European Birds

I was able to take a pair of Numenius’ binoculars (Pentax Papilio) with me on my trip. This was very much not a birding trip, though my friends Jennifer and Harald organized a day of birding in a large wetland south of Copenhagen, where I actually saw my life Barnacle Goose (a whole field of them, actually).

When your birding is done mostly from train or bus windows, your list is going to skew very much to the larger birds. I did see some old friends, including Black Redstart, Wheatear and Dunnock. I am almost certain I saw a Lesser Spotted Eagle growing up in Spain but I did confirm it on the bus ride to Freiburg.

For not being a birding trip, I think I got a pretty respectable list.

Earth Day At 56

Pica had a catch-up conversation with her sister this morning, who mentioned that both she and her son separately went out to pick up trash at a couple of events for Earth Day. This brings to mind my memory of the very first Earth Day in 1970. I was 7 at the time. The event drew the attention of our elementary school teachers, and at a break in the schoolday we went out and picked up trash on the wooded slope between the upper and lower playgrounds of the school. I’m glad this is still a tradition.

Picnic Day Parade

Today was Picnic Day, which is the annual student-run open house event here at UC Davis that draws tens of thousands of visitors to the campus and town. Events range from fashion shows to weather balloon launches to dachshund races. In recent years I’ve avoided the huge crowds on campus but have gone to see the parade which kicks off at 10:15 in the morning and does a loop downtown several blocks from our house.

I decided I’d try to sketch the parade and here is the result. When I was watching the parade I sketched only with a sanguine drawing pencil but took some reference photos too. Back at home I added color with more Derwent drawing pencils and watercolor wash.

Looking Towards The Heavens

Like many others today I was glued to watching the NASA livestream of the Artemis 2 splashdown, with a bit of extra nervousness due to the concerns about the spacecraft’s heatshield. It was a perfect splashdown, but getting the astronauts back to the recovery ship was taking a while, so I went for my late afternoon walk. It was sprinkling a bit, so I grabbed my raincoat and walked where I could have a good view of the eastern sky to see this wonderful double rainbow.

Riverfront Outing

Today I went on a little outing to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, walking to the museum from the Sacramento train station via Old Sacramento and the riverfront. Old Sacramento is the most touristy area in Sacramento; it developed during the Gold Rush. Since I have been reading a lot about Northern California history in the latter half of the 19th century and pondering the Gilded Age fortunes that were made during that period, it’s neat to see the actual storefront where Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made their wealth off miners needing supplies. This is a sketch looking west across the Sacramento River downstream from the Tower Bridge.

Turkey In The Dell

I went to today’s Davis sketchcrawl which was at the eastern end of the Arboretum. My main sketch for the day was of a wooden shade structure with trees in the background, but once I finished the sketch I turned around and saw several turkeys at close range, one of which was displaying prominently.

Backyard Ceanothus

There is a ceanothus shrub just in our backyard right up against the wall of the house that is now in flower. I don’t know what variety this is, not being particularly up on my horticultural ceanothuses. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I knew the local wild species of ceanothus pretty well.) I sketched this with the Derwent Inktense pan color set — I like the way the colors turned out.

The Elusive Bushtit

I’m continuing to try photographing the urban avifauna of Davis, and am learning how bird species differ in their challenges in photographing them. Bushtits are pretty common, but move through shrubbery in a very active flock. It is quite hard to catch one in the viewfinder before it disappears behind a branch. Still, yesterday I walked through the Arboretum and managed to take several good frames of bushtits in a flock at eye level.

Pica and I have a joke that bushtit flocks always come in sizes that are prime numbers.

Urban Rabbit

I am continuing to practice a bit of bird photography by strolling around the neighborhood with my 75-300mm lens. But not all urban wildlife are birds. This is a cottontail rabbit that likes to hide under the shrubbery near the Davis Senior Center. He clearly is finding plenty to eat there.

Enric the Adventurer

Thanks to the vicissitudes of the YouTube algorithm, I have discovered the channel Enric Adventures which has the possibility of entertaining me with Catalan language content for years into the future. This is the channel of a 37-year-old civil engineer named Enric Luzán Pi who as of 30 November 2025 started the grand adventure of walking around the world (La Volta al Món a Peu), beginning in Barcelona and walking west to east. His long distance walks started in 2022 with a circumambulation of Andorra, and continued with traversing the Pyrenees, traversing the Swiss Alps via the Via Alpina Green, and crossing the Caucasus range in Georgia. He is trying to vlog his adventure daily. The channel provides subtitles in Catalan which is good for my language learning input.

Enric is presently on day 77 of his adventure and is now in the middle of Croatia. I only started watching him five days ago beginning at his Day 1 departure point at the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona, so I have catching up to do. His daily videos are about 15 minutes each so if I watch two a day I should converge on following in real time in a month-and-a-half or so. These are a lot of fun to watch because one gets to see the landscape at a slow pace, and I like following his route with OpenStreetMap displayed in a separate window.

Enric has a video on his potential route around the world. Traversing Europe seems easy; going across Asia definitely is not, given geopolitical instability.