Tom’s Birds

May 13, 2022May 14, 2022 Phila Rogers Uncategorized birding, Birds, santa barbara

Tom Ginn and his wife Sherry moved into Samarkand in July 2011 from Los Gatos, a leafy residential community south of San Francisco. Before retiring Tom had worked as a software engineer. He was already a serious amateur photographer using a top-of-the-line Canon.

Along with recording the life of the family, including a son and daughter, he was also adding landscapes to his collection. “I haven’t shot a roll of film since 2003; digital photography and the computer give me so much more versatility,” he says.

But those who know Tom appreciate his outstanding patience as he waits for just the right shot to produce a memorable portrait of an elusive insect, a butterfly with its erratic flight or a shy bird as it comes to the bird bath.

The first bird photos were taken over several months at the bird baths behind Ann and Bob Allen’s duplex, located over the fence at the southernmost end of the EastView apartments. The duplex, Oakcrest, has the ideal birding location, sheltered by oaks up the steep slope of Oak Park.

The birds are drawn to the area by Mission Creek and its forest of sycamores and Coast Live Oaks. Ann has arranged a welcoming collection of shallow pot bottoms filled with water, surrounded by mostly potted native plants. When it’s hard to find a good variety of birds elsewhere at the Samarkand, you can count on being rewarded at Ann’s bird baths.

When a large sandstone boulder (over the fence at the top of the Native Plant Garden) became a bubbling bird bath, the birds had a second choice for their drinks and baths. The first group of photos is in Ann’s garden, and the second larger group is at the “Bubbling Fountain.”

The birds are identified by species accompanied by a few comments. Some of the photographs have been made into greeting cards and can be purchased at the Samarkand gift shop.

ANN’S BIRDBATHS

White-crowned Sparrow. Just before leaving our Native Plant Garden for the long flight to Northern Alaska where they will nest in the willow thickets before returning in October to our garden. — White-crowned Sparrow (1)

(1) White-crowned Sparrow. A group of these sparrows spend the winter in the Native Plant Garden often singing.

(2) Immature White-rowned Sparrow. In April the group flies to Northern Alaska where they nest in the dwarf willows before returning to our garden in October.

(3)(4) Townsend’ s Warbler. Another winter bird with especially bright plumage.

(5) Orange-crowned Warbler. Year-round bird.

(6) Cedar Waxwing. This lovely bird is a nomad traveling in flocks from place to place in search of berries. They are sometimes in the company of Robins.

(7) Group of Cedar Waxwings. In the spring they will head north to conifer forests where they will briefly breed before heading back on the road again.

(8) Nashville Warbler. An uncommon visitor.

(9) Ruby-crowned Kinglet. A small, energetic bird who reveals his bright crown when agitated. He is another of our winter residents

(10) California Towhee. A big sparrow who is a year-round resident.

(11) Yellow-rumped Warbler. Developing its breeding plumage before heading north.

(12) Hermit Thrush Another winter resident who heads for the Sierra in the spring to sing its glorious song.

The sandstone fountain, we call “Bubbling Rock” in the foreground overlooks the Native Plant Garden.

(1) The Anna’s Hummingbird is a year-round resident and the largest of our local species.

(2) & (3) Adult, female, and immature Lesser Goldfinches.

(4) Orange-crowned Warbler. Several breeding pairs sing almost continuously above Oak Park at Samarkand in the spring.

(5) Male Dark-eyed Junco. Juncos, who nest on or near the ground, are one of our most abundant species.

(6) Male House finch(L) and Pine Siskin appear to be comparing stripes.

(7) Like the crows, jays are members of the Covid family with similar aggressive ways.

(8) A wet Orange-crowned Warbler revealing its orange crown feathers.

(9) A titmouse will occasionally build a nest in a bird box.

(10) Male Lesser Goldfinch, one of the most abundant year-round birds.

(11) Probably an Allen’s Hummingbird or possibly a migrating Rufous Hummingbird.

