Sparsely Sage and Timely

Thu 15 Mar 2007

Nature’s Two Acres Part X: ‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’

Posted by DavidMitchell under Marin County, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized, West Marin nature, Wildlife
1 Comment

Life in the wild includes a fair amount of suffering, as this raccoon with a third of its tail missing bears evidence.

A couple of raccoons cut across my upper deck almost night every night an hour or two apart. In fact, a fair number of nocturnal creatures take shortcuts across my deck to avoid having to go around my cabin, and I’ve also spotted a roof rat, numerous possums, and from time to time a family of foxes.

During the day, my deck gets an entirely different crowd of visitors, mostly birds on my upper deck, lizards and frogs on my lower deck.

Not surprisingly, I’ve come to recognize which raccoon is which and tell one crow from another. So a week ago I noticed when my 8:30 p.m. raccoon failed to show up for three nights. When it finally reappeared the fourth night, the raccoon seemed more skittish than usual as it passed by.

I threw several crackers on my deck, and the raccoon returned so I could give it a closer look.

What I saw was grim. At first glance, it appeared to have lost its left eye; the socket was filled with mucous.

I snapped a photo of it to study the injury further, hoping to determine if the raccoon had been in a fight.

From all appearances, it had not, for only tissue at the front corner of the eye was torn. There were no other injuries. I kept watching for the raccoon the next few nights, and Mac Guru Keith Mathews of Point Reyes Station happened to be visiting when it showed up the second night and by then was already starting to recover.

.
Keith’s guess was that the raccoon had poked herself in the eye, possibly while nosing around in a hole. Made sense to me although I wouldn’t rule out a fight. I’ve seen raccoons fight, and they are ferocious in battle.

.
About the time the 8:30 p.m. raccoon’s eye seemed to be almost back to normal (at left), former Point Reyes Station innkeeper Dee Goodman, who is visiting from Mexico, noticed something odd about the 10:30 p.m. raccoon. Its tail looked unusually short.

I agreed and snapped another photo. Horrified, I realized the 10:30 p.m. raccoon had lost a third of its tail. This time a fight definitely seemed the most probable cause.

Losing a third of its tail would be, of course, a painful injury, but naturalist Jules Evans of Point Reyes Station on Sunday told Dee the loss should not be a permanent problem for the raccoon. Still, I pitied both animals, and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s description of “nature red in tooth and claw” kept coming to mind this week.

Having two injured raccoons around my cabin naturally made me wonder if they had gotten into a scrap with each other. At 1 a.m. this Thursday, however, both showed up on my deck together. While they growled at each other over crackers a few times, in general they tolerated each other, and neither appeared to fear a serious attack.

When it comes to birds, on the other hand, the casualties I see are less likely to result from the “law of the jungle” than the spread of civilization. Like most West Marin residents, I periodically flinch upon hearing a bird slam into a windowpane. Luckily at my cabin, birds usually survive their collisions unless they’ve taken off in desperation (e.g. to avoid a pouncing cat). Rather than breaking their necks by flying into the glass head-on, birds generally glance off my windows, perhaps stunned but at least able to fly.

Perhaps the oddest case of this I’ve ever seen involved a mourning dove, which glanced off an upstairs window and flew away.

What makes this incident particularly odd is that the bird left on the window not only a print of its body, wings, and head, the print included its eyeball and the ring around it. More amazing yet, the image reveals the dark feathers and light feathers on the dove’s upper wing, as well as a bit of its eyeball’s color.

So far, I have been unable to find any scientist who can explain the image on my window. The smudge is not mere dust because it could not be hosed off. If any of you know the answer, please send a comment. I’d be fascinated to learn the explanation.

Tags:

Thu 8 Mar 2007

Nature’s Two Acres Part IX: Point Reyes Station’s Blackbirds

Posted by DavidMitchell under agriculture, Photography, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized, West Marin nature, Wildlife
1 Comment

I happened to photograph three Brewer’s blackbirds last Sept. 20, the day Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez drew applause at the UN by comparing President Bush’s supposed sulphuric stench to the devil’s and the day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Bush clashed in the General Assembly over Iran’s nuclear program. Chavez’s sarcastic comments were, in fact, mild given that the Bush Administration had taken part in a 2002 coup that tossed Chavez out of office, only to have Venezuela’s poor take to the streets and reinstall him two days later. The widespread applause Chavez and Amadinejad received in the UN General Assembly made this picture seem symbolic: Chavez (at left) eats the lunch of a frustrated President Bush (center) while Ahmadinejad ominously looks on.

Now that the Park Service has bought the farm, and rancher Rich Giacomini’s cows no longer give Point Reyes Station its traditional redolence, perhaps it’s time for a new town mascot to replace the Holstein.

Having often sat on the bench in front of the Bovine while eating a sweet roll, I would vote for the Point Reyes Station’s ubiquitous blackbird. Not only do Brewer’s blackbirds strut about the sidewalk in front of the bakery looking for crumbs, hundreds of them often flock across the street in the Bank of Petaluma’s pine trees, where their chirping creates a din that’s audible a block away.

Although set off by several white feathers, the red on a Tricolored blackbird’s wing is far less noticeable than on a Red-winged blackbird’s. Tricolors are often found in the company of Brewer’s and Red-winged blackbirds.

On Point Reyes Station’s main street, the blackbirds’ best show occurs in Spring when they brood in the trees and hedges around the bank and neighboring market. The typical drama consists of Palace Market customers parking their cars and walking through the store’s parking lot, only to suddenly flinch and look around in bewilderment after an unobserved blackbird pecks them on the head as it flies by.

Indeed, Brewer’s blackbirds seem fearless during the brooding season. I once saw a blackbird peck a housecat on the head along Mesa Road behind the bank. When a second blackbird pecked it, the cat ran across the bank’s parking lot and ducked under a car.

I was impressed that two birds could have a cat on the run, but the show was just getting underway. There was no stopping one particularly aggressive blackbird that landed under one side of the car, causing, to my amazement, the cat to dash out from under the opposite side.

Blackbirds are members of the Icteridae family, and “the big flocks of Icterids in West Marin,” Point Reyes Station ornithologist Rich Stallcup told me this week, are made up mostly of Red-winged blackbirds, invariably with a sprinkling of Brewer’s and Tricolors.

A mix of Brewer’s and Red-winged blackbirds on my railing.

The flocks that gather on powerlines along the levee road around sunset each evening, are Red-winged blackbirds, Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans pointed out Wednesday when we ran into each other at the post office.

