A guineafowl surprised motorists and pedestrians late Sunday afternoon by wandering around the south end of Point Reyes Station’s main street. When I first spotted the Helmeted guineafowl, it was pecking on the sidewalk and in the grass between the Coastal Marin Real Estate and West Marin Medical Center buildings.

The bird subsequently stopped traffic by standing on the main street for a while. It later paused to reconnoiter while in the middle of the intersection in front of Whale of a Deli. Intrigued by the non-native species, Highway 1 motorists patiently waited until the guineafowl decided which way to go next. One merchant tried to herd it (flock it?) off the roadway but was only temporarily successful.

Guineafowl “eat lice, worms, ants, spiders, weeds, ticks etc.,” Wikipedia notes, so having one roaming around town was probably all to the good.

The partridge-like bird is native to Africa, so I contacted Jack Long, who raises exotic fowl at Creekside Birds along the levee road not far away. From my photo, Jack was able to confirm the bird is indeed a guineafowl but said it does not belong to him. Jack noted I was the second person to ask whether it was his bird but added that he’d stopped raising guineafowl long ago because they’re so noisy (his birdcages are next to his house). Jack told me he doesn’t know of anyone in town now raising guineafowl.

Update as of Tuesday: Neighbor George Stamoulis told me yesterday that he’d just seen a guineafowl at Millerton Point. Neighbor Skip Shannon, a hunter and field-trial competitor, added that hunters sometimes use guineafowl in training their dogs although he doesn’t. And biologist Russell Ridge of Inverness Ridge (“no relation”) told me that anyone who hunts guineafowl better like dark meat.

The moon was full Saturday night, and in the Giacomini family’s pasture next to my cabin, a coyote howled off and on from 12:30 to 3:30 a.m. Sometimes I could hear a second coyote answering from the Point Reyes Station Mesa.

During the past five winters, I’ve seen a coyote in my backyard stalking fawns, which bounded away while the coyote was squeezing under a barbed-wire fence; I’ve seen a coyote on Highway 1 downhill from the cabin; and I’ve found coyote tracks in frost on my steps. I’ve also seen coyotes twice on Limantour Road and once beside Nicasio Reservoir. Twice recently, my houseguest Linda Peterson has seen coyotes along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard near the Mount Vision Overlook turnoff, where she shot this photo. [Update: Since this posting went online, Linda has spotted (and photographed) yet another coyote.] In short, coyotes are again common throughout West Marin.

Coyotes were once so common here that the town of Olema took its name from the Miwok Indian word for coyote. But in the 1940s, sheep ranchers using poisoned bait were able to eliminate coyotes in West Marin and southwestern Sonoma County, and there were none here for 40 years.

In 1972, however, the Nixon Administration banned use of the poison 10-80, primarily because it was non-specific and killed many other animals too. Coyotes, which had never disappeared from northern Sonoma County, then began spreading south. Since they began showing up here again in 1983, they have put more than half the sheep ranches around Marshall, Tomales, Dillon Beach, and Valley Ford out of business.

In West Marin these nights, they can be heard howling as far inland as the San Geronimo Valley, and for listeners who aren’t sheepmen, the high-pitched, barking howls are a beguiling reminder of life on the western frontier.

Frontiersman Davy Crockett (1786-1836) liked to claim his reputation as a hunter preceded him into the forest. As Crockett told the story, he once treed a raccoon that resignedly cried out: “Don’t shoot, Colonel! I’ll come down! I know I’m a gone ‘coon.” This here raccoon was lucky to merely be shot with my camera.

An old friend, Joy Adam, who has been living in Germany for 20 years, dropped by my cabin Saturday night and cooked some spicy dishes from India as a birthday dinner.

Here one of the guests, Gabriela Melano of Nicasio, has a through-the-glass encounter with one of this hill’s roaming raccoons.

On Friday, I had turned 64, and my former wife Ana Carolina in Guatemala had emailed me the lyrics to the Beatles’ song When I’m 64. During Saturday’s birthday dinner, Nina Howard of Inverness, Joy, and Linda used a printout of the lyrics to serenade me with; “When I get older, losing my hair/ Many years from now/ Will you still be sending me a valentine/ Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?/ If I’d been out till quarter to three/ Would you lock the door?/ Will you still need me/ Will you still feed me/ When I’m 64?”

