Why birds stand on one leg

Immature Red-tailed hawk standing on one foot

 

Seeing the one-legged hawk on our recent Nature Ramble tweaked my curiosity.

June 12 2014 Ramble Report

Eighteen ramblers met today on what started as a foggy morning but the fog soon burned off. Our decision to start the rambles earlier this summer seemed to be the right one. The day didn't start heating up until we had finished our walk.

Don Hunter's facebook album of the ramble can be viewed here.

June 12 2014 Reading

Our reading today was provided by Silvio Curtis and is from the Ursula K. Le Guin book Always Coming Home, pp. 51-52:

In our day the River of the Valley barely trickles through a drought year, when by September all but the biggest creeks are dry; but the Na will have been a bigger, though a shorter, stream. When the Great Valley as a whole subsides, the rifting along the fault lines and probably some magma pockets under Ama Kulkun will have sent the Valley's elevation up; 'the watertable under it would also rise; and what with the hot summers of the Great Valley much tempered by the Inland Sea and the vast marshlands, and the sea fogs flowing over the sea currents through a far broader Gate, the climate will have been modified. The dry season not so intensely dry; the creeks fuller; the river statelier, more considerable, more worshipful. But still less than thirty miles from spring to sea.

Thirty miles can be a short or a long way. It depends on the way you go them; what the Kesh called wakwaha.

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive. Like the deer who live there, who will steal your food and be your food, skinny little deer, thief and prey, neighbor and watcher and watched, curious, unfrightened, untrusting, and untamable. Never anything but wild.

The roots and springs of the Valley were always wild. The patterns of the grapestakes and the pruned vines, the rows of grey olive trees and the formal splendor of flowering almond orchards, the sharp-footed sheep and the dark-eyed cattle, the wineries of stone, the old barns, the mills down by the water, the little shady towns, these are beautiful, humane, endearing, but the roots of the Valley are the roots of the digger pine, the scrub oak, the wild grasses careless and uncared for, and the springs of those creeks rise among the rifts of earthquake, among rocks from the floors of seas that were before there were human beings and from the fires inside the earth. The roots of the Valley are in wildness, in dreaming, in dying, in eternity. The deer trails there, the footpaths and the wagon tracks, they pick their way around the roots of things. They don't go straight. It can take a lifetime to go thirty miles, and come back.

Ramble Report June 6 2014

*** IMPORTANT MESSAGE ***

New summer schedule for Rambles:

Summer Rambles will begin at 8:00AM instead of 8:30AM 

New start time is in effect for June, July and August.

In September we will revert to the 8:30AM start time.

*** END IMPORTANT MESSAGE ***

Sixteen ramblers appeared for today's walk.

Don Hunter's photos from today's ramble can be found here.

Today's Ramble Report was written by Hugh Nourse, with photos by Don Hunter.

May 29 2014 Ramble Report

Today 30 Ramblers turned out to enjoy a sunny morning stroll.

All of Don Hunter's photographs of today's ramble can be found here.

May 29 2014 Readings

We had three readings today to commemorate Rachel Carson's birthday (May 27, 1907).

Bill Pierson read from his cell phone:

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

Don Hunter and I (Dale Hoyt) chose selections from Carson's posthumously published book, A Sense of Wonder. 

Don's selection:

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thought can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Finally, my selection:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful an awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

. . .

 I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

May 22 2014 Ramble Report

The turnout today was astonishing, almost 30 (28) people joined us. Today's report is authored by Hugh Nourse, with photographs selected from Don Hunter's facebook album.

The reading was supplied by Hugh and is from John Burroughs, "The Art of Seeing" as printed in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, p. 153,