(12) Four Nutmeg Mannikins. They are escaped cage birds which have successfully naturalized.

(13) Tom Ginn photographing at “Bubbling Rock”

Tom’s Camera:
Canon EOS R with a 70-200mm f4 lens and 1.4x extender

SKY WATCHER

March 23, 2022March 30, 2022 Phila Rogers Nature, Uncategorized Clouds, rain

After a rainless January and February, we were excited to learn that a storm was moving our way. I read that it was being carried down the coast by our old friend the “jet stream,” that fast-moving river of air moving from east to west which circulates around the globe often delivering weather systems to our coast. Or at least it used to.

*A typical clear January and February day in this doubt year*

The possibility of a storm deserved a morning sky watch. Soon after sunrise, I stepped outside on my balcony and aimed my camera at the sky and would continue to do so at hourly intervals until noon. As a long-time sky watcher (or storm watcher) in the Bay Area, the evidence was not encouraging.

Though winter storms generally form in the Gulf of Alaska and move down the West Coast, the winds that accompany them blow counterclockwise, so approaching storms are preceded by winds from the southeast. This morning the wind blew consistently from the northeast and was cold and dry, rather than moist and mild.

*An interesting cloud, maybe even suggesting an omen, but not one promising rain.*

What I loved about most winter storms was the buildup that preceded the arrival of the storm itself. From my Bay Area hilltop house, I could scan the horizon from the south of San Francisco north past Mt. Tamalpais to Sonoma County. Not much escaped my attention.

The classical winter storm usually begins with high cirrus clouds often in fantastical shapes like wispy feathers. The clouds spread across the sky from north to south. At some point the wind begins, fluky at first before settling into gusts from the southeast growing in strength as the clouds thickened and lowered.

*High cirrus clouds, composed of ice crystals, sometimes preceding a storm, but not today. The clouds disappeared by mid-morning.*

After years of living in Berkeley, I knew the wind direction without looking. An early October storm carried the strong, acidic odor of cooking tomatoes coming from the Heinz catsup plant in southwest Berkeley. If the wind was blowing from the northwest, it would carry the strong petroleum odors coming from the Chevron distillery in Richmond.

In Santa Barbara, where I have lived for 10 years, I smell mostly the odor of cooking tortillas and the scent of flowers. Sometimes the alarming smell of burning chaparral tells me there is a fire in the mountains. When the wind blows from the northwest during in the long summer, the air smells vaguely like ammonia or slightly salty of kelp drying on the beach. It feels heavy and damp.

I’ve often wondered why I am so exhilarated just before a storm. I dash around, bringing in outdoor furniture, rolling up outdoor shades and tying them tight. Hankering for the feel of soil, I plant that final sixpack of pansies ahead of the rain.

Now I’ve learned the likely cause of this joyous energy – negative ions. Negative ions associated with clouds and wind facilitate the transfer of oxygen to the cells. No wonder I’m so exhilarated. After a storm has passed, denied this extra oxygen, I descend into what I’ve always thought of as a post-storm slump.

*One thin puff of cloud was all that remained at noon. All chances of rain disappeared.*

None of this energy was associated with today’s morning’s storm watch which began with a few isolated clumps of white clouds and a wind that never shifted around to the southeast. Instead of the air warming as it usually does with an approaching storm, the wind rattling in the dry foliage was cold and odorless. By noon the clouds had mostly disappeared leaving only a few shards to help color the sunset.

*Sunset at the end of yet another rainless day.*

Later I learned that the storm track was inland, bringing a dusting of snow to the higher coastal peaks while delivering generous, dry fluffy snow to the Sierra. I was disappointed after high hopes for a good rain, but I did enjoy the variety – a welcome relief from the still warm air from sunup to sunset.

