SF Nature News Jake Sigg http://planttrees.org
Ecology 101
Three hundred trout are needed to support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off of 1,000 tons of grass. G Tyler Miller, Jr, American chemist (1971)
1. The first Heron Cam in California at Stow Lake will go live Saturday 12 April
2. The Natural and Cultural Legacy of Yerba Buena Island - April 17
3. The future of the Sacramento Delta hangs in the balance. But few Californians seem to grasp what is at stake
4. New bird sighting on Bernal Hill
5. Female quail in San Francisco? Maybe not
6. Identifying Warblers April 17 in Berkeley
7. Book of San Francisco butterflies is online
8. Classes at SFSU Sierra summer campus
9. Heads up for gardeners growing own food/toxins in nutrition supplements
10. California native plant sale in Tilden Park April 19
11. FDR’s WPA program funded 79 years ago
12. Poet David Ignatow - at death’s door - changes his mind about the world
13. 10 Extinct Animals Lost to Planet Earth but Preserved in Photographs
14. The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
15. Mary Oliver contemplates humpback whales
16. Notes & Queries: What are the contemporary Seven Deadly Sins?
1. San Francisco Nature Education announces the first Heron Cam in California at Stow Lake.
Our NEW Heron Cam will go live on Sat. April 12th- just visit our website to tune in: www.sfnature.org
Our Heron Watch interpretive program at Stow Lake also starts
Sat. April 12th and continues for six Saturdays through May 17th. Check out the adults and chicks through spotting scopes staffed by SFNE interns and volunteers. They will also answer questions and explain Heron behavior. Children receive Golden Gate Park field journals and heron mobiles.
FREE – donations welcome. Follow sign at Stow Lake Boathouse to Observation Site around the corner.
Tours of the Heron Colony leave each Sat. at 10:30am and continue until noon.
Volunteers will lead guided tour of the herons nests from different vantage points and point out local birds along the way. Meet at Observation Site. Adults-$10.00,
Children free. For more info., please visit our calendar on the home page: www.sfnature.org
Photo: Copyright San Francisco Nature Education 2014
(Is mother distressed at her offsprings' Mohawk hair-do?)
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2.
San Francisco Natural History Series
7:30pm, Thursday, April 17, 2014
FREE at the Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA
Speaker: Ruth Gravanis
The Natural and Cultural Legacy of Yerba Buena Island
To thousands of Bay Area residents, Yerba Buena Island means nothing more than the tunnel that connects the two spans of the Bay Bridge. But this little island is one of the Bay Area’s hidden treasures – a fascinating place with remarkable remnants of indigenous vegetation, resident and migratory wildlife, astounding views, and a complex cultural history.
Located only a mile and a half offshore of SF’s mainland, YBI is one of the Bay Area’s least known ecological secrets. Here we can find biological communities that include oak woodlands, riparian and coastal scrub, grasslands, and sandy beach. These habitats support a rich diversity of birds, butterflies and other wildlife.
The island’s human history begins with the First People, who used the island as a fishing camp and burial ground. Ownership, or claimed ownership, of this island-with-many-names passed from a multitude of private parties under Spanish and Mexican rule to the United States – at various times held by the Army, Navy and Coast Guard. The extant “torpedo factory,” lighthouse, and officers’ quarters on the National Register of Historic Places help keep the memories alive.
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3.
(click on image)
The future of the Sacramento Delta hangs in the balance
But few Californians seem to grasp what is at stake.
High Country News
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4. New bird sighting on Bernal Hill
On Apr 8, 2014, at 7:39 AM, Robert Hall wrote:
Just wanted to share this sequence of posts on SF Birds about the sighting of a grasshopper sparrow. Although they can be found in the Bay Area, it's pretty rare to find one in the city's shrinking grasslands. Looks like your stewardship may be paying off:
1a
Grasshopper sparrow at bernal heights park now
Mon Apr 7, 2014 8:05 am (PDT) . Posted by:
"Robert Furrow" robertfurrow@rocketmail.com
In the tall grass on the south facing slope, towards the eastern side where
there are remains of an old concrete structure. Flighty and impossible to
get a look at in this tall grass.