I’d already had a earlier birthday dinner Friday at the Station House Café with my houseguest Linda plus Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park, her partner Terry, her daughter Seeva, and our mutual friend Cheryl Keltner of Point Reyes Station.

Sixty-four didn’t sound that old when all of them sang Happy Birthday to You on Friday, but on Saturday after paying attention to the words to the Beatles’ song, I found myself wondering about my Social Security.

As it happened, I was sitting at my dining-room table when I spotted Ms. Raccoon looking over my shoulder, so I asked her what she thought about someone turning 64. Using my camera, Nina snapped this photo as Ms. Raccoon stuck out her tongue in reply.

He was the noblest rancher of them all. Forced to choose between a Farm Bureau political stand he was publicly advocating or standing up for his wife, who was being insulted in print for publicly taking a different position, Mike Gale last week resigned as president of the rancher organization.

Saying he “reacted as any husband would when his wife is unfairly attacked,” Gale had asked fellow directors of the Farm Bureau to oust the director who publicly insulted his wife; when they declined, he resigned.

After news of his resignation became public, even Mrs. Gale’s acrimonious critic, Farm Bureau board member Judy Borello, was quick to say Mike Gale had been a very good president. He had represented the organization well, had brought in organic producers, and was a congenial person, Borello said. With his wife Sally, Mike Gale (above) grows apples, along with raising beef and poultry, in Chileno Valley.

Borello, who owns the Old Western Saloon in Point Reyes Station and a beef ranch near Millerton Point in Marshall, also writes a column, Moo Town News, for The Coastal Post. In the November issue of the monthly publication, she excoriated Sharon Doughty of Point Reyes Station and Sally Gale for breaking with other ranchers during a Board of Supervisors’ discussion on whether to limit the size of ranchers’ homes.

County government had initially considered 4,000-square-foot limits, and Mike Gale on behalf of the Farm Bureau had opposed limiting the size of homes. The supervisors on Sept. 11 then raised the proposed maximum to 8,500 square feet.

(The saloonkeeper is seen last August during a party in the Western for bartender Helen Skinner.)

However, Doughty’s and Sally Gale’s warning of “McMansions” and “starter castles” replacing genuine ranching in areas zoned for agriculture, gave Supervisor Steve Kinsey the opening he’d been looking for,” Borello wrote.
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Two weeks ago, Kinsey and the other supervisors reversed their Sept. 11 decision, voting instead to reduce the maximum size of houses on our expansive ag lands to 7,000 square feet, “smaller than single houses allowed to be built on tiny lots in many Marin towns,” Borello complained. “Why would these two women have the nerve to come out against their (former) friends and neighbors like this? Because they think it will benefit them financially and at the same time garner favor with the government.” The two will benefit financially, Borello wrote, if they get county government to “hogtie” potential competitors.

(Sally Gale stands in the garden of the once-decrepit, Victorian ranch house that she and her husband restored.)

In a phone interview, Borello added that the Farm Bureau had been trying to speak to county supervisors with a “united” voice, and she felt Mrs. Gale had been “disrespectful” when she advocated limits on home sizes while her husband, as Farm Bureau president, was arguing against them.

In her column, Borello wrote that Doughty and Sally Gale “are harming the rights of their fellow ranchers, which I find totally distasteful and disgusting.” In the interview, however, she said, she was “sorry” that her column ultimately led to Mike Gale’s resignation.

Borello conceded during her interview that from a rancher’s perspective, Sally Gale “has been good on a lot of issues.” She had opposed a county proposal for creating public trails across ranches with no compensation to the rancher, and as a member of the Tomales Bay Watershed Council, she had defended ranchers from environmental regulators who displayed more zeal than knowledge. On the issue of home sizes, however, 90 percent of the Farm Bureau disagreed with Mrs. Gale, Borello wrote in her October column.

While Mike Gale and Borello agree the columnist has the right to express her opinions, Gale has written that Borello’s November column “crossed the line” into a personal attack on his wife.

In the column, Borello also accused Sally Gale of undermining ranchers’ “property rights,” and in his resignation letter to the Farm Bureau board, Gale responded, “Are we focused on looking out for the ranchers of West Marin or are we focused on property rights?”

