“The bill removes all protection for habitat and any mandate to move toward recovery,” says Brian Nowicki, Endangered Species Policy Coordinator with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It deletes the critical habitat section of the act and makes all recovery plans voluntary.” Endangered species that now have critical habitat would lose it; those listed but without designated critical habitat would never get it. Protected species could be de-listed on a state-by-state basis. The Pombo measure increases payoffs to land owners, green-lights destructive projects, gives the Secretary of the Interior final say on what constitutes “best science,” and exempts pesticides from environmental review.

On September 29, the bill passed the House of Representatives 220—193, largely along party lines, although 36 Democrats voted for it and 34 Republicans voted against it. Opponents hope to stop the bill in the Senate.

What species would be affected? In Northern California alone, the roster of potential victims includes the Antioch Dunes evening primrose, yellow larkspur, Bay checkerspot butterfly, coho and Chinook salmon, California red-legged frog, Alameda whipsnake, western snowy plover, marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, and Steller sea lion—all currently with federal endangered or threatened status and with critical habitat either designated or in litigation. That’s not even considering animals and plants still in the listing pipeline, like the fisher, greater sage grouse, Yosemite toad, and Siskiyou mariposa lily.

Kieran Suckling, CBD’s Policy Director, sums up: “Pombo’s bill would reverse thirty years of progress. It would rip the heart out of America’s most important wildlife law.”

Behind their ghostly faces is one of the most elaborate sound-detection systems in nature, a model for research that led to the human cochlear implant. Channels in the facial ruff direct sounds to asymmetrically-placed ears: the opening of the right ear is tilted upward, the left ear downward. With different paths for high-frequency sounds from above and below, the owl can triangulate on the elevation and horizontal direction of the source. Sounds register in an aural map of three-dimensional space in the bird’s midbrain, allowing it to target its prey in total darkness.

That would mean mostly house mice and rats for these urban owls. California studies show small mammals composing 95 to 99 per cent of a barn owl’s diet, but the mix varies: in rural areas, voles (67 per cent in one Alameda County sample), pocket gophers, deer mice, and shrews predominate. You can tell what owls have been eating by dissecting the pellets, containing the hard parts of their prey, that they regurgitate at roost sites. North Bay naturalist Stan Moore says there’s a commercial market for barn owl pellets for science classes: “They’re graded like chicken eggs.”

Barn owl nestlings can consume their own weight in rodents each night. Bruce Colvin, who studied the birds in Ohio and New Jersey, has done the math: he calculated a brood of six would eat 600 voles during the ten-week period from hatching through fledging. And that’s not counting the parents’ own intake.

Six owlets may seem like a crowd, but barn owl broods may be as large as 12. Their reproductive strategy is unusual for a raptor. Some organisms have a few offspring over a long lifespan and invest heavily in their care: humans, elephants, condors. Others are short-lived but prolific, like codfish with their millions of eggs. Barn owls are more like codfish than condors. Their life expectancy is low; although they can survive up to 34 years in the wild, 75 per cent may die during their first year. Traffic takes a heavy toll—Carl Marti, then at Weber State University in Utah, counted 35 dead owls in a single day along an Idaho highway—and some fall prey to their larger relative, the great horned owl. Marti found that most Utah owls had only one breeding season in their lifetimes. So they made the most of it, with large clutches and occasional second broods. Barn owl populations may track rising and falling numbers in their prey base.

How many owlets survive to fledging depends mainly on food supply. Unlike young eagles, owlets don’t engage in fratricidal struggles; Marti has even seen older nestlings feeding their siblings. But they’ll cannibalize any nestmates that die. And some young owls are casualties of poor site selection.

Cavity-dwellers by nature, these adaptable birds will nest “any place that gives them a bit of privacy and elevation,” says Stan Moore: construction scaffolding, highway bridges, derelict chicken-farm water towers, haystacks. If you set up nest boxes, they’ll move right in. In cities, though, they have a predilection for palm trees: “a giant attraction, but a really bad nesting site,” according to Susan Heckly, director of wildlife rehabilitation at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek. She says, “A lot of our barn owls are babies that have fallen out of nests in the fronds.” The museum receives more barn owls than any other raptor species—65 in 2000 alone.

