Golden Gate National Cemetery

Last week I joined almost 90 fourth graders on a pilgrimage to the place that changed the state of California forever: Coloma.

In January 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River. There is much dispute about these facts but the effects can not be disputed. The discover of gold in Coloma set off the largest migration in human history. People from across the globe flocked to this quiet valley, displacing the native people and altering the landscape. Now, in the Spring of 2015, the town of Coloma is flooded with nine and ten year olds, with their makeshift gold pans and their unquenchable desire to see the glint of gold in their pans.

For my school, this is the highlight of their fourth grade year. An adventure that lingers long in the mind and also creates students that are stronger, more independent, and resilient by the time they recross the American River on the 1915 Coloma Bridge for the final time. The true gold that they find are not the tiny flecks of gold, swishing in the bottom of their gold pans but the transformational journey they have taken over the course of three days. The journey from Greenhorn to Sourdough.

This is the field trip where I really see my students shine. They have been on a journey of joy, scrapped knees, and tears. Along the way, they have lived the life of a gold miner, felt a connection with the earth, danced the Virginia Reel, and conquered many of their fears. A journey that has all the highs and lows of a tide chart and they somehow come out the other end changed in some way.  This metamorphosis is symbolized and celebrated in a ceremony on the banks of the South Fork of the American River. In the ceremony, they dip their gold pouches in the waters of the famed American River, just upstream from the site of Sutter’s Mill, and when they put their pouches back around their necks, they have become experienced Sourdoughs.

While the Greenhorns were dipping their pouches in the waters, I walked out to a rock that faced downstream, filled a cup with American River water and made a quick sketch of the scene to capture the mood and moment.

Corvidsketcher dipping his own gold pouch into the waters of the South Fork of the American River on his first journey to Coloma in May of 2014, almost 166 years after gold was discovered just downstream.

The American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis. It seems that you can’t spit in the Everglades without hitting an alligator. This reptile is the barometer of the Glades and one of the poster children for its conservation.

Visiting the Everglades today, it’s hard to imagine man’s assault on Mother Nature at the turn of the 20th century. For decades the Everglades was seen as a paradise on earth, the only problem was that it was and is, covered in water. In man’s hubris to control and conquer nature, many attempts were made to drain the swamp but Mother Nature always wins. Her most decisive victory was in 1928 with a hurricane that claimed 2,500 lives.

For years men had used guile, hyperbole, backroom politics, and downright lies to convince others that the Everglades could be conquered and her rich soil could be reclaimed but it took a handful of women to try and save it. It was the women of Florida that helped create Florida’s first State Park in November of 1916. The 4,000 acres of Royal Palm State Park was just one-tenth of one percent of the Everglades ecosystem but it was a start. This 4,000 acres is now the epicenter of Everglades National Park and features the Anhinga Trail, the Gumbo-Limbo Trail and Royal Palms Visitors Center. This is the core of the Everglades that draws a million visitors a year. And the Anihinga Trail is the location where many visitors see their first wild alligator as well as bring an inspiration for the spread above.

The alligators of the Everglades were not the first time I had seen this famed reptile in the wild. That honor goes to South Padre Island in Texas on a birding trip in 2013. Unlike like birds, rodents, and humans, alligators have the capacity to hold still for hours, making them an ideal subject for the sketchbook. The above sketch was done in one sitting.

 

On my final full day in Florida I headed out of Fort Myers and drove west to Sanibel Island. I had a few lifers on my wish list and I was going to start at a well known migrant hot spot: Lighthouse Park. I crossed the three mile bridge from the mainland, scanning the deep blue for any life birds. Just some gulls that weren’t worth risking my life to identify.

I pulled into the sandy parking lot and perched on the roof of the car to my left was my first life bird, or was it? American crow vs fish crow can be one of the toughest IDs in North America, that is, until it opens it’s mouth. If you ask a fish crow if it is an American it will deny it by replying “nah-nah”. This crow certainly denied it, life bird #481.

