Despite not holding the reins on his team, the ever-political Sheriff Bob Doyle takes part in the Western Weekend Parade.

As some of you no doubt read in The Marin Independent Journal, atty. Ladd Bedford on April 12 filed on my behalf a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the County of Marin and sheriff’s deputy Josh Todt.

The lawsuit also lists as defendants “DOEs One through Five” be identified by “their true names [and] capacities when ascertained.”

In an incident which Sheriff Bob Doyle later blamed on my talking over the head of a “beat deputy,” I was chained and handcuffed on March 1 a year ago and taken to the psych ward at Marin General Hospital as supposedly being at risk of suicide.

Atty. Bedford in presenting a claim against county, which was routinely rejected, described what happened to me on that Wednesday morning while I was reading that day’s Chronicle and finishing breakfast:

“Without warning, a deputy from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department appeared at Mitchell’s home and asked to enter the residence. The deputy questioned him at length about his mental state and suicidal tendencies.

“Mitchell cooperated with the deputy and explained that he did not intend to commit suicide anytime in the near future and that he was not a danger to himself or anyone else.”

In fact, as atty. Bedford’s claim notes, I “was busy at home preparing for a court hearing scheduled for the following morning involving a civil matter and was preparing to receive two major achievement awards.”

The Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter was about to present me with a “lifetime achievement” award during a ceremony in San Francisco, and I was in the midst of lining up rides for friends attending from West Marin. Presenting the award would be KQED radio host Michael Krasny (to my left above) and CBS-Channel 5 news anchor Ken Bastida (to my right).

The second award was a Resolution of Commendation from the Marin Board of Supervisors on the occasion of my retirement. During the presentation ceremony, I would also receive US House of Representatives honors thanks to Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey.

I was hosting a reception in a Civic Center garden following the ceremony, and that week, I was working out the details with a caterer. Ironically, among the guests I had invited was Sheriff Bob Doyle, but after I asked him how it happened that I was mistakenly taken into custody, Doyle chose not to attend.

“Furthermore,” atty. Bedford noted, a windstorm Sunday night-Monday morning had ripped shingles off my roof, and I “had scheduled roofers to come and fix [my] roof in two days.”

After receiving my awards, I planned to spend much of the rest of the year taking a “victory lap,” to see cousins elsewhere in the United States and in Canada, I told deputy Todt. And, in fact, I subsequently did.

Well, what about next year, after my “victory lap?” Todt asked. Would I commit suicide then? I laughed and told the deputy it was a ridiculous question, mentioning a character in French literature who was about to commit suicide, but the national elections were that day, and he wanted to know who would win. By the time the results were in, I told the deputy, the guy was no longer interested in suicide.

You can’t predict how anyone will feel about much of anything in a year, five years, or 20 years, I pointed out with good humor. And if I were to someday kill myself, I twice told deputy Todt, “it would almost certainly take the form of smoking myself to death.”

Deputy Todt, who presented himself as having developed expertise in dealing with people in crisis, asked me a few more questions about suicide in general. Because of the generality of the questions, I told him what some important thinkers had written about it. Having taught college World Literature, I was familiar with, for example, what Herman Hesse in Steppenwolf and Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus had to say about suicide.

The opening sentence of Camus’ famous essay, I told Todt, is: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” However, I stressed that Camus also wrote that even if one decides life isn’t worth living, that doesn’t mean he will, or should, commit suicide. I quoted Camus as pointing out, “The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.”

The fact that I was conversant on a topic Camus considered the “one truly serious philosophical problem” apparently caused deputy Todt to assume I must be ready to commit suicide. I was then handcuffed, chained, and hauled off in the cage of a patrolcar to the psych ward. I didn’t resist; there was no point; but I was mortified.

“Mitchell suffered much of the day in an austere sitting room with drunks and mentally disabled people,” atty. Bedford’s claim noted. “Later that day, Mitchell was eventually examined by personnel at the hospital. Those personnel determined that Mitchell was not suicidal, that he had no emergent psychiatric issues, and that he should be released to go home.