What are they like to work with? “They only weigh about a pound,” says Heckly. “That’s a surprise when you pick them up; they’re all muscle and feathers. They’re the most vocal birds we have, with an ear-splitting scream.” Older nestlings are housed in a barn where they learn to hunt live food. Very young owlets are fed cut-up mice by handlers wearing sheets, to prevent the birds from imprinting on humans. Later they’re moved to a hack box, a halfway house near appropriate habitat—in many cases, a vineyard or orchard in need of rodent control—where they can adjust to freedom. Young owls may disperse as far as 1200 miles before settling down, although 30 is more typical.

Not everyone wants barn owls next door, and every now and then some idiot takes a shot at one; the Lindsay Museum treated an owl blinded and deafened by a slingshot. And two Berkeley pairs recently lost their nest sites when their palm trees were cut down. But the California Street owls seemed to have an appreciative audience; on my first visit, a half-dozen people were lined up along the sidewalk, marveling at the neighborhood raptors whose screeches filled the summer night.

In a barren valley between Stovepipe Wells and Furnace Creek, the shallows of Salt Creek are alive with pupfish: Salt Creek pupfish (Cyprinodon salinus salinus), to be exact. It’s spawning season and the males, hanging out at the edge, are wearing their brightest colors. To quote ichthyologist Robert R. Miller’s 1943 description of the species: “In breeding males the sides are bluish to turquoise, with bronze reflection, and deep, purplish-blue iridescence appears along the back and upper sides& The broad cross-bars are deep bluish-gray.” The females, in subtler brown, congregate in midstream.

This is a pupfish lek—a group display by courting males, similar to the behavior of prairie chickens, birds of paradise, and hammerhead bats. Every couple of minutes a brown female approaches a turquoise-purple male. Sometimes he chases her away; male pupfish prefer larger, more fecund females. But here’s a pair swimming side by side in parallel S-curves, quivering as sperm meets egg. Then she heads back to midstream, and he remains to guard his display territory—and, incidentally, the egg now glued to the substrate.

It’s a boom-and-bust world for the pupfish. With a generation time of two to three months, population can increase rapidly; Miller estimated highs in the millions. But they can be trapped in side pools or washed out of the streambed entirely by flash floods, providing a bonanza for ravens and other scavengers. A Panamint Indian named Tom Wilson told Miller his ancestors used to scoop the pupfish up in baskets, then bake them with alternating layers of fish, tules, and hot ashes.

Salt Creek is not what you’d consider prime fish habitat. There’s water year-round, but it shrinks to a few pools in midsummer. The water temperature varies from near freezing to over 104 F. It’s nearly as salty as the sea and laced with boron (39 parts per million). But Salt Creek is a piscine paradise, compared with nearby Cottonball Marsh, where the closely related C. s. milleri lives. (The “cottonballs” are nodules of borate.) In summer the pools in the marsh can be less than 4 inches deep and the salinity can reach 4.5 times that of the ocean.

But pupfish thrive in such places. Some twenty species are scattered through the desert Southwest and northern Mexico, isolated from each other in islands of water in a sea of sand. They’re in California’s Owens Valley, springfed creeks in west Texas, New Mexico’s Tularosa Valley, the Bolson de Cuatro Cienegas in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Not far from Death Valley, two pupfish species survive in Nevada’s Ash Meadows. One, the Devil’s Hole pupfish (C. diabolis), has the smallest habitat of any vertebrate animal: a limestone shelf about 20 meters square in a subterranean pool. Litigation over Ash Meadows’ groundwater and the fate of C. diabolis made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1976. The fish won.

You’d be tempted to think of these extremophiles as the product of millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning that finally have enabled them to live in such inhospitable environments. Not so. Those environments are fairly young, for one thing; the Mojave Desert dates only to the end of the last glaciation, about 12,000 years ago. And the pupfish species are also young. Given the chance, they’ll interbreed freely with each other, and there’s little genetic variation between species. (There’s almost no variation among Salt Creek pupfish, suggesting a recent genetic bottleneck when the species was reduced to a handful of individuals.) Miller speculated C. salinus is about as old as the Mojave, with the split between the Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh forms occurring about 2,000 years ago.