Blackbirds typically head to their roosting site “from 30 minutes before sunset to 15 minutes after sunset,” researcher Gordon Boudreau of Santa Rita Technology in Menlo Park reported to the Third Vertebrate Pest Conference 40 years ago at the University of Nebraska.

Boudreau added that although the bulk of a Red-winged flock has reached the roost site by 15 minutes after sunset, “stragglers continue to arrive for an additional 15 minutes.” All but the late stragglers habitually “pre-roost” on elevated perches nearby for varying lengths of time before moving into the night roosts.

“These pre-roosts may be atop their roost vegetation; it may be in trees or on powerlines a quarter to a half mile away. Late-arriving stragglers fly directly to the night roost.”

Why do blackbirds chatter so much when they flock together? Both Stallcup and Evans attributed the noise to their being “gregarious.” Said Stallcup, “They chatter incessantly as do all animal groups that can.”

Evans added that even small shorebirds continually chatter when in flocks although usually too softly for us to hear.

The Brewer’s blackbird (seen here) is named after 19th century ornithologist Thomas Mayo Brewer of Boston. Brewer’s blackbirds (Euphagus cynanocephalus) are protected under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but their survival, Wikipedia notes, is of the “least concern” among protected birds.

In fact, most ornithologists don’t consider the Brewer’s blackbird a “migratory species” at all. The birds do, however, move from place to place seeking abundant sources of food, which for them is mostly insects, spiders, and (particularly in Fall and Winter) seeds.

“During the day,” Boudreau reported, “wintering blackbirds alternately feed and then loaf, depending on the availability of food. Feeding in open fields is usually [done] in leapfrog fashion, in which all move in one direction, the rear birds rising and landing ahead of [those in front].

“If undisturbed, this feeding pattern continues until the end of the field is reached whereupon the flock may move to another spot in the field or fly to a different area.”

Ornithologist Rich Stallcup of Point Reyes Station on Wednesday noted that “at least some of the birds” in this field uphill from my cabin are Tricolored blackbirds.” (At upper right, for example.) Tricolors are nearly “endemic” in California although their worldwide population is small, Stallcup added.

While blackbirds benefit agriculture by eating enormous amounts of caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers, and other destructive insects, they can also consume large amounts of grain and seed. And when in season, fruit and nuts are also part of their diets.

At the third Vertebrate Pest Conference held back in 1967, researcher Boudreau revealed he had found a way for farmers and ranchers to avoid losing grain, seed, and nuts to Red-winged blackbirds. After experimenting with scarecrows, explosions, shotguns etc., he concluded the only control that works is “biosonic.”

The trick is to tape record the alarm call of each kind of blackbird, which is quite “species specific,” Boudreau reported. These alarm sounds are then “amplified and projected at the birds through loudspeakers. The method is highly effective if the proper sounds are used.

“[An alarm call] indicates the presence of a predator and is usually well developed in gregarious species.” Blackbirds tend, Boudreau had observed, “to avoid areas where these sounds are present.”

Interesting aside: By 1979, twelve years after Boudreau presented his findings, Lee Martin of BlueBird Enterprises in Fresno told a subsequent University of Nebraska conference that by then biosonic controls were in use internationally to keep gulls away from major airports. He suggested they also be used to keep migrating birds from resting at industrial-waste ponds where they frequently ingest lethal amounts of waste materials.

I’ve yet to hear any biosonic blasts of bird alarms in West Marin, which suggests the local blackbird population isn’t too serious a problem for all the ranches, airports, and industry here. Just for housecats and springtime shoppers at the Palace Market.

Tags:

Wed 28 Feb 2007

Nature’s Two Acres Part VIII: ‘Mice & rats, and such small deer’

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, History, Marin County, Photography, Point Reyes Station, West Marin nature, Wildlife
1 Comment

With my neighbor’s housecat keeping them company, eight blacktail deer spent Wednesday afternoon grazing and chewing their cud in the fields around my cabin.

Housecats don’t bother blacktails, unlike the coyote that crawled through my fence in January and caused the deer to immediately scatter.

A blacktail doe watches a housecat on a woodpile washing itself.

Before we go any further with this, however, let’s get our terms straight, for the word “deer” is constantly evolving. Our word “deer” comes from the Old English word “deor,” which referred to animals in general, of course, including deer. In Middle English, the language of Chaucer (c.1343-1400), the word was spelled “œder,” and The American Heritage Dictionary notes it could refer to all manner of creatures, including “a fish, an ant, or a fox.”

Even in the plays of Shakespeare (1564-1616), who wrote in Modern English (albeit of the Elizabethan variety), the meaning of the word remains uncertain. In King Lear, Act III, scene iv, the Earl of Gloucester’s much-abused son Tom Bedlam (disguised as Edgar) laments, “Mice and rats, and such small deer,/ Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”

What does all this mean? “Deer is a commonly cited example of a semantic process called specialization, by which the range of meaning of a word is narrowed or restricted [over time],” the dictionary explains.

Male North American blacktail, white tail, and mule deer are ‘bucks’ while male European red deer are ‘stags.’

Had Shakespeare lived 10 million years earlier, however, Edgar’s lament might have made more sense. As Bruce Morris writes for Bay Nature, “All three major deer species native to North America (blacktail, whitetail, and mule) trace their ancestry back to a primordial, rabbit-size Odocoileus, which had fangs and no antlers and lived around the Arctic Circle some 10 million years ago.”

Based on DNA tests, Morris adds, “researchers theorized that whitetails (Odocoileus virginianus) emerged as a separate species on the East Coast about 3.5 million years ago.

A blacktail buck, characteristically stretching his neck low to the ground, sniffs for a doe in estrus.

“They apparently expanded their range down the East Coast and then westward across the continent until reaching the Pacific Ocean in what is now California some 1.5 million years ago. Moving north up the coast, they evolved into blacktails.

“Columbian blacktail deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) are the subspecies of blacktails native to the Bay Area.” According to the California Department of Fish and Game, there are now approximately 560,000 deer in all California, about 320,000 of which are Columbian blacktails.”

A seemingly perplexed fawn watches as the doe runs away from the buck, who licks his nose in to help pick up her scent.

Morris reports that “blacktails have a typical lifespan in the wild of seven to 10 years, but they can survive in suburban habitat for as long as 17 to 20 years if unmolested.”

The breeding season is in November, notes Mary Ann Thomas writing about West Coast blacktails from Southern Arkansas University. Gestation lasts about 200 days with typically two fawns born. The fawns’ camouflage spots begin to fade after a month.

