Let’s start with the wildlife and move on to language and politics.

A female Anna’s hummingbird at my cabin. The website Hummingbirds in Motion reports, “The hummingbird (scientific family: trochilidae) does not fly in the same way other birds do. They can fly forward, backward, up, down, and even upside-down. The motion of their wings changes its angle with each flap. Unlike other birds, hummingbirds flap their wings horizontally in the shape of a figure 8. They also expand and contract their tail feathers, which allows them to hover in mid-air. However, hummingbirds flap their wings like this on an average of 50 times per second, and during courtship they can flap their wings up to 200 times a second.”

Red-winged blackbirds, with a few tri-color and Brewer’s blackbirds thrown in, forage outside my kitchen window. Stanford University researchers say the diet of the locally ubiquitous red-winged blackbird “includes few spiders; grass and forb seeds; rarely fruit. Young [are] fed 100 percent insects.” And what, you non-gardeners may ask, is “forb?” Wikipedia notes, “A forb is a flowering plant, with a non-woody stem, that is not a grass. Since it is non-woody, it is not a shrub or tree either. Thus most wild and garden flowers, herbs and vegetables are forbs.”

Male red-winged blackbirds fight ostensibly over seeds but mainly to establish their place in the flock’s hierarchy.

Harbor seals sunning themselves at the mouth of the Russian River in Jenner. Harbor seals spend roughly half their time on land and half in the water. They need their time on land to maintain body temperature, meaning that people should view them from a distance lest they be scared back into the water.

A blacktail doe watching me on my deck.

.

A young buck in the shade of my persimmon tree. Blacktails love both the tree’s fruit and its leaves.

Turning now to language… As we were chatting last week, Inverness Park resident Linda Sturdivant was toying with her blonde locks when suddenly she said, “I don’t like the way my hair looks. I’m going to go home and dye it.”

“You don’t need to diet,” I assured her.

“I always dye it,” she responded.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it makes my hair look better.”

“Why would your hair look better if you diet?”

To an eavesdropper, we would have sounded like George Burns and Gracie Allen, with me playing the role of Gracie.

As it happens, former Point Reyes Station resident Sheila Castelli sent me a similar story last week from her new home in Taos: “The County Ag Fair was this past weekend at the ‘One Eye Gonzales Building,’ as announced on the radio. I thought this a quite funny name for such a substantial building. But I happened to see a banner in town for the fair, and it actually is the Juan I. Gonzales Building.”

Obviously words mean different things to different people. Nina Howard of Inverness and I were discussing the meaning of the word “politics” a few months back. “Can union organizing be considered politics?” I asked. “Or are politics limited to government?”

“If they’re not, they should be,” replied Nina flatly. End of discussion.

Unfortunately, political rhetoric in this God-forsaken country no longer bears much resemblance to rational thought. Take, for example, the campaigning of Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, formerly a lackluster senator from Tennessee. In courting the conservative vote, Senator Thompson has claimed “the Virginia Tech massacre proved that students should be allowed to carry guns on campus,” to quote the Sept. 1-7 Economist.

If Senator Thompson were right, highschoolers should also be packing heat to defend themselves. Year after year, they’re far more likely than college students to be gunned down in the vicinity of their schools.

To keep order in a well-armed classroom, teachers would, of course, have to be able to outgun their students, but that would merely require state-of-the-art weaponry plus a mastery of marksmanship and fast draw.

Senator Thompson may argue that because college students are older, they would be more responsible with their guns than high school students, but don’t believe it. Around the time I was a student at Stanford, members of an on-campus fraternity got drunk one night and shot out windows in a women’s dormitory across the street. That couldn’t happen at a high school because the students wouldn’t be old enough to drink.

As Winston Churchill aptly observed in 1920: “Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous.”

.

Another snake in the grass… Friday morning, I spotted this small gopher snake warming itself in the sun near the top of my driveway. Gopher snakes can grow to nine feet long and often live to be teenagers. In captivity, they sometimes live into their 20s. The snake has a large shield on its nose for burrowing in search of small mammals.