It’s true that pupfish in places like Salt Creek can tolerate a range of temperatures, salinities, and high mineral and low oxygen content that would kill most other fish. But so can pupfish that live in freshwater springs at a constant year-round temperature. Those tolerances seem to be not specific adaptations to present environments, but a legacy from a common ancestor that must have been one tough little fish.

The progenitor of all the desert pupfish species is thought to have inhabited ancient estuaries prone to sudden shifts in salt content. It followed the Colorado River up a marshy delta that reached all the way to the Grand Canyon, then through a chain of drainages into Lake Manly and the other Pleistocene lakes of the Basin and Range province. The lakes teemed with fish, but when they shrank away, only the pupfish could handle the harsh new world.

Unlike some of its kindred, the Salt Creek pupfish isn’t considered endangered. Yet. Hydrologists recently traced the source of Salt Creek to groundwater around Furnace Creek, which also supplies a resort complex and an 18-hole golf course. You think fish in the desert are anomalous? Try golf.

What I didn’t know at the time is that the army ants established a beachhead in California long before there was an Academy of Sciences. According to the Academy’s AntWeb site, the Bay Area has two native army ant species, Neivamyrmex nigrescens and N. californicus. Nigrescens occurs as far north as Sacramento and is widespread in the Southwest and South. Unobtrusive creatures that live and hunt mostly underground or by night, our army ants do what their tropical kin do—but on a smaller scale. Their colonies number in the tens of thousands, not the millions, and they prey on other ants and termites.

Neivamyrmex ants—117 known species, most tropical—have been around for a while. The oldest known fossil army ant is a Neivamyrmex, embedded in 20-million-year-old Dominican amber. Their lineage evolved in South America and dispersed north after the Central American land bridge was in place.

Like the Academy’s tropical Eciton ants, Neivamyrmex ants have no fixed address. Every 17 to 20 days their colonies cycle between a nomadic phase, with a different bivouac every night, and a statary phase when the workers make daily raids from a temporary base. (E. O. Wilson and Bert Ho¬lldobler prefer to call the first phase “migratory” rather than “nomadic,” since army ants, unlike some Asian ant species, don’t travel with their livestock). The shift from statary to nomadic seems to be triggered by a shortage of food in the neighborhood. Working with laboratory colonies of nigrescens in the ’70s, Howard Topoff and John Mirenda found that overfeeding delayed emigration to a new base.

When these ants move, the whole colony comes along—brood (eggs, larvae, pupae) and queen, as well as workers. In most ants, winged queens fly off to found new colonies. But Neivamyrmex queens are wingless. When potential queens emerge from their pupae, workers select one contender as matriarch of a new horde. The colony splits, and the new queen marches away with her prospective mates, her personal retinue of workers, and the rest of her troops.

Lacking functional eyes, Neivamyrmex workers follow chemical trails. Foraging workers lay down pheromones by dragging their abdomens along the substrate. The chemistry of the substance is complex and may involve two components, with one unique to each species. Normally the trails lead to and from bivouac sites and food sources; but the ants sometimes get stuck in a circular pattern and continue milling until they march themselves to death.

Other noses pick up on those trails. A family of snakes, the Typhlopidae, specialize in eating ant brood. There’s one of these secretive, sightless burrowers—the western blind snake, Leptotyphlops humilis—in Southern California, although the behavioral studies I’ve seen involve a close relative, the Texas blind snake, L. dulcis. Texas blind snakes have been observed crawling along with Neivamyrmex nigrescens raiding columns, heading back toward the nest; it’s assumed they were after either the army ants’ brood or the booty brought back from a raid. In laboratory settings, the snakes are able to follow the ants’ pheromone trails.

The ants ignore the reptiles in their midst, leading to speculation that the snakes had acquired the colony odor. Blind snakes may get a secondary benefit from the association, since the ants’ scent appears to repel other snakes—including snake-eating snakes like racers and coachwhips.

No one seems to know whether western blind snakes have a similar relationship with army ants, and it may be too late to find out.

Neivamyrmex ants may be the terrors of the termite nests, but they’re pushovers for the invasive Argentine ant, Linepithema humile. Argentines, established in California since 1905, have displaced native ants wherever they’ve spread. Their supercolonies overwhelm the natives; with more workers, they’re better at finding food, and they outfight natives when foraging parties meet at a food source.

