Blacktail deer forage around my cabin on a daily basis, and I’ve often posted photos of them. But apropos May Day, I had a new experience last Thursday with my cloven-hoofed neighbors.

A doe brought this spring’s offspring into my field. They were the first fawns I’d seen this year, and they ultimately provided me with an opportunity to photograph a one- to two-week-old fawn at close range.

As it happened, I’d gone out on my deck to take in the afternoon when I spotted a doe grazing just below me. Soon it nosed around in some tall grass, and up jumped two fawns.

The fawns followed their mother through the grass to my driveway, where she surveyed the surroundings before leading them into the open.

Continuing to photograph them, I followed the three until I caught their attention, and the doe with one fawn (seen here) ran off.

The other fawn, however, may have been to tired to stay with them. It simply wandered into tall grass, which happened to be next to my driveway. As can be seen in the photo above, the grass was far taller than the tiny fawn walking through it.

The fawn might have been expected to seek out a secluded spot in which to rest and not be seen, but this one lay down only a couple of feet off the edge of my driveway not far from where I was standing.

As is evident in the photo above, the fawn was well camouflaged by its spots, and even when I walked up to it, the fawn remained motionless. “It probably thought it was invisible,” Point Reyes Station biologist Jules Evens told me with a laugh Monday. When I walked away from the fawn without touching it, that impression was probably confirmed.

The fawn was so well hidden, in fact, the only way I could get a clear photo of it was by shooting directly down with the grass slightly parted. Even then, the fawn remained absolutely still.

I quickly departed, and for more than half an hour after I left, the fawn lay curled up beside my driveway before its mother returned and led it away.

If a fawn is continually stressed, Susan Sasso of Olema told me, it needs its mother’s licking, as well as her milk, when she returns, for both calm the young creature. Susan, who rehabilitates sick, injured, and orphaned fawns for Wildcare, noted that fawns can die of excessive stress.

At facilities on her property, Susan at present is feeding four very young wards every four hours seven days a week. This exhausting schedule will slow down in a few weeks, but the fawns will be in her care until sometime in August. She does it every year.

Here Susan (at left) and another Wildcare volunteer, Cindy Dicke of Olema, prepare to release a fawn in Chileno Valley.

It was one of six that in 2006 grew up on Susan’s property and then were trucked to Mike and Sally Gale’s ranch for release. The fawns were sedated for the trip but quickly revived once they had received wake-up injections.

Blacktail deer in West Marin are just beginning their fawning season, Susan noted. In total, she has received five fawns, but one, which arrived in bad shape, soon died. The other four, however, are healthy and putting on weight, Susan said.

Wildcare, for which Susan volunteers, ended up with these fawns for a variety of reasons. One was orphaned when its mother died in childbirth; another became separated from its mother after getting caught in a culvert; construction workers separated two from their mother…

“When the fawns are one to two weeks old,” Susan noted, “the mothers leave their babies for a while and graze until their udders are full.” So if you too find a fawn by itself, Susan said, “don’t bother it.” In all likelihood, its mother has simply left for a few minutes to pick up some milk and will be back shortly.

‘Still Life With Raccoon‘ (My school of art obviously lies somewhere between R. Crumb and Art Nouveau)

Black Mountain with the Giacomini Wetlands in the foreground. Much of what is now Nicasio Reservoir, Point Reyes Station, and the land in between was once owned by the Black family, whose daughter Mary married Dr. Galen Burdell, a dentist. When the narrow-gauge railroad between Cazadero and Sausalito went into service in 1875, with a stop in a pasture his wife had inherited. Dr. Burdell subdivided the pasture and created Point Reyes Station. (Photo by Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park)

Point Reyes Station as seen from an airliner. (One of the plane’s jets is visible at upper right.) In the center at the top of the photo is Nicasio Reservoir with Black Mountain just below it while at the bottom, Papermill Creek empties into Tomales Bay. The row of whitish roofs at right is along the main street of town. Guido Hennig, a German friend working in Switzerland, shot this photo while en route from Europe.