“The personnel at the hospital called a taxi for Mitchell and arranged for payment of the $70 cab fare from the hospital back to Mitchell’s residence in Point Reyes. Mitchell gave the cab driver a $10 tip.”

I later complained to Sheriff Doyle that I apparently was taken into custody for merely giving straightforward answers to an unsophisticated deputy who was posing as sophisticated in such matters. “What got you into trouble,” the sheriff responded, “was answering the door.”

Wow! I had always considered the sheriff’s deputies my friends, and now the sheriff himself was telling me I was putting myself at risk by answering their knock at the door. “Unless they have a warrant,” atty. Bedford has since added. Doyle’s response was as threatening as Todt’s had been humiliating.

Doyle bristled when I pointed out that the timing of the deputy’s arrival that Wednesday morning was suspicious and that perhaps his deputies had been deliberately misled.

As it happened, I had learned at midday Tuesday that I had a court hearing with the new owner of The Point Reyes Light, Robert Plotkin, Thursday morning. After talking with atty. Bedford, I discovered I had only a few hours to collect witnesses’ statements against Plotkin and had begun doing so. Todt’s action effectively sabotaged my ability to adequately present my side of the case.

So why did deputy Todt come to the door that morning? Supervisor Steve Kinsey told me that, according to Sheriff Doyle, Lt. Scott Anderson, commander of the West Marin substation, sent Todt to my home in response to statements from Plotkin. In a deposition, Plotkin later admitted he’d told deputies I was suicidal.

The new owner of The Light Robert Plotkin lives well but currently owes former staff and his former printer thousands of dollars.

Before my lawsuit was filed, I told Supervisor Kinsey my main concern was to have government records cleared of my having been mistakenly taken into custody as supposedly on the verge of suicide.

In this age of Homeland Security checks and a few officers, such as Todt, who sometimes don’t exercise common sense, having a Sheriff’s Department blunder on my record could come back to haunt me.

Kinsey did his best to intercede on my behalf but got nowhere. Doyle and the County Counsel seemed to think I wouldn’t risk the embarrassment of publicly admitting what happened to me. That’s the way rape victims were intimidated from pressing charges until the courts stopped identifying them by name.

Because Sheriff Doyle refused to take an administrative action to clear my name, we now have a lawsuit that will set the record straight and inevitably cost county government thousands of dollars to defend.

I need merely to look out my cabin windows to see it all around me, among the deer, horses, and red-winged blackbirds, among the raccoons, steers, and bluejays. It’s the unending struggle by each species to maintain its pecking order.

The pecking order, which is sometimes called “dominance hierarchy” or “social hierarchy,” when talking about humans and other mammals, takes its common name from the fact that it was first observed among poultry.

As Wikipedia explains, “The top chicken is one which can peck any chicken it wants. The bottom chicken is one that lets all the other chickens peck on it and stands up to none. There are chickens in the middle, who peck on certain chickens but are, in turn, pecked on by other chickens higher up on the scale.”

Like other young animals foxes play-fight to establish dominance. I photographed these red foxes across my fence on neighbor Toby Giacomini’s land. The fox described below was the locally more-common gray fox.

You can observe pecking orders in prisons and schoolyards. In his 1960 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey (1935-2001) portrays a sane man, RJ McMurphy, who cons his way into a mental institution to avoid a short prison term for petty crimes. Once in the institution, McMurphy immediately asks his fellow wards America’s eternal question, “Who’s the head bull-goose loony around here?”

Pecking orders are more pronounced among some species than others, I’ve observed. With red-winged blackbirds, for example, maintaining their chosen spot at the feast of birdseed on my railing is more important than eating it. Brown towhees and Oregon juncos, on the other hand, worry far less about who’s at the head of the table.

