Most people probably think of Bambi’s friendship with Thumper as merely a fantasy dreamed up for children. But I suspect that Felix Salten was working from direct observation when he authored Bambi, ein Leben im Walde in 1923. (Walt Disney’s 1942 animated feature Bambi was taken from Salten’s book.)

While I watched from my deck last Friday, a blacktail doe spotted a housecat near neighbor Dan and Mary Huntsman’s fence.

The doe took great interest in the cat’s crawling under a gate.

Deer and cats, as this blog has noted previously, seem to get along well, as evidenced by the doe below watching a housecat wash itself on a woodpile.

It’s an inter-species attraction that folks around the country have noticed. If you want to watch a deer and cat flirt with each other, two videos on YouTube are particularly fun. The first is made all the more humorous by the chatter, as well as, a radio broadcast, in the background. The second is notable for the persistence of both the cat and deer in bussing each other.

.

I’ve also witnessed similar behavior in my fields between a fawn and a jackrabbit. When a curious fawn spotted the rabbit, it began slowly walking up to it. The rabbit stayed put until the fawn started sniffing around it and then hopped under a nearby bush.

.

.
I didn’t manage to photograph that encounter, but many of us have seen a series of photos depicting the friendship between another fawn and a rabbit. Here’s one from the series, which was shot by German photographer Tanja Askani in Alberta, Canada.

.

.

.

Old Christmas trees piled behind the Arthur E. Disterheft Public Safety Building in Point Reyes Station this week.

County firefighters each year encourage West Marin residents to drop off their old Christmas trees at firehouses. The trees are chipped and hauled off, eliminating the risk of dry trees accidentally catching fire around the house. I dropped my tree off at the Point Reyes Station firehouse Monday after calling ahead to make sure I could do so a day after the recycling program supposedly ended for the year. No problem, I was told.

Of course, old Christmas trees shed pine needles whenever they brush against something, so I wasn’t especially happy about hauling the tree in my car’s trunk. “Too bad you can’t just drag it behind your car,” my houseguest Linda Petersen said with a laugh.

I could imagine my route to the firehouse littered with Christmas tree branches and cited the State Vehicle Code, which says that when hauling stuff on a public roadway, you must make sure none of it ends up in the road, with two exceptions, one of which you may never have thought about.

As the Highway Patrol officer, whose patrolcar is seen here, later confirmed in detail, Section 23114 of the Vehicle Code provides: “A vehicle may not be driven or moved on any highway unless the vehicle is so constructed, covered, or loaded as to prevent any of its contents or load other than clear water or feathers from live birds from dropping, sifting, leaking, blowing, spilling, or otherwise escaping from the vehicle.”

This allows farmers to transport “livestock,” the CHP officer said. In short, if you’re allergic to feathers, it’s up to you not to tailgate the turkey truck.

Wild Turkeys at Dawn. Monday morning I was awakened by 37 wild turkeys gobbling outside my bedroom window. Transported by the sunrise, they dropped few feathers.

The non-native turkeys were introduced into West Marin in 1988 by a hunting club working with the State Department of Fish and Game. You can read that story at Posting 76. By now there are far more turkeys than turkey hunters, and their flocks have spread throughout West Marin.

Hunting and slaughtering animals are not for everyone, but for the edification of those inured to them, the Associated Press in 1875 reported on a get-rich-quick scheme for perpetual-motion farming then being advertised in Lacon, Illinois:

“Glorious Opportunity to Get Rich. We are starting a cat ranch in Lacon with 100,000 cats. Each cat will average 12 kittens a year. The cat skins will sell for 30 cents each. One hundred men can skin 5,000 cats a day. We figure a daily net profit of over $10,000. Now what shall we feed the cats? We will start a rat ranch next door with 1,000,000 rats. The rats will breed 12 times faster than the cats. So we will have four rats to feed each day to each cat. Now what shall we feed the rats? We will feed the rats the carcasses of the cats after they have been skinned. Now Get This! We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the cat skins for nothing.”