“Suburban deer have minuscule home ranges, measuring three or four blocks for females,” Morris notes in Bay Nature, “whereas wild deer inhabit territories that extend for several miles.”

While mountain lions, and occasionally bobcats and coyotes, prey on deer, the biggest threat to West Marin’s blacktails are motor vehicles. In fact, being struck by automobiles is the biggest killer of deer nationwide: more than one million a year.

Connecticut alone reported that between 1995 and 2000, the number of deer struck by cars in that state tripled while the number struck by airplanes nationwide has averaged almost one a week for the past 10 years. Or so says Benner’s Gardens, which makes deer-fencing systems.

A young buck on his hind legs nibbles on my honeysuckle while his mother watches.

Here’s a final bit of deer nomenclature for those still puzzled by the Golden Hind. The Encyclopedia Americana notes, “The male deer is usually called buck, but the male red deer of Europe is a stag, or when mature a hart. The female is called a hind or doe.”

Tags:

Wed 21 Feb 2007

The Gossip Columnist

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Photography, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized
[2] Comments

“Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea,” as Walter Winchell led off his World War II radio broadcasts. “Let’s go to press.”

Topping the news: A film is due out shortly titled The Penultimate Truth about Philip K. Dick, the late science-fiction writer who once lived in Point Reyes Station. You can see a trailer for the film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_VgXuYvzfU.

The stories of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) inspired the movies Bladerunner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, among others. “Philip K. Dick was known as the most brilliant sci-fi writer on earth,” the trailer to Penultimate Truth proclaims. Although a drug addict, paranoid, and (as he sometimes thought) possibly schizophrenic, Dick wrote 50 books and many more short stories.

As for his paranoia, Dick suspected the KGB and or the FBI was out to get him. In the movie’s trailer he tells an interviewer, “Anyone who grew up within the Berkeley counterculture [as he partly did] became a marked man. My house was broken into. My files were blown open. My papers were stolen.” The author admits to not being certain the federal government was responsible but notes his lawyers believed that’s what happened. Dick, however, later wondered if he had done the deed himself and just forgotten about it.

As for his drug addiction (especially amphetamine use during all-night writing): Point Reyes Station innkeeper and jewelry maker Anne Dick, to whom he was married from 1959 to 1964, acknowledges in the movie’s trailer, “Towards the end of our marriage, he was taking tons of stuff.”

Ironically, as Wikipedia notes, during Philip K. Dick’s life, he was “highly regarded in France, [but he] received little public recognition in America until after his death.”

Walking onto the silver screen: The Los Angeles Times on Jan. 23 published a lengthy account of the life of Planetwalker John Francis, 60, of Point Reyes Station.

Most of us in West Marin know Dr. Francis’s story: how he stopped talking from 1973 to 1990 and refused to ride in motorized vehicles from 1972 to 1994. His self-published book Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time tells the story, and a feature-length film based on the book is now “in the works,” Times reporter John Glionna notes.

Overheard: An item by Point Reyes Light obituary writer Larken Bradley was picked up by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik for her Feb. 13 “Public Eavesdropping” list: “I’ve had enough hippie guys. I need more superficial, materialistic guys.” (Forty-ish woman to another, overheard at Tabla Café in Larkspur.)

I forget, therefore, I did: A writer friend in Los Angeles this week called me with an item of his own. Having overheard a passing guest at a party ask, “Did I finish that joint?” he quipped that merely asking the question provided the answer. Sort of like Decartes’ “Cognito ergo sum” taken to a higher level: “No memeni ergo feci.”

Rumblings south of the border: Accompanying me on a weeklong trip to Mexico earlier this month was a retired Economics professor from the University of Hawaii, Mac Williams. Mac and I attended high school and Stanford University together, and in 1963, we spent two and a half months driving all over Europe in a VW bug I bought in Brussels.

Mac went on to get his doctorate from the University of Chicago where he studied under famed monetary theorist Milton Friedman.

On our trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mac as always was a great traveling companion, even though I’d never before heard anyone who could match the decibel level of his snoring.

He and I shared a second-floor hotel room overlooking a narrow street in San Miguel’s historic downtown. After returning to the hotel following a night on the town, Mac would go to sleep with his iPod playing music in his ears as his snoring gradually built to the level of our old rooting section in Stanford stadium.

To my astonishment, it was virtually impossible to waken him once he had fallen asleep. Our hotel room shared a common wall with a bar, which had a live band that on weekends played till 4 a.m. The music was loud enough in our room to sometimes disrupt conversations, but once Mac was asleep, he didn’t hear it.

As it happened, immediately across our narrow street was San Miguel’s main cathedral, and its bells chimed loudly and at length every 15 minutes day and night, but that didn’t wake him either.

Only once did a disturbance break his slumbers, although it was subsequently repeated almost every night. The Jardin, San Miguel’s central square, was less than a block from our hotel, and the roads around the square were closed to traffic during the day. However, a second-story roof of the towering cathedral was under repair, and workers were allowed to drive into the square at night to haul away debris.

During the day, workers (such as those seen here) would pile broken bricks and cement blocks at the edge of one nearby roof of the cathedral. At 3:30 a.m., other workers would show up and from the second floor start dropping the discarded masonry into a steel dumptruck parked below our hotel window. The impact of each chunk sounded like an explosion and actually awakened Mac the night it all began. He rushed to the window to see if our hotel were under attack. When he saw it wasn’t, Mac went back to sleep, and the clamor never bothered him again.

The cacophony reached its peak the night we had a lightning storm. The band was rocking, the cathedral bells were chiming, workers were hurling cement blocks from the church roof into their dumptruck outside our window, thunder claps rattled windows, but at least in our room, Mac’s snoring was loudest of all.

I couldn’t shout at Mac to awaken him because others in the hotel would probably think there was a fight going on, so I tried barking and growling in his ear, hoping that anyone who heard me would think there was a street dog outside; however, that didn’t work either.

But, as I said, Mac and I are good friends, so I was able to laugh as the pandemonium built to a roar each night, although I did tend to sleep late each morning.

Tags:

Thu 15 Feb 2007

Saying Yes to Change

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Inverness, Photography, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized
[10] Comments

Former West Marin resident Dee Goodman now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which was founded by the Spanish in 1542.

This past week, an old friend, Mac Williams, and I traveled to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and ended up spending several days with a former West Marin resident now living there, Dolores (Dee) Goodman. Dee lives in one of the many colonias (small, semi-rural communities) that surround downtown and are part of the Allende municipality of 139,000 people.