A spotted axis doe with a white fallow doe in the Olema Valley. Ever since the Point Reyes National Seashore in defiance of public opinion set out to eradicate their herds, the park administration has repeatedly contradicted itself regarding who would benefit from their meat. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com)

Seldom are prophecies as quickly fulfilled as one in my Aug. 8 posting regarding the duplicity of the Point Reyes National Seashore administration. Anyone who still takes seriously the park administration’s public statements might do better to take note of this chronology:

In an attempt to sugarcoat the shooting of axis and fallow deer in the National Seashore, the park administration in early summer repeatedly told the press that dead deer would be given to the Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa and the St. Vincent de Paul Society in San Rafael.

In late July as White Buffalo Inc., the gunmen hired by the park, were preparing to begin their slaughter of 80 deer, the National Seashore administration told the press that no longer were all the slain deer earmarked for feeding the needy. Some carcasses would now go to Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge to feed condors.

On Aug. 8 just after White Buffalo started shooting deer, this blog warned that National Seashore statements about what would happen to all the dead deer were not to be trusted. When culling had been carried out in the park 20 years earlier, it was noted, those deer shot where the park’s hunters would have had to carry them a ways had been left where they dropped. It eventually turned out that most dead deer had not gone to feeding the needy even though the park had told the public that’s what was happening.

The Point Reyes Light on Aug. 23 published a photo of a dead fallow deer and said members of the public had found two such carcasses in the Olema Valley. The Light also reported: “National Park officials had received word of the deer but were as of yet unable to determine who was responsible for their shooting.” There has been a history of poaching in the park and park officials noted that poaching is ongoing. “It could very well have nothing to do with us,” said park spokesperson John Dell’Osso.

The West Marin Citizen that same day reported that someone else had found six carcasses of deer shot to death in the Olema Valley. The paper quoted park spokesman Dell’Osso as by then saying, “We’re basically stopping the work that was going on so we can look into this specific situation a bit more. If we find out this was part of our program, then it’s not acceptable.”

The Citizen also quoted Tony DeNicola, president of White Buffalo, as saying none of the dead deer found in the Olema Valley were shot by his gunmen. “He asserted that his hunters would have removed any animals they killed within a matter of hours,” The Citizen reported.

But the park administration’s line kept changing, and by the time The Marin Independent Journal interviewed Dell’Osso for its Aug. 23 edition, the park spokesman was saying that, contrary to what he and White Buffalo had previously told the press, some dead deer were deliberately “left in the park to provide food for scavenging animals.”

This is an arrogant indifference to truth masquerading as wildlife management. In a month’s time, the National Seashore administration’s story went from: 1) all the deer meat is earmarked for feeding the needy; to 2) some of the meat will not go to the needy but will be fed to condors; to 3) rotting carcasses of deer found shot to death in the park could well have been killed by poachers; to 4) if White Buffalo did, in fact, leave dead deer lying around, that would be contrary to park policy; to 5) the park told White Buffalo to leave some carcasses strewn about as food for scavengers.

And as The Light’s photo demonstrated, the main scavengers are typically vultures and maggots. The park administration wants to increase the amount of flies around here? And is willing to withhold meat from poor people to do so?

And what about the killing itself? The Aug. 2 Point Reyes Light reported that White Buffalo’s gunmen “aim for the head because a bullet to the head kills a deer in 30 to 90 seconds.” Yet the Aug. 23 Light notes the dead deer in its photo was shot in the shoulder. And The West Marin Citizen simultaneously reported receiving photos of six dead deer that “were shot primarily in the body, which could have caused unnecessary suffering.”

Welcome to the Abu Ghraib National Seashore where only the bad guys know how bad things really are.

Using flash photography last Friday night, I managed to get neighbors Jay Haas and Didi Thompson’s Charlie cat climbing into a field of horses, which is better than getting a Charlie horse climbing into a field of cats.