A tight maneuver. Linda Sturdivant while driving home with her daughter Seeva one afternoon last week came upon this full-sized bus making a U-turn on the levee road.

The levee road (a section of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard) used to be straight. The jog in it was created by the 1906 Earthquake. Land on both sides of the San Andreas Fault, which runs under the roadway, was offset 20 feet by the temblor.

Linda, by the way, takes care of people’s pets when they’re away. Recent wards (each owned by a different master) have included a cat, a rat, and a duck. Sounds like the start of political joke.

So that’s how things look around town these days. And if you’re interested in some blossoms for your own cabin, Mrs. Raccoon appears to be selling some nice ones.

This yellow journalism stinks, I said to myself last Wednesday morning upon picking up my San Francisco Chronicle at the bottom of the driveway. As I discovered with displeasure, one of the neighborhood foxes had peed on it.

Foxes are like that, marking relatively prominent spots around their food sources and dens. Last year, neighbor Jay Haas discovered that foxes were leaving their scat on top of the fence posts between his property and mine.

Campolindo Road is a foxy neighborhood. Gray foxes periodically take shortcuts across my deck at night, and several of us on the hill have seen red foxes during the day.

Today I stopped in Point Reyes Station to photograph the Sir George Mallory of chickens, who can often be seen trekking along Highway 1 downhill from West Marin School.

“Why do you keep climbing through the fence?” I asked Sir George. “Because it is there,” he crowed. I urged him to be careful, remembering that his namesake had fallen to his death while making a third attempt to climb Mount Everest. “You’re probably also worried that the sky is falling,” Sir George clucked and went back to pecking.

As for blacktail deer, which every day forage near my cabin….

Does chewing their cuds in the shade

West Marin is in the fawning season. Susan Sasso of Olema, who rehabilitates sick, injured, and orphaned fawns for Wildcare, six weeks ago took in her first fawn of the year. Its mother had died in childbirth.

But the greatest threat to blacktails, as it is in the short term for Sir George Mallory chicken, is the motor vehicle. “Night travel on the road is dangerous,” writes Point Reyes Station biologist Jules Evens in the maiden issue of The West Marin Review.

“Skunk, coon, opossum, and especially black-tailed deer are apt to appear around any curve. By day, one is assured of finding vultures feeding on the victims of our dispassionate, modern-day automotive predators, CRVs, 4-Runners, Humvees, twisted and splayed on the asphalt. The vultures gather in small groups, taking turns at the roadside deer dinner.”

So I ask you, friends, please slow down when you drive past Campolindo Road at night. These deer too are my friends.

Gathered on both sides of Papermill Creek Sunday morning, 125 West Marin residents demonstrated their support for a pedestrian bridge at the site of the onetime irrigation dam for the Giacomini Ranch.

Demonstrators including surfboarders, kayakers, several dogs, and people on opposite shores assemble for an Art Rogers photograph Sunday morning. A line over Papermill/Lagunitas Creek marks where the demonstrators want the Park Service to build a pedestrian bridge.

Originally a saltwater marsh, the ranchland was bought by the Giacomini family in 1944. Encouraged by the federal government (which wanted to increase wartime milk production) and subsidized under the Land Reclamation Act, the Giacominis built dikes surrounding the ranch to keep water from inundating their pastures at high tide. For half a century, the ranch prospered, but in 1998, the State Water Resources Control Board, stopped issuing permits for its seasonal irrigation dam.

In 2000, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area bought 550 acres of the ranch for $5.75 million. This Recreation Area land is being administered by the Point Reyes National Seashore, which last year began excavating it for a new marsh.

Even before the 550-acre sale eight years ago, the Giacomini family had sold more than 400 acres to public agencies, with Marin County Open Space District acquiring a slice of acreage just downstream from the Green Bridge. The acreage is bordered by the creek on the south and Point Reyes Station’s C Street on the north.