For years, Dee lived in Nicasio and later operated Casa Mexicana bed-and-breakfast inn in Point Reyes Station. Her late husband John spent most of his career working for Marin County Mental Health but after his retirement was in continual demand as a stand-up bass player in San Francisco jazz bands. He was also one of the musicians to regularly play with guitarist Bart Hopkin at the Station House Café. If you ever saw him perform there, you’ll remember him even if you didn’t know his name; for when he was paired with Bart in the Station House, John, a tall black man, played the not-so-common pizzicato (plucked) cello, which was strung like a bass.

Dee, his widow, is now living with a working-class family in a colonia that at first glance might strike West Marin residents as a rural slum. The streets are unpaved and littered with trash. Despite high walls, which hide the residents, small homes and gardens, families keep dogs on the roof to ward off burglars.

But outward appearances can be deceiving, and Dee has managed to find a bit of paradise where I never would have expected it. Here is her story:

By Dolores Lara Goodman

My husband John died of lung cancer in December 2000, and my loss was enormous. He was the love of my life. We had been together only 10 years, but those were worth a lifetime. He felt the same way about us.

I hadn’t readjusted well to the change and drifted emotionally, feeling lonely among my friends and family. After a year or so, I moved from Point Reyes Station to Petaluma to help my stepfather care for my mother during her terminal illness. My brother Dan lived with me in a manufactured home I had purchased in the same park as Mom and Bill.

With no children of my own, I had given some thought to long-term planning. Assisted-living residences were popping up all over, and they seemed a likely option for me. I calculated what assets I would have and what my fixed income would be and what type of place I would be able to afford so that I wouldn’t become a burden to my family. I was still relatively young, 60, so I wasn’t making any firm plans.

In December 2004, my friend Lana and I took what was supposed to be a two-week vacation to Puerto Vallarta; however, I had a feeling that I would not be returning to the US with Lana. I had, for some time, wanted to stay in Mexico for an extended time. (Two of my grandparents were born in Mexico but were forced to flee to Texas during the 1910 revolution, and I was brought up in Daly City.)

As it happened, I ended up in San Miguel de Allende, which is roughly in the geographical center of Mexico, about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City. San Miguel is a destination for many US and Canadian retirees; our dollars go twice as far here, and we can live more comfortably on our retirement income.

Imaginative, 60-year-old mural in one of San Miguel de Allende’s art schools.

Gringos have been coming to San Miguel for about 50 years. It started with a group who formed an art colony, and San Miguel now has numerous art schools, galleries etc. The gringo community does a lot for the locals: establishing libraries, scholarships and other helpful projects. And because they help with public matters, along with providing jobs and advancement opportunities, the expatriates are well received by the locals.

The Spanish-colonial downtown, with its park-like square, majestic cathedral, and narrow, cobbled streets, bustles with good restaurants, theatre, music festivals, and barely marked hotel entrances that open into courtyard gardens.

At an elevation of 6,000 feet, San Miguel de Allende has a desert landscape. During winter, middays are warm, and nights are cold. I like the climate.

When I first moved to San Miguel de Allende, I rented in the Los Frailes community at the edge of town. A woman in her 30s named Alicia Gonzalez was the housekeeper at the apartment, and a couple of times I drove her to her home in the Colonia Palmita de Landeta.

The first few times, I met her children in front of their house where they huddled shyly, laughing. They were very curious about me, this Señora Dolores from California. Around the third time I took Alicia to her house, her husband Antonio had just arrived home from work and told Alicia to invite me in. I was led to a front bedroom of their very modest house and was invited to sit on one of the beds.

The visit is still clear in my memory. I remember thinking, “What a beautiful family!” At the time, all five of the family’s children were living at home. (The oldest, Valentina, now 19, has since gone to live nearby with her husband Manuel and his family.)

Dining outdoors under a tarpaulin (from left): Ernesto, Claudia, Marco, Manuel, and Valentina. She and Manuel, who assembles furniture for a living, are expecting their first child in June.

I subsequently moved from Los Frailes to Calle Recreo in the central part of the San Miguel near Parque Juarez. Alicia and Valentina helped me pack and move. Valentina would spend some nights with me at Recreo, especially when I was sick with a cold or something. And they would all worry about my wellbeing, comfort, and safety.

Unfortunately, the Recreo apartment was intolerably hot, so I moved to a two-bedroom apartment on Calle Agua in the Colonia Atascadero closer to their house. The whole family helped me pack, move, and unpack, the five kids and Mom trekking up and down the path to move my stuff.

If they had their way, I would have just sat back and watched the move go on. After all, I am grande now. That’s when you’re older, like into your sixties (I’m now 66).

I did a bit of packing but not much moving. Picture the little one, Rosario, five years old, (seen here a year later with her mother Alicia) insisting she be allowed to help carry stuff to the car. Ernesto was eight; Marco, 10; Claudia, 12; and Valentina, 18.

Even before that move, Valentina began to tell her mother and me that I should move in with them, that they could make me a room. The seed was planted, and I didn’t even consider saying no when the Gonzalezes in 2005 invited me to live with them.

In October 2005, I bought a terreno (lot) next to the family for $10,000. In February 2006, I moved into my almost-completed casita, which was built by Antonio, an accomplished maestro albanil (construction worker), and a crew of four. Antonio is incredibly creative and meticulous, and I enjoyed seeing the building materials used here: basically brick, stone, rebar, and concrete. I was able to suggest what I would like to have done and then see it accomplished.

I had initially planned to have a large living area, one bedroom, and bathroom in my casita, but I convinced Alicia and Antonio to accept half the living-room space to make a bedroom for themselves. They had always had their bed in a common part of their house, in the kitchen or living area. We put up a wall to split my living room into their bedroom and a sitting room for me.

Surrounded by building materials for the completion of their dwellings, Dee dines on the Gonzalezes’ patio with Rosario, Antonio, and Alicia.

Antonio opened up a door in the wall of their house to my casita at their kitchen. I don’t have a kitchen; it’s our kitchen. Alicia is a marvelous cook and for me, eating with the family is better than going to my favorite Mexican restaurant every day.

I participate in the preparation of meals as much as I can and as much as they’ll let me. I’m learning more as time goes by. I also help with the marketing. We go to the plazita market every Saturday, and while Alicia shops for veggies, I shop for fruit: mangos, guayavas, dried Jamaica blossoms etc. I love it! It’s our tradition on shopping days to buy fresh carnitas, bolillos, tortillas, and salsa to eat when we get home.

The daily giving is as important as the receiving. I think the key is being able to share and actually being a member of the family unit, watching the kids get off to school and waiting for them to come home. It’s something I missed out on, not having had children, and it’s a blessing to have been given the opportunity now that I’m grande.