Recent field studies by Andrew Suarez, Ted Case, and Douglas Bolger in San Diego County found that Neivamyrmex army ants were among the native species most sensitive to Argentine takeovers. It’s those earthbound queens that make them vulnerable. Other ant species can disperse by sending out new queens on nuptial flights into Linepithema-free space; but army ants are stuck on the ground, at the mercy of the invaders.

So where does this leave the blind snake? Some ant-eating reptiles, notably horned lizards, find Argentine ants unpalatable and un-nourishing. The western blind snake may also be suffering from the loss of its traditional prey base, including the brood of Neivamyrmex.

In conjunction with Rainforest Action Network, Pickett and BACH publicized Pacific Lumber’s continued assault on North Coast forests. The corporation’s latest gambit is to retool its flagship Scotia mill to maximize the cut while downsizing its work force. BACH prepared fact sheets on sustainability issues for redwood lumber customers, and opened a dialogue with major wholesalers and retailers. Pickett says BACH has made converts among some Bay Area lumberyards and contractors.

On the state level, BACH rallied support for the Heritage Tree bill, which would have given landmark trees legal protection and sparked a petition campaign against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed “streamlining” of logging on private lands through watershed-wide timber harvest plans. After setbacks on both fronts, BACH called for a forest summit so activists can determine how best to fight for such issues. In the meantime, she and her allies scrutinize North Coast logging plans, including one directly adjacent to Humboldt Redwoods State Park and the Avenue of the Giants.

Pickett travels to the North Coast frequently from her rustic cabin in the woods—and she’s been at it for many years. “My door into environmental advocacy was recycling. During the ’70s, as a student at Merritt, I worked on the Ecology Center’s trucks when the curbside pickup was just paper. I ran the recycling center at Merritt for awhile.”

Pickett joined Earth First! in the early ’80s while working at the Ecology Center. “I was the information coordinator, and I ran the library. I did that for ten years. Then Judi Bari was the target of the car bomb attack in 1990, and that changed my life. I quit my job the day of the bombing. There was so much to do. I was a freelance activist for two and a half years before coming back to part-time work in the information department.”

Not long after, Pickett and others formed BACH to serve as an organizing base in the Bay Area. BACH became the Ecology Center’s first fiscally sponsored program. “It took us nine months to put together the agreement because we were charting new territory,” Pickett says. “The BACH agreement became the boilerplate for all the other sponsored programs.”

Another partnership, with Friends of the Earth and the Wilderness Society, took Pickett to DC in October for National Landscape Conservation System Outreach Week. The NLCS is a system of BLM lands that includes the Headwaters Reserve, as well as National Monuments and Conservation Areas designated by former President Clinton—Pickett calls it “the National Parks’ poor underfunded ignored relative.” In Washington, she met with fifty other wilderness advocates and key Congressional staff to address the Reserve’s funding and restoration needs and lay the groundwork for the new Friends of Headwaters Reserve organization.

BACH is also strategizing about how to educate the public on Headwaters access issues. The endangered marbled murrelet, which nests in the Headwaters Reserve, can’t tolerate much human traffic; crows and ravens that prey on murrelet eggs and nestlings are likely to follow hikers. But the enabling legislation for the Reserve requires some access, so BACH is trying to limit this to docent-led tours along a single route.

Pickett says BLM has been doing “cutting-edge restoration work” at Headwaters so far, eliminating a logging road and moving slumped dirt away from streams where coho salmon spawn. BACH will be taking a close look at the adaptive management portions of BLM’s plan for the reserve, which are subject to reinterpretation and potential change. Pickett warns that forest activists need to be prepared to keep the agency on track.

“We’ve been knocked over and then we scramble back up so many times,” she says. “But I have to think where we would be if we didn’t have such a strong grassroots advocacy. Things would have happened at a much more accelerated pace than they have. There has been critical habitat saved and wildlife corridors and conservation easements that don’t make headline news. And in the bigger picture, we can see the anti-globalization movement has a very strong environmental front and an astute analysis of environmental issues. The activism in Northern California around forestry has contributed mightily to that grassroots movement.”