A footpath along the western edge of the county land from C Street to the dam site became popular for short walks.

Meanwhile, the County Open Space District — with assistance from the state — developed White House Pool park on the opposite bank. The park includes a scenic path along Papermill Creek from Inverness Park to the old dam site.

Demonstrators on the south shore of Papermill Creek last Sunday said they want a bridge so that pedestrians and bicyclists, especially children, are not forced to travel along the shoulder of the 45 mph levee road when going between Inverness Park and Point Reyes Station.

Not surprisingly, many of those at Sunday’s pro-bridge demonstration were residents of Inverness Park.

As administers of the Recreation Area land, the Point Reyes National Seashore has said it will soon hold a public meeting to discuss the proposed bridge. At this point, loudest opponents to the proposal are ideologues who insist that once a new marsh is created, humans should not sully nature with a path and bridge.

The new wetland will be located between downtown Point Reyes Station and downtown Inverness Park. The pathway above runs between the proposed bridge site and C Street in Point Reyes Station (seen in the background).

Folks, the land is not virgin terrain on either side of Papermill Creek below the Green Bridge. Not only has much of it been grazed for more than 50 years, humans have been reshaping it since at least 1855 when Samuel P. Taylor “built a warehouse at creekside for the paper he manufactured eight miles upstream,” to quote the late historian Jack Mason’s Earthquake Bay.

“It was here the steamer Monterey deposited passengers Olema-bound.

“A ferry crossed the creek here, Charlie Hall charging 25 cents one way per passenger. His bar, the Ferry House, was nearby to the south…. The county bridged the creek in 1875, the year the train came and the steamer pulled out.”

When the Park Service bought the Giacomini Ranch eight years ago, it’s stated goal was to create wetlands and thereby slow sedimentation of Tomales Bay and improve its overall environment. There was no mention of creating a wilderness area between the county firehouse and the Inverness Park Store. Remember, the former ranch is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the purpose of recreation areas is not to exclude humans.

Demonstrators on Sunday morning walk along the scenic path from White House Pool to the site of the proposed bridge. The Point Reyes National Seashore a while back argued for the elimination of this route near the creek, I have been told by county staff. In the background is Inverness Park.

The National Seashore, which would have to pay for much of the bridge, is also opposing it. For a public park, it is amazing how misanthropic its policies are. A while back, the park tried to convince Marin County Open Space District to reroute the scenic White House Pool path so that it ran along the edge of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard (the levee road) instead of along the creek. That way, nature would not be disturbed by humans walking through it. Fortunately, the county did not go along with the idea.

Now the National Seashore administration has raised a new objection. Even though the bridge would connect two rutted dirt paths, the park says it would have to be wheelchair accessible, and the requisite ramps for the eight-foot-wide bridge would double its length, making it 450 to 600 feet long. That’s more than twice the length of the Green Bridge and more than three times the length of Platform Bridge.

This Brooklyn Bridge over Papermill Creek — up to twice the length of a football field — would cost millions of dollars, the park says, and it is therefore unaffordable. I’m not buying any of it.

Here Joyce Goldfield of Inverness Park, who uses a motorized scooter to get around, takes part in the pro-bridge demonstration along with Duane Irving.

“A little Madness in the Spring/ Is wholesome even for the King” Emily Dickinson

We’re only four days into Spring, and already the world looks brighter. Of course, the return of Daylight Savings Time has probably helped. In any case, here are five faces that have brightened my cabin in the past few days.

My houseguest Linda Petersen’s dog Sebastian among the daffodils.

Deaf and legally blind, Sebastian will turn 15 in May. Linda’s daughter Saskia 10 years ago found the Havanese-mix filthy, matted, and hunting through garbage in the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Saskia managed to locate Sebastian’s owners, who not only were willingly to give him to her but even had a few veterinary records for him.

A wild turkey showed up a few mornings ago just outside my kitchen window. The tom was displaying for some hens under the pine tree.