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5. Quails in Golden Gate Park
On Apr 7, 2014, at 6:01 PM, Dominik Mosur wrote:
Hi Jake,
Just wanted to mention that the report of a female quail in GGP is the first of a female in over a year. A number of experienced birders have seen only 2-3 males in this area since mid-winter 2013.
Even despite this apparent reemergence of a female however the state AND city bird is effectively doomed to expatriation in San Francisco in the very near future.
On Apr 7, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Peter Brastow wrote:
Is Greg sure about the female?
David Assmann and I have seen two male quail there three separate times on SFE staff field trips. We're 3 for 3. David plays the sound w his iphone and the two males come running out hoping for a fem
On Apr 8, 2014, at 12:28 PM, Greg Gaar wrote:
Hi folks-The quail in the sunlight was certainly a male. I looked in the dark understory and saw the other quail. It looked as though it was a female. It was smaller with fewer markings.
Maybe I was wrong about the second quail. For me, it was a wonderful feeling just to see the two quail. I have not monitored this site as other bird watchers have.
When I was a kid, it was common to see numerous quail scurrying through the bushes in the park.
My main concern is the opportunity to create more quail habitat in Golden Gate Park.
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6. Golden Gate Audubon meeting:
Identifying Warblers - April 17 in Berkeley
Warblers are a favorite of many birders, but they are often a challenge to identify. Scott Whittle, co-author of The Warbler Guide, will offer solutions in our April Speaker Series in Berkeley. Scott will talk about important but often overlooked ID points such as overall contrast, subtle facial features, general color impression, feather edging, and behavior.
Date: Thursday April 17
Time: 7 pm for refreshments, 7:30 for speaker
Place: Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda
(between Marin and Solano) in Berkeley
Cost: Free for GGAS members, $5 for non-members
Lights Out for Spring Migration
Now through the end of May is spring migration season. Some birds use the stars and moon to navigate, and can be drawn off course by lighting.
Do your part to save energy, money, and the lives of migrating birds by turning off unnecessary lights or pulling window coverings at night. Click here to learn more about Lights Out for Birds, and how to share this message at your workplace. We have flyers and fact sheets you can download and share.
7. Celebrate Earth Day by joining a GGAS habitat restoration event
Saturday April 5 - Pier 94 - 9 am to noon
Sunday April 13 - Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge - 9 am to noon
Monday April 14 - Crissy Field beach cleanup - 10 am to noon
Saturday April 19 - Bison Paddock in Golden Gate Park - 9 am to noon
Saturday April 19 - MLK Shoreline Park in Oakland - 9:30 am to 12:30 pm
Directions to habitat restoration events are on our web site. Also:
Nestwatch volunteers are needed in San Francisco.
We also need office volunteers on weekdays in the GGAS office in Berkeley.
Contact Noreen at nweeden@goldengateaudubon.org for information on these volunteer opportunities.
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7.
On Apr 7, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Jeffrey Caldwell wrote:
A pdf of a book about San Francisco butterflies (1990) by Harriet Reinhard is online at:
http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/files/butterfly/lib/Reinhard0000.pdf
From the bottom of the page here: http://www.cnps.org/cnps/publications/fremontia/
one can access the October 1970 issue of the California Native Plant Society newsletter with Harriet's seminal article on butterfly gardening.
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8.
'Tis the season...
...to sign up for San Francisco State University's Sierra Nevada Field Campus classes. You stay in campus tents, eat delicious prepared hot meals, and have the rest of your time for feeding the mind and soul.
Classes are offered:
Fungi of Sierra Nevada
Birds of SN
Bird identification by song
Bird drawing (Jack Laws)
Flora of SN
Medicinal and edible plants
Photography
Insect Biology and Identification
Natural History
Butterflies
Moths
Fly fishing
Bats
Astronomy
(look through large telescopes; see wonder-full sights you've never seen before)
http://www.sfsu.edu/~sierra/
http://www.sfsu.edu/~sierra/Courses.html
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9. Alice Polesky:
Hi Jake, I thought this had some good information:
Heads up for urban gardeners
http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/06/study-finds-toxic-reality-urban-garden-soil-often-watered-down?roi=echo3-19859037084-18957241-28eca0bd7ec14d4724fba4126a4c0be5&cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-04-07
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OBSERVATIONS: Toxins in Nutrition Supplements Still Escape FDA Oversight
When young and middle-aged adults started showing up at the hospital with liver failure last spring, doctors in Hawaii struggled to find the thread that connected the patients.