The Farm Bureau “for years… was a model of progressive thinking and was respected. We… are now viewed as marginalized in terms of influence within the community,” Gale wrote.

Marin County Farm Bureau, he added, “can turn it around, but it will take time and a united effort to get there. [But] for me personally, it is over.”

(Gale is seen last month talking with Veda Radke, communications officer for the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, during his organization’s annual luncheon for Marin County politicos.)

Writing to this blog, Gale commented: “Very few choices in life seem so clear as the choice I had to make over the published attack on my wife Sally by Judy Borello, a member of the Farm Bureau board of directors. In her November column in The Coastal Post, she criticized Sally and fellow rancher Sharon Doughty for urging the Board of Supervisors to lower the house-size limitations in the Countywide Plan.

“As president of the Marin Farm Bureau, I spoke numerous times for removing limits, but Sally is not a board member; nor is she bound by its policies. As a thoughtful and independent thinker, she has a right to speak out anywhere or anytime she so desires, and I support her 100 percent.

“Borello’s written assault clearly crossed the line, and I reacted as any husband would when his wife is unfairly attacked: I looked for support for ousting Judy among the board leadership, but that failed to materialize so I sent in my letter of resignation.”

Replacing Gale as Farm Bureau president will be rancher Dominic Grossi.

Members of the Marin County Farm on Tuesday hosted their annual V.I.P. Luncheon for local officials that work with the agricultural community. The event was held at vineyard owner Hank Corda’s deer camp off San Antonio Road. At left in black shirt and black apron is chef Daniel DeLong.

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Chileno Valley beef and poultry rancher Mike Gale, president of the Farm Bureau, told the guests that the elegant fare they were eating was all produced by Marin County agriculture. Sitting in front of Gale (in white shirt) is county Agricultural Commissioner Stacy Carlson. Also on hand was county Fire Chief Ken Massucco.

Marin County Supervisor Judy Arnold, who represents the Novato area, attended, as did Supervisor Charles McGlashan, who represents Southern Marin. Supervisor Steve Kinsey, who represents West Marin where the bulk of the county’s agricultural is located, did not attend but was represented by aide Liza Crosse. Many Farm Bureau members are unhappy with Supervisor’s Kinsey’s support for parts of a new Countywide Plan that would make provisions for establishing public trails on ranchland and would limit housing for ranch families to 4,000 square feet.

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Attorney Gary Giacomini of Woodacre (in dark glasses and cap), formerly represented West Marin on the Marin County Board of Supervisors. When host Hank Corda spoke to the approximately 50 people present, he praised Giacomini for protecting agriculture throughout his 24 years in office. Behind Giacomini, Marin County Sheriff Bob Doyle listens to a story.

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Vineyard owner Hank Corda (at right) chatting with guests at his deer camp. The Corda family has owned the ranchland where the deer camp is located since 1936, he said.
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Bob Berner, executive director of Marin Agricultural Land Trust (at right), was one of several guests representing nonprofits ranging from the Marin Farmers Market to the Marin Humane Society.

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Margaret Grade and Daniel DeLong (left and right) of Manka’s restaurant catered the V.I.P. Luncheon with help from chef Denis Bold. The fare ran a gourmet gamut from goat-burger appetizers (from Evans goats on Point Reyes) to pork loin (from Bagley-Cunninghame hogs in Tomales) to apple pastry with whipped cream (from Gale apples in Chileno Valley). A storm-caused fire severely damaged Manka’s Inverness Lodge and Restaurant Dec. 27, but Grade said she hopes to reopen next year.

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.

Immediately after Saturday’s Western Weekend livestock show and immediately after Sunday’s parade, I published unscheduled postings on the events. Also covered were the contemporaneous debut of The West Marin Pilot and The Point Reyes Light’s reporting that it had lost $62,000 to an allegedly embezzling bookkeeper.

As always, there were photos for which there was no room and stories that could wait until the dust cleared. First a look at some more of Sunday’s parade:

The Inverness Garden Club as always was one of the more colorful entries in Sunday’s parade.

What made the entry particularly unusual this year was the driver of the motorcycle with sidecart that typically is part of the entry. This year the driver, Terry Aleshire of Inverness, wore a gorilla suit although his motorcycle was decked out in flowers. The incongruity was pure theater, and spectators loved it.

