December has been here two weeks already???

Sorry I've neglected the blog a bit. Have moved to another part of town and been settling in and sorting out mails that kept going to the wrong address!

We are having our slice of the rainy winter this week. I sort of luck out since I did my traveling last weekend and can now enjoy the cool rain from inside the dry house. Will have to go out tomorrow, though I think the rain clouds will have left us for the greener pasture east of the Rockies by then.

I'm busy writing articles at the moment, and when I'm not writing I'm trying to catch up with a bunch of reading. Aside from all the books I've been meaning to read since before the local sycamore trees were still leafy, I'm still reading the Book of Mormon and James Talmadge's Jesus the Christ. No! I'm not converting, though my lovely missionary sisters had inscribed messages in the latter before presenting it to me as a parting gift, so I'm sort of compelled to be a good sport and read the thing. Besides, it gives me a good excuse to still meet up with them every now and then, you see. I don't find the church and the dogma very sensible, but the Mormons themselves do intrigue me a bit.

Anyhow, Christmas/Winter Solstice will be here before long, so here's to jump start the holiday season a bit with Elina Garanca's gorgeous rendition of Montsalvatge's arrangement of the Catalan madrigal 'El cant dels ocells' (Song of the Birds). It's the birds' experience of nativity, I think.

“En veure despuntar …… When they saw the rising glow,
El major illuminar ………. of god’s great star,
En la nit mes joiosa; …….. Which floods the earth abright;
Els ocellettes cantant …….. The birds arise in song,
a festejario van, …………… warbling all night long
Amb sa veu melindrosa,…… of joy and glad tidings.

Ocells, veniu, veniu……… Come birds, come,
A festejar l’aurora, …….. And rejoice in the dawn,
I a la millor senyora, ….. And with the great lady;

La garsa, griva i gaig, ….. Magpie, thrush and jay
dieun: la ve lo Maig; ….. Say: ‘May is here’;
respon la cadernera: …. The goldfinch answers:
Tot arbre reverdeix: ….. ‘Every tree revives,
Tota planta floreix ……… Every plant abloom
Com si fos la primavera. .. As if it were spring.” 

Off The Main Road: La fleur qu’il m’avait jetée

I made a quick trip to the grocery store a mile or so away this morning. On the way back as I cut through the park I spotted this cute black phoebe perched on a tree watching my approach.

A black phoebe (Moucherolle noir) I saw months ago in the park. Alas I didn't get a picture of the one I met today.

Black phoebes are this area's sparrows. There are always a bunch of them around rustling in the bushes and on tree limbs. So, though I'm always saying hello and waving to them (I know they probably think me wacky, but I like watching how they react to that) I hadn't taken a photo of one in a long time... and certainly not this one this morning. He got a bit nervous and hopped to a higher limb as I got close. Then when he saw that I was not one of those nasty cats with the bad habit of looking at him as if he is a piece of Tartar steak, he started pecking at a bunch of leaves nearby. I was almost under him when he pecked loose a little flower -- it drifted a little in the gentle breeze and landed on my open fingers just as its dislodger hopped away into someone's backyard bush.

You do bring me flower, you do sing me love song...

Being a rational dude that I am, I'd have no trouble thinking that it is just a particularly nice sort of accident. Sentimentally, though, I'd like to think it a little present from a bird that appreciates weirdos who try to talk to him in a strangely unmelodic language as if he would abandon his infinitely more pleasant songs just for the sake of associating with a featherlessly slow-moving lump of ground-bounded biped. 

Maybe it was a female black phoebe, in which case I shall now call her 'Carmen,' and hope that doing so wouldn't condemn me to the fate of Don José (though exceptions can be made if I then get to look and sing like Jonas Kaufmann with my new featherly friend transforming into one Vesselina Kasarova... almost anything is worth that!!!).

A Gray Trek Along Otay Valley Regional Park

A few miles to the south of where I live is an old river channel called Otay Valley. It used to be a legitimate river; funneling the water down from San Miguel and Jamul Mountains to the San Diego Bay and supporting the bustling grain farming community of Otay Mesa. That was until a dude named Babcott decided to dam(n) the Otay Lakes in 1891. A catastrophe if there was ever one. The dam broke the following January and wiped out the town and its surrounding farms, not to mention the lost of many native plants and animal species that used to live in the river valley.

Nowadays the river bed is mostly dry except for a few ponds that used to be mine pits. It is a protected area now, a joint nature-oriented project by the County of San Diego and the cities of San Diego and Chula Vista. I asked around about it, but none of my native San Diegan friends had visited... They all thought the place dangerous and 'full of illegal immigrants'. I don't know why since many of these friends have no qualms about going hiking down Tijuana River Estuary and Slough considering that Tijuana Slough is right up against the Mexican border while Otay Valley is a few miles further north and well into the United States.