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=11&ms=NDU1NzQ0MzYS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=NDIwOTYwOTg5S0&mt=1&rt=0
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10. Native Plant Sale
Amateur Gardeners or Pros - Saturday April 19th, 10:00am-3:00pm Have Fun & Support Regional Parks Botanic Garden.
Please forward links to your friends, neighbors, and facebook pages.
https://www.facebook.com/events/388684834610235/
http://www.ebparks.org/features/Annual_Native_Plant_Sale#Programming
Rain or Shine, Saturday, April 19, 2014 10am to 3pm California Native Plant Sale
Where: the living museum of California native plants - the Regional Parks Botanic Garden
on Wildcat Canyon Road (between Anza View Road & South Park Drive) in Tilden Regional Park, Berkeley.
Volunteers will direct you to parking spots. Free parking! No entrance admission!
Meet our new director Bart O’Brien!
Experts stationed at every post.
"What plants would do well in clay soil?"
"Any suggestions for a garden that doesn't get much sun?"
"You got any 'deer proof' plants?"
"Where's your seeds table?"
All proceeds will directly benefit the Garden.
Please bring empty boxes to carry your treasures home.
510-544-3169 Bgarden@ebparks.org www.nativeplants.org
To sign up for free e-newsletter of the Friends of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden http://nativeplants.org/email.html
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11.
It was on this day (April 8) in 1935 that Congress approved funding for President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, known as the WPA, a program designed to put unemployed Americans back to work. The WPA was run by Roosevelt's right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, a former social worker and public health administrator. Hopkins was a firm believer in the benefits of good work, even though employment was more expensive for the government than giving direct handouts. He said, "Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit; give him a job and pay him an assured wage, and you save both the body and the spirit." A worker's average salary was $41.57 per month. By the time the WPA was dissolved in 1943, it had employed more than 8.5 million people, working on 1.4 million projects.
The WPA's main focus was on public works, especially infrastructure projects. The WPA was funded for eight years, and during that time workers built or repaired 650,000 miles of roads, 124,00 bridges, 8,000 parks, 39,000 schools, and 85,000 other public buildings. They also worked on airports, dams, sidewalks, swimming pools, sewers, utility plants, and playgrounds. They served more than a billion school lunches, operated 1,500 nursery schools, and sewed half a billion garments.
Most of the WPA workers were men — more than 85 percent. In an attempt to distribute jobs as broadly as possible, only the "head of household" of each family was allowed to work for the WPA. Of the women who were employed, many worked in sewing rooms, producing millions of clothes, diapers, quilts, toys, and other items, which were distributed to public institutions or needy families (sometimes right back to the women themselves). The women tried to make the items fashionable and unique so that the people who wore them wouldn't be marked as welfare recipients.
Another branch of the WPA was its arts programs, collectively known as "Federal One," which included the Federal Writers' Project and the Federal Theater Project. At first, Harry Hopkins was criticized for including artists — some people argued that they never had steady jobs to begin with, so shouldn't be considered unemployed. Hopkins responded: "Hell! They've got to eat just like other people." Of more than 8 million people who worked for the WPA, only 40,000 were employed by Federal One, but the list included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Kenneth Rexroth, Arthur Miller, and Orson Welles.
Artists working for the Federal Art Project collectively created more than 18,000 sculptures and 100,000 paintings and murals. The "easel artists" — who worked in offices or studios, as opposed to mural artists — were required to clock in at 8 a.m. and back out at 4 p.m. if they wanted to receive their day's pay. Jackson Pollock sometimes showed up in his pajamas in order to make the morning cutoff. But besides the strict hours, the "easel artists" were given a lot of leeway — they were unsupervised, and they were allowed to choose their subjects and styles, unlike the mural painters, who were usually instructed to paint American motifs. Mark Rothko was asked to submit an oil painting every four to six weeks, which would be given to a public building.
The flagship project for the Federal Writers' Project was a series of state-by-state guidebooks, but writers also collected folklore, indexed newspapers, recorded slave narratives and other oral histories, and wrote essays about great American literature. John Steinbeck wrote of the WPA guidebook series: "It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating." W.H. Auden wrote: "The Arts Project of WPA was, perhaps, one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state."
Writer's Almanac
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12.