Neighbor Didi Thompson in early afternoon called excitedly to say a bobcat was in the Giacomini family’s field, which is next to her property and mine.

Another neighbor, George Stamoulis, had previously seen the bobcat on our hill, and Cat Cowles of Inverness while driving to work at Hog Island Oyster Company had spotted it walking up Campolindo Road downhill from our homes. Finally, it was my turn to see it, if only from a distance.

Vamping for cannabis: Seeva Cherms (daughter of Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park) and her friend Michelle from Hollywood.

The two are working in the drive to qualify a ballot initiative that would legalize the use of marijuana and the cultivation of its non-euphoric cousin hemp. Please see Posting 104 for that story. While touring the state, they dropped by at sunset to say hi.

The Park Service’s hired hunters are assaulting not only wildlife but the value systems of West Marin residents as disparate as ranchers, deer hunters, animal-rights advocates, and merchants.

Until now, the administration of Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher has managed to avoid most of the criticism it deserves by repeatedly giving out misleading information regarding the need for the slaughter, how quickly it would proceed, and what would become of the venison.

Until the press found out, for example, many fallow deer were left where they dropped, slowly dying of gut wounds. Axis-deer carcasses were carted off in Waste Management dumpsters, one garbageman has reported.

Fallow-buck photo by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com

Wildcare has organized an email petition drive to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Barbara Boxer, calling for a moratorium. I urge readers of this blog to please take a few seconds to sign the petition by clicking here.

Among those offended by the park’s latest round of deer killing is Kathy Runnion of Nicasio (seen below). Many of us know Kathy from her job at the Point Reyes Station Post Office and as the head of Planned Feralhood. This weekend she wrote this message to the press:

I am devastated by the slaughter of the fallow and axis deer, and I’ve wanted to organize some kind of event that will allow the community a way to express our grief and horror.

I spoke with Ella Walker this week and was moved by her story. She lives in the heart of Olema and has spent time in the National Seashore confronting the White Buffalo hunters. Other Olema residents have seen helicopters terrorizing deer out of gulches into the open where they could be shot.

I sure would like to see the press embrace this story and stay on it until we can figure out how the Point Reyes National Seashore was allowed to eradicate axis and fallow deer when so many citizens are against it, including leading politicians. Park Superintendent Don Neubacher’s response to any query is that we all had our opportunity to comment.

Did anybody really listen to our input or respect it? I don’t think the Point Reyes National Seashore was ever very concerned about the community’s feelings.

The axis and fallow deer are a part of our community, whom we have loved seeing as we go about our daily business. I don’t see them anymore and I miss them.

Had the National Seashore not given the public so much misinformation, the public opposition up to now would have been far louder. We were told that the deer were not scheduled to be totally eliminated until 2020 and that there would be time for changing this approach to managing them during the intervening years. But already, the axis are virtually gone, as are a large percentage of the fallow deer.

Trinka Marris, Richard Kirshman, and many other Marin County people have worked hard to stop the killing, and I, like Susan Sasso said in her letter a few weeks ago, thought this group would be able to carry the fight for us. However, the slaughter has been so fast and furious, and there has been so much deception that more of us need to be heard.

Now that we are hearing the horrible truth about White Buffalo’s barbaric practices, it seems their contraception program is, in fact, merely one way they track herds to kill them.

A fallow doe, her head jangling with a tracking collar and tags that pierce both her ears. While all this is supposedly to keep track of which does have received contraception, the tracking collars are being used by hunters to find and kill the does’ herds. Photo by Ella Walker.

Many people in our community complain in private about the abuses they have witnessed but have remained silent out of fear of the park’s ability to retaliate against their business or the home and ranch they lease within the park.

People who know the reality of the culling and contraception program need to speak out and tell the public and our political leaders what has happened to the fallow and axis deer. Silence is complicity when a holocaust surrounds us.

Ella Walker has witnessed White Buffalo boss Anthony DeNicola, his clothes covered in blood, driving across the Vedanta Retreat, where there was not going to be any deer killing, the park had said. At the very least, White Buffalo appeared to be using the retreat as a staging area for killing deer nearby.