TWO BOOKS FOR THE SKY WATCHER

The first book, sumptuously illustrated with clouds from around the world is titled: “The Cloud Collector’s Handbook,” by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. It is the official publication of The Cloud Appreciation Society. The Brits do love their weather. Some photos and descriptions are of familiar clouds. One is so rare you have to travel to the north-east corner of Australia to see it.

The second book is “Reading the Clouds: how you can forecast the weather,” by Oliver Perkins. He is another Brit, a sailor for whom knowing the weather is critical. One reason for “having your head in the clouds” is that they are full of valuable and interesting information.

PICKING UP WHERE I LEFT OFF

March 15, 2022 Phila Rogers Uncategorized

I blame this long lapse on the Pandemic. Being restricted should have had the opposite effect. With few distractions, wouldn’t I have wanted to write? It appears I was absorbed by the drama — the suffering and deaths, the stories every night on television of the terrors of intubation, of patients having to die alone, and families for fear of catching the disease prevented from being at the bedsides of loved ones.

As if this wasn’t enough, what was happening to our democracy under a “leadership” where lies always prevailed over truth.

But as a lover of nature, nothing equaled the horror of my beloved earth being irrevocably changed by a new climate, where the west shriveled under an ever hotter sun where rainfall came in bursts or not at all. A lover of clouds, flowing streams and the beguiling scent of the first few drops of rain at the beginning of a storm, I was a lost soul unmoored from everything I held dear.

Today is February 10, 2022, the second day when the thermometer topped 84 degrees and when less than a tenth of an inch of rain fell during January, considered one of the rainiest months. After a December of generous rain (almost 10 inches), we thought this was a good start to a good winter.

I try to write something every day. I’m committed to writing a nature column for our retirement facility’s monthly newsletter. I make uninspired entries in my nature notebook. I have kept these notebooks since the 1980s when I lived in the Berkeley Hills in a house with it’s view over the Bay. The open land next to me provided a generous helping of natural events. What I write now is a cursory almanac of when I got up, the current temperature and weather forecast. At least something. To both deepen and elevate my thoughts, I had resolved to read a poem every day, but of course I haven’t.

I still have my moments of joy like this week when the brilliant observations in Rebecca Solnit’s “Orwell’s Roses” shook me awake enough to write some passages in my notebook with the bold black pen I now use.

Though I’m not sure it belongs in my Santa Barbara blog, I was inspired to write a heartfelt piece about Angora Lake as yet another forest fire ate its way up the western flank of the Sierra Nevada. It might be worth publishing if only to jog the feelings of readers about their mountain retreat.

STAYING CLOSE TO HOME

May 4, 2020March 15, 2022 Phila Rogers Uncategorized

I wrote my first blog eight years ago when I was 83 years old and had just moved to Santa Barbara into a retirement community.

As I had sold my home in Berkeley, there would be no going back.

The first blog was “Making it Work on the South Coast.” The last written two years ago was titled “The Best for Last,” about Santa Cruz Island which gave me an opportunity to write both about my parents and my experiences on the island. In those intervening years, I had moved to a more agreeable apartment within the complex and had participated in the development of a Native Plant Garden in an area just below my new apartment. And I began a book – a compilation really, of the blogs and shorter nature pieces written for our monthly newsletter.

I used for the title “Best for Last” suggesting that this final period of my life in Santa Barbara was just that, though I still nurture deep reserves of nostalgic memories of the Berkeley Hills where I had lived most of my life. (Available through Amazon or at Chaucer’s, Santa Barbara)

With the help of a talented designer, I created a book that others thought more highly of than I did. I have always felt that what I wrote was less than what I was capable of – if only I could reach deeper.

Now I am ninety-one. I read, poke about in the native garden, or often just sit outside and listen to the birds. Like a native Santa Barbarian, I worry about frequent dry winters. But I am deeply frightened about Climate Change and how persistent droughts and heat on the South Coast and elsewhere, will affect those who follow us. Will my children, grandchildren and now five great-grandchildren know the joys of green winters and flower-filled springs and a sun to seek out, not one to hide from?

