Summer Camp, Summer Solstice

Happy belated Summer Solstice to all. The days stretch a little long for my liking this time of year, so I'm glad that daylight time will once again be shaved off the mornings and evenings.

The first week of camp came and went with a minimum of hiccups. We all slipped right back into our Summer grooves without having to think about it. Midweek, as I stood half-immersed in the pond while singing a made-up song and holding a turtle, I had another one of those frequent moments where I suddenly stopped and said aloud, "I'm getting paid to do this right now!" It is indeed never too late to have a happy childhood.

My favorite camper quote of the week comes courtesy of a little boy named Fox, who said (and I paraphrase here), "you guys always fix my problems. That's why I sign up for this camp!"

In the yard, the unharvested artichokes are blooming, and so is pretty much everything else.

Here are some photos from the first week of camp.

Crows

The neighborhood resounds with incessant chirping and twittering as birds do their springtime stuff. Our yard sees more birds now because of the chicken food. The chickens are pretty efficient eaters, but there is always some left over for the other avians. The lawn is usually hopping with feathery little bodies. It's also dry and covered in avocado leaves at the moment. Drought conditions still prevail.

My favorite visitors are the crows. They never land in the yard, but they often perch nearby. These two visited yesterday:

The trick to photographing crows is to pretend you don't see them while you get into position, and then shoot quickly. Crows don't like being looked at. These two were no exception, flying away over the roof almost immediately.

Transition

Willow is no longer an elementary school student. Today, along with over a hundred of her classmates, she graduated. Each student got a chance to step up to the mic and make a promise to his or her parents. Willow's promise was that she would always be true to herself and be kind to others. Very nice. I'll hold her to it. Many of the boys (as well as a few of the girls) made weak promises about trying to be nice to their younger siblings. A few of the promises were funny, some were poignant, and some of them had loopholes you could shove Rush Limbaugh through (the ones that had words like "try" and "attempt" in them, for starters...).

They grow up so quickly. It really is true.

They also played a slideshow of pictures taken while the kids were at science camp. One of the photos was of me making a dirt angel, which is sort of like making a snow angel, except in the dirt. I'd forgotten I'd been photographed doing that. Some of Willow's classmates, perhaps forgetting that Willow was my daughter, asked me what I was doing at their school. My celebrity status is amusing sometimes.

Crows Crush Squirrels

I often see crows eating roadkill. They seem to prefer the flat squirrels to the other types of two dimensional animals. Based on the lack of dead crows in the road, they also seem to be pretty good at avoiding cars.

A couple of days ago, as I watched a crow chase a squirrel into the road, it occurred to me that crows probably take a more active role in the roadkill process that I previously thought. This was the second time in less than a month that I'd witnessed this particular type of interaction. I think this is how crows prepare lunch, using cars as huge, rolling meat tenderizers. After all, crows are known tool users, and their use of vehicles to crush acorns and other nuts is pretty well documented. Crows have long been witnessed dropping acorns and other hard nuts into crosswalks at intersections, waiting for traffic lights to turn green so the wall of traffic will roll forward and shatter the shells, and then walking out into the crosswalk to obtain their prizes.

Our avian overlords await.

Check out a short clip of a crow preparing lunch here.

Endings and Beginnings

The school year is over for me now. I had originally expected to go back to working nights for the last couple of weeks but I ended up staying in the field instead, which is fine by me because working nights in late Spring is kind of a pain in the butt because the sun wakes the campers up nearly an hour before their official wake-up time. The problem with that is they're supposed to be quiet and I'm supposed to enforce this. It's very hard for fifth and sixth graders to stay in bed and be quiet for any amount of time. Most of them can't handle 5 minutes, let alone an hour.

