Clear water and birds II

I first got a copy of a bird guide--it was Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds of Texas--more than 40 years ago. Barton Creek below the springs (see previous post) was one of the places I went to try my hand at identifying water birds. I was excited to find a large white bird swimming in the creek. Thumbing through Peterson's field guide, I finally concluded it had to be a snow goose. Wow, I thought. A rare find indeed. I brought my girlfriend down to Barton Springs to show her this oddity. She had grown up being hauled around on back roads in the back seat of a station wagon with her brothers while often being forced to wait through long periods of bickering which intensified, depending on the wait, to outright pushing-and-shoving sibling civil war, while their parents, who had stopped the car to leap out with binoculars and bird books in hand, watched birds.

She hated birdwatching. I showed her the goose.

She could be scornful at times. "That's a domestic duck" she said. Obviously, we didn't have ducks on the farm when I was a child. This was perhaps the low point of my birdwatching career.

Nevertheless, in the years since I returned to Austin, I go back to Barton Creek below the springs, especially during winter, to enjoy the beauty of the place, and, of course, to watch birds.

Yesterday's ducks, plus a swan and a coot, below:

Here's a male wood duck



And another male wood duck. These are very foppish ducks



A female wood duck



A gadwall



And another gadwall



Several lesser scaups



OK, that's enough of the ducks; here's a mute swan. Not a native, of course, but they have lived on Town Lake and lower Barton Creek for years



And finally, here's a coot. No, not a self portrait.


Click to enlarge

Clear water and kingfishers, plus some other birds

Barton Springs is a big deal in Austin. It's a very large and very popular spring-fed swimming hole. I think there's something innately appealing about clear water coming out of the ground, or out of the limestone rock in this case. The springs were sacred to the Tonkawa Indians, and they are sacred to most of us who live in Austin today. The place is not exactly in a pristine state--the swimming pool that we now have was created, in 1923 I think, by a dam built downstream from the largest of several springs that flow into it. Keeping the water clear has been a local crusade for at least 25 years, with modest success, so far. That may change if development over the recharge zone of the aquifer continues.The water is not as crystalline as I remember it in the 1960s, but that may be a function of the memory defect that people my age develop, whereby the world when we were 20 was much more beautiful than it is now.

Downstream from the dam, Barton creek flows a quarter mile before it empties into the river. In the winter, the creek downstream from the pool is a good place to go birdwatching. There aren't too many people around on a winter day, and you can see a surprising variety of bird life.

Today I parked my car near the so-called sunken garden, a small circular rock structure built during the depression around the most downstream of the springs, one that does not feed into the swimming pool. I am kinda nostalgic about it. When I was a college student, the rock walls of the sunken garden were normally allowed to fill to the top, and sometimes--I remember it as always being in the moonlight--my girlfriend and I would go skinny dipping there. The place was a little less urban then than now, but there was still a possibility of being hauled off to jail. The recollection of adventurously swimming naked in a clear spring fed pool under a full moon when you are young is intrinsically nostalgia-inducing, though this is possibly a variant of the same memory thing I mentioned earlier. Actually, it was cold as hell, even in summer, but I, uh, barely recall that part.

The water in the sunken gardens is no longer kept high enough to swim in, and there is a fence around it, and a sign in English and Spanish tells us that this is a home of the rare and endangered Barton Creek salamander, as in fact it is. So is the main swimming pool.

I had expected to find ducks on my bird walk, plus the mute swans that have lived here for decades. But I did not expect to find two species of kingfisher peacefully sharing the territory. A belted kingfisher and a green kingfisher were both at work, and both seemed successful in their fishing, in the same 50 yard stretch of creek below the dam. I couldn't get very close to either kingfisher, so the quality of the photos is not the best. But I've never before seen 2 kinds of kingfisher in the same place. I suspect the dry weather has pushed them into this coexistence.

Here's the belted kingfisher, a female, perched on a tree across the creek



Another view of the same kingfisher



And here's a female green kingfisher, on my side of the creek, but still too far away for a good photo. Sorry.