I recognize the lugubrious tone of my writing, but these are lugubrious times when our lives have been transformed by a virus – covid-19. We read about Ebola, grieved for families but took comfort in knowing that this was on the African continent, and that our own horror, AIDS, most often affected others, unless we happened to have a gay son. I was born 11 years after the Spanish Flu, knowing about it mostly from a photograph of my mother, a pretty young woman in her volunteer nurses’ uniform with a red cross on her cap.

Six months after my birth, the world was plunged into the Great Depression and then World War II. Now it is our turn, first with an epidemic, coronavirus (or covid-19), which we barely understand, followed most likely by another Great Depression. As I often do, I have retreated to nature and to birds. But with my flagging energies I am seldom out in the field, or rarely stirred to pursue a hidden bird with an unfamiliar song. I let others do my birding. I accept a mostly vicarious life by reading the postings of local birders – vigorous men, mostly, middle-aged women, who like certain botanists, are “my kind,” what ever that means

We are mostly isolated on our campus, with meals in plastic bags hung on our doorknobs, and no visitors permitted. Most people are wearing masks which makes even my friends unrecognizable. I escape occasionally by getting into my old Scion car and meeting family members at a park for a stroll. Classes and programs are online on our in-house television. My life isn’t so different except when I think about it. As long as my family and those dear to me stay well, I will remember to be grateful.

With businesses closed and most people staying at home, freeways are almost empty, and the air is brighter and cleaner than most people can remember. Wild animals, often unseen, have taken over Yosemite Valley and Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

In one of those beautiful ironies, while most of us have “sheltered in place” the birds are on the move in unprecedented numbers. It appears that Oak Park and our knoll where Samarkand is located are not on one of the migratory corridors. A recent report on my list serve, where local birders post what they see, one young man stood in his driveway for almost an hour, head tilted back, watching an extravaganza of swallows, swifts, loons and kingbirds.

Daytime migrations are unusual. Most birds migrate at night when the air is cooler and quieter, using a combination of navigational aides like the position of the stars, the magnetic fields, or polarized light. At daybreak, most song birds rest and feed and at dusk set off again. Certain birds make marathon flights over water and will need enough stored fats for the journey.

I have often wished I lived in a quiet place far from towns and airports where I could hear the special calls that migrating birds use to keep in touch with one another. Yes. quiet, and truly dark nights where I could see stars beyond counting.

Other birders are reporting unusual numbers of passerines – Black-headed Grosbeaks, Western Tanagers, Orioles, warblers, and others in the high state of excitement that defines the time of migration.

I move away from my computer to rest my eyes and to see if I wrote anything interesting in my journal. My journal often receives my most intimate thoughts.

Dear ones on your strong wings
With even stronger intent.
Are you fleeing this diseased planet?
But you too are a captive of gravity
With lungs which need oxygen.
Mars would never do.

FALL IN SANTA BARBARA

November 10, 2016 Phila Rogers Nature, Uncategorized birding, Clouds, Fog, rain, santa barbara, seasons

images Take this week – in the middle of October. All day the clouds continued to build up against the mountains. And at bedtime, I heard an unfamiliar sound. Opening the door, I was surprised by rain. Pulling open the window next to my bed, I fell asleep to the comforting sound of rain falling, while breathing in that indescribable fragrance of earth refreshed. The morning that followed was the freshest we’ve had in this endless season of harsh drought.

library-023 By Wednesday, the temperature rose to 95 degrees, the humidity descended into the single digits, the red fire danger flags were posted. By the weekend the scene changed again. I could joyfully proclaim fall as it should be – a sky full of clouds of every shape in shades of gray and white. I’ve cracked open the door so I can feel the cool breeze and hear the birds as I work on my computer.

Nothing energizes the bird population like a change in the weather, especially when there is the possibility of rain. If you trust forecasts, rain may be moving our way, coming from the north, the most reliable direction.