As large agricultural conglomerates consolidate and concentrate on fewer and fewer seed varieties, mostly those favored by commercial growers and with the broadest marketing appeal, BASIL’s efforts are becoming more urgent. Large agribusinesses preserve the qualities that large produce growers prize, like shelf appeal, surface good appearance, and sturdiness for shipping; more subtle qualities like flavor are apt to take second place.

Just as important, a variety that has a superior ability to thrive in a particular place gets lost when only seeds for plants with nationwide appeal are left in the market. Just as indigenous races of cattle and fowl, fruits and vegetables disappear, so do the more particular varieties, named or not, that evolve in gardens. As professional plant breeders give evolution a kickstart by selecting for new colors or size or growth habits, amateur gardeners can select for local suitability by saving the seeds of their healthiest, most fruitful, or tastiest plants.

BASIL is inspired by such organizations as Native Seeds/SEARCH in Arizona and Seed Savers Exchange, headquartered in Iowa. Such groups got started by people who noticed that unique varieties of corn, chili peppers, beans, or other garden plants were disappearing as gardeners who’d grown them year after year died or lost their gardens, and as buying rather than saving (or swapping!) seeds became the normal thing to do. Doubtless there are unnamed and mostly unnoticed heirlooms in Bay Area gardens: some lettuces that hang tough all winter and don’t bolt in May; a fava that produces larger, sweeter beans than most; maybe even a basil with different flavor overtones or that thrives in the fog. BASIL is a way to discover and spread these treasures.

BASIL started as just a few people’s seed collections, coordinator Terri Compost says. Sascha DuBrul officially founded the Ecology Center project in 2000. Aside from perpetuating locally adapted and interesting plant varieties, the project concentrates on open-pollinated seeds that will breed true, unlike commercial hybrids that must be bought every year from seed companies.

BASIL has definite goals for the coming year. “We’re applying for a grant to ‘spiffy up’ the library, pay a seed librarian, and computerize our records. With that, we can track what does well here, and the histories of seeds,” says Compost. “We also intend to connect more with school gardens and community gardens.”

She passed along a couple of seed-saving secrets: for one, that it’s easiest to start with plants like lettuce, beans, and tomatoes that don’t readily swap pollen with the neighbors’ gardens, resulting in hybrid fruit and seeds. Another, and fairly counterintuitive tip, is that tomato seeds keep best if you put them, encased in their goop, on a shelf or on top of a refrigerator for a few weeks. Mold will form, which then can be rinsed away before drying and storing the seeds. The mold seems to reduce disease and aid germination.

Compost says the “library” of seeds— a bookcase full of seeds, carefully labeled and preserved in re-used (of course!) jars—kept at the Ecology Center provides “the same exchange we do at the swap meet, but spread out over time.”

The swap is a chance to come in and meet the people and the seeds, trade gardening hints and seed-preserving techniques, to find out what classes BASIL plans in both, and have a good time.

There was more bad news this August. A hatchling condor was found dead below its nest near Hopper Mountain in the Los Padres National Forest, with a gut full of trash. A second bird, taken to the Los Angeles Zoo for treatment of a broken wing, had swallowed half a pound of detritus, including 35 bottle caps. Several chicks that succumbed earlier also contained alarming amounts of hardware.

You might tend to blame feckless captive-reared parent birds, unable to tell trash from honest carrion, for these deaths. But the story is more complex than that.

As scavengers, California condors have specialized in the carcasses of large mammals—mammoths and ground sloths back in the Pleistocene, later beached whales and sea lions, cattle, deer—and the bones are more than even their powerful beaks can handle. But they need calcium to build their own bones, and they’ve met that need by bringing bone fragments small enough to swallow, and bonelike objects such as marine shells, back to their nests. Ornithologist Noel Snyder has seen adult condors picking over defleshed skeletons in search of small bones, and chicks sifting through their nest floors for bone fragments.

So the parent condors were doing something that had worked for their kind for millions of years: picking up small hard objects and bringing them to their chicks. They just weren’t equipped to discriminate between bones and bottle caps.

A similar problem has affected Laysan and black-footed albatrosses.