Being a proud survivor (and lover) of the U. City Loop AKA Delmar Loop in St. Louis (my aunt kept warning me off against getting an apartment there while attending St. Louis University because it was a 'bad' area of town. Well, it had gotten much better since she last visited and I loved the place and its eclectic residents and restaurants), I tend not to take second-hand warnings seriously especially when they come from folks who hadn't seen the place first hand. So I printed out this 'trail map' from Otay Valley Regional Park's website last Thursday and caught bus 929 south to have a look.

The nearest bus stop to OVRP is at Beyer Way and Palm Avenue. My main attraction was to be Finney Overlook, somewhere off to the east. It was a very gray and overcast day, though, so I decided to head west first and make for the 'Ranger Station' before doubling back to Finney and hopefully the sky would have cleared enough for a good panoramic view then.

The OVRP website says that there is also a staging area with parking on the Beyer Way trail head. Well, I didn't see one. The trails are quite wide and well maintained, but are also quite devoid of direction posts. It didn't help that there are branches that don't appear on the trail map... And so I got to see the park a bit more thoroughly than I intended, pocketing 2 dead ends (one a fade into nothingness and the other, a rather dangerous cliff-y drop off), and never managed to find Finney Overlook before my turn-around time (I have a life, after all, and can't keep on walking the thing forever!).

Other would be hikers would be glad to know that the staging station with parking lot and working restrooms at Beyer Boulevard does exist, though there were no ranger there to give any guidance when I dropped in. There was an information post, though, with identical information to what you would find online at the OVRP website. I ran into exactly 2 people on the trail. One was cycling away on his mountain bike and the other was walking 2 very cute dogs... No illegal immigrant lurking about as far as I can tell, but there was a family of hawk on a tall tree by Heart Pond about 100 meters west of Beyer Way that took off as soon as I got my camera out (hawks! I swear these guys are the paparazzi's worst nightmares. They can smell a camera from a mile away!).

 They were very clever, mind you. The small and nearest hawk flew right off and did a bunch of tantalizing circles above a hill off to the east, drawing my camera with him so that I didn't spot the really huge hawk (the daddy hawk?) who went off in the opposite direction a second or two later. I turned to try to photograph the daddy hawk, and two more smaller hawks went off in yet another direction, leaving me spinning in place like an ill-coordinated top without catching any of the hawks in action with my slow-acting camera.

Come to think of it... The first and small hawk might actually have been a kestrel. Have a look at him. He's the first two shots in the panel above. The 'daddy hawk' in the third photo, though, is definitely a red tailed hawk.

They picked a good spot to hang out. Heart Pond is quite well reeded. There are only a couple of spots on the trail running the south side of it where you can get to the pond.

Le May Pond further to the east beyond Beyer Way is easier to get to. I intended to take the high trail out east to Finney Overlook and then come back on the pondside trail, but that was when I went dead-ended twice... And I'm actually not bad at trail-reading! They've got more trails than what appeared on the map, and none of them come equipped with sign post!

For what it's worth, the high trail that turned out to be a maintenance road that end at a cliff does afford some good views of the valley... It just so happened that the haze that was hovering over the ground never cleared that day. So the best shot I came up with is the one above.

I did drop by Le May Pond on the way back, though. Really nice and peaceful place with nobody else in sight (though the valley is a narrow one, so you can always see rows of housing at the northern and southern edge of it)... I sat there a while when this favorite bit of I Capuleti e i Montecchi popped into my head and refused to leave.

And here it is... And it has to be Kasarova as Romeo, too. With the voice comes the mood...

Ordinary Magic: Le Spectre d'une fleur morte

We've got ants. Well, I suspect they have always been with us. Though in the last month or so they've been with us a lot more than we welcome them to. Luckily, though, booming ant population also means plenty of food for formerly starving ant-eating creatures... like spiders.

 So, aside from having to make sure that there are no food scrapes left around for ants to find (or to compel them to redouble their ongoing invasion efforts of the cupboard and kitchen area), we are also regularly walking into spider webs of varying degrees of invisibility. There are some good sides to that, of course. 


How else can dead flower still be dancing in the wind, detached from its old branch, long after its natural demise?


The increase in the number of spiders and other ant-eating bugs also means the increase in the number of the birds that eat those bugs. I've seen more exotic birds in the wild in the last few weeks than I have in a long time. This American kestrel has been hanging out on the next door neighbor's roof almost every morning. 