The advertisement not surprisingly turned out to be a hoax. The perpetrator was an Illinois editor named Willis B. Powell.

It is possible to say too little and end up implying too much. Such is the case with this Marin County Environmental Health Department sign at the Green Bridge over Papermill Creek.

In all likelihood, most visitors to Point Reyes Station (as well as many townspeople) would read this sign to mean Papermill Creek is polluted. Moreover, the sign seems to suggest a person can be harmed by merely dipping his toe in the water.

Equally worrisome, Point Reyes Station’s water system is supplied by creekside wells not far upstream from the sign. The water system is, of course, operated by North Marin Water District, so I called NMWD senior chemist Stacie Goodpaster and asked if the town has a problem. Stacie was surprised to learn of the sign.

North Marin’s wells are set back from Papermill Creek and fed by creek water that is drawn through the sand-and-gravel subsoil. Monthly tests at the wells and the water system’s treatment plant haven’t found bacteria in the drinking water, Stacie said.

North Marin’s tests of Papermill Creek’s water have found only normal amounts of bacteria, including e-coli bacteria, she added. After a rain, of course, the amount of bacteria in the creek goes up temporarily, Stacie noted, because bacteria get washed into the creek.

However, she added, North Marin’s current testing cannot determine the source of the bacteria; they come from soil, decaying plants, or animal waste. She felt reasonably sure there has not been any sewage leak into the creek, for that would cause there to be at least 50 times as much e-coli in the water.

My next call was to David Smail, supervising health inspector for the Marin County Environmental Health Department. David’s first response was that the warning sign is overdue to come down. The county monitors the creek weekly from April through October, and the warning was supposed to come down soon after the Oct. 31 testing. David said he’d have the sign taken down right away.

The rest of the situation, however, is more complicated. For example, the State of California sets different standards for freshwater and saltwater recreation. The standards also differentiate between swimming, surfing, and other aquatic activities in which a person might swallow water (Recreation 1) and aquatic activities such as boating in which a person is unlikely to drink the water (Recreation 2).

David told me the warning signs go up when Recreation 1 standards are exceeded, even if the water may be safe for boating and other Recreation 2 uses.

Unlike North Marin, which monitors water quality by testing for total bacteria and for e-coli bacteria, Marin Environmental Health tests for enterococcus bacteria. However, neither agency’s tests indicate whether there are any pathogens in the water. In fact, with the occasional exception of one strain of e-coli, most bacteria found in West Marin water are not themselves dangerous.

Current water-quality tests determine only whether there are bacteria in the creek that MAY have passed through the gut of an animal or human. If either were sick, its waste MIGHT contain pathogens. Adding to the uncertainty, as Stacie at North Marin noted, such bacteria can also come from soil and decaying plants.

David at Environmental Health told me that under state standards for Recreation 1 freshwater, the maximum number of enterococcus bacteria per milliliter is 61 in a single day’s sample (104 for saltwater). The last sampling at the Green Bridge resulted in an enterococcus count of 63 (only two over the limit), but under established “protocol,” that requires a sign, David said.

In fact, according to people living along the creek, the sign has been up for months.

Like Stacie at North Marin, David at Environmental Health and Environmental Health chief Phil Smith both stressed to me that the amount of bacteria in the creek goes up when it rains. As it happened, rainfall throughout California averaged 125 percent of normal in October, and Marin led the way with almost 4 inches falling at Blackpoint in Novato. After all that rain, however, the enterococcus count in Papermill Creek was only two points over the Recreation 1 limit, suggesting its normal water quality is quite healthy.

Is all this an academic discussion? Not really.

Linda Petersen of Point Reyes Station with her dog Sebastian at White House Pool on Papermill/Lagunitas Creek.

As you could read in a posting from last October, Rod Ruiz, supervising ranger of Marin Parks, has been doing a good job of administering White House Pool. That great, little park was laid out to provide a number of overlooks along Papermill Creek for enjoying West Marin scenery, but a walker’s enjoyment of the view is inevitably diminished when she reads the creek is so polluted she should stay well away from it.