Cats, the musical, was loosely based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot titled Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Opening in 1982, Cats played for 20 years, becoming the world’s longest-running musical, and it now cries out for a sequel. Eliot died in 1965, however, so I’ve decided to submit my own collection of doggerel à la Eliot titled Old Cat’s Book of Practical Possums.

If any of my British readers happen to know composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, please tell the baron he can make millions more with a sequel called Possums, which will be loosely based on my transforming poetry, assuming, of course, I get my 10 percent.

The Naming of Possums

The naming of possums is a difficult calling.
It isn’t a matter of mere caterwauling.
For possums have no names for each other.
They know by the scent who’s mate and who’s mother.

Moriarty: The Mystery Possum

Moriarty’s the mystery possum; he has a pink-skinned snout.
You’ll never know when he’ll show up or when he’s not about.
He baffles the raccoons and brings the foxes to despair,
For when they do their nightly search, their prey’s no longer there.

He knows when there’s a cricket near or a moth is unattended,
Or when the cat food’s been left out or the fence is poorly mended.
For coons and foxes on the hunt, Siamese or cocker-spaniel fare
Was going to be their evening meal, but it’s no longer there.

Moriarty, Moriarty. There’s no one like Moriarty.
Whatever crime’s discovered, he’s not the guilty party.
You’ll find dinner on his mottled coat or in his fingers pink,
And when you think that you have found some paw prints in your sink,
They’re never his paw prints; you know he couldn’t get inside.
Perhaps he can; perhaps he can’t; perhaps he’s never tried.

Intruder? Prowler? Nighttime stalker? Moriarty’s on the go.
Let his brethren play the possum; that’s not his style of show.
A marsupial mystery to us all, some say he’s like a rat.
Moriarty cares not what they say. He’s watching for the cat.

Gus: The Theatrical Possum

When he is scared, the possum Gus bares his fangs and growls,
But Gus is not a one to fight and secretly fears scowls.
So when you see opossum Gus looking mighty tough,
I’d just say, “Hi,” and walk on by. It’s only huff and puff.

The Ad-dressing of Possums

As you’ve learned about possums, they’re not all the same.
When sending one home, will you now know its name?
His tail may be scaly, his fur in a mat,
But this you must know: a possum’s no rat.

Last week’s posting discussed Senator Dianne Feinstein’s challenging Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher’s plans to close Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

County supervisors had asked Feinstein to intervene after hearing from members of the public, including UC Berkeley biologist Corey Goodman, who revealed the park administration had misrepresented research to justify closing the company.

On July 21, Feinstein toured the oyster farm with owner Kevin Lunny and Supt. Neubacher, as well as convened a meeting in Olema of top Park Service officials, National Seashore officials, Lunny, Supervisor Steve Kinsey and others. The upshot of the meeting was that Lunny can now get the permits he needs to improve the oyster operation.

Four days earlier, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey had written Supt. Neubacher, saying his plan to imminently start exterminating the axis and fallow deer herds in the park was unjustified. She disputed his administration’s claim that park research showed the growth of the herds has reached crisis stage. Nonetheless, extermination has now begun.

White, as well as brown, fallow deer browse with spotted axis deer in the Olema Valley. Notice how the spiral antlers of the axis buck seen here contrast with the palmated antlers of the fallow buck in the next picture. (Photos by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Perhaps the park has displayed its most outrageous chutzpah when it claims the fallow and axis deer eat too much brush, thereby depriving the blacktail deer of food and the threatened red-legged frog of riparian habitat. In fact, there is such a buildup of brush in the National Seashore that it has become a fire hazard. Why do you suppose the park each year holds all those controlled burns?

As for threats to the red-legged frog, the main two dangers are from bullfrogs and the National Seashore administration.

