Unfortunately, my posting is a bit late this week. Three afternoons visiting physicians, five and a half hours on Sunday in Kaiser Hospital’s Emergency Room, and an MRI scan on Monday put me behind in my schedule.

The medical consensus is that a couple of weeks ago I was hit with “temporal arteritis,” which is a big headache, believe me. Left untreated it can lead to blindness. Temporal arteritis amounts to inflammation of an artery that goes through the temples (hence the name “temporal”) and feeds blood to the eyes. The problem is common enough that rheumatologists have developed a standard treatment using the steroid Prednisone. The cause of temporal arteritis is unknown, but it mostly hits us older folks.

With me just out of sick bay, my neighbor Jay Haas has graciously stepped up to help with this week’s posting. Jay shot all the photos and tells much of the story.

Like Lynn and I, he and his wife Didi Thompson, get a fair amount of wildlife around their front door: bobcats, foxes, all manner of birds, and much more. In fact, we probably share many of the same animals.

The number of bobcats showing up around Point Reyes Station homes has increased in recent years. Some townspeople believe that the pastures of the Giacomini ranch had been the prime hunting grounds for a local bobcat population, but those cats were forced out when the Park Service bought the land and in 2007 flooded it.

A bobcat walking past Jay’s and Didi’s home. I suspect this is the same individual that for a few days roamed my fields next door.

White robin

The first robin of spring in the yard of Jay and Didi five years ago was an albino. “For some reason, albinism and partial albinism have been recorded in robins more than any other wild bird species,” this blog at the time quoted the the American Robin website as reporting.

One study found that 8.22 percent of all albino wild birds found in North America were robins. But only about one robin in 30,000 is an albino or partial albino. Most records of robins with albinism are only partial albinos, which of course live longer than total albinos.

As the American Robin explains, totally albino birds have no pigment in their irises and retinas to protect their eyes from sunlight, and many eventually go blind.

Providing a more-recent springtime show was a family of gray foxes that began appearing around the deck where Jay and his friends have been known to share a drink at the end of the day.

“The vixen and her kits, already fairly large, showed up one night under ‘The Gin Deck’ in late May 2012,” Jay wrote on Friday. “The kits would get fairly close to me on the deck,” he added, his toes bearing evidence of the fact.

Fox in the tomato bed.

“Mom would stand farther away and scowl at me.”

“The kits clearly had fleas, as they were scratching all the time.”

“One interesting observation was that when mom brought prey home, [such as] a bunny, the kits would fight over it. Then one would take it away and fight off its siblings, eating it all.

“After a few weeks, I had some friends visiting, and we were all out on the deck for quite some time. There goes the neighborhood. This was too much for mom; the next morning they were gone. Just as well; I was tired of cleaning up all the poop.”

The old dichotomy of “nature v. nurture” may be a false one. As a couple of photos shot at Mitchell cabin last week demonstrate, nature also nurtures its own.

These photos are hardly remarkable in and of themselves, but they record what a remarkable variety of nature is just outside my window.

The sunset on July 14 gave the western sky the dazzle of a technicolor movie.

Even more dazzling was this simultaneous rainbow in the eastern sky. Numerous people around Point Reyes Station saw it, and several posted photos of the rainbow on West Marin Feed-Facebook.

After relentless begging with its beak open and its wings fluttering, a juvenile blackbird finally gets a parent to feed it birdseed even though it’s perfectly capable of feeding itself.

Last week Lynn spotted a fox on our picnic table peering in our living room between the slats of a chair. Its presence kept the blackbird at left on the railing and off the table.

The Gray fox was on the table to eat seed Lynn had scattered for the birds.

Staying well away from the fox, a jackrabbit eats grass just outside our kitchen window.

A doe and her fawns can be seen around Mitchell cabin virtually every day.

One of the sweetest-looking little animals around, a blacktail fawn walks past our bedroom window.

Fawns seem to be often on the run. At their age, it would appear, they enjoy being able to dash from here to there.

A young blacktail buck grazes by itself in the field below our deck.