A red-bellied woodpecker proved a lot easier to get close to than the kingfishers



An American goldfinch, a male, in brush below the woodpecker



This is a least grebe, which, like the green kingfisher, is an uncommon bird around Austin. I was surprised to find it. Again, not that great a photo, but it was the best of ten or so I tried to take. Grebes dive very quickly, so I had lotsa pictures of the surface of the water, no grebe, plus two or three of a grebe with its head in the water--and this one.


Tomorrow I will post pictures of the ducks and the swan.

Yesterday's birds

Yesterday there were flocks of white-throated sparrows, but no robins, along Onion Creek. The day before that, there were flocks of robins, but no white-throated sparrows--a fact of no obvious consequence. I've think always prefered those kinds of facts to the important ones.

But I am no closer to understanding the calls of the crows, though I can tell you they are complex and I often imagine that they have a special code for "here comes the guy with the camera; fly away while he is trying to focus." No photos of crows.

A white-throated sparrow


Cedar waxwing in the hackberries


Lincoln's sparrow beside a drying-up pond


Yellow-rumped warbler--our main wintertime warbler in Austin


A black vulture trying to gain altitude

Michael Moore=Osama bin Laden? I don't think so

Sadly, once again I have disgraced my vows as a Buddhist. Chris Matthews likens Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden on national TV, and people say, basically, ho hum. I confess it made me mad. So I felt compelled to send the following intemperate outburst, violating at least two of the Buddhist precepts, to Mr. Matthews, which, of course, I am well aware he will never read. So I might as well put it here.
==============

Matthews, you have really crossed the line, you unctuous creep. You have got a lot of nerve comparing ANYONE in this country--other than the criminal who is running it--to Osama bin Laden.

And speaking of Osama bin Laden, where IS that fellow nowadays? The last I heard he was still at large, courtesy of his greatest beneficiary and ally, George Bush. So, hardball guy, why don't you ask one of Little King George's hired mouthpieces a REAL hardball question, like "where the bloody hell is Osama bin Laden four years and 3 months after the Pipsqueak-in-Chief promised to bring him to justice, dead or alive?" But you won't do that. "Hardball?" You guys? Not a chance--you'd come in last in the softball special Olympics. But, now that I think about it, how would such a competition be any different from contemporary broadcast journalism?

Dead or alive, huh? That's what Mr. Tardive Dyskinesia promised, and that mission does not seem to have been, um, accomplished, does it, you groveling prostitute? You and all the other TV punditlings servicing the Republican regime and urinating on the grave of Edward R. Murrow could--if struck by lightning or a sudden bolt of integrity--start asking Republicans why the hell they didn't actually go after our real enemies instead of sinking us--courtesy of lies, deceit, and hireling journalists--into a bottomless quagmire in Iraq, plus incidentally killing as many Americans as Osama did, not to mention feeding the Bill of Rights into the shredder and disgracing our country with torture and secret prisons around the world which seem to house almost anybody EXCEPT the people who actually attacked us on 9/11. And now Iraq is breeding new terrorists like a swamp breeds kudzu, thanks to George AWOL Bush and his mainstream-media enablers like yourself.

But you push boldy in front of the cameras, as if going where no suit has gone before, clutching a sheaf of Republican talking points (or should I call them marching orders?) and compare Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden! Wow!

You worthless fool. You pole-dancing trollop. You are paid more for a minute of your talking-head prostitution than your average over-the-hill hooker gets for an hour of phone-sex, but I'll tell you what, you pissant bottom-feeder, you have light-years less decency, because the hooker doesn't harm much of anybody, and probably loves her country. I wouldn't say that about you.

Very Sincerely

Jim McCulloch

A cloudy day near Onion Creek

These photos are from the day it almost rained in Austin, coupla days ago. But now we are back to dry and sunny and warm and windy.


This should be a metaphor for something



Hundreds of robins were out, but the light was poor. This is the best picture I got.



An eastern phoebe, watching for bugs. Most flycatchers go south for the winter, for obvious reasons, but there seem to be enough wintertime insects around Austin to keep the phoebes here.



Lots of riders were on the trails. Here's one in the distance.



End of the day in the greenbelt.

The FBI is swamped with false leads. Who woulda thought?