My two final weeks in the field for the season went by in a blaze of sunshine and dust. The first week, I was impressed by the kid who chose to carry a car tire all the way back from the reservoir so he could throw it away (he carried it for probably around a mile), and the last week was notable for the number of bats we saw on the night hike (not really a night hike, but more of a crepuscular crawl, since it stays light so late this time of year) and the fact that Lake Ranch Reservoir is so low that we could walk all the way around it (usually, the far side is more or less impassable due to the water level and the lack of a trail). It was the first time I've done that. Several of the kids sunk in the mud near the shore, but they all managed to get out again. We found Killdeer eggs too, as the mom pretended to be injured so she could lure us away. At one point, I turned around and one of the boys was holding a Killdeer egg. At first, I was upset with him because I thought he'd taken it from the "nest" (in quotes because Killdeer don't build nests, they just lay their eggs on the ground), but he claimed he'd found it by itself in a shallow depression nearby. I put it down close to the other eggs, and the Killdeer looked confused as she returned to sit on the other ones.

Before these two weeks, I spent a few days in Baltimore for Maryland Deathfest, a 4-day music festival. I'm working on a report/review for my other blog, and I'll add a link here when it's up.

Tomorrow, we start summer camp set-up week. Thursday, Willow graduates from the fifth grade, and next week summer camp begins.

Of Ghosts and Coincidences

Willow had a turbulent camp week, starting with one of her friends mentioning seeing a ghost in their cabin at night (Willow is not a fan of ghosts), followed by her teddy bear somehow ending up on top of the ceiling fan (the teachers from the other school sharing the week are known pranksters), and culminating with her getting a fever on Wednesday evening. She skipped Thursday, staying home and recuperating, and was back again for the last morning of camp on Friday. The thermometers were full and red most of the week, with the temperatures reaching nearly 100 degrees in the afternoons. When this is coupled with the fact that there are a lot of sunny, uphill hikes, the week wasn't for the faint of heart.

My week went well though. I had a few of Willow's friends in my field class, including Ghost-girl. The night hike was particularly good. I once again did a long one, walking my group uphill for around half a mile so we could take in the view. As if the twilight view of slowly appearing stars and the wavery sparkle of distant city lights wasn't profound enough, we were treated to the spectacular sight of full moon cresting the East Bay hills, turned dirty orange by the intervening layers of particulate matter in the atmosphere. The only snake we saw was a very irritable Rattlesnake that went into full defensive mode when we encountered in alongside the trail. The kids were impressed. I pioneered a new loop for the so-called epic journey too, taking a new stretch of trail down from the dry pond to the almost dry (97% empty, the last I checked) Steven's Creek Reservoir and following the little trickle of Steven's Creek back uphill toward camp.

Coming back from this particular hike, Ghost-girl mentioned that she'd lost her digital camera but was pretty sure she'd left it at the creek near camp. She looked for it, but to no avail.

The missing camera was pushed to the back of my mind until, last night, I got a Facebook message from one of my old friends (one who I hadn't seen in person for around 6 years), saying that her niece had found a camera in the hills. They'd looked at the pictures on the camera and found photos of fifth graders, cabins, and a scorpion. My friend, of course, knows what I do for a living and knows my affinity for arachnids, so I had popped into her mind when she saw the photos. She said they had found it near her favorite tree (you've got to love people who have favorite trees), a huge sycamore that leans over Steven's Creek near the camp. I remembered Ghost-girl entering the water there on Wednesday while trying to catch a crayfish. I also knew that Ghost-girl had taken a picture of a scorpion I'd found. The final confirmation was my friend posting an image from the camera into the Facebook message. It's a good thing that Ghost-girl takes selfies.

To my mind, it is a stunning coincidence that an old friend would stumble across the camera in the hills the same day a kid in my field class lost it, and then have the presence of mind to check in with me to see if I knew anything about it. Add that to the fact that I don't often work at our Cupertino site where the camera was lost. My friend does claim to be psychic though, so I guess anything is possible...

My friend and her niece found it just in time too, because a nearby family had also seen it and wanted to keep it. The camera is currently sitting next to me as I type. I'll send Willow to school with it on Monday. It was nice to catch up with my friend too. We sent her home with some fresh eggs.