A cross between a House sparrow and a Great horned owl?

Lynn and I correctly guessed the bird is actually a young House finch, but we had no explanation for its “horns,” so we dropped by the Point Reyes Station office of the Institute for Bird Populations.

Dave DeSante, the institute’s president and founder, was in the office, and we asked him what was going on with this bird. After pondering the bird’s unlikely appearance, he concluded the horns are actually pin feathers that somehow got ruffled on opposite sides of the finch’s head.

An adult, male House finch eats birdseed next to our birdbath. As I noted here back in May, their coloration is derived from the fruits and berries in their diets. Adult female house finches tend to be light brown with white streaks.

Nor is all peaceful around Mitchell cabin. A redtailed hawk, believe it was this one, killed a collared dove on our deck last week. We heard the impact when it swooped down and seized the dove, leaving behind a mass of white feathers as evidence of nature’s savagery.

A raccoon, which had been showing up each evening on our deck begging for scraps of bread, showed up this past week with three kits in tow. No wonder she’d been looking so tired of recent.

Here the raccoons scour the grass around the deck for slices of bread Lynn threw there to keep them away from another, feisty raccoon on the deck.

And while the kits are perfectly able to eat bread, they still try to get mom to nurse them. They sort of remind me of juvenile blackbirds that want to be nurtured.

“Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking.” Goethe

While in the Seahaven neighborhood of Inverness a week ago, Lynn and I happened to park under one of the everyday world’s oddities. I was once again intrigued by the sawed-off section of a tree limb that years ago had grown around the guy wire to a utility pole.

A closeup reveals how thoroughly the cable became embedded in what remains of a long-gone branch of a long-gone tree.

Nor is there only one overhead reminder of arboreal history. Further down Drake Way on the other side of the utility pole, another limb had grown around a pole-to-pole cable. The tree may be gone, but this relic of a limb remains.

A log in a tree? Now that’s a real widow-maker, I said to myself last week when I spotted it teetering 10 feet off the ground in a crotch of a pine tree. The pine grows at the entrance to neighbors Skip and Renée Shannon’s driveway.

However, when I walked around the tree to get a better look, the optical illusion became apparent.

A Western gray squirrel soaks up the morning sun beside my birdbath. I see squirrels around Mitchell cabin fairly often, but it’s hard to photograph one. The moment they’re aware I’m around, they dart out of sight. Last week I got lucky. The squirrel didn’t see me.

There’s always evidence that squirrels are around. They leave the ground underneath my pine trees littered with well-gnawed pine cones and the green tips of limbs. Squirrels like to feed on pine trees’ cambium layer, which is immediately under the bark. The bark that’s softest and easiest to gnaw through is at the narrow ends of growing limbs, resulting in squirrels forever gnawing off the ends.

“Well, we brought reinforcements too, so you can warn your king we’re going to keep advancing a pace at a time and over two until none of his knights is left standing.” (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

California quail

A mother quail marched across the yard a week ago as a dozen chicks ran to keep up. Males and females both have crests. The males’ is black, the females’ brown. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

When a noise in the bushes caused momma to suddenly stop, the nervous chicks collided in a quailing pileup. But there was no danger, and soon all of them were off and running again. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

A purposeful doe and her small fawn hurry past the bedroom window.

“We live in an old chaos of the sun,/ Or old dependency of day and night,/ Or island solitude, unsponsored, free/ Of that wide water, inescapable./ Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries.”  Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

White House Pool, which is maintained by the County of Marin, is my favorite park in West Marin. The park, which is midway between Point Reyes Station and Inverness Park, includes a few picnic tables and open areas, but mostly it consists of a beautiful trail along Papermill Creek. The “pool” is basically a wide bend in the creek.

Point Reyes Station and Black Mountain as seen from White House Pool.

Here’s its story. A “fast-talking” developer named Isaac Freeman “began hawking lots in 1909” in a tract that was to become Inverness Park, to quote the late historian Jack Mason. “White House Pool, just south of the Park, was a watering place where Freeman had bathhouses, water tank, windmill, and tract office.”