I once asked Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans why some birds are more aggressive toward their own species when feeding than are other birds. Evans said he wasn’t certain but theorized that birds whose diets are limited to certain food would likely protect it more aggressively than birds that eat a wider variety of foods.

While social hierarchies are supposed to exist within a species, there are obviously similar hierarchies among species.

The cutest little roof rat you ever did see stretched like a first grader at a drinking fountain to get a drink from my birdbath at twilight Thursday.

Last week, I was watching a towhee pecking at a scattering of birdseed under my picnic table when a roof rat ran out from behind a flowerpot and drove the towhee off. I’d never seen such a thing before, but the towhee seemed unfazed. It merely hopped three feet away and started in on another scattering of seeds.

To some extent size determines which species dominates which. A possum will scurry off if a raccoon shows up. But as I observed Tuesday night, a raccoon will flee a much-smaller fox.

Usually, confrontations between raccoons themselves are limited to growling and, like blackbirds, fluffing up to look bigger.

But I’ve also seen raccoons fight, and they were savage.

Although raccoons have fearsome canine teeth, the little gray fox I saw Tuesday clearly had a much-larger raccoon buffaloed, if you can stand the metaphor. And even if you can’t, this column is over. But if someone knows why a raccoon would be afraid of a fox, please send in a comment.

Too many rainbows? The first week of April, it rained at my cabin virtually every day or night. A factoid reflected in this photo from my deck is that the sky is always darkest outside the arc of a rainbow. The reason is a bit complex, but if you want a good explanation, check the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research website: http://www.eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/

Rain having fallen almost every day or night since April began, the grass in my pasture is high, and neighbor Toby Giacomini’s stockpond is full. Water districts like late rains so their reservoirs are full going into the dry months.

All the same, I’m already ready for May. So are half the people in West Marin. The other half (apart from ranchers and water district operators) are a contrary lot; more than a few of them are here because they’re not wanted someplace else, or because they are.

In any case, the minute someone mentions being tired of rain, someone else pops up with with Al Jolson’s (at left) 1947 lyrics: “Though April showers may come your way,/ They bring the flowers that bloom in May./ So if it’s raining, have no regrets/ Because it isn’t raining rain you know. It’s raining violets.”

On the other hand, April showers may cause some of us, who in school had to plow through the field of English literature, to instead recall the grim opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Wasteland:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”

In the late 1960s, I taught English Literature, World Literature, and Journalism at Upper Iowa College. I liked teaching the poetry of Eliot (below right), but I prefer listening to Chaucer’s, the masterpiece of which is The Canterbury Tales written in Middle English during the late 1300s.

So I was a bit surprised when almost 40 years after I left teaching for newspapering, it suddenly dawned on me last week that the opening lines of The Wasteland satirize the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales:

“Whan that aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour.”

In Modern English, that would be something along the lines of: “When April with its showers sweet has pierced to the root the drought of March and bathed every vein the moisture whose essence begets the flower.”

With all this going on and the “male foweles maken melody,” wrote Chaucer (right), “thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”

Eliot naturally saw April more darkly and went on in The Wasteland to ask, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?”

Personally, I am not one of those folk longing to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury or anywhere else (too much walking); my view of April is certainly less gloomy than Eliot’s; so I was almost taken in by Jolson’s advice:

“When you see clouds upon the hills,/ You soon will see crowds of daffodils./ So keep on looking for a bluebird/ And listening for his song/ Whenever April showers come along.”

As it happens, I planted daffodils along my driveway last October. Five weeks ago, Dee Goodman, formerly a Point Reyes Station innkeeper and now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, arrived for a visit. On her first day back in town (above), the daffodils I’d planted came into bloom.

Dee, however, observed that if West Marin residents were to follow Jolson’s advice and search the hills for daffodils following April’s showers, they’d miss them by at least a month. “A better flower for April would be the Forget-Me-Not,” Dee suggested, having just noticed them in profusion along Nicasio Valley Road north of Moon Hill.

Eliot, no doubt, would have agreed.

