Arboretum, L.A. version

This afternoon I took Shannon and Courtney to the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum, just up the road in Arcadia. It's a fabulous arboretum, with specimens from every continent, and in addition to a place for serious botanical research is a marvelous place to take kids. It's full of meandering paths, ponds, fountains, and Lake Baldwin with its Queen Anne cottage, built by Lucky Baldwin for his fourth (!!) wife, a 15-year-old who stayed married to the old goat for approximately one year. The best spot in the arboretum, though, is what we used to call the Jungle Trail, now renamed the Prehistoric Area—groves of tall bamboo, mysterious tunnels through dark undergrowth, part scary, part fun. When my sons were little, my mom used to take them to the arboretum to wander along the Jungle Trail, so it was a treat to go there with my own grandchildren.

Here they are at the Queen Anne Cottage. The interior is furnished in period style, complete with mannequins in costume, and at this time of year, it's beautifully decorated for the season. You can't go inside but you can look through the windows. Courtney wanted to know if we would see the queen, and we did spot a lady who could very well have been royalty, or at least quite high-born.


There are jillions of peacocks here, too, and not only in the arboretum proper but throughout the surrounding neighborhoods. People who live around here get used to hearing their unearthly shrieks and slowing for them as they meander across the streets. One wandered in front of the camera as I was taking the girls' picture.


The three of us had a great time. This evening, after dinner, we exchanged our Christmas presents. Here are the girls wearing their presents from me: headlamps from REI:

They spent several happy minutes in their closet, trying them out. Now, all we have to do is keep them from blinding each other with the beam.

P.S. Shannon read this post and said, "You didn't say anything about the dead squirrel!" OK. As we were walking up to the Queen Anne cottage, we saw a dead squirrel lying by the side of the path. It had a hole in its neck, with blood coming out. We don't know what happened. It could have been attacked by a raptor, like a hawk, but it's a mystery. Shannon said at the time, "When I go back to school, I'll say, 'On the second day of my winter break, I saw a dead squirrel!' It was sick!" Courtney wanted a second look, but not Shannon.

Notes from 30,000 feet

Takeoff from SMF, 3:55pm, into north wind, destination Burbank; flight path more easterly than usual . . . streets and houses below make patterns like inlaid mosaics, some white, some dark . . . trees cast long shadows on this solstice afternoon . . . land all lumpy, mousy brown, trees look like pebbles that could be brushed away were there a hand large enough . . . snow in the high country . . . and hanging over the wing, a nearly full moon in a pale blue sky . . . river canyons dark slashes . . . passing Yosemite, El Capitan with a cap of snow, Half Dome looks like half a bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar . . . White Mtns visible, seeming to dwarf the Sierra . . . right turn, and we're back over the Central Valley, roads and canals cutting their way south . . . grid of valley towns, straight roads, smooth rectangles, all under control . . . dozens of large plots containing scores of long, silver-roofed buildings . . . poultry? . . . don't know . . . and some odd, crisscrossed plots I've never seen before, even though I fly this route frequently . . . now some badland-looking terrain plopped in the midst of the groomed, tidy landscape . . . the big Central Valley Project canal appears below, fat as a nightcrawler, and as smooth . . . land now corrugated, arid, bleak-looking, some appears to have been flooded . . . where, exactly, is this? . . . Here are the Tehachipis, stark and beautiful as always, dusted with snow, ochre and pink in the long rays of the sun, places that look like William Morris paper . . . a river valley, dry riverbed branched and braided like sinew and muscle . . . over the top of the wing I can see the San Fernando Valley hoving into view . . . another turn and the orange paint on the wings looks lit from within, then another slight turn and it once again looks just ordinary . . . hard right, and the portside wing's angle reminds me of the raptors I saw wheeling in the sky last Sunday . . . Touchdown, Burbank, 4;45 p.m.

Solstice

Walking home up E St. yesterday afternoon from downtown Davis, I spotted a hawk flying low over the parking lot between 3rd and 4th. He landed in the big elm at the corner of 4th and E, which has so few leaves left on it that I could get a good look at him. No doubt it was a red-tailed hawk—light-colored breast, with what I think (imagined?) was a lightish belly band, and when it took flight again the pattern on the tips of its wings resembled the red-tail. But its head was quite dark in contrast to the rest of him, and I swear I didn't see the red tail. I didn't find any other hawk in the Sibley's that it could have been, so I can't be certain one way or another. The more birds I see, the more complicated it becomes. But Tuesday afternoon there were three turkey vultures perched in a big sycamore across from my house. Those, I recognize; no problem there.

