After graduation she had the options of going to India on a Fulbright, entering law school at Harvard or Yale, or taking a job offered to her by Alinsky at his new training institute. She chose law school.
10 January 08
17th Worldwide Sketchcrawl
Get ready! Saturday, January 19th, is the next worldwide sketchcrawl. We had a fantastic time in November with a group of dedicated crawlers at the Sacramento Zoo. This time we’re going to keep it local in Davis because there’s a lot going on that weekend and to be honest I’m trying to reduce the number of trips we make by car.
If you can’t find a sketchcrawl near you, start one! Even if it’s only you, it’s a great way to spend an hour or four: gets you outside your head. It’s the time of year where that might be a good thing to do.
9 January 08
Vote By Issue Quiz
Last night’s election results show that this election campaign is going to have more twists and turns to it than a braided river in the Yukon. For those who are interested in trying to separate out candidates’ campaign platforms from their personalities, there is a very instructive quiz put together by radio station WBUR. The way it works is you read a set of unlabeled quotes by issue from each of the candidates, mark which ones you agree or disagree with, and at the end the quiz tells you which candidates have views most similar and dissimilar to your own. Don’t be surprised if you’re surprised.
8 January 08
Silverpoint!
Before Christmas I was hankering for a silverpoint tool. Well, my cousin Gainor took pity on me and sent me a small silver rod and three sheets of prepared paper. The package arrived today. I sanded the point down and stuck the rod in a mechanical pencil holder.
Your blackest black is never really very black, only gray, so the whole effect is quite washed out. But this is the tool of the Renaissance: no graphite yet. It’s a trip to sit at my kitchen counter and draw my thumbnail and muse on 500 years ago…
8 January 08
The Latest Baseball Gizmo
Never mind about wireless weather forecasting devices, what about something that will give all the up-to-date baseball line scores? The company Ambient Devices has decided there’s a market here, and will be releasing their Baseball ScoreCast device at the beginning of the upcoming baseball season. It does look slick, but it’s pretty high-priced ($125) for doing only one thing.
5 January 08
A Three-Falcon Day
A three-falcon day:
Kestrel, peregrine, merlins
Taking on the storms
4 January 08
Trees Down
The worst of the storm hit this morning, with rain and heavy winds gusting from the south to 45 miles per hour. I didn’t get very far into my day at the office when the lights flickered a tad. The power stayed on, but we lost network connectivity, leaving me aimless for a while. My officemate Jim looked out our window, and noticed that the acacia tree just to the south was swaying in the gusts down to its base. Even its exposed roots were moving a bit.
We got to see the tree fall. About an hour later, the tree was leaning heavily, and Jim had summoned in four other folks from the windowless computer lab across the hall. A gust, and it gently toppled as we all applauded. A brand-new Toyota Prius parked nearby barely escaped damage, as only the leafy bits of the tree landed above it. A campus landscaping crew came by and cleaned up the mess by three in the afternoon.
Pica meanwhile went home for lunch to find that one of the tall black walnuts across the street had fallen and completely blocked the road. By nightfall the Solano County road crew had cleared off the road, and all I saw of the event was lots of logs and cut branches piled on the eastern bank of the road.
2 January 08
Storm on the Way
They say this series of three storms may be as bad as anything since 1995. On Friday it’s predicted to rain 1/2 inch per hour. The question is, how long for? And with what strength winds?
I moved back to California in 1996. I remember huddling in our cabin in Santa Barbara, on the mountainside, as El Niño demolished Route 154 above us. If this is going to be worse, I’m worried.
But there are no mountains to fall on us, or for us to fall down on. It’s just us: the floodplain with levees. The water runs south from here, said the landlord yesterday. If it didn’t, we’d be in trouble…
1 January 08
Bigby By Tandem?
A birder in Québec named Richard Gregson recently came up with the idea of doing a Big Green Big Year, or Bigby for short: that is, seeing as many bird species as possible in a year without driving or flying. There are three categories, the walking Bigby, the self-propelled Bigby (walking, cycling, or canoeing), and the public transport Bigby (also adds travel by bus and rail). Today we took a little 13-mile tandem ride, and seem to have gotten started on a self-propelled Bigby, seeing 32 species over the day.
This will be a good way to get in shape. Significantly different habitats from where we live are a long way off (e.g. twenty-five miles each way to the hills). The ideal town to do this in is probably Santa Barbara, where we used to live many years ago, since it’s only a few miles between the 4200’ high Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That is the reason why the Santa Barbara Christmas Bird Count consistently is one of the top several counts by species numbers.
The public transport option is quite favorable for us, though. The combination of Amtrak train, bike, and bus can get one all over California. It doesn’t end up being very frugal, however.
[Added by Pica, 1/2/08: The running list of our BIGBY is in the sidebar of Bird by Bird . The champion BIGBYs as far as I can tell, so far, are the Yukon-to-Florida-or-bust-by-bike team, Malkolm and his parents Wendy and Ken ]