There are few birds that approach the California condor for sheer presence, but albatrosses are among them. I’ve seen these long-winged seafarers on Monterey Bay (and the single Laysan that keeps returning to Point Arena for the winter), but we’re only on the periphery of their vast cruising ranges. They nest on the remote northwestern islands of the Hawai’ian chain, hours by air from Honolulu, immense distances from anywhere else—but unfortunately not beyond reach of the crap we throw away.

Albatrosses have suffered enormously at human hands. Plume hunters ravaged the coral atolls and volcanic crags where they breed; a species once common off California, the short-tailed albatross, was driven almost to extinction. In the 19th century, albatross eggs were collected for making albumen photographic prints. When the northwestern Hawai’ian islands became strategic territory, the US Navy found itself sharing air space with collision-prone seabirds; to reduce the hazard, Marines and civilian construction workers clubbed thousands of “gooney birds” to death. Other nesting islands became military bomb-practice targets.

But after the war in the Pacific, most of the islands slipped back into obscurity, and the albatrosses prospered under legal protection. Then came a more insidious threat: floating plastic. In Eye of the Albatross, ecologist Carl Safina describes watching a parent Laysan attempting to feed her chick but gagging on a green plastic toothbrush, and seeing the carcass of a young albatross, “its whole rib cage packed with plastic,” including the legs of a toy soldier. Safina also catalogues what he found on the once-pristine beaches of Laysan Island: an astroturf welcome mat, golf tees, and plastic toy trucks, elephants, tyrannosaurs.

Foraging albatrosses look for floating objects as cues to food. That’s particularly true of black-foots, whose diet consists in large part of flying-fish eggs. The fish lay their eggs on flotsam: in the past, bits of pumice, driftwood, kelp; now, mostly driftplastic. Whatever the eggs adhere to, the albatross swallows whole. Pumice gets harmlessly regurgitated; plastic is another story. Plastic is not nutritious, and it’s good at absorbing and concentrating non-water-soluble pollutants like DDT and PCBs.

The albatrosses, doing what has worked for them for their long evolutionary history, bring cigarette lighters and plastic buffaloes back to their hungry chicks. An unquantifiable number of chicks die. And more plastic keeps entering the marine food chain. In a Natural History article last year, oceanographer Charles Moore estimated that the North Pacific subtropical gyre, the Texas-sized swirl of currents where the albatrosses feed, contains 3 million tons of plastic debris, the lethal effluvium of consumer society.

The bottle caps that choked the condor may have been made in the USA; the plastic that’s killing the albatrosses is primarily Japanese in origin. It doesn’t really matter. What’s dismaying is that neither the Southern California wilderness nor the far Pacific is free from our refuse. The death of another condor may seem like small potatoes at a time when we may well re-elect a president who’s still in denial about global warming. But it’s critical enough for those birds, whose time-tested ways of making a living have turned deadly.

Patrick Beach

Doubleday, 2004

$24.95

After six years, the crash of the felled redwood that killed David Nathan “Gypsy” Chain on a remote Humboldt County hillside still reverberates. Although not first blood in the North Coast timber wars, it was still a pivotal event. In the ensuing protests and legal battles, Chain’s death seemed to eclipse his life. Was this young Texan a committed forest activist martyred for his cause or a naive dupe who died in a grotesque accident?

A Good Forest for Dying: The Tragic Death of a Young Man on the Front Lines of the Environmental Wars is probably as close as we’re going to get to an even-handed account of the “Gypsy” Chain story, and it turns out to be compulsively readable. Patrick Beach, an Austin newsman, came to the story as an outsider, drawn by the Texas roots of both Chain and Maxxam’s Charles Hurwitz. With those two exceptions, he had access to most of the major players: Earth First!ers, Pacific Lumber execs, loggers, lawyers, cops. Treesitters with “forest names” must have seemed pretty exotic to him, yet he manages to get beyond stereotypes and capture the tangled mix of motivations on all sides.

Although Hurwitz remains a shadowy presence, Chain comes alive through the memories of his family members, friends, lovers, and fellow activists. A working-class kid born downwind from the Houston Ship Channel, drifting between jobs and relationships, he seems an unlikely candidate for the role of old-growth defender.

But it becomes clear how the forest changed him and gave his life a focus.