Because current tests may primarily count naturally occurring bacteria originating with plants and animals in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, the GGNRA etc., a sign that fails to acknowledge this possibility unfairly denigrates West Marin, making its scenic countryside sound troubled in ways it may not be.

Phil, the Environmental Health chief, in fact acknowledged that in recent years, Tomales Bay and creeks flowing into it have (along with “Muir Beach North”) received bad publicity that “erroneously” portrayed them as having poor water quality.

His department is now planning an $840,000 Beach Water Quality Testing Project to be financed with state money. The project will allow Environmental Health to determine if specific bacteria (such as a toxic strain of e-coli called O157H) are present in West Marin waters.

In its initial stage, however, the project still won’t identify the source of bacteria in the creek, plant, human, or animal, and if animal, what kind. In short, if something somewhere is contaminating the creek, the county still won’t know what or where. And if most of the bacteria in the creek are naturally occurring, the county won’t necessarily know that either.

However, Dr. Corey Goodman of Marshall, a National Science Foundation fellow, has offered the county $200,000 to refine its analysis of Tomales Bay water, Phil noted. If this leads to a second phase of the Beach Water Quality Testing Project, he added, the county might finally be able to track the sources of bacteria in Papermill and nearby creeks.

Until then, however, the tourists who read the county’s warning signs are likely to return from West Marin talking about how polluted our waterways are while residents here will sometimes wonder whether it’s safe to even paddle a canoe in Papermill Creek.

At the foot of steps climbing from my parking area to my cabin, a palm tree stands as a memorial to the late conservationist Margot Patterson Doss of Bolinas (1920-2003).

Margot was a San Francisco Chronicle outdoors columnist, a Bay Area-hikes docent on tv’s Evening Magazine, and an author of 14 books. She was also a member of the California Coastal Commission and a member of the Citizens Advisory Commission to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (which she helped establish) and Point Reyes National Seashore.

The desert palm beside my steps had once been among several Margot was growing at her home. She gave it to me as as an ironic political statement because we shared a distrust of the non-native zealotry of a few folks in West Marin.

It seems more than coincidental, for example, that the once-liberal Sierra Club, which has become so anti-immigrant that white-supremacist members in 2004 made a run at taking over the national board, is also hostile to the hundreds of non-native species in the US.

The president of the Marin Group of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the National Sierra Club is Gordon Bennett, a member of the National Seashore superintendent’s kitchen cabinet. As such, Bennett has become the loudest voice defending the nativistic policies of the Park Service on Point Reyes.

Ironically, non-native Roof rats, such as the one above, were in North America 400 years prior to the founding of the Sierra Club. And European starlings, such as the one below, have been making noise in the US longer than the organization. All three can be annoying, but the Republic will survive.

Conservationist J.L. Hudson, who runs a nonprofit seed bank in La Honda, on his website describes today’s nativistic zealots this way:

It is “ominous” that during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the National Socialists (Nazi Party) had a program to rid the landscape of ‘foreign’ plants. An interesting paper, ‘Some Notes on the Mania for Native Plants in Germany’ by Gert Groening and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Landscape Journal, Vol. II, No. 2, 1992), details this history.

“The extension of the Nazi pseudoscience of racial purity to the natural world is chillingly identical to the modern anti-exotics agenda, down to the details of ‘genetic contamination.’

“With the current rise of racism, immigrant-scapegoating, and other noxious, unAmerican ideologies, we must be prepared to hold all those who are promoting the anti-exotics frenzy personally responsible for their part in legitimizing a pseudoscience which leads directly to the horrors we saw in the 1940’s.

“Clearly, ‘eco-fascist’ is not too strong a term to describe these people.”

Ask yourself: is Hudson overstating the zealotry? Then look at the next two photos.