One of the odder events in this long-running saga called Nature’s Two Acres occurred Saturday night. (The two acres, of course, is my pasture surrounding this cabin in the hills above Point Reyes Station.)

It all began when Dee Goodman, who is visiting from Mexico, and I went out on my deck at twilight Saturday to enjoy the view. For a while, we sat on patio chairs drinking coffee, but as the evening grew chilly, we went back inside.

While outside, I had set a nearly full mug of coffee on the deck, and probably because Dee and I were talking when we went indoors, I forgot to take the mug with me.

As it happens, I drink my coffee with a fair amount of those sweet, flavored (hazelnut, vanilla nut, or crème brulé) creamers made by Nestle. I am not alone in enjoying coffee thus diluted nor, as I’ve now discovered, is my species.

Later last Saturday I was working at my computer when around midnight I went downstairs for a bite, and to my surprise, a possum was on my deck lapping up my forgotten coffee. Before long, he had emptied the mug. I wasn’t worried and laughed to myself that if a possum could digest roadkill, it could digest a mug of coffee.

Still writing in my loft at 2 a.m., I went back down to the kitchen, and as I headed toward the refrigerator, I immediately spotted the possum. It had returned and was now outside my kitchen door.

It’s fairly common to see a possum scurry when scared, but I can’t say that I’d ever seen a perky possum before. One mug of coffee, and this little guy was wired.

The possum was pacing back and forth outside my door, climbing on and off the railing, and occasionally poking around my covered firewood (above). Again amused, I decided to give the perky possum a slice of bread. The possum started when he heard me unlatch the kitchen door, but rather than scurrying off, he made a dash toward the opening.

From what I’ve observed, possums don’t see diddly squat at night (although they’re supposed to) and depend almost entirely on smells to guide them. I’m not at all sure this possum even saw me, but he sure smelled food in my kitchen. I had to bean him with a piece of bread to keep him from running into the cabin.

As he ate it, I tossed out a few more pieces and he spent the next 10 minutes running around the deck, sniffing for crusts.

The moral to all this, I suppose, is that if your neighborhood marsupial is too prone to playing possum, just serve him a cup of coffee.

SparselySageAndTimely.com previously quoted Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evens as saying, the “common opossum” is not native to California but rather the Deep South and was introduced into the San Jose area around 1900 “for meat, delicious with sweet potatoes.” By 1931, possums had spread as far south as the Mexican border but did not reach Point Reyes until 1968.

Luckily for possums, the Point Reyes National Seashore hasn’t any plans to exterminate the hundreds, if not thousands, of them in the park although like the white deer they’re not native.

When the National Seashore opened in 1965, possums were just arriving in the park while the non-native white (fallow) and spotted (axis) deer had been living on Point Reyes for 20 years. But unlike the white deer, the public hasn’t shown particular interest in possums, and the National Seashore administration in its perverse fashion targets its eradication programs on non-natives that appeal to members of the public.

Why? It’s simply a matter of Calvanism reminiscent of the Puritans’ ban on bear baiting (siccing dogs on a chained bear). The Puritans weren’t particularly upset by cruelty but didn’t like to have the public enjoying itself so much.

SparselySageAndTimely.com extends a warm “Happy Birthday!” to restaurateur Pat Healy of Point Reyes Station (left), who topped 80 on Wednesday.

Pat operated the Station House Café for 30 years, during which time she turned the former hamburger shop into a restaurant praised in Gourmet and other food-and-drink publications.

Pat in June 2005 sold the café to its manager Sheryl Cahill (right), and as of this writing, Sheryl was planning a party with no-host bar for Pat this Thursday (March 29) from 5 to 8 p.m. in the Station House.

Also celebrating her 80th birthday is Missy Patterson of Point Reyes Station, who will turn 80 on Sunday. For 24 years, Missy has run the front office of The Point Reyes Light, where she is circulation manager.

While the job requires dealing with all manner of people, Missy is never overwhelmed, having raised 11 children of her own, the youngest of whom, Duncan, drowned in Papermill Creek while still in his teens.