I’m referred to by the family as Tia (Aunt) Lolita and am usually addressed as Tia. The parents have given me a grandmother’s authority over the children and have instilled in them a kind respect for me. I love feeling a grandmotherly cariño (affection) for the kids.

Rosario and Ernesto, the youngest two, and I are particularly attached. Mi sombra (shadow), Ernesto, doesn’t let me leave the house alone. When I leave the house to walk Omar, my dog, Ernesto always accompanies me.

I think the kids were initially told by Mom and Dad to accompany me whenever I went out, and Ernesto (at right with his brother Marco) has taken charge. He says he’ll protect me from aggressive dogs and picks up rocks to throw in the event we run into any, which does happen. He’s my little angel.

I’m glad I said “yes” when the Gonzalez family invited me to live them. We’re a great match. All of us can’t believe our good fortune. I was able to make the move and provide my own space, but had I not been able to do that, had I been totally without financial means, they would have gladly made room for me in their home, and we would all be just as happy, I’m sure.

That’s the way it’s done in the Mexican culture and many other cultures of the world. Older folks don’t have to move someplace with strangers their own age and be cared for by other strangers. There is always room for them in a family member’s home and daily life, until their dying day. I’m still young enough to foresee more changes in my life, and this may not be my “journey’s end.” But it just may be, and that’s great.

Tags:

Wed 7 Feb 2007

The Bush Adminstration at Point Reyes Part II: Whatever happened to the Citizens Advisory Commission to the GGNRA & Point Reyes National Seashore?

Posted by DavidMitchell under agriculture, General News, Marin County, West Marin nature, Wildlife
Comments Off on The Bush Adminstration at Point Reyes Part II: Whatever happened to the Citizens Advisory Commission to the GGNRA & Point Reyes National Seashore?

After three decades of generally good relations between West Marin residents and the Point Reyes National Seashore, how did we end up with a park administration better suited to an autocracy than a democracy? Why does the general public now have only a perfunctory say when major park policies are set?

Frankly, the answer is politics, both Republican and Democratic.

Back in the 1970s, when the former program for managing the exotic-deer herds through culling was established, the public debated the alternatives, experts of various points of view spoke, and a consensus was reached to maintain the herds at 350 each. And where did all this happen? In public sessions of the Citizens Advisory Commission to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore.

Recognizing that the National Seashore and GGNRA were established to serve an urban population, Congress provided for local governments around the Bay Area to nominate most members of the commission, who then were appointed by the US Secretary of the Interior.

The commission required Congressional reauthorization every few years, and for almost three decades, Congress approved it. However, in 2002, its term expired, and with Republicans in charge of Congress and the White House, the commission was allowed to die.

This time [then-Interior Secretary] Gale Norton (at right) and the Park Service said, “It’s been a very good commission for 29 years, but we don’t need it anymore,” noted former Commissioner Amy Meyer in an interview I conducted for Marinwatch.

Meyer of San Francisco and Ed Wayburn spearheaded creation of the GGNRA during the Nixon Administration and served throughout the commission’s existence, along with Richard Bartke of El Cerrito, representative of the Association of Bay Area Governments.

“We had moved toward the sunset clause several times before,” Meyer noted. Each time the commission was about to expire, Congressman Phil Burton or his widow Sala, who replaced him in the House, would extend it for three to five years, she said. They “wanted to have an advisory commission.”

National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher, however, did not want one. As park spokesman John Dell’Osso acknowledged to me in 2004, the park administration had found the commission sometimes interfering with what park staff felt should be done. The Neubacher administration has further argued that local residents don’t speak for all Americans. It’s a specious argument since most park visitors are from the nine-county Bay Area and because people here are far more familiar with the park than people in other parts of the country, who typically know little or nothing about it.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (at right), who represents West Marin, did introduce legislation to resurrect the commission, and it was attached to a House bill being pushed by now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others to acquire land in San Mateo County for the GGNRA.

The bill passed in 2005, but when it did, the rider resurrecting the commission was gone. What happened?

Meyer said she and other people went to Congresswomen Pelosi (at left) and Woolsey and asked that they drop the advisory-commission legislation.

They feared, Meyer explained, that the Bush Administration would pack the advisory commission with people who share his ideology.

“Having no advisory commission is better than having a bad one,” Meyer added. “Gale Norton [who resigned last March] was a terrible Secretary of the Interior. No one wants to bring the commission back until Bush is out of office.

Throughout its existence, Meyer said, the advisory commission was seldom politicized. When it comes to advising the Park Service, she said, “there is nothing worse than a politicized commission in being able to [fairly sort through] public desires.”

Former Commissioner Meyer isn’t necessarily against Neubacher’s plan to eliminate non-indigenous deer, but she said that in deciding what to do about the deer, or a ranger’s 2004 pepper-spraying scandal, or other matters, the commissioners could have been “as they once were,” a crucial interface between the public and the Park Service.

While the commission was only “advisory,” Commissioners’ decisions carried weight. “The advice they could give the Park Service,” Meyer noted, “could modify a policy.”

The local citizens advisory commission to the national parks was not the only one that has not been reauthorized despite the fact that “to make a park responsible to the people is very important,” she added. “It’s happening all over…. We have an administration that doesn’t believe in participatory democracy.

“We’re all sitting here waiting for 2008 [to see] if we have the right president who is going to appoint the right Interior Secretary. The president could be a Republican,” Meyer stressed. “Even Nixon had two of the best in history.”

In short, thanks to the power struggle in Washington, residents of West Marin and the rest of the Bay Area must remain frustrated for two more years.

For now, there is no effective forum for influencing National Seashore policy:

When rangers run amok (e.g. extensively pepper-spraying innocent people who not surprisingly sue the Park Service and collect $50,000).

When the National Seashore decides there’s money to be saved by slaughtering majestic deer that have long been a part of Point Reyes and are beloved by much of the public. Ironically, settling with the pepper-spray victims cost the Park Service far more than a year’s culling once did.

When environmentally responsible mariculture is treated like a pariah.

Better days no doubt are coming to Point Reyes. In the meantime, here’s a Valentine’s Day heart from SparselySageAndTimely.com and a flock of Canada geese between my cabin and Inverness Ridge.