The most vivid portrait is of Chain’s mother, Cindy Allsbrooks. I was reminded of Lila Lipscomb, the Flint, Michigan woman who appears in Fahrenheit 9/11— another mother struggling with grief and rage, trying to make sense of the loss of her son to a distant, barely comprehensible conflict. Allsbrooks wanted justice, but also reconciliation; whether her tortuous journey through the courts led to either one is an open question. While a new forum for dialogue was created, the opposing sides remain entrenched, and the timber wars drag on. —Joe Eaton

David Carle

University of California Press, 2004

$39.95 hardcover,

$16.95 paperback.

First in a projected series of Sierra natural history guides, Sierra Birds was described by author-illustrator Jack Laws as “the kind of field guide I’ve always wished I had but couldn’t find.” It’s novice-friendly but detailed enough to be useful to experienced birders, and it would fit neatly into a hip pocket or backpack.

Laws borrows Roger Tory Peterson’s approach of grouping his subjects by appearance rather than taxonomic relationship. If you’ve seen a small streaky brown bird but are unsure if it was a sparrow, a finch, a pipit, or a female blackbird, see the two-page spread of streaky brown birds from all these families. The dipper, an eccentric water-loving songbird, is grouped with rails, sandpipers, and other birds likely to be seen at mountain streams or lakes.

The lively illustrations are good at conveying not just shapes and colors but recognizable attitudes. The concise text points out key plumage features and identification cues from habitat and behavior.

—Joe Eaton

More handbook than guidebook, this new title in UC Press’s California Natural History Guides series does an admirable job of explaining California’s natural waterscapes, what we’ve done to them, and where we go from here. Dealing with an alphabet soup of agencies and projects—CVP, SWP, MWD, CALFED—David Carle makes what could have been a forbiddingly technical subject accessible to anyone with an interest in water policy and politics.

Introduction to Water in California outlines the natural water cycle, describes the state’s hydrologic regions and water delivery systems, and addresses wildlife and wetlands conservation, water quality, and public health issues.

With 27 maps, this is also a useful water atlas. It’s sobering to contemplate the Central Valley’s vanished wetlands, the lost salmon streams, the maze of plumbing that shunts water all over the state.

The book is testament to William Mulholland’s dictum: “Whoever brings the water, brings the people”—and sustainability be damned. —Joe Eaton

Nora Harlow and Kristin Jakob, Editors

University of California Press, 2004

$24.95

Collecting the vast experience of a dozen California pioneers of native plant gardening into one accessible volume was a thirty-year task that began with a Bay Area study group in the 1970s. The group narrowed its focus to monocotyledons for practical reasons—”they are a clearly identifiable group and are not so numerous as to be daunting.”

Flowering plants belong to one of two botanical groups: monocots emerge from germination with one seed leaf, their flower parts usually come in multiples of three, and their leaves most often show parallel veining. All other flowering plants are dicots, with two seed leaves; they outnumber monocots almost four to one.

California’s monocot treasures include lilies, irises, orchids, and perennial grasses, as well as sculptural garden specimens like agaves and yuccas, and the native fan palm. Two hundred fifty of the most garden- worthy are described here; it’s information you’ll find nowhere else. Though color photos enliven the text, Kristin Jakob’s graceful line drawings steal the show.