Above Everything
I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air -- a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
~ David Ignatow ~
(Whisper to the Earth: New Poems)
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13.
NEWS: 10 Extinct Animals Lost to Planet Earth but Preserved in Photographs [Excerpt & Photo Essay]
These 10 animals are just a few of the species to have been lost to extinction but still can be seen via old photographs
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=42&ms=NDU1MzQxODYS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=NDIwMzc4Mzk4S0&mt=1&rt=0
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14.
Avian zoology
Fairy creatures
Two legs and good eyesight are just a few of the things that birds and humans have in common
Apr 5th 2014 The Economist
Family man
The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human. By Noah Strycker
PLATO suggested that humans were “bipeds without feathers”. People walk on two legs like most avian species. They are also largely diurnal and rely upon sight as their primary sense. All of this, incidentally, is unlike most mammals. Yet how much do humans really share with birds?
More than people admit, argues Noah Strycker, an American field biologist, in a new book. The author wants people to appreciate birds “one feather at a time”. He trawls through an impressive amount of field research and introduces readers to some flabbergasting facts.
A manx shearwater, for instance, was once kidnapped from a burrow on the Welsh coast and flown 3,200 miles (5,150km) before being released in Boston harbour. In less than 13 days it had found its way home. Mr Strycker also alights on the amazing biometrics of hummingbirds, whose pea-sized hearts are the largest of any bird when measured in proportion to the bird’s body mass. These vast organs can pound away at a staggering rate of 1,200 beats a minute.
What makes Mr Strycker’s hummingbird essay particularly engaging is his concern to explore how the avian facts carry implications for human beings. It turns out that humans and hummingbirds, despite differences of scale and style, enjoy a lifespan of about a billion heartbeats, a rule that holds good for many warm-blooded animals, from mice to elephants. But hummingbirds are “trapped” in an evolutionary sense at the outer margins of warm-blooded existence, locked by their relentless quest for high-calorie foods into a cycle of aggression, isolation and the constant threat of starvation.
None of this would matter were it not for the fact that human lives are also moving this way. The pace of life is quickening in wealthier countries; one study shows that it takes people an average 10.5 seconds to cover 60 feet (18.3 metres) of pavement in Singapore, 18 seconds in Bahrain and 31 seconds in Malawi, indicating marked differences between developed and developing nations. Overall, people walk fastest in the world’s biggest cities. Mr Strycker thinks people should heed the hummingbirds—creatures that are “slaves to speed, desperately fighting for control of calories”.
“The Thing with Feathers” turns a shrewd, comparative eye on a succession of bird families to explore what he calls their “human” characteristics. Most striking are the gorgeous Australian fairy-wrens (pictured), whose intergenerational altruism looks uncannily like humans’ supportive family life, and the bowerbirds of New Guinea: avian painters and decorators that construct fancy little “gardens” of shell, pebble and foliage where they lure potential partners into a mating mood. Could these bowers emanate from an aesthetic appreciation comparable to that manifest in human art? And does the albatross, always so loyal to its single long-term partner, raise the possibility of “love” and “commitment” that matches people’s own marital lives? This is an engaging work which illuminates something profound about all life, including our own.
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15.
Humpbacks
There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.
You know what I mean.
The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.
Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.
They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.
Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.
We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash through the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then
they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.
I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.
I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.
I know several lives worth living.
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(American Primitive)
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16. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
Please don't name your children after some fruit
What are the contemporary Seven Deadly Sins?
1) Computer hacking
2) Talking loudly on your mobile on the train
3) Eating strawberries in winter
4) Watching reality TV
5) Road rage
6) Cosmetic surgery
7) Writing daft lists
Susan Irwin, Oldenburg, Germany
1) Instant coffee
2) Monosodium glutamate
3) Low-fat ice cream
4) Partner look
5) Socks with sandals
6) Naming one's child after a fruit
7) Breeding useless dogs
Stephanie Himstedt. Bochum, Germany
Why seek new contemporary deadly sins? Pride, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Envy, and Avarice are still with us.
Alisoun Gardner-Medwin, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
(JS: I have escaped them all--except for writing daft lists, which I do a lot of--and dream of others that I never get around to. Gotta stop doing that.
Oh, socks with sandals. Anything wrong with that? It's cold in San Francisco.)
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