We see in the Bush administration a unique combination, AFAIK unknown in our history, of malevolence, in its love of torture and secret prisons and imperial and dictatorial powers; corruption, in the K Street project and outright bribery at every level of a pay-to-play government where we outsource essential tasks to Halliburton and Bechtel, the corporate equivalent of roving gangs of burglars and car thieves; and incompetence, in everything from Katrina to the ongoing Medicare drug fiasco to today's New York Times revelation that the imperial project of big-brother spying on millions of Americans, in outright violation of the law, has actually damaged national security by swamping the FBI with false leads.

Who can be surprised?

No one who pays attention.

I mean, look at it, we have all of the stuff mentioned above, plus the same gang of criminals and psychotic theocrats gambling with astonishing irresponsibility with the lives of our children and grandchildren (and presumably, the lives of their own children and grandchildren, which places their commitment to family values in a harsh bright light) as they put the pedal to the floor in the looting and poisoning of the physical world we live in, that we have to get our food and water from, to a degree that threatens the continuance of human civilization.

"Unsustainable lifestyles? Hey, we're sustaining ourselves handsomely, thank you very much," they murmur, in hypothetical moments of honesty. If anything I think they see permanent war and global warming and the uncertainties of climate change and the coming energy crisis and the possibility of increasingly severe pandemics all as short-term opportunity to seize more power for the Imperial Presidency and for corporate enrichment (assuming Republican connections, of course), and I suspect they either have a vague optimism behind it that Republican children will when the time comes have the wherewithal to build and stock fortified compounds and lay in supplies of vaccines, courtesy of the Commander in Chief, or that they will be provided for by Jesus after He returns to earth, courtesy of God.

The odd thing, to me, is that not only do Republicans conspire to destroy the Bill of Rights and rule by imperial decree the war powers of the Commander in Chief, enrich their friends (who God knows are rich enough already), degrade and destroy the planet; they take a perverse joy in it, like cannibals eating the brains of their victims and smearing themselves with blood as they do a victory dance, infecting themselves with kuru in that very moment they imagine themselves invulnerable. To mix a metaphor a little, the brains they have eaten seem to be their own.

So with people like this running the show, it makes an odd kind of sense that the National Security Agency, apparently now operated out of Karl Rove's office in the White House, damages the same national security President Bush cites as his rationale for spying on us.

How to insult the memory of Martin Luther King

It has always surprised me that our government commemorates Martin Luther King with a national holiday. Today, to be honest, it seems almost like an insult to his memory and to his beliefs. I am glad a few people remembered what King really stood for when they objected to a military aircraft flyover of an MLK day parade in San Antonio. The day should not be a celebration of American military might. A lot of San Antonio Republicans got huffy and more-patriotic-than-thou about it. I makes you want to weep.

On Easter of 1967 I was one of several thousand people who marched against the Vietnam war in the streets of Chicago. Martin Luther King was at the head of that march. All I remember of the march itself is the sparse streetside clumps of sullen and angry white people shouting unfriendly words at us as we went by, and a few American Nazi Party members--who looked slightly crazy and disheveled, like they had been living in their cars in their comic-opera ragtag uniforms--holding up banners questioning our patriotism. I think the actual ideology of these Nazi wannabes would today be mainstream Republicanism, needing only the removal of any references to the Fuehrer and the substitution of "the Commander in Chief" instead, as needed.

King gave a speech after the march in a big cavernous building, some kind of coliseum or armory, I don't remember now, and I was at the back and could hardly see Dr. King, but I could hear him very well; the bad and echoing acoustics of the building somehow complemented King's rolling thunder oratorical style. I don't recall the actual words, but I remember the Moses coming down from the mountain sound of the rhetoric. But I looked his words up today. He called the Vietnam war a "blasphemy against all that America stands for." I am certain he would say the same today with regard to our obscene military adventure in Iraq.

On that Easter in 1967 he must have been preparing for the longer and more famous speech about a week later at Riverside Church in New York City, in which he called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Although that was then and this is now, that accusation is still, sadly, correct. He went on to say "It should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war." That seems just as true nearly 39 years later.

Toward the end of the Riverside Church speech he said that we are a people approaching spiritual death if we continue in our unjust wars, our oppression of the poor, our siding with dictators, and if we continue to make property rights more important than people.

It makes me sad, but I am sure the flyover of the San Antonio parade took place as planned today, taking us one step closer to spiritual death as a people.