Tags:

Wed 31 Jan 2007

The Bush Administration at Point Reyes: Part I

Posted by DavidMitchell under agriculture, General News, History, Inverness, Photography, West Marin nature, Wildlife
[3] Comments

Fallow deer in the Point Reyes National Seashore range from white to spotted to black. Naturally gentle, they are among the few deer that can be easily domesticated, and they are widely raised for meat. The fallow herd was periodically culled by the park until Don Neubacher became superintendent in 1994. He stopped the culling and now claims the herd is becoming too large and must be totally eliminated. (Photo by Janine Warner)

West Marin residents need to start paying attention to how much the administration of the Point Reyes National Seashore has come to reflect ideologically rigid policies of the Bush Administration Park Service, not to mention the Bush Administration’s belligerent approach to Homeland Security.

Combativeness, ideological zeal, and indifference to public opinion are the hallmarks of this approach. At the National Seashore, it is taking the form of:

A widely criticized program to slaughter the long-resident white and spotted deer from Asia, which much of the public finds enchanting, on grounds it would be cheaper to eliminate them than to control herd sizes with culling or contraception.

The only public hearing on the pogrom before the National Seashore administration last year approved it was so tightly controlled as to be meaningless. No general discussion, with public debate, was allowed. Supt. Don Neubacher assembled a panel of like-minded folks to present the administration’s point of view. Respected organizations that oppose slaughtering the deer, such as the Humane Society, were noticeably left off his panel.

These fallow deer (originally from the Near East) and axis deer (originally from India and Sri Lanka) have been a part of the Point Reyes ecosystem for 60 years, far longer than the Park Service. (Photo by Janine Warner)

Yet the Neubacher administration talks about the fallow deer as if the growth of its herd is out of control. No it isn’t. The Neubacher administration in 1994 merely stopped the park’s periodic culling.

The park administration in trying to rationalize the pogrom claims that because non-indigenous deer eat acorns and so do indigenous blacktail deer, the wellbeing of the blacktail is being threatened. The claim is typical of the pseudo-environmental malarkey we’ve come to expect from the Bush Interior Department that also claims opening up the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling is environmentally necessary.

Blacktail deer are abundant throughout West Marin as this herd, including a doe who’s found one of my persimmons, bears witness.

There’s no shortage of blacktail deer in and around the park. Yes, a lot of them are dying on and off parkland here. And whose fault is that? Almost entirely motorists, many of whom are among two million visitors a year drawn to West Marin by the Point Reyes National Seashore.

National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher’s announced intention to close down the venerable Drake’s Bay Oyster Company when its lease expires in five years.

There may be ranches, not to mention a Coast Guard station, next door, but Neubacher claims the land around the oyster company’s waters is “potential wilderness” and that it would take an act of Congress to keep the oyster company open. If that’s true, and county officials are skeptical, then it’s Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey’s responsibility to take action in Congress.

Like the exotic deer, the oyster company has been on Point Reyes far longer than the park, which opened in 1965. Oyster growing has become part of the Drakes Estero ecoystem, and oysterman Kevin Lunny notes that because oysters filter water, the water is cleaner in his part of the estuary than where oyster growing has ended.

For many visitors to the National Seashore, buying oysters at the oyster company brings them far more pleasure than visitor centers, sandcastle contests, boarded-up ranch buildings, and the Morgan horse stable, not to denigrate any of them but merely to take note of the obvious.

I’ve never heard Lunny himself say this, but some ranchers on Point Reyes see Supt. Neubacher’s plans to close the oyster company as “payback time.”

They believe that Lunny, who is also a beef rancher, roused the superintendent’s ire two years ago when he helped organize the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association so that ranchers in the park can collectively negotiate their leases with the National Seashore administration. Ranchers I’ve talked with say Neubacher (pictured) reacted bitterly to formation of their association.

One indication of the park administration’s attitude toward the association occurred a year ago when the National Seashore hired a “range ecologist.” No sooner had he arrived than he showed up at an association meeting to introduce himself, say he’d noticed some ranches had fences in need of repair, warned that he would give ranchers one notice to make repairs, and said if they didn’t then hop to it, he would seek to have their leases revoked. Dick Cheney couldn’t have said it better.

(Ironically the Jan. 30 San Francisco Chronicle described in detail the sorry state of Golden Gate National Recreation Area fencing at Crissy Beach. Neubacher administers, along with the National Seashore, part of the GGNRA but not the beach in San Francisco.)

One rancher, who doesn’t agree with the “payback” theory, instead believes the oyster grower’s problems began when Gordon Bennett, chairman of the Marin Unit of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the national Sierra Club, got Neubacher’s ear by becoming part of the park superintendent’s kitchen cabinet. *

With Congress stalling on reviving the Citizens Advisory Commission to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore, the park superintendent has been able to cherry pick whom he listens to. Sometimes the arrangement reminds me of our government’s unstated alliance with the Taliban during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

An environmental fundamentalist, Bennett is the loudest critic of Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which he considers equivalent to a 165-foot-high old Buddha in potentially Taliban-pure wilderness. The opposition of Bennett, who lives in Paradise Ranch Estates, to a popular oyster farm founded more than a century ago is perfectly in character.

A major stopover for birds migrating on the Pacific Flyway and a haven for harbor seals, seabirds, and long-legged wading birds, Bolinas Lagoon may completely fill with silt if its channel isn’t dredged and tidal circulation restored. The chairman of the Marin Unit of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club opposes the necessary dredging.

When the nonprofit Marine Mammal Center needed to upgrade its treatment facilities on the Marin Headlands or when people around Bolinas Lagoon hoped to dredge silt from its channel before the lagoon becomes a meadow, Bennett was always there to lend a criticism.

* The term “kitchen cabinet” in its political sense originated in the 1820s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson abandoned official cabinet meetings and instead took his advice from an informal, kitchen-table cabinet more to his liking. A number of these advisors, such as influential newspaper editors, were chosen because they had a pulpit for defending his policies.

Next week: Bringing the voice of democracy back to the Point Reyes National Seashore delayed by congressional Democrats’ distrust of Bush Administration.

Tags:

Thu 25 Jan 2007

Marin supervisors refuse to tilt at McEvoy windmill

Posted by DavidMitchell under agriculture, Marin County, Uncategorized
[3] Comments

Nan McEvoy’s olive groves on Red Hill. (Photo by Jim Kravets)

It took 3.5 years of permit hassles, but Marin County supervisors Tuesday finally told Nan McEvoy she can erect a 149-foot-high wind turbine at her olive-oil-producing ranch along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road.

County planning commissioners had previously rejected the windmill proposal in a 6-to-1 vote. The supervisors, in contrast, unanimously approved it in a modified form.