The park’s policy of converting historic stockponds from freshwater ponds to saltwater lagoons amounts to eliminating primary habitats for the red-legged frog. Indeed, when the park was initially discussing plans to convert the Giacomini Ranch to a saltwater marsh, the Neubacher administration acknowledged it would be wiping out red-legged frog habitat but said not to worry; there’s plenty more elsewhere in the park. At the time, the administration boasted that one of the largest populations of red-legged frogs in California is in the National Seashore.

A much greater threat to red-legged frogs than non-native deer are non-native bullfrogs, which eat adults and tadpoles. Scientists have noted that much of the park’s red-legged frog population has been displaced by bullfrogs, which are found in ponds throughout the park. Hundreds of bullfrogs can be found in some Olema Valley ponds.

A brown fallow buck displays his moose-like antlers.

So why isn’t the park setting its sights on bullfrogs rather than pretending that the threat to red-legged frogs is fallow and axis deer? Because what the Neubacher administration really wants to protect is itself. What the park passes off as science is in actuality a political calculation: “Catch hell now and get it over with.”

Neubacher became superintendent after a citizens advisory commission appointed by the Secretary of the Interior held hearings in which the public and scientists from across the county determined the optimum size of the herds. Their conclusion? Approximately 350 deer apiece. What followed, however, were periodic public outcries over methods used in culling the herds.

It periodically seemed the park just couldn’t do it right:

In the 1980s and early 1990s, rangers claimed 90 percent of the deer they killed were going to St. Anthony’s Dining Room to feed the poor. In 1992, however, when The Point Reyes Light invoked the Freedom of Information Act to check the park’s culling records for the previous eight months, it turned out that only 29 percent of the deer shot had been ending up at the soup kitchen. Deer slain where rangers would have had to lug them a ways to reach a vehicle were left where they dropped.

The National Seashore earlier this year said it will donate the slain fallow and axis deer to the Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa and the St. Vincent de Paul Society in San Rafael. It now says the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in the Central Valley will get some of the meat to feed condors. The park would like the public to think that all the meat will go to these organizations. Past experience suggests otherwise.

During culling in 1992, some rangers merely herded the deer into low brush, shot willy-nilly at them, made no attempt to finish off wounded animals, and left them all to rot. Unfortunately, deer with a gut wound can take several painful days to die. When then-Supt. John Sansing found out what was going on, he acknowledged the rangers were in the wrong and demanded the culling be done in a humane fashion. The culling then continued through 1994, after which Supt. Neubacher stopped it, and the herds began growing.

A white fallow doe, whose ancestors lived in the Near East, and a spotted axis doe, whose ancestors came from India and what is now Sri Lanka. Rancher Doc Ottinger in the late 1940s acquired the original members of their herds from the San Francisco Zoo, which had a surplus, and brought them to Point Reyes for hunting.

So what is really going on? Despite Congress’ intent when it voted to create the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Neubacher administration is in the process of creating a Disneyland-like facade of wilderness. In the process, much of the cultural history of West Marin is being obliterated.

The narrow-gauge-railroad town of Hamlet has been razed, the pioneer town of Jewell has been wiped out, historic barns have been torn down in the Olema Valley, attempts are underway to end 150 years of oyster growing in Drakes Estero, and the 65-year-resident herds of fallow and axis deer are threatened with extermination. All this reminds one of Taliban zealots in 2001 blasting apart two 6th-century Buddha statues carved into a cliff. The Taliban considered the the 125- and 174-foot-high sculptures non-Islamic and, therefore, out of place in Afghanistan.

From the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago until the National Seashore was created, elk and, since the Gold Rush, cows kept Point Reyes in grassland. However, the park has eliminated grazing on hundreds of acres, which have now become brushed over with coastal chaparral. As this happens, rare plants that can only live in grassland are endangered. Grassland rodents disappear, thus reducing a key food source for eagles, hawks, and owls that had hunted the fields.