One thing about King was that he was not afraid of being divisive in the service of the brotherhood of man. I do believe he would have been the first to get in the face of the San Antonio parade planners, and would have joined, and led, the protest against the F16s overhead.

Friday cat blogging, plus some stuff about a dog

The cats have to be separated to eat, because Grendel eats fast and Gray eats slow, and then they will disagree about the remaining cat tidbits which Gray is still individually examining prior to nibbling. And getting hungry cats into adjoining rooms is your classic herding cats problem, unless you are crafty and plan ahead, hard to do right after you get out of bed and are besieged by the small dog who wants to be fed RIGHT NOW and is jumping up and down and twirling in tight mad squealing circles, more excited than a game-show winner on TV, as if the interval between the opening of a can of dogfood and the dish getting put on the floor was emotionally unbearable, I guess maybe like the time between drawing the winning lottery ticket and being handed the check.

So, I open the can of dogfood and now Bella is snarfing her food like a starving animal, which, I hasten to say, she is not, and I can attend to the cats, who have to be tricked into different rooms which takes a couple of feints because each wants to eat the first bowl I put out and if I put out two bowls at once they will be in the same room, not good, and then I will have to move a cat while it's eating, not good. But with lies and promises I get them, finally, into separate rooms, and everyone is happy.

They eat.

Then Gray wants to go out onto the back porch, and it's cold but he doesn't know that and you can't tell a cat anything, and he thinks Grendel wants to go out too so he rushes thru the door, like he is escaping, instead of his usual dainty smelling of the door and considering life while I hold the door open. Now then, he's out. Comes to a dead stop--like, what am I doing here? And because it's chilly out there he will soon be back at the door demanding a refund.

In the meantime Grendel sees Gray is out and wants out too, but because there is now no competitive urgency he does the dainty smelling of the door routine while I hold it open except I have other things to do and boost him out with my foot while he tries to brake with his front feet, but now he's out too and instantly recovers his self-esteem using the amnesia cats quickly apply to memories of indignities like being boosted out the door. The cats explore opposite corners of the porch. They know they have caught lizards out here, so they are optimistic, unaware of the seasonality of lizards.

In about 5 minutes, as I predicted, they are back at the door wanting in, insistent and impatient, and enter in a formal two-cat procession, tails vertical, with a certain offended haughtiness like they're thinking well it's about time and you just can't get good servants any more.

This is why we have cats.

Grendel checking for danger before he gets a drink


Gray ignoring the bad behavior of the servants

News from the Texas Coast, part 2

Texas was at one time a populist state, and as a consequence of this we still have socialist beaches. Everything between the ocean and the line of vegetation beyond the high tide mark is public property. Consequently, every storm moves the property line a few feet towards Canada (or in the case of a major hurricane, many yards.) Hurricane Rita put a good many beach houses on the upper Texas coast on public land, or strictly speaking, put public land under the beach houses.

The State of Texas, strangely enough in such a Republican part of the world, zealously enforces its property rights against the unlucky beach house owners. The vacation home below, one of a dozen or so on this stretch of beach in the little town of Surfside, is not being repaired because it is now parked on the public right of way, and the Texas General Land Office won't allow repairs. It will be torn down, with no compensation to its owners. This seems harsh, and there has been some grumbling, but on the other hand, every landowner near the ocean has known since the 1890s that this is a peril of seaside living in Texas.


Damaged house, now on the public beach



This business, which I think was a boat-repair shop, is not on the beach, but is fifty yards from a muddy back bay. Doesn't look like it's being rebuilt.



The birds, however, are going about business as usual. These white ibises are enjoying the low-tide mud near the destroyed business above



Here is a snowy egret in the surf (I had another photo of this bird in Texas Coast pt. 1)



This snowy egret which was working the edge of a marina has just caught a fish and is trying to get it aimed in the right direction to be swallowed, which it very soon was



A brown pelican, a ring billed gull, and a royal tern resting in the sun on this unusually warm early January day



A few miles inland, an eastern bluebird

Salmon Rushdie and Orwell

Salmon Rushdie has an article in the Toronto Star about misuse of language. Specificially, he is talking about our government's use of the phrase "extraordinary rendition" instead of plainer English words like kidnapping and torture. His point is that such Orwellian doubletalk is always an indication of evil intentions.