—Gina Covina

Birds—and the meaning of life—take center stage in Mark Bittner’s engaging and bittersweet tale, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. During the ’80s, street musician Bittner was homeless, making a scanty living through odd jobs and the kindness of strangers. In 1990, he took a caretaker job on Telegraph Hill, where he met another kind of stranger, a handful of parrots living free. Bittner became more and more fascinated by the parrots, and by paying sympathetic attention and acquiring knowledge without letting preconceptions get in the way, he became an expert about the flock and the species.
Most of the flock are cherry-headed conures to the pet trade, red-masked conures to naturalists. Bittner points out that these birds aren’t feral because they were never tame; they’re naturalized—wild-caught birds or their descendants. As they need fruit year-round, which they get largely from exotics planted in the city, they seem not to pose a threat to California’s native birds.
In 2000, documentarian Judy Irving began filming Bittner and the parrots. Bittner’s book came out this January from Harmony, followed soon after by the feature-length film of the same name. It’s now showing to sold-out audiences at festivals, and filmmaker Irving is seeking national distribution.
Bittner’s back in a flat on Telegraph Hill, still in touch with the flock, and three parrots are living with him.
<strong>Could you introduce us to your guest birds?</strong>
The two cherry-headed conures are Phoenix, better known as Big Bird, and Parker, for Charlie Parker. Phoenix smashed into a window as a baby and has vision problems. He was out of commission for a long time and lost connection with his parents. Now he’s a cuddle- muffin. Parker has some kind of palsy. He’s a wild bird—he endures me. And Filbert, an orange-fronted conure from Mexico, was abandoned by his owner on the Filbert Steps.
<strong>Are you still feeding the wild parrots?</strong>
Not much right now. A red-tailed hawk has been following the flock, and I don’t want to make them more vulnerable to attack. I’m seeing hawks in the area year-round now, not just during migration.
<strong>How’s the flock doing these days? How many are there?</strong>
The flock’s too big for me to know individually—I don’t see which adults are with which babies. I counted 130 a few months ago, but there have been some deaths since then. They don’t fly in one group very often any more except just after the fledge. I’m wondering if the change in flock size changes their behavior.
There are now 15 or 20 mitred/cherry head hybrids in the flock. The backcrosses are getting elaborate color schemes, red on the chest in addition to the head.
They abandoned their evening roost in Walton Square Park after 13 poplars were cut down. Most of them now roost in another park near the Embarcadero, but some may be going to the Presidio or elsewhere.
<strong>Are there other parrot flocks in the Bay Area?</strong>
There used to be a flock on the Berkeley-Albany border. I once met an elderly gentleman who said he had been trapping them because he was worried for them; he didn’t think they’d survive here. And there’s a blue-crowned conure flock on the Peninsula.
<strong>You’ve said there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the parrots. Examples?</strong>
I got a threatening e-mail from a neighbor complaining about one of the parrots that sang all night. That had to have been a mockingbird.
People think they talk, and claim they have talked to them. They believe there’s a pecking order in the flock; I know there isn’t. They believe they can’t take the cold, but it’s easy for them once they’re acclimated. The flock has gone through at least one freeze. They do have a problem with hard rain—trouble making fine maneuvers in flight.
And they have trouble in the heat here. They pant a lot. The median temperature where they come from in South America is 74.
<strong>How do they react to other birds?</strong>
They fear most hawks, of course. They used to be afraid of kestrels. Then I noticed one year a kestrel was diving at them and they were ignoring it. Sometimes they fly off when a raven or crow approaches; other times there’s no reaction. Maybe they recognize individual ravens who have given them trouble. They definitely recognize individual people.
<strong>Do you ever see same-sex pairs?</strong>
It’s hard to say. Connor and Catherine, the blue-crowns, may have both been males. You can’t really tell the sexes apart except by who disappears during the nesting season. There are differences in behavior: the males do throw their weight around more.
<strong>Does the flock have traditions?</strong>
Oh yes—for example, they use different trees for different purposes. They play in that incense cedar. They always stash their babies in the same tree while they feed; they also use it for napping and flock screams. A scream may go on for an hour and a half—and it’s distracting! Sometimes it’s triggered by seeing a hawk, and sometimes I think they’re just celebrating their parrotness.
<strong>How about their intelligence?</strong>
You can see them evaluate a situation and make a decision about it.
When you deal with the parrots, you’re encountering other personalities with their own likes and dislikes. I’ve watched them die and seen the struggle and sorrow they’re feeling.
<strong>Do you still hear from purists who want to get rid of the parrots because they’re not native?</strong>
Not so much. But I’ve thought a lot about that issue. You can’t just defend them by saying “Oh, the birds are my friends.” I think you have wildlife managers who exaggerate the problem. The parrots aren’t harming anything—I’ve never seen them attack a native bird, they aren’t driving them out. And it’s not their fault that they’re here. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to protect them.
<strong>Has your association with the flock changed the way you see nature?</strong>
I never not see birds anymore. I’ve become fascinated by raptors and I’m getting familiar with the birds in the neighborhood. I think of the parrots as ambassadors from nature. One of their great values is to get people to look at birds again.
<strong>Any future plans, now that the book and movie are out?</strong>
I’d love to go down to South America and see where they come from.