The environmental damage to the grassland ecosystems of former pastures seems to matter less to the park administration than making the landscape look wild. However, this artificial wilderness bears no resemblance to what Point Reyes had been like since the Pleistocene Epoch.

The Neubacher administration would appear to imagine that the tule elk, which the park reintroduced to Point Reyes in 1978 after a 110-year absence, will eventually become numerous enough to replace cows on the point. But it’s all Fantasyland. If elk numbers ever got that high again, the park would need to reintroduce 15,000 Miwoks, as used to live in the area, to cull the herd through eating a lot of venison. In contrast, the herds of cows the elk would displace can be, and are being, efficiently culled by the ranchers who own them.

It’s time that more members of Congress than just Woolsey and Feinstein pay attention to the park administration’s repeatedly thwarting the will of both Congress and most of the public. So far, the Neubacher administration is shrugging off Congresswoman Woolsey’s letter opposing its plan to eliminate the fallow and axis herds. The time to act is now. Professional riflemen have already begun shooting deer. Readers need to email Woolsey via http://woolsey.house.gov/contactemailform.asp and request she organize more support in Congress for these exotic creatures.

Threatened with extinction in the Point Reyes National Seashore, black and white versions of fallow deer browse in the park’s underbrush. Generations of the deer, whose ancestors came from in the Near East, had lived on Point Reyes before the National Seashore opened in 1965. The National Seashore now wants to eliminate them as non-native newcomers. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

The administration of Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher is beginning to feel the heat from members of Congress.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey and US Senator Dianne Feinstein have now joined West Marin residents, the agricultural community, and animal-rights groups in questioning the park administration’s justifications for two drastic plans: closing Drakes Bay Oysters and eliminating the park’s 60-year-resident herds of fallow and axis deer.

At the request of county supervisors, a concerned Senator Feinstein on July 21 convened a meeting to discuss the National Seashore administration’s plans to close Drake’s Bay Oysters. The company is owned by Kevin Lunny, who also raises grass-fed beef within the park, and he was on hand along with top National Park Service officials, state officials, Supervisor Steve Kinsey, and others.

Kevin Lunny shows baby oysters that will be raised in Drakes Estero. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Senator Feinstein, who also toured Drakes Bay Oysters, at times had her hackles up. She knew Professor Corey Goodman had revealed to the Board of Supervisors that the park administration had misrepresented data in justifying its plan to close the oyster farm. Dr. Goodman, a professor of microbiology at UC Berkeley whose expertise in analyzing data is widely recognized, previously reviewed research as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The upshot of Feinstein’s meeting in the Olema Inn is that Lunny can now get the permits he needs to upgrade the oyster farm he bought from the Johnson family. Still to be decided, however, is the fate of the mariculture operation after 2012 when its current lease expires.

Also familiar with Dr. Goodman’s revelations regarding the park’s misrepresenting research data is Congresswoman Woolsey’s office, as spokesman Chris Shields confirmed for me last week. The congresswoman on May 30 discussed axis and fallow deer with a coalition that included the Marin Humane Society, In Defense of Animals, Marin Wildcare, and local residents. She subsequently wrote Neubacher on July 17, disputing his claim that there is an immediate need to eliminate fallow and axis deer in the park.

“There is no urgency to move forward,” Congresswoman Woolsey wrote. “Park research fails to show any ecosystems collapsing or any native animal populations currently declining because of the exotic deer’s presence in the park.”

Not all “white deer,” as they are often called, are white. Fallow deer can be white, brown, spotted, and black. The spotted deer seen here, however, are axis deer while the black critter is angus beef on the hoof. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Unfortunately, as Dr. Goodman complained to Marin County supervisors, the press too often has uncritically spread the National Seashore’s inaccurate claims about the oyster company. The same could be said of inaccurate claims about the deer herds.

One claim is that the fallow and axis herds are growing out of control. Two years ago, the park administration told the public the fallow herd was doubling every 6.5 years. A week ago, The Independent Journal quoted the park as now claiming the herd is doubling in four years. The claim, of course, is malarkey, as anyone who regularly drives through the Olema Valley knows.