Dove

We did a general cleanup in the backyard yesterday, and Jeanine startled a fledgling dove doing its best to blend in with the ground over by the compost. I took a break from scraping up chicken shit and brought out my camera. I like the little trifurcated branch in the first photo. It makes it look like the dove just ejected a leg.

Inside, Dexter let his contempt for all things with feathers be known.

Spring Frenzy

Time has passed. Once again, I find that having a daytime schedule interferes with the life of the mind. Two weeks of camp have passed since I last updated this blog. Both weeks were good ones. I led a total of 41 kids up and down various trails, hopefully instilling within them a new respect for natural processes and new determination to become stewards of our planet rather than the parasites so many people appear to be. I also learned a bit more about the reservoir that I often choose as a destination on Thursday, a day when we have around 5 and a half hours to play with. Lake Ranch Reservoir was built by hand in the late 1800s, and at one point was the property of a family named Bernard. The elder Bernard accidentally killed his son (or stepson, depending on whose story I believe - the online source or what one of the park rangers told me) while hunting. Bernard, overcome with grief, later took his life on the property. I don't plan on sharing that part with the kids. Even the cabin leaders, who are usually in their mid teens, see ghosts behind every tree if given the slightest mental nudge in that direction. Elementary school students are even more susceptible to suggestion.

Here are some photos taken this week.

...And a few from last week.

The water level in the reservoir is at about 20% of capacity, not because of the drought but because seismic testing has never been done. The other local reservoirs, built much more recently, have all been seismically tested.

Our trip down south to see Black Sabbath was a success. Read about it here.

As for my trip to Yosemite, which I mentioned in the last post but didn't elaborate on. I'm ecstatic that I finally got to go there, and filled with disbelief that it took me so long to do it. It definitely lives up to its internationally renowned status. See my photo set here. As for the park being lousy with tourists, it sure was, although as is usually the case, the further up the trails one goes, the fewer fellow tourists there are. Most people stick to the valley. There was a wide range of humanity there alongside us. On the good side, our campground neighbors thoughtfully staked our tent down after it blew away during our absence. On the bad side, some sloppy excuse for humanity decided that stuffing a dirty diaper under a rock counted as throwing it away. I briefly thought about finding the person responsible and making him (or her) eat the damn thing. It was nice to hang out and relax with my co-workers too. We'll have to do something like this again.

Willow is going to be at camp this coming week. She's excited, but oddly enough worried about being homesick. Not only will I be there, but she knows the majority of the staff. She's funny sometimes.

Trails Full of Flowers and Snakes

Working during the day cuts into my time spent in front of the computer, which is a good thing but it also means fewer posts here. I've worked a few weeks at our Cupertino site now, and I'm currently in the middle of a week off. I spent the first part of the week at Yosemite National Park with my co-workers Jellyfish, Pelican, and Papa Bear. Everybody I work with was amazed to discover that I hadn't been there previously (because I'm a naturalist and grew up in California), and now that I'm back, I must say that I too am amazed that I hadn't been there before. More on Yosemite later though. For once, I'm actually doing something with a week off other than sleeping in and staying close to home, so in a few hours, Eva and I are heading for L.A. to stay at my old friend Chris' house, along with another old friend, Jack, who is heading north from San Diego to meet us there. Then, we're all going to see Black Sabbath. Unfortunately, Jeanine has to work, so won't be joining us. I had initially invited Willow along too, but she balked at the long car ride.

Right now, it is cloudy and drizzly out, although the last couple of weeks have been mostly sunny and warm. The reptiles and birds have been out too. Here are some pictures from the last few weeks. I'll save the Yosemite pictures for another post.

