Yesterday, with a friend, I walked along the beautiful the Central Coast bluffs. A magnificent display of wildflowers spreading color up against the cerulean blue sea was breathtaking. My friend shared her story about a recent whale watch trip. “It was great. We saw seven gray whales. But there was a baby whale that was alone and swimming south instead of north. That bothered us.”
I am much like you.
I’m a gadabout
dressed in threadbare wings
still fluttering from
flower to flower…
The human-made threats like habitat destruction, development, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and invasive non native plants, are outside of a butterfly’s adaptability. This is where you and I must step in if we wish to continue the soulful joy of butterflies in the sky.
And our planet’s modifier is in trouble. It’s a Neptune 911 crisis. What can we do to combat our ocean’s struggle with marine debris, hypoxia and acidification? The answers are found in university labs, recognized in world organizations, and ignored by feckless politicians and leaders.
Do the kings and prince’s of Saudi Arabia spend time with the aborigines of Australia? Do the captains of industry in the western world hang with the indigenous of the American continents? Do the Russian oligarchs hang with the Aleuts and Inuits of the Arctic regions? And so on. Probably not.
Wealth and power can put heroin addiction to shame.
Wealth and power can correct social and planetary imbalances, or tip the balance to unsustainable levels.
Spotting scope zeroed in on a nesting female peregrine falcon, director chairs set up for conversation near the base of Morro Rock, it takes less than 15 minutes before a person asks, “Are you Bob?” or says, “Bob, I brought my family to see the falcons.”
“Welcome back,” Bob Isenberg greets, as he readies to share his personal excitement about the recently hatched chicks on a Morro Rock State Preserve ledge. There, a 5-year-old female peregrine falcon (falco peregrinus) that arrived on the Rock three years ago with an ID tag stamped “23R” that tracks her beginnings at the Moss Landing Power Plant, has taken on a life-partner and set up a new eyrie (a bird of prey’s nest), one never used before, as noted on Isenberg’s website pacificcoastperegrinewatch.org.
23R’s arrival joined the only other nesting peregrine on the Rock — an older female that hasn’t produced viable eggs for the last three years, according to Isenberg.
Enough of this world and all of its crooks and liars crushing the light out from the morning headlines! A high octane call to take to the road fuels my inner nomad. Drape me in beads and hats. Pack my bags (minimally). Climb aboard Gilda, the 1997 VW EuroVan with 136,000 miles already journeyed
“Are we dead?” I asked Spouse.
Maybe the EuroVan, the newest family member, missed one of the treacherous curves on Nacimiento-Fergusson Road and plunged a thousand feet or more into eternity.
I just returned to Yosemite National Park after decades of absence. It is magnificent, if you ignore the hordes of people crawling the valley like ants, and the over 66 million dead conifers in the Sierra Nevada, with the grey and brown bulk seen along the roads leading into Yosemite National Park through Mariposa County. I lost my breath seeing the death of these trees.