Being an incurable nostalgic I remember days like this in the Bay Area we called the “second spring.” The first rain of the fall brought up sprouts of green grass on the hills, certain native plants set buds or even bloomed, and the birds began singing again. I guessed that maybe they were fooled by day and night equaling in length, the way it did during the spring equinox.

More knowledgeable birdwatchers than me, call this “second spring” “Autumnal Recrudescence,” a word new to me. Looking the word up, I read that it was most often a medical term meaning the return of an illness after a remission. Or it could mean the recurrence of an unpleasant feeling like doubt.

Naturalist give the word a happier meaning.

The Autumnal Recrudescence of the Amatory Urge

When the birds are cacophonic in the trees and on the verge
Of the fields in mid-October when the cold is like a scourge.
It is not delight in winter that makes feathered voices surge,
But autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge.
When the frost is on the pumpkin and when leaf and branch diverge,
Birds with hormones reawakened sing a paean, not a dirge.
What’s the reason for their warbling? Why on earth this late-year splurge?
The autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge.

-Written by Susan Stiles, copyright December 1973

After the mostly silent late summer, I was delighted with the bird chorus. I also attributed it to the completion of energy-robbing activities like nesting followed by molting where in most species, every feather had to be replaced with a new one.

The arrival of the winter residents certainly energized the local, year-round population. The regulars and newcomers set about declaring and defending their winter territories.

north-pacific-high — Illustration by Peter Gaede “A Naturalist’s Guide to the Santa Barbara Region” by Joan Easton Lentz

Wanting to better understand fall in Santa Barbara sent me back to Joan Lentz’s “A Naturalist’s Guide to the Santa Barbara Region,” my bible on all things local. She says that the distinction between summer and fall is more pronounced than between spring and summer. Enter our old friend or nemesis The North Pacific High. If the atmosphere behaves as it should, this zone of high pressure which held sway over the summer, producing the northwest winds blowing down the coast and causing coastal fog, should begin to move south following the sun. Winds cease and with them the fog. A rain may even sneak through as it had last Sunday evening. With less fog, the skies are clearer and the blue skies are a palette for the extraordinary clouds of fall.

In the Berkeley Hills where I’ve lived most of my life, we especially dreaded the August fogs with their frigid winds when the gloomy, damp overcast could persist for days on end. When late September brought relief, we were ecstatic. Both in the Bay Area and in Santa Barbara, fall winds sometimes blew from the north and northeast, coming from the Great Basin, bringing the odors of sage and when passing over the mountains, the tangy smell of conifers.

Though Santa Barbara, by its location and topography, is spared the full impact of the Santa Anas (unlike the LA basin), we often have the offshore winds, heat, and lower humidity.

In my drives around town I look for autumn color to further affirm the change of season. Sycamores, which grow wherever there is a little ground moisture, have been dropping leaves all summer and even in the best of years are only a dusky gold, showing their best color when back lit by the sun. Liquidambars, also called sweet gum, a native to the southeast, are beginning to show their autumn color, but we will have to wait until late November for their best display.

Image result for images of native sycamores

Weary of my endless comparisons between Berkeley and Santa Barbara, my daughter decided it was time for a drive over the mountain to the Santa Ynez Valley, for a change of scene. And change of scene, indeed! What a difference a mountain range makes. The Santa Ynez Valley is hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. The continental influences prevail, moderated somewhat by the proximity to the coast and the ocean. But the sub-tropical trees in Santa Barbara’s parks and gardens would not succeed here.

2016-10-22-10-09-46

This is the wide-open country of vineyards and olive orchards where the horse is king. Some ranches provide individual horse casitas with white stucco walls, tiled roofs, and individual corrals.

And, yes, I did find the color I was hoping for in the bright yellow cottonwoods growing along the dry Santa Ynez River watercourse. We like to be drenched in the fall brilliance of yellows, oranges, and red – this intoxicating dazzle – the final flaring before the bare trees in the dimming light and short days of winter. fall1

But what pleased me the most were the ambers of the vineyards, the pale grasses long spent and all the other shades of gray-greens, ochers, umbers and shades of color for which I have no names — and the swirls and small bunches of white clouds against a soft blue sky.

