calabash music

Well, I found my song. Or a version of it, anyway. The version I found is different in that it has different countries, not different parts of Spain, and instead of saying Que comemos every time, it says the same thing in the appropriate languages. I also think the instrumentation is different. But it's definitely the same people and basically the same song.

The group is DJANBUTU THIOSSANE from Gambia, and it is available at Calabash Music, where you can also get songs by 3 Mustaphas 3 and, well, lotsa other stuff.

avian burglary and slough definitions

Well, to celebrate my birthday we went out to Elkhorn Slough with the Coastal Watershed people -- actually three different groups of citizen water quality monitors, from north of Half Moon Bay down to San Luis Obispo -- and had a tour of our favorite "dismal swamp" -- actually a beautiful, vibrant wetlands. I have no pictures because I forgot to put the chip back in. This is a sorry thing because we saw some pretty spiffy stuff.

Just the views of the slough are worth the time. The low, rolling hills, so brilliantly green this time of year, the meandering estuary, the striving trees and banks of pickleweed. I could have shot off half the chip without even getting down to events. The coolest thing! There were a lot of great blue herons in the trees, and several red tails doing their red tail thing in the trees next door. So this one red tail starts flying right into the middle of the heron condominium, and the docent gets excited because the herons might have an egg by now and they probably won't take any guff from any little old red tail. But no. The herons did a kind of perfunctory startle-and-settle, and let that red tail land on a nest. When the red tail took off, it was carrying a stick away from the heron's nest! The herons did not think that last year's nesting material was worth arguing with the red tail over, and the red tail thought he had gotten away with something special, I bet.

I saw a red-legged frog! Well, I saw its eyebrows sticking up through the duckweed in this water box they call a "guzzler" which the Elkhorn Slough people provide as fresh water sources for whichever animals might need it. Because the slough is a seasonal estuary -- the fresh water source (Carneros Creek, I think, except in 1995 when the Pajaro River decided to take a little walk) dries up all the way in the summer, so the brackish water of the estuary turns kind of salty then -- the upper reaches actually get saltier than the bay.

Also, there was much discussion of how to tell various waterbirds apart. Also, I finally figured out that the hummingbird I thought was Anna's is Allen's, and the hummingbird I thought was the most amazing thing ever and how did it get so red, so dark, so shiny? is Anna's.

Also, I heard a story about the Empire Shooting Club that used to be at the slough. The docent said that from 1902-1908, the Del Monte Special train used to have a whistlestop there, and men from the City would get off and shoot ducks at the slough while their wives went on down to Del Monte (Pacific Grove) and spend the weekend. She said it stopped because the wives thought something else was going on at the gun club besides duck hunting, but I suspect it was an issue of spending too much capital to get too little profit. Anyway, I was thinking about it and looking at the little island where the train tracks crossed and thinking about the isolated house and the caretaker and men with guns coming and going, a murder mystery just started to write itself in my mind -- the wives who saw him get off the train, the men who said they never saw him set foot in the lodge . . . it would be a doddle but I'm writing things now.

Also: sun cups (camissonia, I can't get a species because all the pictures I see have the wrong leaves) and wild cucumber. Blooming.

So that was the main event of my day. We did go to the Lighthouse Field cleanup day but we were moving slow so we were only there for about ten minutes before we had to turn around and go away again. And I planted sweet williams and columbines and red linarias and thyme and sweet peas and weeded and weeded and weeded and watered, which is sad. I am always sad when I have to water before April.

I'm thinking in terms of Mr. D -- drought -- this year and next.

Oh, and Sal: your plant with the pretty round hairy leaves? I saw it in a brochure on invasive plants -- a helichrysum species called "licorice plant." I'm pretty sure. The brochure said it was all over the Golden Gate nature preserve -- isn't that where you saw it?

omni omni umanum

I like writing omni.

Just saying.

I don't know if I've ever written omni before, though the Marek and Jackson stories came pretty close.


Also, there is a mountain in the central Coast Ranges -- maybe the Santa Cruz Mountains, or maybe another of the parallel ranges which I honestly can't tell where one stops and the next starts -- which is named Umanum. Shirley, the Elkhorn Slough docent said it was Ohlone word for hummingbird. Somebody else says it's the word for butterfly.

I just like saying omni omni umanum.