As indeed it is.

What has always puzzled me is why these words are even invented. At first glance you would think it is part of a scheme to hide criminal behavior from a public which might put a stop to it. That may be a part of it. But certainly not all. Even Hitler felt the need of these kinds of words, and he certainly was in no in fear of German public opinion. When he could have easily said "yes, we are actually killing all the Jews" he did not say that at all--instead he was silent on the matter and had Himmler talk about sending the Jews off "to the East."

I don't have an answer as to why these circumlocutions are used in place of the plain truth. It's true the public doesn't want to know--or at least that part of the public that supports a Hitler, or a low-grade nightmare like Bush, doesn't want to know. Maybe it comes down to something as simple as a guilty conscience, if not for Bush then for the red-state claque that put him in office.

The British Law Lords handed down an opinion on torture (quoted in the Rushdie article) notable for its straightforwardness. "Torture is an unqualified evil...It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished." Maybe the extraordinary renditionists still know this. I'm inclined to think some residual kernel of shame in the torturers impels them to use Orwellian language for what they do. Why else would someone like Himmler display queasiness over speaking plainly about what he was doing?

Plain language would seem to be the canary in the coal mine here. When ordinary words go missing, and someone substitutes these bizarre replacements like "extraordinary rendition" we know we know we are in serious difficulties. Houston, we have a problem.

News from the Texas Coast, part 1

When I arrived at the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge, it was on fire. I had chosen an inopportune time to come. A controlled burn, undertaken when most of Texas is under a mandatory burn ban--not applicable, as with most laws nowadays, to the federal government--had gotten out of hand, and was burning out of control, filling the sky with smoke and making birdwatching out of the question.

So instead of walking the trails of the refuge, I poked around the little towns of Freeport and Surfside--both still showing damage from Hurricane Rita, and took some pictures of birds on the rocks of the jetty, and on the beach, and in the surf, and just standing around, as birds sometimes do. Plus a stick-in-the-mud ibis.

A Snowy Egret in the surf


A Willet near the Snowy Egret


This Great Blue Heron is on the rocks of the jetty beside the Freeport ship channel


Close-up of the Great Blue Heron


A Tricolored Heron beginning to develop breeding plumage


This Laughing Gull is standing on the beach looking anything but elegant


One of two White Ibises probing in the mud at low tide.


Click on any image for larger view

Shades of gray

The sun today was occasionally hidden by haze, and my walk in southwest Austin was through a terrain notable for subtle gradations of very muted color--pretty much gray, in other words. I tried to get a photo of a roadrunner, but was foiled by the wily paisano taking cover behind juniper trees each time I had almost focused the camera. But I did get a photo of a mockingbird.

Mockingbird


Same mockingbird, different view


Returning along a mountain bike path, I noticed I was walking through a bed of thousands of small fossil oysters eroding out of the soft yellow clay of the Del Rio formation. These specimens of Ilymatogyra arietina range in size from 1/2 inch to maybe an inch and a half in length. They died in the early Cretaceous cenomanian seas and were buried in mud from the volcanic ash of an episode of volcanism in Mexico about 97 or 98 million years ago, and have remained undisturbed until boys making ruts in the dirt with knobby-tired bicycles released them into the sunlight. So here some of them are.

An Ilymatogyra arietina


More Ilymatogyras


Photo of myself, with the Ilymatogyra trail behind me.


This will be my last post for a few days. I will be out of town, to see my sister and to visit the San Bernard National Wildlife refuge on the Texas coast.

The war on freedom

There are many problems with President Bush exercising the extraordinary powers he has insisted are his, not least of which is that he is in effect claiming that actual dictatorial powers are given to him by the Constitution (!) in a time of war.

War, in his view, automatically makes him commander-in-chief, with--again in his view--powers to defy laws made by Congress and ignore the Bill of Rights. And what war would we be talking about? Certainly the actual conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq hardly justify his assuming such extraordinary powers. So the war in question would have to be the "War on Terror." In fact, Bush has been very explicit about this.

Now, "terror," as many have pointed out, is an abstract noun, which, as is the nature of abstract nouns, can never surrender or capitulate, and thus a war against it can and presumably will--like its prototype, the war on drugs--go on forever, at the convenience of whatever president might feel the need of dictatorial powers.