A lot of information is coming out now about White Buffalo’s disturbing tactics in communities all across the country. I wish we could have had an opportunity to learn something more about them, to be a part of the process that determines life and death in our homeland. I thought West Marin’s concerns were supposed to be significant.

Not only are we in West Marin part of the public that owns the park, we are a key part. The National Seashore is part of our community, and more than most Americans, we are aware of what is occurring within it. We in West Marin are its caretakers as much as the Park Service employees who get assigned here. And we demand a stop to the killing.

I’ve lived here 35 years. This land and this community have been the love of my life, my healing place, my home. Now I wake every day with a pit in my stomach, knowing my animal friends have been terrorized and murdered. I feel sick.

The Point Reyes National Seashore needs to know a very heavy toll has been taken on this community. We wish the park would have shown us some respect and considered our feelings about these innocent, majestic animals.

Why the blitzkrieg after the park said it would proceed gradually? Like the deer, we as a community never had a chance. To the Point Reyes National Seashore I say, “Shame on you!

Kathy Runnion
Nicasio & Point Reyes Station, 662-2535

Photo of fallow does by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com

A herd of up to nine blacktail deer have taken to spending their days on this hill, here joining the horses of Point Reyes Arabians for a late-afternoon snack.

California’s Department of Fish and Game has estimated that well over half the roughly 560,000 deer in California are Columbian blacktails, the deer native to West Marin and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mutual friends. Two blacktail does licking each other’s coats.

For years many people believed (and many websites still say) that blacktails are a subspecies of mule deer, a species found from the Northwest to the deserts of the Southwest and as far east as the Dakotas. DNA tests, however, have now found mule deer to be a hybrid of female whitetail deer and blacktail bucks. Or so says author Valerius Geist in Mule Deer Country.

Whitetails first appeared on the East Coast about 3.5 million years ago, as this blog previously noted. DNA evidence suggests they spread south and then west, arriving in California about 1.5 million years ago.

In moving up the coast, whitetails evolved into blacktails, which resemble them in appearance and temperament. Blacktails eventually extended their range eastward, meeting up with more whitetails coming from the east. Apparently the blacktail bucks were able to horn in on the harems of their parent species. The result: mule deer.

Mule deer as seen on the website of Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills. The deer are so named because of their long ears.

And for an amazing look at a whitetail deer, check this YouTube clip of one running into the path of a motorcycle on a mountain highway, but avoiding a collision by jumping over the biker as he ducks.

What is there to say about the American turkey that hasn’t recently been said? In the last 20 years, wild turkeys have spread throughout West Marin. I grew up in Berkeley and six weeks ago attended a New Year’s Eve party there; to my surprise, residents of my old neighborhood were likewise talking about wild turkeys moving in on them.

Well, how about this curiosity? Why does the bird have the same name as the country? As it happens, Turkey was the talk of the world’s chattering classes this past week after Turks voted that henceforth women can wear headscarves in universities. But getting back to the coincidence of names:

Here’s an explanation from an educational website, Kidzone, for younger students; it’s consistent with the etymology given by The American Heritage Dictionary:

“When the Spanish first found the bird in the Americas more than 400 years ago they brought it back to Europe. The English mistakenly thought it was a bird they called a “turkey” so they gave it the same name. This other bird was actually from Africa, but came to England by way of Turkey (lots of shipping went through Turkey at the time). The name stuck even when they realized the birds weren’t the same.”

The African bird which the English confused with the American turkey was the guinea fowl, The American Heritage Dictionary notes. As it happens, for the past two months that bird has been the talk of Point Reyes Station’s chattering classes, such as we are, because a representative of the alien species has been walking the streets of town.

The first report of that streetwalking was published in this blog Dec. 16. Yesterday, The Point Reyes Light reported that after two months of hunting and pecking throughout Point Reyes Station, the bird has now been caught by Station House Café employee Armando Gonzalez.