Most of these photos taken at work, while I was on the clock, so to speak. The two Kingsnakes were found on the same trail, but on different weeks. One of them was missing an eye and had several other partially healed wounds. It looked like it had been captured and dropped by a hawk. The other one had only one wound. Something must find Kingsnakes yummy, either that or they're going after prey that takes serious exception to being eaten. When I found the second snake, our group was accompanied by a teacher and a parent who was doubling as the school yearbook photographer, meaning that the snake has a chance of being in a school yearbook. Like it cares.

The napkin dispenser photo was taken after Papa Bear, who is currently the night supervisor at our Cupertino site, pointed out the face to me. I even mentioned it to the students when I was running the astronomy program because there is a picture of the "face" on Mars in our powerpoint presentation. Faces pop up in the strangest places.

The Canada Geese and the Softshell Turtle photos were taken along the Los Gatos Creek Trail. The turtle is an invasive species, but I'm always excited to photograph reptiles. They pose so nicely.

I went out and watched the full lunar eclipse earlier this month too. If I had been working nights that week, I would have gotten paid for that as well. As it was, I ventured out into the backyard a few times between 11:00 PM and midnight. The clouds more or less cooperated too.

New Chickens, Old Crows

I've always had trouble saying no when people offer me free reptiles, and Jeanine has proven that she has a similar problem when it comes to chickens. This is why we have three new chickens. At the moment, they're confined to their coop (which came with the chickens) until they get used to their new surroundings (and the old chickens), but hopefully soon they'll successfully intermingle. Here they are:

Nearby, the crows are busy building nests. Now that I have a better lens, I can actually get photos of them without them realizing it.

Well, almost...

Mystery

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the strange cloud that was hovering over the South Bay around a week ago. I'm not sure what atmospheric conditions are necessary for the formation of something so perfectly oval. It was suggested by several people that it looked like a word balloon, as if the planet was trying to communicate something, cartoon-style.

Fear of Being Eaten By A Cormorant While Falling From the Golden Gate Bridge

More rain fell this week. On Monday, it percolated down through all three layers of clothing, turning me into a soggy mess. I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure this particular storm blew in from the north. I led my group of kids down rushing rivulets that had once been trails, and they were good sports about it. The slugs and worms were out in force, making the robins happy.

There was a kid in my group who was so into bugs that he referred to species by their scientific names. He said he wanted to be an entomologist when he grows up. My kind of kid. As all weeks do, this one flew by. Next week marks my third in a row at the Cupertino site.

Over the previous weekend, Jeanine, Eva, Willow, and I went up to San Francisco to do some letterboxing. Our quest first took us to the Hotel Vertigo, which was a location for a certain famous film.

Then, we went out to the Golden Gate Bridge, which coincidentally also served as a backdrop for scenes from the same film.

While we were there, we witnessed a Cormorant doing some heavy duty snacking. Cormorants take their snacking quite seriously.

Stamp Art

I've been trying to carve at least one rubber stamp a month this year. Here's a piece of art incorporating a couple of stamps.

Sunset for Cinema

I've just finished a week of working at our Cupertino site, which has fewer Redwoods and more chaparral, not to mention a bigger creek and better views at the tops of the hills. There are fewer trails though. There was a boy with Down Syndrome in my group, and he was super cute and super excited to be there. There was also a boy who said he wants to be a biologist when he grows up. He even brought his own field guide with him, and I saw him referring to it from time to time.

During the week, we got a bit of rain, although it rarely got heavy. Just enough to bring out the newts and moisten the dust.

Speaking of childhood, the local dome theaters that marked the landscape of my youth are falling one by one. The Century Theaters were once five: Century 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25, but now they are three, 25 and 24 having been reduced to rubble in the name of "progress", although the way I see it, "progress" is usually just a euphemism for greed. Developers are swooping in with their avaricious plans. The three remaining domes have fallen under the jaded gaze of the people who toppled the old Town & Country shopping center across the street, where the sprawling shopping dystopia called Santana Row malevolently squats. It looks like Santana Row is soon going to engulf the property where the domes currently reside.