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A stilt-walker from Circus Finelli managed to gracefully navigate Point Reyes Station’s main street during Sunday’s parade. After the parade (and without stilts) she, along with the rest of the circus, entertained guests with comic gymnastics at the Farm Bureau Barbecue in the yard of Toby’s Feed Barn.

A satire of The Point Reyes Light was distributed to spectators during Sunday’s parade. Although stacks of the spoofs were on store counters around town, nobody seemed to know who produced it.

The four-page Point Reyes Dim was in the style of The San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Don Asmussen’s “Bad Reporter” parodies of the press. For example, The Dim’s banner headline proclaimed “Editor Throws in Towel: Towel Cries Foul.” The accompanying story reported “Point Reyes Dim’s unpopular editor Plankton has walked away from his position…. Because most of the editorial staff of The Dim has recently resigned, leaving the front-desk greeter and the lavatory attendant with the weekly burden of recreating the award-winning Point Reyes Dim, editor Plankton announced his resignation, effective this issue. ‘Everyone else is leaving, what’s keeping me here?’ the highly esteemed writer and visionary was heard mumbling as he scuffled [sic] down Mesa Road.”

Many others of us around town were also lampooned. Publisher Plankton’s paper includes a photo of a chimpanzee and tells readers it’s a picture of me. Inverness artist Andrew Romanoff, grandnephew of the last tsar of Russia, is referred to as Prince Stroganoff. Historian Dewey Livingston is listed as Dewy Lovesbeingstoned. Someone, by implication from Spirit Rock Meditation Center, supposedly sent a disapproving, albeit somewhat meditative, letter to the editor: “Dear Editor, Mmmmmmmmmmmm, mmmmmmmmm, m m m m m,” and signed it “Valley Dharma, Woodacre.”

Light publisher Robert Plotkin no doubt can handle the ridicule. He’s probably getting used to it by now. A more significant problem for him was revealed in the May 27 issue of The San Francisco Chronicle.

Plotkin has been recruiting unpaid interns to cover the news of West Marin, East Marin, San Francisco, and Sonoma County. In fact, if The Light keeps adding to the number of communities it covers, it may soon try assigning interns to Vallejo, Hercules, and Pinole, possibly along with Milpitas, Coalinga, Brisbane, and “parts” of Tehama County.

Chronicle reporter Kathleen Pender, however, warned last week: “What many students and employers do not realize is that federal and state labor laws require for-profit employers to pay interns at least minimum wage unless the job meets specific requirements.”

The California Department of Labor has announced that an unpaid internship must “be an essential part of an established course of an accredited school or of an institution approved by a public agency to provide training for licensure or to qualify for a skilled profession. The program may not be for the benefit of any one employer, a regular employee may not be displaced by the trainee, and the training must be supervised by the school or a disinterested agency.”

Under federal law, for-profit employers must pay workers unless the position meets six criteria. One says the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees or students.”

The Chronicle also noted, “Students who work in unpaid private-sector internships that should have been paid can file a federal or state wage claim and could receive back wages even if they had agreed to work for free.”

When I owned The Light, interns were required to live in West Marin during their internships, were paid (typically well above minimum wage), and received gasoline expenses — if they worked three or more days a week. The few one- or two-day-a-week interns we ever used received gasoline expenses but were not paid. It would now appear they should have been paid or, more likely, were not used at all since a legitimate internship involves many hours of coaching.

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But getting back to Western Weekend, here judge Kelsey Cheda of Petaluma FFA appraises junior heifer calves, awarding first place to Elyassa McClure (left), second to Janelle Kehoe, and third to Ben Ielmorini during Saturday’s livestock show.

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More on dairy cows. Chileno Valley journalist Ivan Gale, who now is a business writer for The Gulf News in Dubai, passed through West Marin last week en route to an airline conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. When I caught up with Ivan, he appeared to be spraying graffiti on a cow at the ranch of his parents, Mike and Sally Gale. In fact, another rancher recently gave the Gales the cow after it fell into a ditch. The cow had been slightly injured when it was stuck in the ditch for several hours before being found, and Ivan turned out to be spraying antiseptic on some scrapes.

