Toad in the Hole

Out Past Livermore

Joe heard there were a couple of recent tricolored blackbird colonies and a pair of Cassin’s kingbirds out by Corral Hollow Road and Patterson Pass. Nice coolish Sunday morning, off we went.

First golden eagle was a youngster above Corral Hollow Road, wheeling in a leisurely fashion and visible from a handy pull-out. Good thing, because there was lots of traffic, mostly guys in pickups with dirtbikes loaded up, in a tearing hurry to get to the State Vehicular Recreation Area. And me all unarmed, dammit.

The kingbirds were supposed to be on the Alameda-San Joaquin county line, which is right in the middle of the wReck area. On the other side is a LawrenceLivermoreNL-US-Something’r'other explosives test area, quite an extensive piece of ground. I’m thinking it would be an efficient use of land to combine the two, myself. Hey, they want thrills, right? And I’d pay to watch.

If the birds are still in residence, the great annoying buzz of weekend Good Clean Fun was keeping them out of sight, which is unusual for kingbirds. Maybe we’ll try again on a weekday.

East to the freeway, north just a bit to the Patterson Pass Road exit, and down that familiar road. Usually we do that on a loop with Altamont Pass in winter, for fancy hawks. This time we took a left onto a road I’d been wondering about for years; turns out to be a dead end to a mysterious enough gated commercial building—manufacturing? Remote offices? Hard to tell, and no clue in the signage. Along that road is a little cattail pond where the blackbirds were supposed to be. We saw two females who, on studying the guides, seem to have been trikes, but we neither saw nor heard any males, which is weird indeed for blackbirds. We’d got a late start; maybe they were having a midday siesta.

The second blackbird location was dry in both senses: a creekbed with no visible water and no visible blackbirds. On the way there, though, we did see lots of western kingbirds, several shrikes (always heartening, and these are likely residents), two more golden eagles and one eagle, very distant, that just might have been a juvie bald, lots of white over tail. Several redtail pairs, three or four kestrels, and of course lots of turkey vultures.

Just a few magpies, but I think that’s just because of the route we took. Lark sparrows, meadowlarks, lesser goldfinch, whitecrowns and goldencrowns, savanna sparrow; and Pacific chorus frog by ear. Ravens and crows harassing each other; crows harassing vultures. Ah, sweet Spring!

Lots more of the usual, and flowers scattered about: blue tritelia, several lupines (blue, purple, white; bush and herbaceous), blue dicks, fiddleneck, owl clover, paintbrush, butter-n-eggs, the usual posies in a handsome show. The grass is still green, but starting to ripen and get gold on the east side of the hills by I-580. Quite advanced in the season compared even to just two weeks ago when we went through there to Death Valley. 

And butterflies. The painted ladies continue to stream through in serious numbers, more than one a second in some spots. Near that cattail pond, I scanned a drift of blooming mustard and found it speckled liberally with painted ladies, and there were more in a patch of milk thistle at one of the stops on Patterson. So they do stop to nectar in the middle of the day. I’m not surprised at their unfussy eating habits, as they’re apparently about the most widely-distributed butterflies in the world—pace the Chron’s science writer, including in Australia.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

Red-State Humor

Anyone who still thinks, oh, that bureaucrats or Southern US cops or red-staters in general have no sense of humor, or that anything at all breaks down into neat predictable categories, can check this bit of the East Point, Georgia official police department site.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

OK, the Late Pope

So I keep hearing stuff about how, well, the Pope was a doctrinal conservative, but he made up with the Jews. Or: He was rude to women and gays and condemned contraception as well as abortion and forbade the use of condoms that would have saved lives—in effect, made sexual “sin,“ even that of another (like one’s husband) a death-penalty crime—but he was against the Iraq war and “naked capitalism” too, just as strongly.

As if it somehow balanced out. I’m sure Tom DeLay is nice to kittens and fluffy dogs, too, and he probably eats his vegetables like a Clean Plate Ranger.

But those statements aren’t even true anyway. He was a doctrinal conservative? The hell. He added to Church doctrine his own well-established social opinion that women are second-class citizens in his church (whatever “separate-but-equal” spin the hierarchy might put on it) and may not ever be priests, end of discussion. I am amazed that people are even considering such a person a legitimate speaker to crowds, let alone a moral leader. He made the idea that a seminary must be a seg academy a matter of doctrine! The next thing to an ex cathedra declaration!