The path through the park has become popular with dog walkers, most of whom responsibly bag their pooches’ poop.

The name “White House” has nothing to do with the US capital. Rather it refers to a white building that at different times played significant roles in the area’s history. It was “one of the oldest houses on Point Reyes,” Mason wrote in Earthquake Bay. “Edward I. Butler [1874-1961] lived in it as a boy before going on to a career on the bench and in politics.”

Butler would become the San Rafael city attorney; would serve two terms in the California Assembly; would go on to be elected Marin County district attorney; was appointed and then repeatedly reelected to the Marin Superior Court bench, serving 31 years. All this according to the County of Marin website.

One of the county’s greatest challenges in maintaining the park is controlling its abundant poison oak. Pacific poison oak is naturally rampant throughout West Marin, and unfortunately most humans have allergic reactions to touching its oil and to inhaling its smoke during fires. Common reactions are rashes, blisters, and intense itching.

“World War II gave the [white] house new importance as an Army communications center. Telephone Company employee Earl Hall, who rented it, took calls incoming from the Pacific Theater on his telephone, one of the few around,” Mason wrote. “His wife Avis recalls messages from the big White House coming through her little one!

“A soldier with fixed bayonet stood outside searching cars for possible Japanese infiltrators.”

The pedestrian bridge near the White House Pool parking lot at times is so overgrown with poison oak that it takes care not to brush against it.

After the war, the building evolved into a lightly used fishing cabin. “When the white house… fell into disrepair, owners William and Lloyd Gadner, reacting to a county order they either bring it up to ‘code’ or demolish it, chose the latter,” Mason wrote. “I have rueful memories of that 1969 morning, holding off Walter Kantala’s bulldozer while I hurried home for a camera.”

Among the delights of the White House Pool trail are a series of side-paths through more poison oak mixed in with other foliage. (You can avoid the bad stuff if you’re at all careful, and it’s worth the effort.) These paths lead to clearings on the creek bank where a walker can rest on a bench while enjoying views of the foot of Tomales Bay.

For those wanting to keep further away from any poison oak, there are also a few benches in open areas.

As Lynn observes, Marin County Parks and Open Space Department periodically cuts back the poison oak that protrudes through the railing of the White House Pool footbridge. A member of the department staff on Monday told us the frequency of cutting depends on what staff observe and what the public reports to the county.

On Monday, however, the staffer’s main concern was not poison oak but a vandal who over the weekend managed to drive around the barricades at the edge of the parking lot in order to “spin donuts” in dry grass. I doubt the jerk will ever be identified, but if he is, he ought to be sentenced to clearing poison oak at White House Pool.

Lynn looked out the kitchen window Thursday morning in time to see a doe and two fawns grazing only a few feet away. Immediately, I grabbed my camera.

The spots suggest the fawns are only about a month old.

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 “der,” 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 ‘o Bedlam (disguised as Edgar) laments, “Mice and rats, and such small deer,/ Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”

To our surprise, the fawns soon trotted under Mitchell cabin’s deck but before long emerged from the far side.

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,” Bruce Morris writes in Bay Nature.

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 Southern California about 1.5 million years ago.

In moving up the coast, whitetails evolved into blacktails, which resemble them in appearance and temperament.

The fawns soon followed their mother (note hoof at left) away from the cabin.

The blacktails eventually spread inland, 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.

DNA tests have determined that mule deer, which are found from the Northwest to the deserts of the Southwest and as far east as the Dakotas, are a hybrid of whitetail does and blacktail bucks, author Valerius Geist writes in Mule Deer Country.

The doe crossed our parking area keeping an eye out for any threat to her fawns.

Columbian blacktail deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) are the subspecies of blacktails native to West Marin and the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area. The California Department of Fish and Game a few years back estimated there were approximately 560,000 deer in all of California, about 320,000 of which were Columbian blacktails.

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

The fawns walked behind our cars as they followed close behind the doe.

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

More surprising is the number of deer struck by airplanes, an average of one a week nationwide. Or so says Benner’s Gardens, which makes deer-fencing systems.