McEvoy has had to contend with a chorus of neighbors who didn’t like the proposed location (so she moved it) and the proposed height (so she repeatedly lowered it, from 246 feet to 210 to 189 to 149). Ironically, they simultaneously warned about windmills killing raptors. That has been a problem with small wind turbines. The blades spin so fast the birds don’t always see them. A longer blade, which requires a taller tower, spins much slower, making it easy for to birds to see it. Unfortunately, the neighbors didn’t want to see it themselves, and McEvoy agreed to monitor for three years the windmill’s effects on birds.

McEvoy plans to use the 660-killowatt wind turbine to power its oil-pressing plant. [Update, Marin Planning Commission Chairman Wade Holland of Inverness this week said the “sad” fact is that the turbine’s output was ultimately reduced to 250 killowatts. Please see his comment.]

As it happened, one of the times I interviewed McEvoy was back in 1996 just before the County of Marin issued a permit for the plant.

Former Point Reyes Light editor Jim Kravets and his wife Kristan at McEvoy’s Victorian house and its pond during a harvest party. The pagoda at right (with a palm tree behind it) is part of the ranch’s dining room. For her to create this estate in agricultural zoning, the County of Marin required McEvoy to come up with a viable farm operation. She ended up pioneering olive-oil production in the county, exactly the type of result for which the zoning was enacted.

McEvoy, who formerly chaired the board of The San Francisco Chronicle Publishing Company, had bought the 552-acre ranch in 1990 with plans to make it into a country estate.

“I bought this place because I thought it was very pretty,” she told me during an interview at a long table in her immense kitchen, which stands alone as a single building. “The county would not help me [get permits to improve the buildings] unless there was an agricultural purpose. It was then I came up with olives.”

Her parents had raised cows, she said, “and I knew I didn’t want cows. I thought of fruit trees, and from there almost immediately of olives. I had in my head always that an olive tree is a very handsome thing. They have very few pests; they’re very good for cooking; they’re useful.”

“I had been to Italy for cooking classes, and I didn’t think there was much good olive oil around [here].” Having read a cookbook called The Feast of the Olive, McEvoy contacted the author, Maggie Klein, who turned out to live in Oakland.

Klein said that much of the book’s technical information about olive-oil production came from an Italian named Maurizio Castelli, and she arranged for McEvoy (accompanied by an interpreter) to meet him.

Before flying to Italy, however, McEvoy sent Castelli water and soil samples from her ranch, along with weather records, and “he decided, yes, we could do it,” she said.

With a stone wheel of the olive press in the background, ranch consultant Maurizio Castelli shows me his magician’s skills, appearing to hold two cups of olive oil in his hand while balancing a wine glass on one finger. (Photo by Jim Kravets)

The UC Extension Service and others were initially skeptical, fearing the ranch would prove to be too cool, foggy, and windy, but McEvoy demonstrated that not only would olive trees grow well on her Red Hill property, they could produce award-winning olive oil.

By now she has 18,000 olive trees growing on her hills. McEvoy’s success has encouraged other owners of West Marin agricultural land to plant olive trees, and they too use her press.

For several years, I have attended harvest parties at the ranch, hosted by her and (in recent years) her son Nion, chairman and CEO of Chronicle books. The guests have typically been a mix of politicos, ranchers, and members of the press. To say McEvoy has always been “well connected” would be an understatement. Many years ago, it was not uncommon to see her on the arm of Adlai Stevenson.

At a harvest party five or six years ago, I found myself seated next to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who two weeks ago became the first woman (not to mention the first Californian and the first Italian-American) Speaker of the House of Representatives. Our conversation alternated between her impressions of Congress, which were pretty dreary at the time, and her husband’s reminiscences of spending time as a youth on Steve and Sharon Doughty’s ranch in Point Reyes Station. Family members then owned the ranch.

McEvoy not so long ago was a director of the American Farmland Trust, a nationwide nonprofit which tries to keep agricultural land in agriculture despite the financial pressures on ranchers and farmers. As most environmentalists here realize, reining in the conversion of agricultural land to residential and commercial development also preserves open space.

The hassles McEvoy just endured to get permission to use alternative energy are symptomatic of the obstacles society puts in the way of all agriculture, even organic, sustainable agriculture.

Tags:

Wed 17 Jan 2007

Nature’s Two Acres Part VII: Rats v. dishwashers

Posted by DavidMitchell under History, Inverness, Marin County, Photography, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized, West Marin nature, Wildlife
[6] Comments

Exotic rat at Point Reyes

This week I shot a rat. With my camera, that is. To be precise, I photographed a roof rat foraging under a flowerpot for stray birdseed. It was a lucky shot, for an instant after I snapped the picture, the rat was gone.

For 30 years, I have been aware of roof rats on this hill, for they have sometimes made themselves known in a particularly disruptive fashion.

It typically happens this way; every few years, a resident of Campolindo Drive turns on the dishwasher only to have soapy water spread across the kitchen floor. (If memory serves, it happened to my late neighbors Ben and Charlotte Glading twice, to my neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman once, and to me twice.)

Inverness applicance repairman Dave Brast this week explained what’s been going on: “There’s one hose that drains a dishwasher, and usually it goes through a hole in the cabinet wall that separates the dishwasher nook from the space under the kitchen sink. If the sink drain goes through the wall under and behind the sink and if that hole is overly large for the drainpipe (thereby leaving a gap), a rodent can crawl from inside the wall through the gap into the under-sink space and then through the hole in the cabinet wall over to the dishwasher nook…”

(For roof rats to “enter homes and buildings,” The New York Times-owned website About.com notes, “they only need a hole the size of a quarter.”)

Brast further explained, “To do damage by gnawing through the dishwasher drain hose, the rodent can gnaw the portion of the hose under the sink or under or behind the dishwasher.

“I think the hose in the nook is the favorite target because there the rodent is completely protected from being disturbed by cats, dogs and humans….

“In the last few weeks I’ve had to repair two rat-gnawed dishwasher-drain hoses in Bolinas, one at the home of Aggie Murch and the other at the home of Charles and Veronique Fox. The two houses are on opposite sides of the road just a few hundred yards apart. The first gnawing was in the Murch house and days later in the Fox house.

“This made us wonder if it wasn’t the same rat doing the gnawing. After it gnawed through the first hose, it thought, “Well, no more to gnaw here at Murch’s. Guess I’ll mosey on over to Fox’s and see what there is to gnaw there…. Another dishwasher-hose gnawing I remember happened to Herb and Gina Kutchins’ [Inverness Park] dishwasher.”