At 7:45, there where already birders scattered around the trees and bushes that surrounded the lighthouse, all hoping for a bounty of birds. Lighthouse Park is on the eastern point of Sanibel Island and it’s trees are a magnet for northern bound birds coming up from the tropics. The anticipation was palpable as we waited for a warbler or a vireo to appear and the park was abuzz with news of what was being seen and where.

Blue-headed vireo, then a northern parula, follow by a white-eyed vireo. Then in the upper branches of a tree was the liquid gold of a male prothonotary warbler, a bird that I had added to my life list in Golden Gate Park the previous October (see the post from October 8, 2014). As I lowered my binoculars I noticed there were even more birders in the park and they had just seen a Swainson’s warbler!

Among these birders were field guide authors Don and Lillian Stokes. They spent half the year on Sanibel Island and they were essentially birding their local patch. A male hooded warbler was seen and the birders with binoculars and cameras circled the tree where the bird was foraging.

I introduced myself to the Stokes and I headed to another part of the park with Don. On the way I asked him if he had seen all the birds in his guide books. He asked me what I meant by “seen”. He noted that there are many ways in which a bird can be “seen”: adult plumage, juvenile, 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year, male, female, etc. In all my rush to add birds to my life list I had sometimes lost sight of the pleasure of simply looking at birds for just the enjoyment of looking at birds. We stopped and looked up into a palm where two birds where foraging. A hooded and prothonotary warbler where giving us nice views as they moved between palm fronds. I had seen both of these birds in California, in two different places in San Francisco and with 11 years between sightings and now I was seeing them together in the same tree with Don Stokes as my walking and talking field guide.

I left Sanibel Island without adding Swainson’s warbler to my life list. But my short experience of birding with the Stokes helped me remember that it really didn’t matter whether I had 28 or 29 life birds on this trip to Southern Florida. It was about the quality of experience. I was a guy with his binoculars and journal and paints, marveling at the the splash of sunshine turning on a palm frond above.

This was somehow enough. And it was.

“The list total isn’t important, but the birds themselves are important. Every bird you see. So the list is a frivolous incentive for birding, but the birding itself is worthwhile. It’s like a trip where the destination doesn’t have any significance except for the fact that it makes you travel. The journey is what counts. ”

-Rich Stallcup, Birding legend, as quoted by Kenn Kaufman in Kingbird Highway

I  will probably never see 28 life birds on a single trip in North America again. I have birded some of the Meccas of birding, my home state of California, southern Arizona and Texas and finally southern Florida. To see this many new birds, I would have to go to the farthest reaches of Alaska (and be extremely lucky), or have an incredible migrant fallout in Cape May, or travel to another country.

To celebrate this haul of birds I wanted to sketch each bird, because I believe that to sketch something you attain a deeper understanding of it and you really internalize the shape, color, feather patterns and contours of each bird. As source material I used photographs, drawings, and field guides. For these pages I designed a unifying theme, using overlapping cartouches to list the life bird number, date, location, and time.

This spread documents an amazing morning of birding with a Michigan snowbirder named Dave.We birded Babcock-Webb WMA and Prairie/Shell Creek Preserve.

There is a much sought after bird in Florida and I was going to try my damnedest to add it to my life list. This is the snail kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis), formerly known as the Everglades kite. It’s a much sought-after bird because it is only found in the United States in southern Florida and it specializes in feeding almost exclusively on apple snails. The apple snails depends on water and the depletion of the Everglades means that the population of snail kites has suffered. The kite is currently listed as a Federal and State endangered species because of it’s small population and extreme population specialization. It is estimated that there are currently less than 400 breeding pairs in Florida.

I wanted to see one out of those 400 pairs and according to my Falcon Guide, Birding Florida, there are a few spots on the Tamiami Trail, across the highway from the Shark Valley entrance to the Everglades to check for this bird. I tried there, scanning the marshes for the bird. No kites. I read in my guide:

“A more reliable spot in recent years for this sought-after species has been an abandoned airboat concession across from the Tower Market. . .The kites may be seen coursing over the marsh or may be perched on distant trees. If it’s your lucky day, one may be perched on a cypress tree directly in front of your vehicle.”