I'm getting ready to leave town in a couple of hours, heading to SoCal to spend Christmas with my family. I'm taking Mr. Wonderful along, but blog entries may nevertheless be slightly more erratic than they already are. My winter solstice countdown clock tells me there are 14 hours, 52 minutes and 5 seconds left until the sun reaches its southernmost point and begins the return trip. Spring, with its longer days—and baseball!—will be here soon. Happy hols to all!

Two anniversaries

Nine years ago today, my son Fred married Jennifer Stewart aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor. The bride wore Chantilly lace and a tartan sash. The groom and his groomsmen wore full-dress kilts. It was a wonderful wedding of two people who were clearly in love. They still are.

Eight years ago today, I crashed while riding my bicycle in Amador County. When I came to, my first question was, "Is my bike OK?" Then the paramedics showed up and loaded me into a helicopter, at the end of which I threw up. Too bad; it was the only helicopter ride I'll probably ever take, and it wasn't much fun. Diagnosis: five fractured vertebrae and a whole lot of (luckily) superficial road rash. My outfit for the next three months: a cervical collar and a brace thingy that made me resemble a cross between Madonna and a trussed-up turkey. Pictures of this you don't want to see.

Morning sun

When it's full-on summer, the sun pours directly into my kitchen window. But now, as we wheel closer and closer to the winter solstice, just around 8 a.m. its rays enter at an acute angle and light up the shelf where I keep my teapots. Hanging above that shelf is a framed lug label from the San Fernando Heights Lemon Assn. It's called "Morning Sun." The other day I took a picture of it when representation and reality coalesced.


P.S. No sun this morning; instead, we had an honest-to-god rainstorm. Supposed to do it again tomorrow, too.

Cheep thrills

Yesterday was the Christmas Bird Count, and I went along. As I mentioned in my Dec. 6 post, I'm a total beginner in the bird-watching world, so I wasn't at all sure how it would go. I told myself that I'd be happy if the day ended with my having been impact-neutral; i.e., having caused no chaos or havoc amongst the "real" birders or rendering their statistics useless.

I needn't have worried. I had a wonderful time! I was in a team of four, led by Mike Lawler, who, in my opinion, should be the designated newcomer-shepherd-in-perpetuity. He was patient, good-natured, easy-going, a great teacher and seemingly happy to have me along. And the best part was that we were covering an area extremely familiar to me, as it's a favorite bicycling route, one I've ridden numberless times. But I never saw it like I saw it yesterday. It's one thing to look at a cliffside or pasture, even at a slowish pace, and quite another to stand quietly and look at the ground underneath a pile of branches—I never knew there were so many birds out there. (I usually think of them as being only flying from one place to another, not hopping around under the shrubs.)

It was pretty amusing, though, at least to me. For instance:

Mike: Hear that? It's a [insert name of any bird smaller and quieter than a crow].
Me: Uh . . . no.
or
Mike: Those markings around the eyes mean it's a [insert name of interesting bird]. Did you see them?
Me: We-l-l-l . . . no.

Clearly, if I'm going to do any birding at all, I'm going to have to a) train my eyes to see more and/or get new glasses, and b) get hearing aids. Luckily, I was the designated recorder, my job being to note on the species list what we saw and how many of them, so nobody was relying on my impaired senses. (The printed list presented its own challenges, as it was arranged according to some convention known to people who do this all the time and based on some arbitrary ordering of species, not, as I would have preferred, alphabetically. I spent a lot of time searching frantically for the name of some bird or other and hoping I'd find it before somebody called out yet another species.) It was wonderful fun, though, and I was utterly absorbed in it, like you are when you're doing something new and interesting. It was cold, but it didn't matter. I didn't think about anything that didn't have to do with finding and recording birds.

And we did see some good ones. Here are some of them:

This is a phainopepla, a bird I'd never heard of until yesterday. Isn't he important-looking? I love his impertinent crest.

This guy is a ferruginous hawk, the only one seen yesterday by all the teams out on the count. Again, a bird I knew nothing of until yesterday.

And this lovely creature is a lark sparrow. Until yesterday, I had no idea there were so many different kinds of sparrows. Or that they are as large as they are. I learned a lot.