Why do roof rats do this? “My understanding is that rodents gnaw because they have to,” Brast told me. “If they didn’t, the front teeth, which never stop growing, would get so long the animal wouldn’t be able to open its mouth wide enough to eat.” In short, it’s a dental procedure.

And there are more serious reasons for not wanting roof rats in our kitchens than periodically sudsy floors.

As reflected in their grating scientific name Rattus rattus, roof rats are notorious creatures. I’m reminded of Nabokov naming Lolita’s stepfather Humbert Humbert emphasize that rat’s ugly nature.

“The roof rat is an introduced species of rat [that is] native to southern Asia,” the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Science notes. (Florida has a particular problem with roof rats in citrus groves.) “It was brought to America on the first ships to reach the New World.”

“The rat is the same species that carried the bubonic plague around the world [killing half the people in Europe during the late 1340s] and is also the host for murine typhus” in the South.

Cats kill roof rat “pups” but seldom the adults. Charlie cat seen here fence sitting belongs to neighbors Jay Haas and Didi Thompson, whose dishwasher has thus far escaped rat damage. Whether Charlie should get the credit, however, is unclear.

Because roof rats (which like to gnaw their way into attics) are arboreal, traveling along branches, utility lines, and fence tops, they seldom fall prey to cats except when the pups are young and still dispersing, the University of Florida notes.

Traps are more effective in controlling roof rats.

Hawks, such as this redtail on my hill, and owls (especially barn owls) are even better, the University of Florida reports.

A female roof rat can have as many as five litters a year of up to eight pups each. And each generation is ready to begin reproducing in three to four months.

For the past two centuries, rats have been a fact of life on every continent but Antarctica.

The so-called Norway rats or “sewer rats” (Rattus norvegicus) are actually native to northern China. They reached Europe and the Americas from Asia much later than roof rats. The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology reports they were inadvertently carried on ships to Europe in the early 1700s and the New World in the 1770s.

In Asia, Rattus norvegicus was native to forests and brushy areas, the museum notes. Today, however, Norway rats find preferred habitat to be alongside the rapid expansion of the human population. Nearly every port city in the world has a substantial population of these rodents.

I happened to have been reporting for the old San Francisco Examiner back in 1982-83 when the City of San Francisco reconditioned its cable car tracks and, while it was at it, replaced antiquated sewer lines underneath.

A supervising engineer on the sewer project told me at the time that he and another employee had recently gone into a sewer tunnel under Market Street at the edge of the Financial District. The tunnel opened into a large chamber, he said, and as the two of them shone their flashlights around the tiered vault, they saw reflections from eyes of hundreds of rats. The two men beat a hasty retreat. A typical city, the engineer noted, has one rat for every human.

In case you have your own encounter with a representative of the genus rattus and wonder just what species you’re dealing with, the easiest way to distinguish between Norway rats and roof rats is by the length of their tails.

Norway rat tails are shorter than their bodies while the tail of a roof rat is noticeably longer than its body. Norway rats have bald ears. The ears of roof rats are furry. Norway rats are only slightly longer than roof rats; in fact the rattus rattus above would probably measure more than a foot from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail. In general, however, Norway rats are far heftier.

Tags:

Wed 10 Jan 2007

Nature’s Two Acres Part VI: How Flashing Affects Wildlife

Posted by DavidMitchell under Marin County, Photography, Point Reyes Station, Uncategorized, West Marin nature, Wildlife
[3] Comments

Flashing wildlife makes some nature photography possible that would otherwise be difficult at best. *

The results of flashing, however, can be gratifying or frustrating, depending on how one sees things. Flashes often give humans red eye, and I don’ t mean conjunctivitis (AKA pink eye). In fact, possums are the species that end up with pink eye in flash photography. Blacktail deer come out with blue eye while raccoon eyes can end up white or green or both.

A blacktail fawn gets “blue eye,” not “red eye,” from being flashed.

(For the edification of readers in other parts of the country, I should note that flash photography can make prairie dog eyes look orange and alligator eyes look red.)

However, the reason flashes, which are often vital for photographing nocturnal wildlife, give these animals’ eyes their various colors is not the same reason flashes can make human eyes look red.

The eyeshine of possums is pink.

Among mammals, the iris of the eye expands and contracts to let in the optimum amount of light as conditions become darker or brighter. When a camera flashes, the human iris cannot contract fast enough to keep bright light from reaching the back of the eye; as a result, red blood vessels of the retina reflect light and show up in photos as red eye.

Unlike humans, many other mammals, especially nocturnal creatures, have a mirror-like surface, the tapetum lucidum, behind their retinas. The eyeshine of a deer caught in the headlights is a reflection off the tapetum lucidum.

The tapetum lucidum helps nocturnal animals hunt and forage in low light. Here’s how. Light from outside the eye passes through the iris and the retina and then bounces off the tapetum lucidum back through the retina. This magnifies the intensity of the light reaching the rods and cones of the retina, which are what sense light.

However, the color of the tapetum lucidum differs from species to species, which is why rabbits have orange or red eyeshine while dogs are often green or blue.

Showing both green and white eyeshine, a raccoon looks through my kitchen door at Nina Howard of Point Reyes Station.

Nor is having a tapetum lucidum an unmixed blessing. As Wikipedia notes, the tapetum lucidum improves vision in low light conditions but can cause the perceived image to be blurry from the interference of the reflected light.

And then there are other curiosities. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reports, “Animals in which the views of the two eyes overlap a lot, such as people and owls have good stereoscopic vision [which helps them gauge distances]. Animals whose vision overlaps less, such as deer and rabbits, have less stereoscopic vision, but they can see more around them.”

Not all animals have round pupils like those of human eyes. In the same way we squint to see more clearly, some animals’ pupils are naturally narrow to sharpen their vision, perhaps somewhat offsetting any blurring their tapetum lucidum might cause.

The pupils of foxes and small cats, for example, are vertical slits, which help these predators notice when any prey is scurrying around off to their sides. The pupils of goats, sheep, and deer are horizontal slits, as can be seen in bright light; this gives them better vertical vision on steep terrain.

When I spotted a blacktail doe grazing in the shade of a pine tree outside my bedroom, I opened a window to take a picture. The doe looked up and saw me, but she appeared oblivious to being flashed and went back to grazing. Notice her horizontal pupils.

Surprisingly, wildlife including birds do not usually show any reaction to sporadic flashes â€” even those directly in their facesâ€” but a quick succession of flashes gets their attention.

* SparselySageAndTimely.com wishes to thank

Inverness Park resident Linda Sturdivant

and three blacktail residents of Point Reyes Station

for posing for this posting.

Tags:

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Most recent posts