A word of warning. If guinea fowl is the dinner special some night at the café, remember the caution of Inverness Park biologist Russell Ridge: “You better like dark meat.”

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,/ That the small rains down can rain?/ Christ, that my love were in my arms/ And I in my bed again. Anonymous, circa 1530

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Happy Valentine’s Day! from a flock of Canada geese and from SparselySageAndTimely.com (or WestMarinNews.com for those of you using the URL that’s easier to type). This photo, which I post annually for Valentine’s Day, was shot from my deck. Inverness Ridge is in the background.

For the sake of West Marin’s lovers, let’s hope the goose hangs high this Thursday. That odd-sounding expression, which was more common a century ago, means everything is wonderful, presumably because geese fly higher in good weather.

A fascinating article in Wednesday’s Marin Independent Journal reveals a “second massive sewage spill” at the same Mill Valley treatment plant discussed in the last posting here. The total amount of sewage spilled in one week is now put at 5.2 million gallons.

Because of a bureaucratic snafu, the Jan. 25 spill of 2.45 million gallons into Richardson Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, didn’t come to light until after last Thursday’s spill of 2.75 million gallons. As the article by reporter Mark Prado explained, the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin (which owns the treatment plant) should have immediately notified the Regional Water Quality Control Board after the first spill but instead emailed notification to the regional board’s parent body, the State Water Resources Control Board.

A typo in the email resulted in the date of the spill being given as Jan. 15 instead of 25. Seeing the date, a state employee put the email aside, assuming it dealt with a two-week-old event, the newspaper reported. When the regional board finally learned of the earlier spill, The IJ added, they too were confused by the typo, until yesterday.

“Health officials posted signs at beaches and waterfronts along Richardson Bay warning people of the contamination last week after the second spill was disclosed,” The IJ noted and showed such a sign, which was photographed by Jeff Vendsel.

Why the sign looks almost as serious as the one below that health officials posted many months ago next to the Green Bridge! The Marin Environmental Health Department in early January told me this sign should have been taken down in October and would be right away. It’s still there.

So why was this sign along Papermill/Lagunitas Creek posted in the first place? Did millions of gallons of sewage also spill into the creek? Did any sewage spill into the creek?

Not according to North Marin Water District. North Marin monitors water quality in the creek because it draws the drinking water for Point Reyes Station, Olema, and Inverness Park from creekside wells.

As was noted here in Posting 94, North Marin’s tests of Papermill Creek’s water have found only normal amounts of bacteria, including e-coli bacteria, NMWD senior chemist Stacie Goodpaster told me. After a rain, of course, the amount of bacteria in the creek goes up temporarily, Stacie noted, because bacteria get washed into the creek.

However, she added, North Marin’s current testing cannot determine the source of the bacteria; they come from soil, decaying plants, or animal waste. She felt reasonably sure there has not been any sewage leak into the creek, for that would cause there to be at least 50 times as much e-coli in the water.

Marin Environmental Health later confirmed there was no indication of a sewage spill into Papermill Creek.

Supervising health inspector David Smail told me that under state standards for Recreation 1 (swimming) freshwater, the maximum number of enterococcus bacteria per milliliter is 61 in a single day’s sample (104 for saltwater). The last sampling at the Green Bridge, which followed unusually heavy rains in October, resulted in an enterococcus count of 63 (only two over the limit), but under established “protocol,” that requires a sign, David said.

And despite the “avoid contact with water” line in the county sign, Papermill Creek did not test unsafe for boating (Recreation 2). So the “avoid contact” part wasn’t accurate even at the time the sign first went up.

But who’s to care? Runoff from heavy rain carries apparently normal amounts of soil, plant debris, and wildlife waste from forested parkland into Papermill Creek; doesn’t that warrant posting warnings at least as dire as those for a 5.2-million-gallon sewage spill?

Needlessly alarming West Marin’s tourists and local residents doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s just bureaucracy fubar. Or crying wolf.