I returned to my rental and drove a mile west to the airboat concession on the right. I pulled into the parking lot and bingo, today, April 1, 2015, was my lucky day! A male snail kite was perched across the canal on a cypress. I was able to take a few photos and I returned to my car to grab my sketchbook and pens. When I returned, the bird was gone. This kite was not to be as accommodating as the black vultures of the Anhinga Trail, but it certainly was one of the easiest Florida life birds to add to my list.

The two other Florida specialties I sought on this trip was the endemic Florida scrub-jay and the red-cockaded woodpecker. Both birds are listed on the state watch list, which includes species most in danger of extinction without significant conservation action.

According to e-bird and my Falcon Guide, Babcock-Webb Wildlife Management Area (just north of Fort Myers) was the hot spot for red-cockaded woodpecker. You must arrive at dawn near their cavity trees (which are ringed with white paint by field biologists). The birds gather near their cavity trees before dispersing to forage for the day. The painted trees were easy to spot and a car was already parked along the dirt road. A snowbirder from Michigan was already there, waiting for the show to begin. As if on cue, a single red-cockaded flew in and perched on a tree for less than a minute, enough time to see the identifying white cheek field mark, and then was gone. The show was over. North American life bird #472.

I followed the snowbirder, (Dave) and we made our way around Babcock-Webb. With his help I picked up three more lifers: brown-headed nuthatch, northern bobwhite, and eastern bluebird. He offered to show me where to find Florida scrub-jay at the Prairie/Shell Creek Preserve near Punta Gorda. After a short walk, Dave led me to the area where they are seen. I spotted the rare jay flying to the top of an oak. Life bird #476 was mine!

One of the photos I was able to get of the male snail kite that was handed to me on a platter, just before he flew off.

 

 

“There are no other Everglades in the world. ”

-Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Most spring breakers head to Florida’s white-sand beaches to collect stupidity, lovers, and hangovers. But I was here, in the southern extremes of the Sunshine State, to collected birds, alligators, and journal pages.

I had been drawn to Florida at an early age while looking through a book about endangered animals. I had always loved animals but the concept that they could be endangered was new to me. The Florida Panther, American alligator  and the Everglades kite were from the state that presented a continuing threat to their existence and as an adult I wanted to see them before they disappeared for good. And I wanted to see the Everglades before it was completely covered in water.

My first impressions of Florida where driving through the concrete jungle from Miami International to my hotel in Homestead. According to the FBI, Homestead is the sixth most dangerous city in Florida, but it ranks number one when it comes to violent crime. It proves that the most dangerous animals in Southern Florida are not Alligators, venomous snakes, or mosquitoes, but Homo sapiens.

It was nice to leave behind Homestead and the gun shops and strip clubs and enter the fabled Everglades National Park. I picked up three life birds just in the parking lot of the visitor’s center. I headed into the park and my first stop was Royal Palms and the Anhinga Trail.

I headed out on the loop trail and true to it’s name there was an anhinga sunning itself with open wings. At the end of the boardwalk were about twenty black vultures perched on the rails. They were certainly not afraid of close human approach and preferred to walk rather than fly away. This called for a sketch. This sketch, featured above, was a very loose drawing of the different postures of the vultures as they preened before their mid-morning foraging over the “Sea of Grass”.

I had further adventures on my first day in the Everglades, including surprising a four foot eastern diamondback on the Snake Bight Trail, seeing a rare American crocodile, and watching two elegant swallow-tailed kites as they effortlessly rode the thermals. I ended my first day in Florida with 12 life birds.

Over the next few posts I will include pages about some of the 28 life birds I saw over the course of my week in south Florida.

The observation tower in the middle of the 15 mile bike loop at Shark Valley, the Everglades.

There are subjects that I keep coming back to, touchstones.

One definition of a touchstone is:

a black siliceous stone formerly used to test the purity of gold and silver by the color of the streak produced on it by rubbing it with either metal.

These subjects become the stone which I test my own purity to see if I can extract gold or silver out of my sketch. 