With the traditional lasso twirling and the Coast Guard color guard’s precision marching, Sunday’s Western Weekend parade drew roughly 2,000 spectators, who lined the sidewalks of Point Reyes Station’s three-block long main street.

Of course, back in 1980 and 81, the parade drew crowds of 10,000 people, largely because participating groups came from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. But that large a multitude in a town which then had about 600 residents was overwhelming. Rowdy motorcyclists roared up and down the main street when the parade ended. Beer flowed in the gutters.

The chaos prompted the West Marin Lion’s Club, which then sponsored virtually all of Western Weekend, to call off the parade for two years while retaining the weekend’s Junior Livestock Show. (“Junior” in the sense that all the contestants exhibiting animals were youths from 4-H and FFA clubs.)

When parades resumed in 1984, they were smaller, home-grown affairs. Which from a spectator’s point of view, not to mention public order, is far more comfortable. Of course, there’s still plenty of spit and polish, for Point Reyes is a parttime home for the US Coast Guard Communications Station crew and for Marin County firefighters (seen at rear).

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One of the odder entries (last seen heading toward the Old Western Saloon) was dubbed “Light ’em if you got ’em.” The bizarre contraption featured a spinning rack of antlers on the front and belched fire from it’s chimney. At times, the “devil” at left would turn up the gas, and fire would shoot higher into the air. Nervous spectactors were relieved when “the devil” — despite his legendary propensity for mischief — did not turn up the gas while passing under any overhead lines.

Cowgirls for Peace were followed by protesters with a banner: “Stop Bushwhacking the Planet.”

A group from the Dance Palace Community Center danced its way down the parade route.

The Western Weekend barbecue, which followed the noontime parade, was sponsored by the Farm Bureau this year and was held at Toby’s Feed Barn instead of at the Red Barn where it traditionally was held. Also moved from the Red Barn this year was the livestock show, and attendance was sparse Saturday. A spot check around town found most people didn’t know it was being held in rancher Rich Giacomini’s corral next to the Dance Palace.

Liberty 4-H Club member Danae Burbank (with brown cow) took first in Senior Showmanship (for members 12 and older) in dairy cow judging at the Western Weekend livestock show. Janelle Kehoe of Point Reyes-Olema 4-H Club (walking behind Burbank) took second, and Michele McClure of Point Reyes 4-H (foreground) took third. Judging their animals was Kelsey Cheda of Petaluma FFA. Cheda is also the dairy queen for District 3 of the California Milk Advisory Board.

The Western Weekend that got underway Saturday in Point Reyes Station was strikingly different from the previous 57 celebrations. Some things lost; something gained.

The 4-H club members showing their cows in the opening livestock show, however, were as serious as ever. For weeks, 4-H’ers have been practicing showmanship: how to maintain poise while leading a sometimes-recalcitrant cow around a ring, how to groom it for competition, how to make it stand correctly for inspection (which includes keeping one hind leg well behind the other), and much, much more.

One youth was penalized when he could not tell the judge the exact date of his heifer’s birth.

Michelle McClure took first in senior Holstein heifer competition, and Nathan Hemelt took second. Both belong to Point Reyes-Olema 4-H Club.

Despite the extensive preparations that went into the livestock show, far fewer people showed up than in previous years. Those who did were mostly from West Marin’s ranching community.

The light attendance might be blamed on several things: overcast skies, no horseshow this year, no dog show etc. However, when I walked around Point Reyes Station’s three-block-long main street after leaving the livestock show, I discovered what was probably the main reason for the sparse attendance.

Nobody I encountered knew that the livestock show was occurring elsewhere in town at that very moment. Remarkable, given how small Point Reyes Station is.

Western Weekend Queen Shelley Schreiber with her mother Patti Collins, manager of the Point Reyes Station branch of the Bank of Petaluma. Schreiber handed out awards to some of the livestock show winners.

Instead of being held at the Red Barn, as it had been for decades, the livestock show took place in rancher Rich Giacomini’s large corral next to the Dance Palace. The West Marin press has to do a better job next year of letting people know where the livestock show is being held.

Ed Brennan of Point Reyes Station looks over the new West Marin Pilot while rocking on the porch of Toby’s Feed Barn.