A barely non-native cypress tree? John Sansing was superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore from its opening in 1965 until Supt. Don Neubacher succeeded him in 1994. About 40 years ago, Sansing had this Monterey cypress planted at the Abbott’s Lagoon trailhead to soften the stark, industrial appearance of its restrooms and parking lot.

Last summer, Supt. Neubacher had the cypress cut down, and the Park Service explained why in the Aug. 2 West Marin Citizen: “Many have noticed the removal of the lone Monterey cypress at the Abbotts Lagoon trailhead parking. It is a California native species but well out of its range and thus an exotic species for Point Reyes.

“The removal was to prevent additional seeding in an area of traditionally treeless native dunes, which support the snowy plover population, among other reasons.”

How bizarre! First, as botanists will tell you, relatively few of a cypress’ seeds are viable, and in any case cypress cones often don’t open for years, which is why there was only a “lone Monterey cypress” (according to the Park Service) at the parking lot for 40 years. Monterey cypress simply is not an invasive species, despite what National Seashore staff say.

Second, park staff claimed to have worried that ravens would roost in the trailhead cypress tree before flying off to eat snowy plover eggs and chicks at the beach. The plover nests, however, are more than a mile from the trailhead, and there are plenty of other trees in their vicinity.

Third, the diameter of the cypress tree was 4.5 feet in places, and cutting it down did not make for a more-traditional landscape. Just the opposite. Removal of the large tree left the trailhead’s starkly utilitarian restrooms as a prominent feature of the landscape, along with rows of vehicles in the parking lot.

A native Pacific tree frog enjoys perching on a non-native bamboo growing in a wine barrel on my deck.

Native blacktail deer and non-native housecats comfortably coexist hereabouts. The cats, both domestic and feral, do take a toll on birdlife, but the park isn’t about to start shooting cats.

Possums are native to the Deep South but not California although they’ve been in the Bay Area for a century. Tourists don’t take particular notice of possums, so the park leaves them alone even though possums eat native birds’ eggs, frogs, and berries.

.
Red foxes, like Monterey cypress, are native to California, but here again the park considers them 75 miles or so out of range on Point Reyes. Supt. Neubacher, however, has yet to announce any fox hunts. Nor are the park’s non-native muskrats being trapped.

With innumerable non-native species in and on the edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore, which ones has the Point Reyes National Seashore chosen to eradicate?

As it did with the Monterey cypress at the Abbotts Lagoon trailhead, the Point Reyes National Seashore has killed hundreds of white fallow deer and spiral-antlered axis deer because they’re supposedly not part of the “traditional landscape.” (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com)

In short, Point Reyes is being sacrificed to a park administrator whose personal prejudices are reflected in a capricious form of nativism. Supt. Sansing administered a park that had a place for the stately cypress tree, the axis and fallow deer, an oyster company in Drakes Estero. Supt. Neubacher is now reversing significant policies established by his predecessor. Is this going to go on forever? Will each new superintendent redecorate the park to suit his own taste?

People who work for or with the Point Reyes National Seashore occasionally claim there should be no non-native species in the park because it is not a “zoo” but a nature preserve. In fact, it’s neither.

When the land was being threatened by subdividing and logging, Congress created the park for the benefit of the surrounding urban population. And today, as the park reports, 70 percent of its 2 million annual visitors come from the nine-county Bay Area.

Nor is there any question that Congress intended that much of the park remain grazed pastures filled with non-native species, as a Park Service sign (above) near the cypress’ stump acknowledges.

By tradition, the holidays are a time for seeing old friends and new. Here are some of the visitors I saw over Christmas.

The population of wild turkeys around my cabin keeps getting higher. Nine toms and 35 hens marched around my fields on Saturday while sentries such as this kept watch from pine trees.

Newspaperman Ivan Gale, a former reporter for The Point Reyes Light, has been writing for The Gulf News in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, for the past year. Ivan came home for Christmas to visit his parents in Chileno Valley, Mike and Sally Gale, and will move to a newly founded daily newspaper in Abu Dhabi when he returns to the UAE. Here Ivan feeds windfall apples to Lucy the cow, who savors every chomp.