One subject that I keep coming back to is the odd roadside attraction just north of the “Flintstones” house and Crystal Springs bridge on Highway 280. This is that odd Father Junipero Serra statue that is pointing towards an unknown object or, perhaps, looks like he has just released a ball at the bowling alley.

This statue has always been a landmark on my Saturday morning journeys to my grandmother’s house in the West Portal neighborhood in San Francisco. I would first look for the “Flintstones” house that my dad told me was earthquake proof and then I knew the odd roadside statue would be appearing shortly, on the top of the rise, pointing to something on the other side of the highway which I could not see. I would crane my neck to watch the cartoonish padre recede from sight. Of course we never stopped to take a closer look.

Perhaps that is one reason this statue remains a touchstone for me, not because it is a work of incredible artistry or it is something that is fun to sketch, but because it is that one permanent feature from my childhood in the ever charging world of California. A touchstone that takes me back to those pleasant journeys north, to visitmy grandmother. 

A bit of whimsy from 2013. Godzilla is about to meet his match when he faces off with Father Serra.

“I look up, I look down. I look up, I look down, there’s nothing to it. ”
-“Scottie” Ferguson on sketching

As a celebration of film on this Academy Awards weekend I went to one of the Temples of Cinema, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, to see the film that has recently usurped Citizen Kane, as the greatest film of all time, on “Sight & Sound” list of the 50 greatest films of all time. That film would be Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
I couldn’t think of a better temple to see this masterpiece than in a theater that regularly accounts for 25% of classic film attendance in the United States. The Stanford was opened in 1925, at a time when movie theaters looked more like cathedrals than cinemas.

We were treated to live music on the mighty Wurlitzer as the organist’s hands moved across the rows of keys and his feet danced out the bass line on the pedals. He began to play the spider-like Bernard Herrmann Vertigo theme as the organ and organist slowly sunk from view and the curtains parted. It’s show time!

There are only a handful of these movie palaces left in the Bay Area. The Castro, the Grand Lake, and the Paramount. No other theater focuses more on classic films (films made between 1910 and 1970) than the Stanford, which was purchased by the Packard Foundation in 1987 and restored at an additional cost of $6 million. It reopened in 1989 with The Wizard of Oz.

The Paramount Theatre in Oakland featuring Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Note: The fourth grader I was with described Vertigo this way: “Driving and talking and driving and talking and trees!” Give it another 20 to 25 years and I’m sure he’ll come to love it.

 

I try to use every page of my Moleskine watercolor journal including the front two pages. These pages I reserve for quotes, poems, song lyrics, and thoughts that I come upon in the three months it generally takes to fill a journal. I also record the start and stop time of the journal. In the front page above I included my current staff portrait (my students voted for the bow tie over the straight tie), quotes (Dr. Seuss, Dr. King, Kurosawa, the sketcher), a portrait of Captain Joshua Slocum, my hand stamped Coloma miner’s name (Hawkeye) and a part of last years Sibley calendar (a male American kestrel that seems to be staring me down) . Rubber cement is a common tool for my front pages.

Sometimes I come upon a quote that I think deserves its own page. I write the quote and them come up with some sort of image that supports the words. Such was the case when I came upon a quotation while reading Robert MacFarlane’s new book: The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. MacFarlane walks the ancient footpaths that crisscross England, Scotland and elsewhere.  He quotes the American historian and geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson:

“For untold thousands of years we traveled on foot over rough paths, not simply as peddlers or commuter or tourists, but as men and woman for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were”

I first sketched out the lines of the path that leads to an inviting distant horizon. I then wrote in the quote, allowing the path to bisect the words. The landscape I created was really a landscape of the mind. I created a place I would have liked to travel through. A place that was a foil to the rainy and windy February day outside. I wanted the landscape to be inviting. The oak tree beckons me to ascend the hill, to see what landscape lies beyond. And maybe I would like to stop for a rest, pause for a meal and I could look over the crest of the rolling hill and maybe even sketch.There is a story in this spread and it is really up to the viewer to fill in the details.