The President's obsession with such powers is perhaps best revealed in his, um, sense of humor. His humor, like his facial tics, gives a lot away. His occasional wry jokes (3 below, for your wry amusement) about how much easier his job would be if he were dictator, are in the same humor ballpark as someone getting on a plane carrying a tennis shoe with wires sticking out of it. But even less funny.

Bush quotes follow:

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier...just as long as I'm the dictator..."
--Washington, DC, Dec 18, 2000, during his first trip to Washington as President-Elect

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
George Bush Describing what it's like to be governor of Texas.
--Governing Magazine 7/98)

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
--(Business Week, July 30, 2001)

I think Bush assumes a certain continuity of fear-based governance, such that the perpetual commander-in-chief will be perpetually a Republican. Such self assurance would seem to be founded on political wisdom best and most succinctly enunciated by a philosopher of a previous reich, Herman Goering.

Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist was assigned to interview Goering in his Nuremberg cell, kept a journal of his conversations with Goering. This one below is from the evening of 18 April 1946.

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war ... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

"It works the same in any country." I think Karl Rove must have learned a lot from this interview. And I think he then went on to improve on Goering. The perpetual threat of war will work even when the shooting war is far away and not a direct threat to the nation. In fact, even if the war in Iraq should devolve into a long-term occupation, with nothing but occasional outbreaks of violence, the war on terror, in Rove's scenario, will be going strong, waged here at home, by a Republican presidency, against democracy and freedom.

We are all illegal aliens, as far as the Hopi and Cherokees are concerned

Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado (both Republicans) are hard at work whipping up hysteria about illegal immigrants coming here to have citizen-babies. Apparently Republicans consider such behavior a sort of demographic terrorism. About 70 members of the House signed onto legislation designed to somehow circumvent the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship to the U.S. born children of illegal immigrants. Though Deal and Tancredo don't say so (being dimly aware, I suppose, of the bad press that comes with outright racism) it's pretty clear to me that the object of their animus is Mexican immigrants. But Tancredo puts the matter in terms of illegality.

"Any issue that has a `damn right' response, you can go with," Tancredo said. "You ask if we should stop illegal immigrants from coming onto this country and having a baby here who is an American citizen, and most people say, `Damn right.'"

The "damn right" test would seem to be very much like the test every fascist has historically found useful for directing public fear and loathing against the fascist scapegoat of choice.

Mr. Tancredo and Mr. Deal, like a lot of Republicans, seem to think their ancestors were planted here by Johnny Appleseed.

Given that up until 1924 in fact, there was essentially no restriction on European immigration, but that it was quite hard an immigrant to become a naturalized citizen, many, perhaps most Americans today can trace their own citizenship, today, to the fact that whoever happens to get born here has citizenship by virtue of that. Many first generation immigrants, perhaps Mr. Tancredo's own ancestors for all we know, never became citizens, but their children inevitably did. The difference is that in an earlier day we did not deport the parents.

For most nationalities, during most of our history, there was no such thing as illegal immigration. All you had to do was buy a ticket, and give your name to the record-keepers at Ellis Island--who would misspell it commonly enough to account for much of the riotous orthographic anarchy of American phonebook white pages listings today--and you were a legal immigrant. And when you had children here, they would be citizens

That's not to say that there was not nativist restriction on immigration--there was, directed mainly against Asians. And although great efforts were made through various bracero agreements to make sure Mexicans went back home after they harvested the peaches, Mexicans were not subjected to an actual immigration quota until 1968, believe it or not.

Until fairly recently (more recently than for most nationalities), there was no such thing as a Mexican illegal alien, unless the immigrant failed to conform to the fairly minimal requirements for getting here.

The last time I looked, a year or two ago, the number of "illegal aliens" in this country was thought to be in the neighborhood of 10 million (and the figure varies wildly, because no one really knows), of whom most will be employed at any given time and the rest actively looking for work.

And who exactly is in competition for a job on the framing crew with the Mexican construction workers building your house? If Republicans were not actively engaged in the destruction of the labor movement, perhaps there would be more non-Mexican working-class Americans accustomed to a first world living wage, looking for jobs of that kind.