Although some raccoons can become acclimated to human surroundings, domesticating wild animals is often not good for them and can lead to smoking and drinking. This counter-feral raccoon may have taken up bartending to support a corrupted lifestyle.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and thanks to no cats, all the creatures were stirring including these rats. Here two roof rats enjoy a Christmas Eve dinner of birdseed spilled on my deck.

“I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country,” Benjamin Franklin complained in 1784. “He is a bird of bad moral character… Like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy. The turkey… is a much more respectable bird and withal a true original native of America.”

On the other hand, if the turkey and not the bald eagle were our national symbol, would it be unpatriotic to eat drumsticks at Christmas dinner?

From our dinner table to yours, Santa Claws and I wish you a Merry Christmas.

To readers of this blog, I offer the following yuletide greetings, which were forwarded to me by a friend. I would credit the author, but I don’t know who he or she is.

Please accept without obligation, express or implied, these best wishes for an environmentally safe, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, and gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday as practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice (but with respect for the religious or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or for their choice not to observe religious or secular traditions at all) and further for a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated onset of the generally accepted calendar year (including, but not limited to, the Christian calendar, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures).

The preceding wishes are extended without regard to the race, creed, age, physical ability, religious faith or lack thereof, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee(s).

A salamander to die for.

The weekend’s rains have led to the start of an annual migration across my fields. California newts have begun the long trek from the Giacomini family’s stockpond just east of my pasture to Tomasini Creek a third of a mile to the west.

Newts travel so slowly they’re easy to catch, but if you do, wash you’re hands afterward. This salamander’s skin secretes a neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin, that is “hundreds of times more toxic than cyanide,” Wikipedia reports. It’s the same toxin found in the internal organs of Puffer fish, the one that each year kills a few daring diners in Japan who eat incorrectly prepared chiri (puffer-fish soup) or sashimi fugo (raw puffer fish).

California newts, which are found mainly along the coast and in the Sierra, have a mating season that runs from December to May. For their aquatic courtship, adult newts return to the pool where they hatched. It’s an eye-nose-and-throat foreplay. After they swim in a mating dance, the San Diego Natural History Museum notes, “the male will mount the female and rub his chin over the female’s nose.”

Occasionally, several males try to mate with a female at once and end up in a ball, rolling around in the water. Although newts are amphibians, females have been known to suffocate in these orgies.

It seems that a fair number of coyotes are conducting their mating-season romances around Point Reyes Station this year. In the past three weeks, I’ve heard them howling almost every night right outside my cabin, typically with another coyote howling back. (This one along Limantour Road near the Sky Trailhead is the third coyote my houseguest Linda Petersen has recently seen and the second she has photographed.)

For some people, the influx of coyotes is bad news. Sheepmen, of course, hate the critters, and Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park three weeks ago wrote this blog that people had seen two coyotes grab a chicken in her neighborhood. Tony Ragona, owner of Windsong Cottage B&B on the north edge of Point Reyes Station, last week told me that the coyotes have taken to howling so loud and long outside his home that they sometimes keep him awake. When it goes on too long, Tony said, he shines a flashlight on them so they leave.

Paradoxically, the influx of coyotes is good news for birds that roost in scrub brush. Biologist Jules Evens of Point Reyes Station told me last week that when coyotes move in, the number of mesopredators goes down. By mesopredators, Jules said, he was referring locally to raccoons, opossums, skunks, and foxes. He might have added feral cats. In any case, they are all smaller predators that eat birds or birds’ eggs.

So what’s the connection with coyotes? Coyotes eat fox cubs, and they compete with foxes and cats for field rodents. In the main, however, coyotes reduce the number of mesopredators merely by their presence, Jules said. Foxes, raccoons, opossums, skunks etc. don’t like to be around coyotes and stay away from their territory.