More than once Missy regaled the old Light’s staff with an account of the time her former husband, Realtor Donald “Pat” Patterson, needed to stop by the Inverness home of Professor and Mrs. Seth Benson on business. The professor taught Zoology at UC Berkeley, and he and his wife (both now deceased) were part of the Zero Population Growth movement.

While the men discussed business, Mrs. Benson invited Missy to chat in the kitchen, quickly turning the conversation to ZPG. “And how many children do you have?” she asked Missy.

“Eleven,” Missy answered, and Mrs. Benson began shouting at her, “Out! Out of this house!” True to form, Missy left feeling amused rather than insulted.

She was my wonderful colleague for 21 years, and SparselySageAndTimely.com sends her a sincere Happy 80th Birthday wish too.

Missy’s real name, by the way, is Rosalie, but nobody around here calls here that. Which gets us to the nature of nicknames.

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Not long ago I hired Nick Whitney of Inverness Park, one of the members of Pacific Slope tree trimming services, to cut down two Monterey pines that had died near my parking area.

If the trees had fallen in a windstorm, the worst damage would probably have been to neighbor Toby Giacomini’s barbed-wire fence, but that was enough for me to want them out.

In addition, I wanted a large limb growing over my roof removed from another pine, so Nick sent over a crew consisting of Brian Arnold (seen above), Pepe Franco, and Nacho Franco.

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Brian and Pepe (seen above) have trimmed trees at my cabin previously, so I expected, and got, a good job from the crew. Not having to worry about their work, I found myself instead wondering about their names.

I had to do a bit of research, but it turns out Brian is an Irish name meaning “high” or “noble,” which should please him. After seeing Brian dangling from the top of a pine tree while avoiding large limbs falling from his chainsaw, both Gaelic meanings seemed appropriate.

The common Spanish nickname “Nacho” at right) was easy for me to check on. It’s merely a shortened form of “Ignacio,” sort of like “Robert” shortened to “Bob.”

In some recent years, the most common name of male babies born in the US was José, so it’s not surprising that many guys named José opt to use its nickname “Pepe.” Sort of like fellows named “John” using the nickname “Jack.”

But how in the world did “Pepe” become the nickname for “José?” When I finally found the answer, it surprised even my Spanish-speaking friends.

“José” derived from the old Spanish equivalents to Joseph: “Josepâ,” to “Josepe.” In Italian, the name would be “Giuseppe.” Because the final syllable of Josepe is stressed, it was a short step to “Pepe.” So, Joe, now we all know.

Writer John Grissim (left), formerly of West Marin, with the late pornographic filmmaker and theater owner Artie Mitchell (no relation) 22 years ago. The occasion was a gala party for the opening of The Grafenberg Spot. Grissim wrote the screenplay.

For eight years, The Point Reyes Light carried a column called West Marin Diary by John Grissim, who wrote from a wine-barrel studio above Stinson Beach, where he was a volunteer firefighter for 12 years, 2.5 years of that as head of the fire department’s ambulance corps. As a columnist, his topics ranged from running on the beach to watching Behind the Green Door star Marilyn Chambers use an Uzi to shred paper targets in Nevada.

John eventually married therapist Susan Robinson, and the couple lived in Point Reyes Station along the levee road in one of those houses where every time Papermill Creek flooded, they needed a rowboat to reach their front steps. Luckily, the main part of their house was on the second floor and didn’t get wet.

In 2000, John and Susan moved to Sequim near Port Angeles on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. After much shopping, they bought a manufactured home, and John, as is his wont, turned the search into yet another book: The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Manufactured Homes and Land, How to Find a Reputable Dealer and Negotiate a Fair Price on the Best-kept Secret in American Housing. The book has turned out to be a best seller and John is in demand on the speakers’ circuit.