Of course, a first world living wage may be a thing of the past. But...that will stop illegal immigration. It's worth noting here that Mexican immigration slowed to almost zero during the Great Depression. Historically, the surest way to control our borders would seem to be complete economic collapse, a drastic means our Republican rulers may well have in store for us.

The last time I needed to hire someone for a job of work was not long ago when a large tree partially fell on my house. I knew that one of my neighbors (himself a legal green-card immigrant) was an entrepreneur who had a tree, lawn, and landscape business. I got a bid from him, hired him, and he had a crew out that day with the necessary tackle, ropes, and chainsaws, and it was done.

Since I speak Spanish, I talked a little with the crew, and I have every reason to think all of them but my neighbor were illegals. They were hard workers. They knew what they were doing and got the job done well and fast. Nice guys, too. Most of them will probably go back to Michoacán one day. Some will contrive to stay here.

But my point here is that the illegal immigrant situation springs from the absurd-but-not-comic illegalization of what in a previous era was thought to be commendable personal get-up-and-go, and from the fact that we have a lot of unfilled hard-labor jobs.

Deal and Tancredo and the 70 co-signers of their bill got nowhere this time. But the issue will no doubt be back in time for the next elections, unless Bush and company plunge the country into a depression and render the question moot. Who is going to walk through a dangerous desert to have a baby in a place where no one has a decent job?

New Year's Day fritillary

On New Year's Day in the morning, I went out in my yard to find the sun shining and a butterfly on a dandelion. A Gulf fritillary. (The name fritillary traces ultimately to the Latin word for a cup used for throwing dice. I have no idea how the name got applied to butterflies.) Photos below.

This butterfly thing needs some explaining. I have been a birdwatcher for years, as some readers of this blog are probably aware. But until I got a digital camera with a powerful zoom lens, I had never taken much interest in butterflies, except for a vague consciousness of their unidentified multicolored presence occasionally. But when I got the camera, I discovered I could take pictures and later identify them, and find out something about them.

So now I find myself noticing them more. I am soon to be 65 years old and have lived much of my life in Texas, and had never previously paid attention to the fact that we have winter butterflies. At least we do around here, right now. We've had warm and pretty days lately, in the 70s in the daytime, but the butterflies have previously survived a week or so of temperatures cold enough that I had to drip outdoor faucets to protect the pipes. I don't know if they will last through the next cold spell. I suspect that at some point they either hibernate or freeze or migrate further south. We'll see.


Anyway, I owe a certain enhancement of my awareness of nature to technological innovation. I wonder if this is considered a paradox?

Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae)


Another photo of the same butterfly, with a better view of the lower hindwing markings


And a third view, showing the totally different patterns on the underside of the wings

Butterflies in winter, and other wonders of nature

At McKinney Falls State Park the day was beautiful. Here is a typical upland landscape at McKinney Falls, with a pencil cactus at the left, scrub cedar elms here and there, lots of prickly pear cactus, and lots of blue sky.


The fact that no birds were visible, or scarcely any, hardly mattered. I did get one photo of a mockingbird which was in the process of swallowing a bug.


I don't know if the bug was a butterfly, but today was the 29th of December, and I am still seeing butterflies. The most common were small sulphurs, but I got a photo of a variegated fritillary and (once again) a buckeye.

Variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia)


Buckeye (Junonia coenia)


And here is one of the largest mustang grapevines I have ever seen, nearly a foot in diameter at the base. Maybe in wetter climates wild grapevines this size might be common, but around here this is a monster. I wonder how old it is?

The Bluff Springs store

I think it was about 1978 that my father-in-law Tom Sutherland bought a country store outside of Austin. It was near his house. I drive by it several times a week. I don’t know why I thought about it when I drove by today. Maybe because the area seems quiet and empty during the holidays, so it’s easier to see and hear the previous inhabitants. My father-in-law’s store is no longer a store; somebody lives there now. It’s a small place--almost too small to be lived in.

For some reason Tom--my father-in-law--had imagined the store as a kind of office where he could sit behind the counter and drink scotch and smoke cigars while he set about translating the great Gaucho epic Martin Fierro--a project he never finished--undisturbed by wife and young children at all, and by customers but little. He had retired from his job as an English professor.