One last bit of deer trivia: “The male deer is usually called a buck, but the male red deer of Europe is a stag, or when mature a hart, [and] the female is called a hind or doe,” to quote the Encyclopedia Americana.

What many of us on the coast like most about West Marin these days is its mix of land and animals, both wild and domestic. They provide a refuge from the violence, hatred, greed, and misfortune that dominate the news coming in from Kabul to Kiev, from Kenya to Korea.

Horses from Point Reyes Arabians stable graze in a pasture next to mine. Downtown Point Reyes Station can be seen through a gap in the trees at right.

The horses drink from, and in warm weather cool off in, this stockpond and another further downhill. Originally created to provide water for cattle, the ponds these days are watering holes for deer, such as these, and other wildlife, along with the horses.

A young buck grazes alone near Mitchell cabin. Most of the year, I can spot blacktail deer around the cabin virtually every day. Herds of 12 and 14 animals are not uncommon. Deer, as most of us know, will eat flowers, vegetables, and shrubbery if given a chance. At Mitchell cabin, any plants I want to protect from deer are grown in containers on my deck. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

Three cows laze about Carol Horick’s pasture across the canyon on a warm afternoon last week. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

The jackrabbit that has taken to hanging out along my driveway was there every day this past week, usually with a companion. The other rabbit is more skittish, however, and hops away whenever it sees me. As a result, I’ve yet to get a photo of the two of them together.

House finches are year-round residents of West Marin, but they seem more plentiful at this time of year. Their cheerful warbles are as colorful as the males’ feathers. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

Male house finches are usually red, with the intensity depending on the season. Their coloration is derived from the fruits and berries in their diets. Female house finches tend to be light brown with white streaks. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

When it comes to coloration, however, no other bird around Mitchell cabin can match this lone, male peacock, which for three years has been hanging out with a flock of wild turkeys. Peafowl which originated in India were introduced on the US mainland in California back in 1879.

A golden-crowned sparrow looking for birdseed on my deck. People have compared the bird’s song to Three Blind Mice sung in a minor key. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

Although it’s called an Oregon junco, this variation of junco can be found from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, as far north as southern Alaska, and, occasionally, as far east as Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Their song is a sweet trill. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

We’ll close with three house finches in a classical pose on the railing of my deck. Originally native to Mexico and the southern United States, house finches in the 1940s were introduced on the East Coast where they have rapidly spread. Ornithologists estimate there are now between 267 million and 1.7 billion of them in North America. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

For years, this was my view of Mitchell cabin as I drove up my driveway.

The cabin was framed by a large Monterey pine on the right and two others on the left.

It was an ideal setting for a cabin, I’d always thought.

My former wife Cathy and I built the cabin in the winter of 1976-77, and we planted the pines soon after moving in.

_____________________________________________________________

The pines on the west side of the house have long been perches for all manner of birds and have provided refugee for many four-footed creatures, as well.

They’ve also been people-friendly. A year ago they inspired my stepdaughter Shaili (left), who was visiting from Minnesota, to try her hand at climbing.

________________________________________________________________

The only chipmunk I’ve ever seen around Mitchell cabin showed up one summer morning at the base of one of the pines.  _________________________________________________________________

Wild turkeys have become accustomed to using the pines for lookout posts.________________________________________________________________

Here a bashful possum peeks around one of the pines. _________________________________________________________________

And here a coyote prowls underneath the same trees. ________________________________________________________________

Tragically, this stand of pines became doomed. The nearer tree died in the drought, and the further tree had begun to lean precipitously over the cabin. With great reluctance, I called Nick Whitney’s Pacific Slope tree service to cut the pines down and haul away any sad reminders of them. ________________________________________________________________

The pines had become so much a part of my home that I remembered how I felt when I had to take a sick, old dog to the vet to be put down. But there was no avoiding it, and Monday morning, the Pacific Slope crew showed up and got right to work. Here climber Ignacio Franco (left) listens to my lament. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod) ______________________________________________________________

Despite the sadness of the occasion, Lynn and I were fascinated by the almost-gymnastic feats of Ignacio (seen here) and his brother José as they climbed the trees. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

________________________________________________________________

A large limb comes floating down after Ignacio cuts it loose with a chainsaw. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod) ________________________________________________________________

The limbs, pine needles, and cones were ground up in the orange chipper at right and then hauled away.