Last week, I happened to be near the remains of another old movie theater, the Meridian Quad. The only physical evidence that it was ever there is this sign:

Why was I there? I was inside the pizza place getting face painted by clowns. Yes, clowns need to practice this kind of thing. I then went to work, where my coworkers weren't surprised at all. In fact, my boss didn't even ask why my face was painted. I love my job.

Mysteries, Both Real and Imagined

Spring has been gathering steam for most of the Winter, and now it's officially here, as of 12:57 P.M., EDT. Happy Vernal Equinox. Hopefully we'll have some Spring showers before Summer comes along to cook us.

My nights at work this week have been relatively easy. I finished reading Edogawa Rampo's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" and almost finished watching season 4 of Farscape. I can do that sort of thing when the campers are all asleep. Three more episodes to go.

I also marveled at the mysterious pile of crap that appeared outside one of the cabins. Sometime in the middle of the night, one of the campers evidently couldn't be bothered with the 30 second walk to the toilets, but instead let fly less than 10 feet from his cabin door. He can cross "criminal mastermind" off of his list of potential careers though, because after the deed was done, he stepped in it, allowing the janitor to follow the tracks back to his bunk. That was where things stood when I left this morning. I'm sure he's had a talking-to by now.

The Beckoning Darkness

After around a month of working days, I'm back on the night shift this week. It's actually not that hard for me to switch back and forth, but only because even when I'm working nights regularly, I tend to be diurnal on the weekends. It's probably not good for me to constantly switch my schedule around though. when I'm working nights, I usually spend nearly 24 hours awake at the beginning of the week. I manage this by exerting very little energy on those days, and taking cat naps at work (and apparently, by sitting in my comfy chair and blogging).

Yesterday, Willow used a bunch of her own money to buy various gag items to use on April Fool's Day. She wants to organize a party at which she and her friends prank each other. I tried to convince her that pranks are less effective if people expect them, but dad advice often falls on deaf ears.

Speaking of special days, here's a photo of the birthday present I got for my step-daughter, Eva, on her birthday last month:

I wonder how many kids go through a "creepy doll" phase. I approve.

Records, Pizza, Coffee, and Snakes = the Perfect Outing

I'm currently reading a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", by Nicholas Carr, and so far it hasn't told me much that I hadn't already figured out for myself. The internet is distracting us and ruining our attention spans. Carr provides the reader with a lot of interesting background information though, so from my perspective, it's still worth reading.

I'm reminded of another interesting piece of information that I once read (or heard), pertaining to the reason why people often walk into rooms and suddenly forget whatever mission they had in mind. It has to do with the fact that we evolved in a world without compartments, where there were no rooms. Once we moved away from the wide open vistas and stuffed ourselves into compartmented boxes, it in turn compartmentalized our thought processes. The end result of this is that when we suddenly find ourselves in a new room, whatever it was that we were thinking in the previous room sometimes vanishes from our mental horizons.

The internet can be like that. The continuous landscape of a book vanishes into a welter of enticing, neon-lit alleyways down which every imaginable distraction (or vice) is displayed. Every link is a doorway leading to another "room". It really isn't surprising that our thoughts can end up scattered and our internal calm shattered.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I notice that some physical shops are taking things in the opposite direction. Yesterday, Willow and I were wandering through Berkeley (after stopping by a friend's house to buy a truly impressive record with real leaves pressed into the vinyl, followed by lunch at Zachary's pizza with Uncle Greg) when we stumbled across a coffee place called Artis. See an article here. We mostly went in just to use the bathroom, and I figured I'd pay for that privilege by buying some coffee. I figured it would be one of those places that brews each cup by hand, and I was right, but they took it one step farther. They roasted the beans by order too. I bought a pound of beans and watched them roast it for me. I must add that the bag that contains my newly roasted and purchased beans exclaims, "each bean in this bag was PICKED LOVINGLY BY HAND thousands of miles away".

Taking this to its logical conclusion, I envision that one day citizens will be able to wander into coffee shops and witness beard-tugging hipsters gathered around pots of soil as they watch coffee plants grow, waiting for the beans to be ready for harvesting so that they can conclude their transactions.