Raccoons perform a pas de deux outside my dining room.

When the coyotes first started howling nightly three weeks ago, this hill’s performing raccoons stopped touring for a couple of days. By now, their traveling troupe has resumed making its rounds, but showtime is earlier in the evening, well before the coyotes start howling.

On more than a few mornings recently, there have been numerous freshly dug holes in my pasture. They are usually only two and three inches wide through grass and a short ways into the soil. Unable to figure out what critter was causing them, I asked Jules, who immediately knew the answer: “Wild turkeys.”

That made sense. This hill has recently seen an influx of not only coyotes but also wild turkeys. Notice the holes in the grass downhill from this flock. I’ve had 25 turkeys in my pasture at a time, and neighbor Carol Horick last week spotted more than 50 outside her home.

Another neighbor, George Stamoulis, today told me that in the last day or two, he had seen the first wild turkeys on his property.

But the sighting that George really relished was of a bobcat hunting outside his window last week. The bobcat soon tired of hunting, George said, and it lay down to take a nap, spending altogether an hour or more just outside his door.

Last week I read in The West Marin Citizen that at this time of year, female blacktail deer form “clans” while the males are “solitary.” Apparently, the word hasn’t reached this buck yet because in recent weeks, he’s been grazing with the fawns and females on my property. Or maybe he considers himself above the law of nature.

Bolinas residents watch private companies skim oil offshore after being told by sheriff’s deputies that they themselves were prohibited from cleaning up bunker oil that had washed up on the town’s beach. Some townspeople, however, concluded saving wildlife was more important than obeying a deputy.

There are many lessons to be learned from Nov. 7’s 58,000-gallon oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The spill occurred when the container-cargo ship Cosco Busan struck the fender of a Bay Bridge tower, tearing a 100-foot-long gash in its hull.

By now oil from the spill has drifted out the Golden Gate and traveled as far up the coast as Point Reyes and as far down the coast as Montara Beach in San Mateo County. Near Point Reyes, Drake’s Bay Oyster Company has had to stop harvesting and has said it could go out of business.

This week The San Francisco Chronicle reported that as of Monday approximately 2,150 seabirds had been found dead or had died at rescue centers, leading ornithologists to believe the real death toll is closer to 12,500 birds.

Ornithologists now warn that patches of bunker oil can be expected to wash up on coastal beaches for months to come. The toll on birds could get significantly worse, they note, because so many migratory birds winter here. Citing a lack of “resources,” federal and state scientists on Wednesday said they have already given up on trying to save roughly 250 oiled birds now dying on the Farallon Islands.

Whose interests were served when a National Park Service ranger stopped a Muir Beach resident from cleaning oil globs off the town’s beach: nature’s, the resident’s, the Park Service’s, or this government-hired cleanup company’s? (Photo by Gustav Adam)

For West Marin residents, the spill provided fresh evidence of the need to shake up the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service as soon as President Bush leaves office. From the Point Reyes National Seashore, to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to Yosemite National Park, Pacific West Region law-enforcement rangers have in recent years become notorious for bullying and otherwise abusing well-intentioned members of the public.

The Marin Independent Journal two weeks ago quoted Muir Beach resident Sigward Moser as saying that on Nov. 9, he was threatened with a Taser gun, forced to the ground and handcuffed by a National Park Service ranger for refusing to stop cleaning up the oily beach beneath his home.

Moser, a 45-year-old communications consultant, said he was forced to sprawl handcuffed on the wet sand for an hour before he was released and given two misdemeanor citations, one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a “lawful” order [to stop his volunteer work]. “It was pretty wet and uncomfortable,” he said.”

Wearing protective gloves, Moser, a member of the Muir Beach Disaster Council, and a group of novice Buddhist monks from the Zen Center had already removed 3.5 tons of oil globs from the beach when he was arrested.

Why didn’t the ranger want Moser there? The federal government, as usual, was paying private corporations to do public work, and volunteers by the thousands were turned away from Bay Area beaches. Public safety was a concern but one that was grossly overblown.