Here José Luis Franco, better known as Pepe, (in light-colored shirt) feeds the chipper while David Antonio Lopez (in yellow shirt) drags limbs over.

Ignacio, meanwhile, prepares to cut the top off the dead tree. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

_____________________________________________________________

Pepe cuts a large limb off the top of the leaning pine. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

_______________________________________________________________

A man can work up a thirst climbing to the top of a tree and then sawing off heavy limbs, so Pepe took a moment for a drink of water.

Hoisting the bottle from ground level was his brother Ignacio, who used a block and tackle already in place for lowering cut limbs. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

_____________________________________________________________

Ignacio (left) uses a pulley to lower part of a limb that Pepe has cut while David drags off another. The limbs were too close to the house to be simply dropped. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod) ________________________________________________________________

As Pepe descends at the end of the day, these skeletons were all that remained of what had once been a familiar stand of Monterey pines. Tomorrow morning, the Pacific Slope crew will be back, and these too will disappear. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod) _______________________________________________________________

Late-breaking news: Pepe, Ignacio, and David returned Tuesday as scheduled and finished their logging.

Here Pepe appears to be dropping a section of trunk on David’s head, but David is tough, and the impact didn’t faze him. Perhaps because he was actually standing a safe distance away. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod) ________________________________________________________________

Mitchell cabin has survived, but to my eye, its west side now looks starkly naked. For the sake of decency, Lynn and I will soon adorn it with something floral, but for the moment we’re just pining for a couple of old friends.

As I drove down my driveway Sunday afternoon, a jackrabbit was sitting at the edge of the gravel eating grass. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I stopped and waited awhile for it to hop along. When it didn’t, I restarted my car and approached the rabbit slowly. The rabbit hopped away from the driveway 10 feet or so and watched me drive past.

Twenty minutes later when I returned, there were two jackrabbits beside the driveway, so I parked and walked up through a field to the cabin and got my camera. By the time I returned to my car, one rabbit had disappeared, but this one had stuck around.

I got back in my car and again drove toward the rabbit very slowly. Once I got close enough to snap a photo, I stopped, leaned out the car window, and shot several. Then I started slowly driving toward it again.

When I had almost reached the jackrabbit, it hopped behind a coyote bush, and I watched to see it if would continue on across the field. It didn’t. And as I drove past the bush, I spotted the rabbit hunkered down only a few feet from my car. Again I stopped and shot some pictures before driving on.

Unfortunately for the rabbits, this bobcat has taken to hunting around Mitchell cabin. I’ve seen it catch a gopher or two, but so far there’s been no evidence of its catching a jackrabbit.

The bobcat casually walks across Mitchell cabin’s parking area between my car and the barrier we call “Woodhenge.” (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

Birds, of course, are not the only creatures with pecking orders. Here a raccoon at the top of the pecking order grabs a slice of bread off my kitchen floor Sunday night while a subordinate raccoon (barely visible at left) waits its turn.

Once the dominant raccoon has taken a slice, the subordinate raccoon reaches inside for its own bread.

It was raining cats and dogs last week, so when the sky finally cleared, these horses in a pasture next to Mitchell cabin lay down for a sunbath. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

As for the origin of the phrase “raining cats and dogs,” it’s nothing like the malarkey that has been circulating on the Internet for the past 15 years. Repeatedly forwarded emails claim the phrase dates back to the thatch roofs on the huts of medieval peasants. The thick straw supposedly was the only place for little animals to get warm, so all the pets, dogs, cats and other small animals, lived in the roof. When it rained, the roof would become slippery and the animals would sometimes slip off. This is said to account for the saying, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

The phrase does indeed date to the Middle Ages, the venerable Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins agrees, but only because of the superstition of an era when people believed in witches, ghosts and goblins. “The cat was thought by sailors to have a lot to do with storms, and the witches that were believed to ride in the storms were often pictured as black cats,” the dictionary explains.