Of course, the West Marin press itself was the source of some interesting news this week. The West Marin Pilot published its “Volume 1, Number 0.9” issue on Friday.

The odd number of the issue reflects the fact that the paper won’t begin regular editions until the first week of July. And by then, the weekly may have a new name. The introductory issue, which describes itself as “of, by, and for West Marin,” asks readers to suggest a permanent name.

Much of The Pilot’s staff, editor Jim Kravets, office manager Missy Patterson, advertising representative Sandy Duveen, historian Dewey Livingston, obituary writer Larken Bradley, and cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux, worked for The Point Reyes Light when I owned it.

That fact has prompted a comment on this blog from Jan Tacherra, who suggests the new paper be called The Pilot Light.

Point Reyes Light owner Robert Plotkin wrote in this week’s issue that his former bookkeeper Lashanda Goldstein was charming all the time she was allegedly embezzling from him.

Meanwhile, The Light on Thursday confirmed what The Marin Independent Journal had reported May 26; a former bookkeeper has been arrested on charges of embezzling $62,000 from the newspaper. The arrest came almost six months after a credit card company alterted Light owner Robert Plotkin to what allegedly turned out to be $23,000 in fraudulent use of the paper’s account.

The bookkeeper, who went to work for The Light in June 2006 as Lashanda Lewis, later that summer married Marty Goldstein and became Lashanda Goldstein. Just the champagne for her wedding probably cost $800, for among the charges on the company credit card last August was $800 for champagne.

When the charge was first noticed in January, Goldstein initially claimed I made the purchase. After I pointed out I had cut up my copy of the company credit card in front of Plotkin when I turned the paper over to him in November 2005, Goldstein suggested the purchase must have been made by her predecessor, but that didn’t hold up either.

Goldstein is alleged to have embezzled for everything from household expenses, to a laptop computer, to a new car, using the company credit card, writing checks to herself, and stealing petty cash, The Light reported.

In The Light’s account, which was written by Plotkin, he reported Goldstein was “lively, vivacious, and charmed Point Reyes Station.” Some of Plotkin’s staff, however, considered her more obsequious than charming. They have told me she put in short hours, failed to perform significant duties of the bookkeeper’s job, but continually fawned over Plotkin.

As an indication of the significance of the loss to The Light, which is published 52 times a year, The Independent Journal reported, “The $62,000 that was allegedly stolen is more than 56 times the amount of the newspaper’s top advertising rate, $1,102 for a full-page, color ad.”

Tomales cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux drew an enthusiastic crowd to Bodega Landmark Gallery in the town of Bodega Saturday when she opened a two-week exhibit of her surrealistic and often-whimsical oil paintings.

The final days are this Friday through Monday.

Not surprisingly, two of her favorite subjects, cows (such as Moonrise Over Tomales seen here, copyright K. LeMieux) and the California Mermaids, not only attracted the most attention but also the most buyers.

West Marin residents who read Feral West on The Bodega Bay Navigator website or read it for 10 years in The Point Reyes Light are familiar with two of her California Mermaids, Fera with her pet shark Fluffy, and Lana with her cigar and cocktail glass.

copyright K. LeMieux

For this exhibit, Kathryn added some unfamiliar and even more voluptuous mermaids, rendering them in a painterly, rather than cartoon, style.

Although Mavis the cow was missing, Kathryn’s paintings of cows jamming the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge (copyright K. LeMieux) and grazing around Point Reyes Station’s old, brick Grandi Building were on display and selling.

Kathryn claims Mavis the cow is her alter ego in Feral West, but many of us, including her husband Don Armstrong, believe she’s really a California Mermaid, as the photo below, which I took of her at the Marshall Store, would tend to confirm.

Kathryn, along with five other women cartoonists, also draws the nationally syndicated cartoon Six Chix for King Features. The strip formerly appeared in The Press Democrat and now appears on SFGate.com if you go to this link.

Other websites around the country also buy Six Chix from King Features, which has created a subscriber service “with perks,” Kathryn noted. One of the perquisites is that readers who miss seeing the cartoon in print can have it delivered by email to their computer daily. In addition, they can call up past installments of the cartoon.

Since the cartoonists get a cut of what King Features sells, drawing for online readers is becoming an increasingly significant part of their income, Kathryn told me.