As soon as he got the store, however, he was overtaken by the desire to make money from it. One Saturday morning he had gone to a downtown flea market, where elderly people had little stalls overflowing with knick-knacks, garage sale junk, and he decided to buy an entire stall, all its goods, and move it out to his new business. He told this old lady he wished to buy her out. She said make an offer. They settled on a price, maybe a thousand dollars, I don’t remember now, and he was the new owner of a ton and a half of old flat-irons, bedsteads, Readers Digest Condensed Books, lamps, porcelain dolls, candlesticks, hair rollers, costume jewelry, stamp collections, boxes of polished rocks, coffee mugs with sayings on them, old gilt-framed faded prints of dramatic paintings of St. Mark's Piazza, ornate tins full of ornate buttons, stacks of glass saucers no two alike, several office swivel chairs with the vinyl cracked and degraded ill-smelling granulating spongy foam coming out, a selection of used Bibles, and much more.

Tom put all of it into the store that would fit alongside the troublesome cooler and the canned goods and the rack with potato chips and put the rest in the tack room of his stable where he kept a mare no one could ride and a pony which bit children.

He had a new family which consisted of seven people besides himself. He was living in a big chaotic house 200 yards across Onion creek from his store, with his second wife and her three children from another marriage and her three young children that he had sired in his old age, much to the dismay of six of his seven original daughters, my wife being the undismayed exception.

This second wife was the widow of one of Tom's drinking buddies, a colorful character himself. She was 30 years younger than Tom, and bore him three children pretty quick. It would be fair to say that their relationship was tumultuous. Disorderly. They both tended towards impulsiveness.

But Tom liked the disorder of a house with six children. He was not the sort to grow old gracefully. His house, and despite his original intentions, his store, were noisy and exciting, and all his life Tom liked noise and excitement, which is possibly why he never finished writing a book.

Both house and store were not so far from Austin's only volcano, a smooth and grassy basalt knoll called Pilot Knob about two hundred feet high, extinct since the late Cretaceous. Some pretty bad characters lived out there in those days. One was murdered a mile or so away from the Bluff Springs store and then beheaded by unknown assassins during the bucolic days of the homegrown dope trade in Austin before all of it but the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine was outsourced south of the border in an early wave of globalization. I think I mentioned this once in an earlier post. The murder victim owned some monkeys that got loose, and neighbors discovered the murder when they saw the monkeys playing with the decayed head.

This was an atmosphere my father-in-law must have felt to be inspiring for his translation project. But he being old and moreover tending to enjoy being distracted, I doubt if he got more than a chapter into it. I don’t think anyone knows where the manuscript went. It’s not like Martin Fierro has never been translated into English, though.

But to get back to his business, it failed for the simple reason that he had a catastrophic personality quirk for a person setting up in a retail trade. It was this: whenever anyone wanted to buy any of his used stuff, he felt that by virtue of the fact of someone wanting it, it must be valuable, and that, if it was valuable, the would-be buyer was trying to pull a fast one and get it too cheaply. It would be best, therefore, to hold onto it.

So he always refused to sell things that people wanted to buy. Except for things like potato chips and candy and drinks the cooler did not quite keep cool enough. Not only did this no-I-won’t-sell-it-to-you trait ruin his career as a storekeeper, it ruined at least two giant garage sales my wife and two of his other daughters arranged to save him from being overwhelmed in his own house by stuff he accumulated and never let go of.

It was very paradoxical. My wife observed it at the garage sales. The higher the offers went, the more adamant he became in rejecting offers to purchase. My wife and her sisters were almost in tears with rage when he refused an offer of maybe a hundred dollars—this was many years ago—for two non-running rusting automobiles, surrounded by weeds, in his back yard. His daughters did manage to sell off a small amount of household junk without his noticing while he was occupied bargaining with some of the more persistent (and perplexed) would-be buyers of other items.

But all-in-all the garage sales were failures, like his store. Failures from an economic standpoint, that is. From his point of view, which I can understand better now, none of it was probably a failure at all, even though his business was finally closed down for good by the health department because of the cooler. As far as I could tell he enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes I think of knocking on the guy's door who lives there now and telling him a little of the history of the place. And then I think, "nah." So here it is in my blog instead.

News from the front

The demands of the War on Christmas will probably keep me from posting much until about 5 days after the winter solstice.