“Dogs and wolves were symbols of the winds, and the Norse storm god Odin was frequently shown surrounded by dogs and wolves. So when a particularly violent rainstorm came along, people would say it was ‘raining cats and dogs’ — with cats symbolizing the rain and the dogs representing the wind and storm.”

In light of that, I’d say West Marin could use a few more cats this spring, but no more dogs.

“With joy I sing the miracle of spring/ The promise true of life anew the warm days bring.” Popular lyrics to The Happy Farmer by the German composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Six blacktail deer stay together as a herd as they graze in the fresh, green grass around Mitchell cabin.

Many animals identify other members of their species by smell, not by sight. Unlike dogs, however, deer have the good manners to sniff each others’ front ends when making sure who is a family member.  _______________________________________________________________

The horses in the pasture next to mine at last have green grass to munch on.

They had been hanging out as a group, but with patches of new grass here and there, they now spread out looking for the thickest  clumps.

Their enthusiasm for dining over a wide area makes me think they had gotten tired of eating together at piles of dried alfalfa.

______________________________________________

We’ve had 20 inches of rain in West Marin during the past two months, bringing the total for the season (July 1 to June 30) to 25.5 inches. In a normal year, West Marin would have received 40 inches by now.

Among the creatures appreciating the recent rains is this salamander, which I uncovered when I pulled a handful of pine needles out of a drainage ditch at the bottom of my driveway. Even in the open air, the salamander’s coloring provides amazingly good camouflage from potential predators. _________________________________________________________________

Many ancient Greeks and Romans believed that salamanders are born in fire.

Some salamanders inhabit rotting logs, and when the logs were put in a fire, the salamanders would try to escape, leading people to believe that salamanders were created by the flames.

_________________________________________________________

The hills are alive with the sound of music.

The recent rains have not only turned the hills green again, they’ve brought back our nightly chorus of tree frogs.

The frogs are loudest at two stockponds near Mitchell cabin, but some hop on over to my lower deck to chirp.

This one is on bamboo growing in a wine barrel.

A Pacific tree frog’s color depends on where it is at the moment.

Unlike chameleons, whose colors change to match background colors, tree frogs’ colors change (between brown and green) depending on how dry or moist their surroundings are. _________________________________________________________

Immigrant flora and fauna next to Mitchell cabin.

Daffodils are native to meadows and woods in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia, with a center of distribution in the Western Mediterranean, according to The Cultural History of Plants, a 2005 collection of scientific writings edited by Mark Nesbitt and Sir Ghillean Prance.

Turkeys, meanwhile, are native to North America but not to West Marin. Working with the California Department of Fish & Game, a hunting club in 1988 introduced the local wild turkeys on Loma Alta Ridge, which overlooks the San Geronimo Valley. The original flock of 11 hens and three toms all came from a population that Fish & Game had established in the Napa Valley during the 1950s. ________________________________________________________________

Turkey hunting, however, has dropped off significantly in recent years, and in some parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, wild turkeys are becoming a problem in gardens and on roadways.

Last year one bicyclist died when he crashed in Martinez trying to avoid a flock of the birds, The Contra Costa Times reported.

The year before, a motorcyclist wrecked but survived when a turkey hit him on Interstate 680.

And as I noted here a couple of weeks ago, a wild turkey blacked out the town of Tomales for four hours in 2005 when it flew into power lines over Highway 1 downtown.

Nor was it the first turkey problem in Tomales. They were already considered pests because of their tearing up gardens and aggressively challenging schoolchildren. On one occasion turkeys lunged at two youngsters on scooters, and although neither was harmed, both were forced to abandon their vehicles and flee on foot.

