Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Snow Day


No day here all day. Finally snow and moisture but my creek that used to run all years still hasn't started running. Other changes that I've noticed, it's snowing and I have mosquitoes and pigeons which in the past only came in summer. Last year I had coastal bird here for the winter which is 150 miles away and 50 miles north. I don't leave that to misguided birds but a change in the weather patterns. There are also several type of sage starting to show up in the last few years.
I'm so amazed at the little birds and how they can tolerate the weather here. Under normal conditions this place without a house would have been a harsh place to live. It wouldn't have been a normal place to travel because of the rocky hills, dense brush and rapidly changing weather. In the summer it's too hot and the winter it's too cold. Still the wild life lives as long as they have enough space left to live. looking at the country side with Google Earth and World Wind a great NASA program you can see the land looks like it has a infection or rash with blotches of cleared land. Fences are another problem for wild life preventing there travel for food. If it wasn't for the gold rush this place would sill be a undeveloped. Now it's taken on a new roll where people come to retire from the bay area. A lot of old hippies that wanted to be with nature moved here. Then there are the rich who can buy large plots of cheap land and build their Mc Mansions. This is a place where the animals need the space to travel because there isn't that much natural food and humans are bringing in plants that don't belong here and they use lots more water then indigenous plants. Again I bring up the people of Easter Island and how they perished. This is a same type of ecosystem that will have the same outcome for animals and humans. With the clearing of the lands the water shed is being removed causing water to run off the mountain and foot hills rather then soaking in to the ground, that's why my creek isn't running all year round these days like it used to.

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