Accepting for the moment the Neubacher administration’s estimate, there are now 900 fallow deer in the National Seashore, give or take 50 or so. If the herd were really doubling every four years, there would have been only 125 fallow deer in the park when Neubacher became superintendent 12 years ago and stopped the culling. In fact, his predecessor, Supt. John Sansing, had been following a policy of maintaining the fallow and axis herds at roughly 350 deer apiece through culling.

Nor did the axis herd ever recover from that culling. The park says it now numbers only 250 deer. Yet the Neubacher administration also claims the axis herd doubles every 3.5 years. If that were true, there would have been only 16 axis deer left in the park when Neubacher stopped the culling.

The fallow herd is growing, and its size should ultimately be limited, but the rate of growth is hardly out of hand. As Congresswoman Woolsey notes, there is time to find alternatives to eliminating the herds.

Gentle and curious, fallow deer are easily domesticated. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Consider the National Seashore’s claim that the fallow deer are now out-competing native blacktail deer for grass and brush. As most residents will confirm, there are more blacktail deer in West Marin now than at any other time in recent memory.

Why? One reason is that homes have been built up to the edges of the park, creating the sort of non-urban, residential development where blacktails thrive. Studies in the Bay Area have found suburban blacktail deer often live more than twice as long as those in the wild, with does doing fine in territories as small as three or four square blocks.

The park also claims the growth of the fallow herd is forcing it to expand eastward. Wait a minute! The park itself is expanding eastward. The Truttman Ranch, the Beebe Ranch, and the Lupton Ranch, all on the eastern slope of the Olema Valley, have been taken out of agriculture since being acquired by the park. All the residents of Jewell on the eastern edge of the Neubacher administration’s jurisdiction (which includes pieces of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) have been evicted.

By steadily reducing human activity at the eastern edge of the fallow deer’s long-time range, the park through the years has been unintentionally encouraging the fallow deer to occasionally wander eastward.

So what is really behind the National Seashore administration’s eagerness to eliminate the park’s fallow and axis deer? Protecting blacktail deer, red-legged frogs, or the administration itself? That will be the topic of next week’s posting.

Two ravens have begun defending my pasture, often sitting atop pine trees and croaking out loud “cr-r-ruck” warnings. Whenever I wander down my driveway, they circle low overhead, creating quite a din. The easiest way to distinguish ravens from crows, by the way, is by their tails. Raven tails are tapered like the bottom of a man’s tie while the ends of crow tails are squared off. In this photo, a downward flap of the wings leaves a ghost image above them.

A blacktail fawn nibbles on a blackberry vine outside my kitchen window.

Whether one finds entertainment in music, wildlife, or the cosmos, Marin County can be a pretty good place to live. The wildlife alone is more entertaining than television, and enjoying it merely requires keeping your eyes and ears open. In West Marin where light pollution is minimal, the cosmos is on display every night that isn’t foggy. And as for Marin’s music scene, the venues may be small, but the performers are typically top notch.

Moonrise at the Station House Café. The arms of light extending to the right and left are part of a small cloud in front of the moon. In the foreground, a woman in the shadows reads a map by the light of the café sign as a car drives by.

Meanwhile inside the Station House, Si Perkoff on piano, Daniel Fabricant on standup bass, and Dale Polissar on clarinet perform a dazzling set of melodic jazz.

Last Friday a friend and I attended an impressive performance of Hawaiian slack-key-guitar music at the Dance Palace, and on Saturday another friend and I went to the venerable No Name Bar in Sausalito to listen to jazz. The No Name is virtually the last establishment around here surviving from the Beat Era, and the music we called “modern jazz” in the 1950s and 60s can still be heard in the bar every Friday and Saturday night.