He is a rather cool bloke (blue wings mark him as a male. Female kestrels have reddish rufus color wings). I think I also ran into him walking home a couple of weeks ago. He came gliding out of the park nearby and landed on the top of a lamppost and just perched there to people watch. I am endlessly aggrieved that my camera doesn't zoom well enough to have captured a good clean shot of him yet. One of these days!!!

Die Blumen aus dem Balboa Park: Musing On Observed Evolution

Hmmm... I see the bees had already been through here.

This little Costa's humming bird was a busy glutton when I found him. He was so bent on sucking all the nectar out of the entire bush that he couldn’t care less about intrusive me and my prying camera.

Watching the feeding frenzy, I found myself wondering about how some grade school biology teachers would tell their student about the adaptation of the bird’s beak and the shape of the flower petals. How they fit so well - in some cases - that a certain type of flowers can only be pollinated by a certain type of insects or birds. Biology teachers have to be so careful with how they phrase their explanation or they’ll end up implying purpose where none is really warranted.

Adaptation by natural selection is not a purposeful nor is it a directional event. You don’t have the ‘which comes first; the flower or its pollinator?’ deal here. Both species had to have evolved together since one can’t survive without the other. The flower of a certain shape can only survive to reproduce if there also happens to also exist a pollinator that can physically enable the spores and eggs to meet... and one that is particularly attracted to the flower's particular feature. If such a pollinator didn’t already exist when the first flower with this structure appeared, then the flower would have simply died out... as many flowers and trees and animals obviously had done (and that's why 'purpose' is not inferred. If the process is directional or guided for a purpose, then there wouldn't be 'extinct losers' littering the history of this planet. Life didn't evolved on a one-on-one progressive basis. Many different varieties evolved (and are still evolving), and only those that hadn't gone extinct remain).

The pollinators also benefit from the 'fit', of course, especially when the specific hummingbird's beak type enables it to get to a food source that the other sorts of hummingbirds that have different beak-shape can't physically utilize. Then he can monopolize the food source without having to engage in more competition from other hummingbird varieties. Now... the pollinators come with varieties of their own, of course, and there is competition inside the same species (refining the 'fit') that, over time leads to greater diversity with more variations of petal shape and beak shape being accommodated by each other.

That is, until some abrupt changes in environment come about and cause a drastic drop in the population of one or more of these organisms thriving in a symbiotic arrangement. This 'bottleneck effect' is a big cause of extinction. Some organisms may survive the change, but if there isn't enough survivors to keep producing offspring that can also survive the new environment, then... Adieu, mes amis. Il faisait bien de vous connaître ...

And here I should probably give a shout out to those who love to dismiss the phenomenon of climate change/global warming as 'unimportant' or 'not worth worrying about since the earth won't get destroyed by it'. The really intelligent folks are worrying about it not because they think that the earth won't survive but because they realize that the sort of environment this climate change/global warming is leading to may not be one that OUR SPECIES can survive very well in. See the difference? And it doesn't comfort us any if we will be able to survive but the species that we eat for food will not - which also means that the survival of the species that our food source depend on for food is also of tremendous importance to us! Among other things....

Extinction... is a cold hard fact of life. That extinction occurs over and over again to reflect the change in environment and other 'stress factors' reinforces Darwin's theory. 'Survival of the fittest', be it a bit of a misnomer since a trait doesn't have to be the fittest to survive, it just has to be relatively harmless to the organisms' survival, is NOT a theory. It is an observed phenomenon of nature. A fact of life. The theory that Darwin came up with in order to explain that phenomenon is called 'Evolution by Natural Selection'. And what it says is simple - the diversity of life on earth came about because only the organisms that have the traits that enable (or at least fail to hinder) them to survive and reproduce (passing along those traits to the next generations) in the prevailing environment are spared from extinction. 'Swim or sink, you lot' is what nature says.

The theory hinges on there already being life (it does NOT say anything about how the first life came to be in the first place), a variety of it, for that matter. And it also depends on the traits being capable of modifications (mutations), and that the modified traits can be transmitted from one generation to the next. If possessors of a certain trait aren’t competitive enough and lucky enough to keep surviving to reproduce (not to mention finding a niche like the hummingbirds and the flowers with long and narrow tube-like petals enjoy), they just go extinct. The process is non-directional, but it is by no mean random. It is regulated by the prevailing environment (so if someone tries to tell you that ‘evolution says that things happen at random’, you should immediately look out for flying bullshit and other superfluously inane stuff that surely are about to start splattering around you).
Had life on earth been 'intelligently designed', then there shouldn't be naturally occurred extinction now, should there be? Else, the term should have been modified into 'unintelligently designed'.... in order to fit in with what the evidence says.