Volunteers were at first told they would need 40 hours of training before they would be allowed to help. Eventually, the amount of training required for most volunteers around the Bay Area was reduced to four hours, but many volunteers were then told to go home and wait to see if they’d be needed in a month.

Numerous townspeople ignored deputies’ orders and proceeded to clean large amounts of oil off Bolinas Beach. Unlike National Park Service law enforcement, sheriff’s deputies declined to arrest or manhandle good Samaritans and let them do their work. Here Mark Butler dumps a bag of rags used to sop up oil into a truck owned by Nidal Khalili of Bolinas (left) and his partner Joy Conway. Khalili and Conway planned to take the bags to a staging area in Stinson Beach. Coming off the beach at right is Walter Hoffman, who had just spent hours cleaning oil off sand and rocks.

Marin County officials in their perniciously precious way at first resisted the shortened training program. A sheriff’s spokesman told The Independent Journal there was concern within his office as to whether “a four-hour training program [is] enough to ensure public safety.”

Come on now! The main risks from bunker oil to volunteers on the beach are rashes (if they get it on their skin) and nausea (if they eat it). Casual contact is virtually never fatal, which is why many oily seabirds survive if they’re cleaned. In fact, volunteers have been told that everyday Dawn dish soap is good for removing oil from both birds and one’s own skin. A West Marin plumber, who has worked with chemicals far more dangerous than bunker oil, grumbled this week, “Twenty minutes of training would be enough.”

Particularly irritated by private companies being in charge of the cleanup effort was Stinson Beach Fire Chief Kenny Stephens. One cleanup company called Clean Bay had regularly practiced at Bolinas Lagoon, but it never showed up, Stephens noted. Finally a company call NRC arrived (above) “four days late and about 40 people short,” he added. NRC was supposed to string a boom across the Bolinas Lagoon channel but didn’t know what to do.

Stinson Beach and Bolinas residents during the much larger oil spill of 1971 had figured out how to erect a wooden boom across the channel mouth to keep oil out of the lagoon. NCR, however, tried to use foam-filled booms that broke every time the tide came in, even though Bolinas and Stinson Beach residents had already determined such booms (as seen here) wouldn’t hold up. After the fifth boom broke, NCR gave up.

The volunteers above are on Kent Island within the lagoon. At the time, mired birds but no floating oil had come in off the ocean, although it has by now.

Bolinas fisherman and other local residents, are familiar with currents and the contours of the channel, the fire chief said. However, he added, those running the cleanup “didn’t put local knowledge to use.” Residents wanted to get involved, “but our hands were tied,” Chief Stephens said. The only outside official who initially worked with the two towns, he added, was Brian Sanders of Marin Parks and Open Space.

Northern California oil-spill-cleanup teams were so unprepared for even this medium-sized spill that “they’re tapped out of boom material,” Stephens said with amazement. The chief credited Sanders with “doing a great job locating lots of stuff” for Bolinas and Stinson Beach to use in trying to contain the floating oil.

On Nov. 11, the Bolinas Fire Department held a community meeting in which residents complained about members of the public not getting official cooperation when they cleaned oil from beaches.

Meanwhile in Congress, the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Marine Transportation on Nov. 19 questioned the Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board about six concerns in particular, The Chronicle reported:

Whether the pilot should have attempted to leave port in heavy fog when he had doubts about the ship’s radar.

Whether the pilot of the Cosco Busan was wrong in relying on the ship’s captain to interpret an electronic-chart system with which the pilot wasn’t familiar.

Whether there was a language problem between the local pilot and the Chinese crew.

Whether the Coast Guard should have warned the pilot sooner that the ship was heading toward a bridge tower.

Whether the tugboat accompanying the Cosco Busan could have been used to avoid the collision.

Whether freighters, like tanker ships, need double hulls.