Once I yearned to live in open country with only distant neighbors if any at all, under a curving sky with stars beyond counting, winds that travelled long distances unobstructed, and the distant yips and howls of coyotes.

But I was content enough to return back over the mountain, to the marine air which is kinder, and to a town of neighborhoods where lights in other windows comfort me. On the weekends, music and voices of children come up the hill from the city park below. Once the winter rains begin, I will hear the music of Mission Creek.

fog Yesterday, at the end of the month, the clouds thickened during the day. In the afternoon, a few large drops fell. The air felt dense and heavy, maybe rich in negative ions which some say lifts the spirits.

Around 3 am, we awoke to a long roll of thunder. For the next hour, lightning and thunder alternated, until the lightning seemed to rip open the heavy undersides of the clouds releasing a torrent which in a few minutes left behind a half inch of rain. At the end of the day, the clouds had retreated back to the mountains.
It appears that at last I have the intemperate Santa Barbara I had expected – a Santa Barbara of sundowner winds gusting down canyons, landslides, firestorms and debris flows, floods, thunder ricocheting off the

mountain sides, and on the coast, high surfs which rearrange beaches.

Is this the fall and winter which will end the drought? Such secrets are closely held. In the meantime, I look often at the sky, sniff the air, and even conger up promising clouds. It can’t hurt. 2015-06-26-20

Some of the birds which arrive in the Fall

ruby-crowned-kinglet-042 — Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Photos by Tom Ginn

The Way It Was

Image October 17, 2014November 28, 2014 Phila Rogers Uncategorized

Sitting on a bench at Franceschi Park in the foothills above Santa Barbara, I look over the city. The streets are laid out in grids, dense with houses and buildings. The beach is backed by rows of tall palms. The harbor is filled with boats of every description. I can’t help but think about how the same scene would have looked a thousand years ago.

Wiping the palette clean, what I now see is a narrow plateau sloping gradually to the sea. The conical, thatched huts of a Chumash village cluster where a stream enters the ocean. Offshore are several plank canoes with paddlers headed across the Channel to smaller villages on the Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Islands.

This scene persists until the arrival of Europeans in the late 1700s, when the Spanish coming up from Mexico established a string of missions along the coast. At the larger missions, such as the one at Santa Barbara, a small village grows up around its presidio.

It was to this Santa Barbara on a warm and windless January day in 1834, that The Pilgrim, a brig out of Boston, dropped anchor offshore. Aboard was a young student from Harvard, Richard Henry Dana. He would later write the story of his adventures on the high seas and along the coast of California for a year of gathering hides and tallow. His story would become one of the best-loved books of American literature: “Two Years Before the Mast.”

What Dana saw at Santa Barbara was a small village of about 100 white-washed adobes with red-tiled roofs, surrounding the larger presidio. The mission built on a slope above the town served as the mark where the vessels came to anchor.

The town is finely situated with a bay in front, and an amphitheater of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is that the hills have no trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years ago, and they have not yet grown again. The fire described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach (January 1835).

old view of santa barbara harbor — 1830’s view of Santa Barbara Harbor

As a lad from Massachusetts, he would have expected the hills and mountains to be covered with trees. He must have been puzzled by this dry, central California landscape where steep sandstone mountains could only support gray-green chaparral.

Sailing ships coming to Santa Barbara typically anchored three miles offshore, as this was an exposed and dangerous roadstead.

The whole swell of the Pacific Ocean rolls in here before a southeaster, and breaks with so heavy a surf in the shallow water, that it is highly dangerous to lie near in to the shore during the southeaster season, that is, between the months of November and April. The wind is the bane of the coast of California (January 1835)

Along the length of the California coast only San Diego and Monterey offered a reasonably safe anchorage, with San Francisco Bay offering the most secure. Dana extols San Francisco Bay, prophesizing that San Francisco will someday be one of the great cities.