A Point Reyes Light article on the blackout (which, of course, is quoted in our new book, The Light on the Coast) reported: “Tomales residents’ efforts to get rid of the turkeys have met with little success. The Marin County Humane Society deals only with domestic animals, and Fish and Game refuses to relocate turkeys until an Environmental Impact Report is completed.

“In their desperation, residents even sought out exterminators but could find none willing to take on an assignment involving turkeys.”

When I awoke Sunday morning, skies were overcast. A light rain was falling. Never before had a gloomy day looked so good. Just maybe the present drought won’t be quite as severe as we Californians have been fearing.

Sunday afternoon Lynn and I drove through through the drizzle to Marshall, where there was an opening party for an exhibition of art by Jon Langdon of Point Reyes Station.

Jon Langdon with his Cubist painting “Oops!”

The show is titled Beyond Geometry, and the subjects for all the works displayed are geometric shapes. This painting, in which the fourth cube appears to be falling off the plane, is called “Oops!”

Notwithstanding the rain and its being Super Bowl Sunday, Art by the Bay Weekend Gallery was packed for Jon’s opening, and a number of people who showed up were other artists. I immediately spotted Russell Chatham, Martha Borge, Toni Littlejohn, Chuck Eckart… I’m sure there were others whom I lost track of in all the coming and going.

Jon was a well-known contractor in West Marin for many years, and in January he gave another artist, Christine DeCamp, an interview in which he explained why he took up painting eight years ago. (The interview can be heard by clicking here.)

“I was recently divorced, and I had retired,” Langdon told Christine and then added with a laugh, “I thought, ‘I got to do something to keep myself out of the bars.’ I had done a little bit of art throughout my life. My dad was an artist, so I feel I have sort of a genetic background… It all just fell together.”

The exhibition at Art by the Bay Weekend Gallery will continue through March 30. The gallery is located at 18856 Highway 1, across the road from Tony’s Seafood.

Saturday morning brought its own special news. When I looked down into the field below my deck, I saw mounds of freshly dug dirt.

My fields are pocked with gopher holes, but I quickly realized I wasn’t looking at gopher mounds.

If that’s all they were, I reasoned, I wouldn’t notice them at that distance.

“There may be some new badger holes in our field,” I called to Lynn and went down to take a look.

Badger holes in the field below Mitchell cabin.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what I found. Five large badger holes, each about a foot in diameter. The only creature I’ve seen around here that digs a hole that big is a badger, and I haven’t seen many of them, just their setts, as badger burrows are called.

In the classic children’s story The Wind and the Willows written by Kenneth Grahame in 1908, when Ratty (a water vole) and Mole get lost in an English forest during a snowfall, Mr. Badger shelters and feeds them in his spacious sett with its long and wondrous chambers.

There’s no mistaking the entrance to a gopher hole for an entrance to a badger’s hole.

Unlike storybook badgers in Edwardian England, Point Reyes Station’s badgers eat moles and voles. Badgers are remarkably efficient diggers thanks to long claws and short, strong legs. They generally hunt by digging fast enough to pursue rodents into their burrows. It is not uncommon for badgers to take over the burrows of prey they’ve eaten.

A mother badger (known as a “sow”) and her cub (sometimes called a “kit”) sunning themselves on the mound of dirt around their sett near Mitchell cabin five years ago.

Two “Gypsy cob” horses. Their owner, Kim Daniels of Point Reyes Station (in green jacket at left), says cobs originated in the British Isles and Europe where they were once used to pull wagons.

Although bystanders were surprised, everyone agreed it was perfectly appropriate for these two long-haired horses to show up at the main street door of Point Reyes Station’s saddlery, Cabaline, on Jan. 15.

Even the name of the day was a bit of a surprise, at least to me. As it happened, the Full Wolf Moon occurred on Jan. 15. That’s what some people call it, The Old Farmer’s Almanac says. That name for January’s full moon originated with Native Americans in the northeast, according to the almanac. Apparently wolves howled in hunger outside Indian villages during the full moon of mid-winter.

I’m going to remember that for next year when the Full Wolf Moon occurs on Jan. 5. Ahoooo!