Shortly after we found a table, three couples showed up and took a pair of tables next to us. One nut-brown-complected woman in the group was speaking French, and before long she stood up and began dancing all by herself. Now it’s not unusual for a couple or two to dance in the narrow straits between the No Name’s bandstand and bar, but in my years of going to the place, I had never before seen a dancer quite like this one.

The woman must have been a French stripper, for she started doing bumps and grinds in front of the band, giggling all the while. Her dance routine included flirting with men at the bar and periodically raising her a leg over her head as if she were flashing. (In fact, she was wearing long pants.) At other times, she passionately kissed her rakishly coifed husband, and in general kept both men and women in the bar wondering what she would do next.

When the band at her request played a bossa nova number, she and a tall blonde from her group started to dance only to have a somewhat tipsy guy, who’d been on a stool at the bar, cut in and start dancing with her. The blonde then convinced a more-than-hefty black woman from another table to dance with her. Rhythmically swaying to the beat, the third woman’s grace was as impressive as her size. The French woman meanwhile danced holding the tipsy man’s hands on her butt or alternately holding her own arms around his neck; her husband just laughed.

When the three couples finally left the bar, the waitress quipped: “Show’s over.” My friend and I chuckled, but the tipsy guy on his stool at the bar looked forlorn.

The rest of the world may going to hell in a handbasket, I thought to myself, but here in Marin County, folks are still finding ways to have fun.

More entertainment: With a droplet of water still on its chin, a roof rat prepares to climb down a lattice after taking a drink from the birdbath on my deck. In the late 1340s, roof rats’ fleas spread bubonic plague throughout Europe, but the main danger from the timid, little roof rats now in West Marin is to dishwashers. Please see Posting No. 13 for that story.

A blacktail doe and her two fawns in my field.

Fawns at play bound across my field.

Now that Independence Day is over, let’s take a moment to reflect on what it was really all about. Footraces in Inverness? Parades in Woodacre and Bolinas? A tug of war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach? Illegal fireworks on Stinson Beach? I myself spent much of the holiday enjoying nature.

The odd thing about the Fourth of July is what it doesn’t represent. For example, did the 13 colonies begin their fight for independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776? No, the “shot heard ’round the world,” at the opening battle of the Revolutionary War, had already been fired on April 19, 1775, in Concord, Massachusetts. Paul Revere had made his famous ride the previous night. On April 23, 1775, King George III had declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. The colonists had seized Fort Ticonderoga from the British on May 11, 1775, and on June 16, 1775, had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In short, the American Revolution had been underway for a year when on June 7, 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies, meeting in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress, began debating whether to declare independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. On July 2, all the colonies except New York (which abstained) voted to approve a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

On July 4, 1776, members of the Continental Congress (with New York as usual abstaining) voted to approve a final draft of the Declaration of Independence, but only John Hancock, president of the Congress, signed it before it was sent to a printer.

The document we know as the Declaration of Independence was signed by all members of the Continental Congress, including New York, on Aug. 2, 1776, and backdated to July 4. Perhaps one reason we don’t celebrate Independence Day on Aug. 2 is that those who signed the document on Aug. 2 did so in secret to avoid British reprisals. I personally would have thought that keeping the public in the dark negated the purpose of a “Declaration of Independence.”

In any case, all this was so convoluted that future President John Adams mistakenly wrote his wife after the first vote: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Likewise in the dark and fighting for survival: this dauntless vine of ivy has worked its way through a narrow gap in the wall into my basement, where it is now growing up through a cabinet in my workshop. Because there are no windows in the workshop, the vine gets light only when the basement door is briefly open, as it is here, or when the sun is in a position where there may occasionally be a crack of dim light around the door. The photo demonstrates the valiant persistence of ivy, but it also reveals why many homeowners don’t want it growing on the outside walls.

In contrast to the controversy raging in town and in the press this week over the sorry state of The Point Reyes Light under its new publisher, life has remained fairly bucolic at my cabin.