The crew of The Pilgrim spent almost a year on the California coast gathering and preparing hides for transport back to Boston, where factories produced finished leather goods. Hide and tallow were the principle exports at a time when the land was divided into vast ranchos where herds of long-horned cattle roamed freely.

On one trip up the coast to Point Conception, the ship encountered a ferocious gale that blew unabated for three nights and days. Even some of their reefed sails were ripped, and they were blown far out to sea. Point Conception and Point Arguello, located where the coast bends inward, are still notorious for brutal winds in all seasons.

The Pilgrim made several stops at Santa Barbara over the year. One visit was when the youngest daughter of the De La Guerra family married the American agent, Alfred Robinson. It was a grand ceremony beginning at the Mission and continuing with a “fandango,” at the De La Guerra hacienda, lasting several days and nights.

Dana described the deterioration of the Missions following Mexico’s winning independence from Spain, twenty-one years earlier. Under Mexican rule, the Missions were stripped of their power and lands, leaving the Fathers with only religious duties.

Shortly before setting sail for the east coast Dana encountered Thomas Nuttall, the famous British collector of plants and birds (our Oak Park woodpecker, Nuttall’s’Woodpecker is named for him). He had been most recently botanizing in Califonia and came aboard as a passenger on Dana’s present ship The Alert,” homeward bound for Boston. For Nuttall’s eccentric ways, Dana dubbed him “old curiosity.”

In 15 years, California became a state, and the Pastoral Era of the great ranchos came to an end. As new people poured into California, the Spanish landholders, unfamiliar with English and lacking cash, were unable to defend their lands against the newcomers. Gold mining would pollute rivers and even San Francisco Bay itself. Giant trees began to fall before the axe, as cities replaced the tiny presidio towns, and grazing lands became farms. Nature itself was transformed with disappearance of large animals, and with exotic species replacing much of the native vegetation.

* * * * *

THE PERFECT STORM

I have never had the privilege of being a part of a winter storm at sea as Richard Henry Dana did during his winter aboard “The Pilgrim,” while off the coast of California in 1864. But I have experienced innumerable storms while living in Coastal California, both north and south. In this driest year in memory, I can’t resist reenacting in my mind one such storm.

It’s November. After a few cloudless days, I look up to see cirrus clouds. Formed of ice crystals and blown by high altitude winds into thin wisps, cirrus clouds often precede an approaching storm.

Toward evening the wind begins to pick up out of the south, bringing warmer air. At bedtime, the rain is yet to fall, but the stars have disappeared behind thickening clouds. The building winds bring a palpable tension. The eucalyptus creak and groan, their leathery leaves clattering together sound like falling water. The pines sing and sigh.

I’m awakened during the night by the sound of rain falling against the south-facing windows. The wind blows unabated with harsh gusts rattling the windows in their frames

At daybreak, following a restless sleep, I awake to the rain still falling. The street is littered with streamers of bark and torn leaves. The wind becomes erratic blowing this way and that, releasing a final deluge of rain. And then all is silent and air grows chilly. Clouds race across the sky allowing brilliant sun to shine through. As the wind shifts to the north, remaining clouds gather into towering cumulus. On the horizon beyond the islands, they move south like galleons under full sail.

Fragrances are released that I’d forgotten. Streams flow again. The dry earth is sated. The wind has curried the trees releasing all that is tired and spent. The revived earth is born anew.

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ANN’S BIRDBATHS

The sandstone fountain, we call “Bubbling Rock” in the foreground overlooks the Native Plant Garden.

Tom’s Camera:Canon EOS R with a 70-200mm f4 lens and 1.4x extender

Some of the birds which arrive in the Fall

Tom’s Camera:
Canon EOS R with a 70-200mm f4 lens and 1.4x extender