Obligatory New Year Post

The cycle continues

For Americans, this is the day of the New Year, an occasion to reflect and resolve, to mark the cycle's turn. In places where people did not dump the moon for a calendar solely solar, the New Year comes later. For me, the Winter Solstice is when one year clicks over to the next, and this Gregorian conceit that begins the new year a week and a half later means little.

But, it does come with a day off work, and therefore some time to write. Maybe also to reflect backward resolve forward.

The grimacing corpse of 2013

Looking back,...I'd rather not. The first year of the new Baktun (what? nobody wants to use the Mayan calendar now that it does not portend the End of Everything?), was not great. Coulda been worse, though, and I guess bad years just help make the other ones look good, and whatever dies becomes the soil for future fecundity. Not that I'm a relentlessly positive person, mind you; it's not as much "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" as it is "If life dumps a load of shit at your door, make compost."

This year's run transmogrifies into a monster and fights itself to death, but also creates a new round of growth and life.

Looking forward,...I guess I'd rather not do that either, except in the most general way. I have no specific resolutions other than to continue trying to make the patch of earth I occupy a bit better. The compost should come in handy.

Ugh. All I really wanted to do today was post these photos of the 2013 chum salmon run on Kennedy Creek (photos date to a few weeks before the Solstice). Maybe I should have written nothing, instead of risking this maudlin run into a Message. Maybe I should just stop now and leave you with New Years Resolutions by Greg and Teddy Wayne (via McSweeney's):

• 640 × 480
• 800 × 600
• 1024 × 768
• Get into jazz

Happy New Year, whenever it begins. 

Nature Show in the Yard*

My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.

Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes  be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk, but how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, does a hawk have to spend much time eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Maybe the impact of cats on raptors is tiny. Maybe I could find out if only I spent another few minutes searching the internet. But, I will not, because I suspect that the data are, even if they exist, apt to take more than a few minutes to find. Besides, the main point of this post was to share some photos of a nature show in my yard. These shots were zoomed like hell on a cheap digital camera, but they came out pretty cool, I thought. Sometimes just having a camera handy beats hours of waiting with fine photopgraphic gear.

* Adapted from a post at Land Before Me.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

OK, maybe those don't look like heads to you, but to an archaeologist, they look like profiles of hominid skulls (I just cannot haul myself into this century and say "hominin"), even if neither was intended as such. One looks left, one looks right. One was the result of something being added, one was what remained after something was removed. One is ephemeral, one lasted for decades if not centuries.

The bottom one is not too far from the US Atlantic coast. It is the remaining bit of stucco on a partially-restored column of one of the Founding Fathers' famed plantations. Maybe it looks like Africa, home of humans who were kidnapped and sold into slavery to build and then serve in the mansion.

The top one is in the tidal zone of the US Pacific Coast, very close to Canada. It is either gull poop or herring sperm, deposited on sand deep in the intertidal zone. Maybe it will last a long time on the internet, but the actual thing is long gone by now, a stain washed away by the tide, dissolved in the ocean.

The symmetry of these two heads, the balance they achieve without having ever met, is an artifact of my own odd head working solo, recognizing a mirror image in photos taken 3,000 miles a a few months apart. Heads are like that, craving company so they can take turns using their jaws and their ears, coming up with ideas that are better than either one could invent by itself (like the idea of posting about Australopithicene-ish skull images formed from marine creature excreta and plaster palimpsests, holding a mute conversation).

Fresh Water Memories

Follow the Columbia up river for a while, past Pasco, over dammed eternities, and eventually you reach the upper, uh, reaches of Lake Roosevelt. Now and then, places like China Bend more or less duck the river valley's legendary winds, and lake becomes mirror. 

You pull over to take a photo, and of course the wind whips up, rippling the looking glass. But it's still worth clicking off a few shots. 

Reflections of ridges and hills in the water reel you into a horizon that joins crisp land with it's wobby inverted doppelganger. Symmetry's lower half smeared, but still pleasing.

Back home, weeks later, you trip across these imirages and decide to remove the real part, to flip and focus on the waterworld. Like a memory: impressionistic, not as sharp, changing with the wind, maybe opposite of how it really happened, but beautiful if you want it to be.

Picture This

Visual anthropology no longer captivates me to the point that I subscribe to the journal (Visual Anthropology), but then again it's more fun to toss out a few observations than to talk all academic. Oh, and I take a ton of photos, and once in a while I get the urge to get something more than a forgotten jpeg. Most of the time, though, there's just the passing instant of the shutter clicking, capturing something.

This is some of my combat photography near the end of a Sponge War, an extremely popular part of the elementary school's field day. On either end of the field of battle are lines of big buckets filled with water and sponges. In the middle is a line they can approach, but not cross. Being there with my first grader, the sense I got from the kids was more of "I'm gonna get wet! Yay!" than anything about a war. Lots of kids just squeezed sponges on themselves and each other directly.

My visual cortex is not so interested in deconstructing socialization rituals, but it does suggest that I report the following about this photo:

• My daughter's about to whip a sponge at some unsuspecting boy. I think she missed, but scored a hit for grrrldom.
• The kid at the left is just off the field of battle, and has evil Joker make-up. More extensive than most of the face-painting I saw that day, and he seemed to be exhorting people on the field of battle while himself staying clear, slightly elevated. But not enough for anyone to do what he was saying. He must be a member of the priesthood in this culture.
• The field of battle is within sight of, but obtrusively below and outside of, the high school athletic field, Monumental Architecture on the neighborhood scale. These kids will be there, one day; they'll traverse the cultural landscape as they grow. [I know, this sounds like I am delving into socialization, but it's only because I do so revel in cartographic visualization.]
• It being near the end of the action, a lot of kids had lost interest in the battle, or in taking sponges to the buckets to re-load. A few, like mine, took the mission pretty literally, and kept picking up sponges (not always re-loading), firing again and again.

So much more could be wrung from this picture (way more than a thousand words, were I aiming for publication), but those seem like the highlights, and it's late. I'll drift off and maybe dream about what other people see in this photo.