That old test is still useful: substitute absolutely any other group for “women” in that statement, and see what the reaction is. I do note with grim amusement that the one thing people of every race and nation can be counted on to unite around is their willingness to diss women.

I’ll let “the Jews”—right, one mass with one opinion—decide how well JP2 satisfied them about that little unpleasantness in the 1930s and 1940s.

As for the “he was equally against war” “seamless garment” nonsense, just exercise memory a bit. Was it ever suggested by anyone in the Catholic hierarchy that John Kerry lose his Communion “privileges” for his support of the Iraq war? No. Have they, any of them, started excommunicating plutocrats? Somehow it seems never to have come up.

Was Pinochet excommunicated? Far from it; I do believe the Pope pleaded for mercy for the old mass murderer.

And of course, just as Mother Theresa didn’t die in one of her own clinics, John Paul 2 was allowed to die after only a brief bout with a nasogastric feeding tube, not a surgically implanted one, and no further medical interventions. Bet they pulled the NG tube too. And that’s not even invasive, as surgery to introduce a permanent feeding tube is. Anyone who thinks “that’s difffferent” from Terri Schiavo’s unnecessarily protracted death needs to look at the available primary evidence.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

Sunol Stroll

Drove down to Sunol Regional Park today, because someone had reported a Harris’ sparrow hanging out with a flock of golden-crowns. What the heck, an excuse to get out on a sunny day. The creek was running high and merry, and everybody was full of Spring excitement.

Posies were popping out by the road—several lupines, mostly blue; one was so blue I took it for delphinium at first. Also some pale pink lotus, woodland star, fiddleneck, poppies, the exotic short deep-pink cranesbill, mule ears, butter-n-eggs, owl clover, paintbrush. Tha bigleaf maples and oaks (achoo) were blooming too—I took bad photos of the maple flowers, because they’re really quite handsome: a sort of dangling loose snapdragon like a set of windchimes, red and yellow, that on close inspection has tiny maple noses starting out on it.

Found the sparrow flock after being redirected to the other parking lot, and after a few minutes’ patience as they skittered in and out of some low snowberry lining the leaf-littered path, sure enough, one was a first-year Harris’. It seemed a bit shyer than the golden-crowns, retreating to cover more often and for longer periods.

We also has a couple of glimpses of a dusky-footed woodrat doing the same dance in and out of the brush. Cute little booger.

Strung out on the same path, a couple of spotted and several California towhees, plain titmouse making lots of noise, Hutton’s vireo, chickadees, acorn woodpeckers, black phoebe, and a Bullock’s oriole by ear, chattering and singing.

After the sparrow flock got flushed by walkers, we strolled out onto the arched and weirdly bouncy bridge over the creek, where a few other birders were looking around. Another oriole (or the same one, dunno)—two orioles, male and female, in sight this time, in the sun, chasing and bopping around in the mostly-leafless sycamores along the creek. A park naturalist told us that one of the stick nests in view over the water belonged to a pair of red-shouldered hawks, and sure enough we heard one hollering, though no one was on the nest. Cliff swallows dashed over, and a house wren sat on a twig near one end of the bridge and sang his head off for at least five minutes.

Turned onto the trail in the general direction of Little Yosemite, and there were more house wrens carrying on—in total at least three males and two females, paired up and one carying nesting material. We stopped to sort out a chatter between acorn woodpecker and red-shafted flicker, and followed the flicker up a sycamore trunk, where she did us a great favor.

She skittered up over a hole in the trunk, and a face appeared in it, looking for all the works like a little fuzzy old man just awakened from not enough sleep and grumpy about it. Once the face was in sunlight, it blinked and winced and finally settled in to enjoy the warmth. As it poked out farther, filling the hole completely, we decided it was a western screech-owl. There it stayed, eyes slitted, basking and occasionally blinking, eventually bringing its small ear tufts up.

We walked up the trail a bit, taking wildflower photos—lots of blue-eyed grass—and watching those wrens carry on, admiring the new foliage on oaks and sycamores and walnut, until it felt like lunchtime.

Coming back, we re-found the sycamore and hole and the owl was still there, apparently napping in its hole in the sunshine.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed

Gossip, Dammit

Joe was in the UC library today and heard someone say that Alan Dundes, the urban folklorist, had dropped dead. Haven’t heard it from official sources yet… Maybe it’s an urban legend.

If not—damn.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | Comments are closed