In previous incarnations, John wrote eight books on topics as varied as surfing and billiards, was an editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and wrote articles for publications as diverse as Playboy, Smithsonian, Sports Afield, Surfer, and National Fisherman. In his younger days, he was a communications officer on a Navy fleet oiler and later was on the dive team that discovered the $20 million Spanish treasure galleon Concepcion off of the Dominican Republic.

He also snorted cocaine with gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, the basis for the character Duke in Doonesbury. Seen here in a Wikipedia photo by Allen G. Arpadi, Thompson had gained widespread literary recognition in 1971 with his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In a facetious column for the old San Francisco Examiner, Thompson in 1986 described a party in Burbank’s Sheraton-Premier Hotel where “a man named Grissim tried to jump off a fifth floor balcony with a bottle of gin, but he was restrained by police, then forced under a cold shower in the hospitality lounge. His friends and associates laughed as he was taken away in a neck hold.”

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John answered in his own column that while he was complimented at rating a mention from (now deceased) Hunter Thompson, “I rarely drink gin, and there are no balconies at the Sheraton-Premier.” As for the neck hold, “that lithe arm around my neck belonged to my dear friend Seka, the ash-blonde superstar who at that moment was whispering to me some small confidence. All I remember is the heat of her breath in my ear as [the then-porno actress] confessed she too was into TM, tan maintenance.”

For seven years, John was executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin. For two more years, he published a lively quarterly titled Marine Watch. And in 1985, he wrote the screenplay for Jim and Artie Mitchells’ pornographic comedy The Grafenberg Spot.

In March 1985, the film premiered at a “gala opening party,” in the words of the invitations we in the press received.

It was a media event I wouldn’t have missed.

Searchlights lit the sky in front of the OFarrell Theater while guests inside, such as the late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (seen at right during the gala), the old San Francisco Examiner’s columnist Warren Hinkle, and writer Hunter Thompson mingled with porno stars Annette Haven and Juliet (Aunt Peg) Anderson, as well as the men and women of San Francisco’s liberal establishment.

This debut of Grissim’s film parodying the G-spot was meant to be the ultimate in porno chic. The Mitchell brothers served champagne, cracked crab, calamari cocktails, and endless mixed drinks.

Examiner columnist Warren Hinkle at the gala for The Grafenberg Spot. The G-spot is named after German gynaecologist Ernst Grafenberg, who in 1950 claimed to have discovered it.

Of course, things went downhill from there. In a move to rein in his brother Artie, who had become addicted to cocaine and was drinking heavily, Jim in 1991 went to Artie’s house one night armed with a rifle (supposedly for his own protection) to have a talk. Instead he ended up shooting his brother. A jury convicted Jim of voluntary manslaughter, but he served only a three-year sentence in San Quentin after San Francisco’s Mayor Frank Jordan, Sheriff Michael Hennessey, and former Police Chief Richard Hongisto all urged leniency for the prominent pornographer.

Artie, sadly, is dead, but as John Grissim wrote me this week, “The G-spot lives.” His comment came in response to a March 17 Economist article on President Bush’s week-long tour of Latin America:

“Mr. Bush and Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva [seen below in a UN photo], agreed to promote ethanol production and use across the region, and to cooperate on research. By fixing purity standards, they hope to make ethanol a globally tradable commodity. But Mr. Bush refused to talk about the high tariff that protects American corn farmers, whose ethanol is more costly and carbon-emitting to produce than Brazil’s.

“There was no visible progress on the Doha round of world trade talks [aimed at lowering trade barriers between countries of different wealth], though the American trade representative, Susan Schwab, spent an extra day in São Paulo to talk to Brazilian officials and industrialists. And Lula, somewhat mystifyingly, insisted that ‘we’re going firmly toward finding the so-called G-spot for making a deal.'”

The Brazilian president’s startling comment prompted Janine Warner, a former reporter at The Light, to write from Los Angeles, “To see the term G-spot used in the vernacular like that shows how far that concept has come.” To which she added, “No, I didn’t mean a pun there, really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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