I wonder if this kind of thing is a reaction (conscious or otherwise) to the fast-paced, hectic online world that many of us inhabit. If so, I approve.

After we left, we went to East Bay Vivarium and looked at snakes and spiders. Willow wants me to get another python. I still have my eyes on the Beaded Lizards.

In other news, Willow's softball season is up and running. She keeps saying that each year will be her last, but keeps signing up again anyway. She's a busy girl.

Lanterns to Light the Darkest Passage

Broughty Cole's body was fished out of the Sacramento river yesterday. According to police, there was "nothing suspicious" about this. Really? At least his family can have some closure, but that doesn't lessen the tragedy of his passing.

Here are some faerie lanterns to light his way into the beyond. I don't necessarily believe in a beyond, but if there is one, it should have faerie lanterns.

What Tomorrow Brings...

Remembered past is history and unknowable future is a mystery, and somewhere in the future lies the answer to the question about a man named Broughty Cole, who vanished off the face of the earth a little under a week ago, leaving his car parked at a marina near Sacramento. I didn't know Broughty, but he played drums for the opening band, Lasher Keen, at a show I attended a couple of days before his disappearance. I am slightly acquainted with his two bandmates though, and they're both fine examples of humanity. This fact, coupled with having seen him just a couple of days before he vanished, makes what is essentially yet another missing person case more personal (yes, they all suck, but we'd all be emotional wrecks if we took every bad news story personally). I find myself checking for updates quite often (there is a Facebook page set up to coordinate search efforts) and I donated some money to help fund the search efforts (you can too, if you are reading this in a timely manner - just go to the Facebook page and send money via Paypal to the e-mail address mentioned there).

Other than that, words fail, so here is a healing photo of a forest, taken earlier this week.

...And here is the most recent version of the flyer. I don't imagine that posting it here will make much of a difference, but I know for a fact that not posting it here will make exactly no difference.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

There is a teacher at camp this week whose name is Concepción.

The kids call her Misconception.

When Working Is Playing

We've been getting a bit of rain over the last week, with attendant rainbows.

Last Wednesday was especially moist, but that didn't stop us from hiking. I figured it would be a good day for the kids to learn about water. We ended up wearing it. I don't think we would have gotten any wetter if I'd led the kids into the pond. As it was, we spent a lot of time playing in the gutters and culverts. At one point, we unblocked a clogged gutter and got to watch a refrigerator-sized cluster of leaves, branches, and other debris go racing away down the hill like a bear saddled with extra gravity. The kids loved it. They also loved just playing in the water. I love getting paid to play in the water.

During all of this, a boy said that he could have chased a coyote in his pants and nobody would have noticed. "Chasing a coyote" is camp code for peeing, and yes, we were all that wet.

On the mid-week feedback forms that we have the kids fill out, one kid remembered the lesson on decomposers slightly incorrectly. We teach about decomposers (fungus, bacteria, and invertebrates), using the acronym "F.B.I.", and one kid remembered that part, but wrote that he'd learned about fungus, bacteria, and immigration.

As I was leading the kids into the nature lab, one girl looked up and told me, "you smell like syrup." At first I was confused, since I hadn't eaten anything with syrup that morning, but then remembered the Candy Cap mushrooms I'd had in my backpack. They smell strongly of maple syrup, and even though I've lost the mushrooms somewhere, my backpack continues to smell like syrup. As smells go, it's a pretty good one.

This week, it feels colder and the clouds remain. Maybe we'll get some more rain. Speaking of getting things, one of the teachers from a couple of weeks ago showed her appreciation for what we do by giving all of the staff members who were working that week inscribed copies of her book. I hadn't even known she was an author. It's a children's book about the Redwood forest, complete with beautiful illustrations (check it out here). I love it when people make these kinds of gestures. It's yet another reminder that what we do is appreciated.