In preparation for the fire season, tractor operator Gary Titus from Tomales on Saturday mowed my pasture and that of my neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman.

Homes uphill from fields of dry grass are particularly vulnerable to wildfires, county firefighters remind West Marin residents each summer.

Titus, who mows our pastures annually, told me that ours, like other fields he’s mowed this year, were faster to cut than usual even though the grass was higher. It apparently has to do with which types of grass grow best as the timing and amount of rainfall vary.

The mowing provides quite a show, for crows continually fly in circles around the tractor looking for insects, snakes, and other small creatures killed, or at least stirred up, by the mowing. It is not uncommon for West Marin’s ubiquitous gopher snakes to get chopped up by mowers, but Titus was happy to report that this year he hasn’t killed a single snake.

Most of the wildlife around my cabin have, of course, not been affected by the mowing.

Possums at night still climb lattice to drink from the birdbath on my railing.

And the raccoon that my stepdaughter Anika photographed last month peering in my dining-room window is back at it. Standing on my firewood box outside, the raccoon (which appears earlier on this blog) initially seemed to be merely checking on what those of us inside were doing.

This week when I spotted her again, however, the raccoon had more on her mind. On my window ledge is a ceramic candlestick with the lifelike shape of a small bird. The raccoon obviously wanted to grab it, but there was a pane of glass in the way.

In contrast to the rural tranquility around my cabin, protesters in Point Reyes Station milled around in front of The Point Reyes Light Monday morning. Some were upset by the paper’s sensationalism, which which under publisher Robert Plotkin has been heavy on gratuitous gore. Others complained that the newspaper no longer provides West Marin with the coverage it needs. “It’s lost connection to the community,” protest organizer Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness told the press.

The demonstration, which got advance coverage in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle and by the Associated Press, was covered live on Monday by Sonoma County public radio and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

In a lengthy article by Paul Payne, The Press Democrat quoted Plotkin as calling the demonstration a “march to mediocrity, a protest against excellence. I bought the newspaper to make something extraordinary.”

Payne also interviewed Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, who plans to launch a competing weekly newspaper in West Marin on July 5.

Hack told The Press Democrat and The Chronicle that his newspaper would cover school board and other public meetings (as The Light did before Plotkin bought it in November 2005). He also promised to also cover the special accomplishments of everyday residents, such as “aunt Mabel’s prize-winning raspberry jam.”

The new paper has been temporarily dubbed The West Marin Pilot until readers chose a final name, and Hack last week told The Chronicle that scores of people have begun subscribing before the paper even exists or has a definite name. He has also reported significant success in lining up advertisers.

Editing the new newspaper will be former Light editor Jim Kravets. In Saturday’s Chronicle, Kravets is quoted as saying, “It’s a journalist’s dream to work in a community where people don’t just pick up the paper out of rote, but run to it.”

Kravets has called for a community meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, June 18, in the Dance Palace, to tell editors and staff of the West Marin community newspaper what they want and don’t want in their newspaper. He described the meeting as a chance for West Marin residents to ensure the “paper is not merely relevant but essential for the enlightened practice of West Marin citizenship.”

Notwithstanding the protest and a new competitor, The Light itself got some good news this week.

Missy Patterson, who runs the paper’s front office, has changed her mind and will not work for the new newspaper, Hack reported. He said Patterson did not explain her reasons in detail, mentioning only that she was uncomfortable with her earlier decision to jump ship.

And on Wednesday, The Independent Journal reported that former Light bookkeeper LaShanda Goldstein has pled guilty to embezzling $62,000 from the weekly.

Goldstein, 29, of Santa Rosa remains in Marin County Jail in lieu of $62,000 bail, The Independent Journal added.

On Monday, she pled guilty to “one count of embezzlement with an enhancement for stealing more than $50,000,” the paper reported. She could face a maximum sentence of four years in state prison, but Deputy District Attorney Rosemary Slote said Goldstein may be sentenced to probation because she has no prior record.