Congressional leaders, however, were unhappy with the answers they got from the Coast Guard and especially the National Transportation Safety Board, which said it would need a year to figure out what had happened.

Irritated that the Coast Guard and the California Department of Fish & Game are now responsible for investigating their own behavior in the wake of the spill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, “I don’t think they have the credibility to self-examine or self-investigate.” Pelosi, a member of the subcommittee, said Congress has now asked the inspector general of Homeland Security to conduct a separate probe.

The Department of Homeland Security, like the occupation of Iraq, is unfortunately a cornerstone of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror.” Already the California Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Save the Bay, and the Sierra Club have warned that the Coast Guard’s new emphasis on “homeland security” may be hampering its ability to cope with an oil spill. (Remember when there was a shortage of National Guardsmen to help Hurricane Katrina victims because so many guardsmen had been sent to Iraq?)

Coast Guard Rear Admiral Craig Bone told the House subcommittee the cleanup has “exceeded expectations” and is “one of the most successful cleanups I’ve ever experienced.”

But it was typical government BS. Stung by widespread criticism that it had waited too long before trying to contain the spill, the Coast Guard had already replaced the regional commander, Capt. William Uberti (left). Capt. Paul Gugg is the new Bay Area region commander and is now in charge of the Coast Guard’s part of the cleanup. Photo by Gustav Adam

Here to join me in wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving are a flock of wild turkeys, which I spotted this afternoon behind my pine tree as they strutted near the fence of neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman.

Wild turkeys, of course, are not native to West Marin. Working with the California Department of Fish & Game, a hunting club in 1988 introduced the wild turkeys on Loma Alta Ridge, which overlooks the San Geronimo Valley. The original flock of 11 hens and three toms all came from a population that Fish & Game had established in the Napa Valley during the 1950s.

By now wild turkeys are common throughout West Marin, particularly around Spirit Rock and Flanders Ranch in Woodacre (where they’re protected), around Tomales (where they’ve shorted out overhead lines and intimidated children), and around Nicasio, Point Reyes Station, and Olema.

The only folks doing much turkey hunting around here anymore, however, are Point Reyes National Seashore rangers. As might be expected, the park has attempted to eliminate these “exotic” symbols of America’s first Thanksgiving celebrations.

America’s Thanksgiving, as it happens, originated with two celebrations. The initial one was held by Virgina colonists in 1619 to thank God for an abundant harvest. Two years later, Massachusetts colonists held a Thanksgiving celebration after their first harvest. This second celebration was the one where the governor of Plymouth Colony invited the Wampanoag people to join them for three days of feasting, and the Indians brought venison to the potluck.

Every year at this time, I like many other people in the Western World display a cornucopia at home. I knew from my days as a Latin student that cornu means horn and copia means plenty, but until last year, I’d never looked into the mythology behind the display. It turns out to be fascinating and has to do with the birth of the god Zeus.

The ancient Greeks and Romans considered Zeus the youngest son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus, who then ruled the world, supposedly had been told that he would lose his throne to one of his children, so he gulped down each one when it was born. To avoid having another baby eaten, Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete. She then wrapped a rock as if it were a baby and gave it to Cronus, who swallowed it whole.

Growing up on Crete, Zeus was protected by a goat named Amalthea, who also provided him with milk. One day while the young god was playing with Amalthea, he accidentally broke off one of her horns. Horrified by the pain and distress he’d caused his surrogate mother, Zeus promised Amalthea that forever after, the horn would always be full of whatever good things she desired. Thus was born the cornucopia that many of us display each fall as a symbol of an abundant year.

And may you too get whatever good things you desire during these end-of-the-year holidays.

A reminder: This year the annual West Marin Community Thanksgiving Dinner will be held in Point Reyes Station’s Dance Palace. Turkey dinners will be served at no charge (although donations are always welcome) from 2 to 3 p.m. And for the first time, those planning to attend have not been asked to make reservations. However, people willing to volunteer time serving the dinner have been asked to call West Marin Community Resource Center at 663-8361.