More Internet news: Horizon Cable, which provides television, FM radio, and Internet service to more than 1,200 homes and businesses in Point Reyes Station and Olema, Inverness and Inverness Park, Dillon Beach and Stinson Beach (as well as roughly 375 customers in Novato) has moved its headquarters from Novato to the Farm Bureau building in Point Reyes Station.

Like many other Horizon customers, I was without Internet service for extended periods last week, but the outages were not related to the move. Susan Daniels of Fairfax, who with her husband Kevin owns Horizon, on Tuesday told me Horizon is in the midst of a major upgrade. “Every active component in the system will be changed,” she said, explaining this will increase the system’s bandwidth. Along with this will come improved Internet service, high-definition television, and more channels, she added.

This being West Marin, however, not everything that recently interrupted Horizon’s Internet service can be blamed on its being upgraded. On Monday night, a PG&E transformer exploded near the Red Barn in Point Reyes Station. Only a handful of nearby customers lost power, but one of them happened to be the Horizon cable system headquartered next door. It was down for several hours.

Indeed, there has always been a wild-west aspect to providing West Marin with a cable system. The original system, West Marin Cable, was created strictly to improve television reception. John Robbins, then of Inverness, began the system in 1983 and sold it to Kevin and Susan in 1991. John’s was not an entirely conventional system.

Creating a viable cable system for such sparsely populated towns as West Marin was daunting. Sometimes John had to string cable on power poles for more than a mile to reach just one ranch. In awkward locations, John had to string his cable on barbed-wire fences.

Horizon Cable office manager Andrea Clark fields the calls when customers need help. Her motherly manner makes it difficult for most of us, even when frustrated, to get annoyed with her. Owner Susan Daniels and system technician Jim Townsend standing behind behind Andrea say major improvements to Horizon’s television and Internet services are being implemented now that the company has relocated its office to Point Reyes Station in the center of its service area.

John had been building the Stinson Beach part of his system when he sold West Marin Cable to Horizon. As it happened, county supervisors had issued John a cable franchise for Stinson Beach, but Seadrift subdivision developer Don Beacock had his own deal with Wonder Cable, which at the time served Bolinas.

Horizon had no sooner taken over the system when something like the Oklahoma Land Rush began on Seadrift Spit. Within the subdivision, cables had to be buried. Both Horizon and Wonder showed up with trenching equipment, and “it was a race for the spit,” Susan recalled, with each company trying to lay claim to the land first. With two cable companies digging parallel trenches on opposite sides of Seadrift’s roads, county supervisors intervened and ruled that Horizonâ’s franchise for Stinson Beach was communitywide.

That sort of cable conflict, however, pales in comparison to what is currently happening in the former Soviet Republic of Estonia.

For those of you who don’t follow politics in the Baltics, you should realize that at this moment a new and economically crippling form of warfare is being waged by Russia. It’s serious enough that the May 12-18 Economist warns that stopping the assault “is not yet NATO’s job, but it may be soon.”

As Britain’s Economist explains, “For a small, high-tech country such as Estonia, the Internet is vital. But for the past two weeks, Estonia’s state websites (and some private ones) have been hit by ‘denial of service’ attacks, in which a target site is bombarded with so many bogus requests for information that it crashes.

“The Internet warfare broke out amid a furious row between Estonia and Russia over the removal of a Soviet war monument from the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to a military cemetery.

“The move sparked rioting and looting by several thousand protesters from large population of ethnic Russians, who tend to see the statue as a cherished memorial to a wartime sacrifice. Estonians mostly see it rather as a symbol of a hated foreign occupation.”

The attack, which is sabotaging Estonia’s Internet commerce, as well as government operations, was initially launched by computers traceable to the government of (Ras?)Putin (seen here in an Economist photo). But the assault has now been taken over by sympathetic supporters, some of whom plant viruses in other people’s computers so that innocent users unknowingly help sabotage Estonian institutions.

The assault would be called an “act of war” if it were carried out with a missile instead of with computers, one senior NATO official told The Economist. NATO and the US have rushed observers to Estonia to figure out how a country can fend off such an attack.

In the meantime, “the best defence is to have strong networks of servers in many countries,” a Finnish expert is quoted as saying.