What is there to say about the American turkey that hasn’t recently been said? In the last 20 years, wild turkeys have spread throughout West Marin. I grew up in Berkeley and six weeks ago attended a New Year’s Eve party there; to my surprise, residents of my old neighborhood were likewise talking about wild turkeys moving in on them.

Well, how about this curiosity? Why does the bird have the same name as the country? As it happens, Turkey was the talk of the world’s chattering classes this past week after Turks voted that henceforth women can wear headscarves in universities. But getting back to the coincidence of names:

Here’s an explanation from an educational website, Kidzone, for younger students; it’s consistent with the etymology given by The American Heritage Dictionary:

“When the Spanish first found the bird in the Americas more than 400 years ago they brought it back to Europe. The English mistakenly thought it was a bird they called a “turkey” so they gave it the same name. This other bird was actually from Africa, but came to England by way of Turkey (lots of shipping went through Turkey at the time). The name stuck even when they realized the birds weren’t the same.”

The African bird which the English confused with the American turkey was the guinea fowl, The American Heritage Dictionary notes. As it happens, for the past two months that bird has been the talk of Point Reyes Station’s chattering classes, such as we are, because a representative of the alien species has been walking the streets of town.

The first report of that streetwalking was published in this blog Dec. 16. Yesterday, The Point Reyes Light reported that after two months of hunting and pecking throughout Point Reyes Station, the bird has now been caught by Station House Café employee Armando Gonzalez.

A word of warning. If guinea fowl is the dinner special some night at the café, remember the caution of Inverness Park biologist Russell Ridge: “You better like dark meat.”

Before we forget the wrecks that never happened near Dogtown a week ago, when half the southbound lane in a 55-mph section of Highway 1 dropped away….

You may recall that storm water pouring off the roadbank at left undercut a 20-foot stretch of highway about 5:30 p.m. Jan. 25. Fortunately, a Caltrans supervisor “proceeding slowly” (in the words of his boss) found the gap in time to warn motorists before any fell through it. He was also able to keep motorists from having to swerve around it at the last second, possibly resulting in head-on collisions.

Eve Breckenridge of St. Helena looks down the steep slope below the missing roadway.

Prompting this retrospective on the event was the news about a hapless sewage-treatment-plant operator in Mill Valley. From what I read, he didn’t leave enough pumps on when he went home last Thursday night (apparently not anticipating how heavy the rain would be), and this caused the plant to overflow into San Francisco Bay. The result, of course, has been an environmental and public-health headache.

By way of contrast: Caltrans spokesman Bob Haus yesterday got for me the name of the road-crew supervisor who was keeping an eye on the condition of Highway 1 thoroughly enough to be proceeding slowly. When supervisor Eamonn Dymer rounded a curve and discovered half the lane ahead of him ending abruptly in a high dropoff, he was able to stop in time and then alert others.

Most people would have expected any storm damage that dangerous to be more visible from a distance, but the supervisor, who is based at the Manzanita Maintenance Yard, was properly observant and thus careful. In today’s sense of the word, supervisor Dymer wasn’t heroic. Nowadays that term is usually reserved for the player who scores the winning touchdown. But because supervisor Dymer went about his job the way he was supposed to, he was able to avert some horrible crashes.

The two incidents should be a reminder that despite the attention we give politicians and celebrity CEOs, it’s our too-often-forgotten working people who mostly determine whether our country is safe and functioning. But unless they screw up, we seldom talk about them.

It makes me wonder whatever became of society’s admiration for diligent workers. These days it’s little more than perfunctory speeches on Labor Day and employee-of-the-month photos on retail-chain walls. We may be in the 21st century, but we need to remember that the real heroes are still hardworking people going about their daily jobs.

A female Bufflehead swims across the Giacomini family’s stockpond next to my pasture last Friday.

A male Greater Scaup paddles up Papermill Creek at White House Pool on Jan. 13.

West Marin’s waters provide winter havens for many thousands of ducks that summer further north. Ornithologist Rich Stallcup of Point Reyes Station, who helped identify these ducks, this week told me the “Greater Scaup does not nest in California, and only a few Buffleheads do.”

Buffleheads and Greater Scaups, Rich noted, “begin to arrive in West Marin in early October, and each species numbers well into the thousands on Tomales Bay during herring runs in late December and early January, at least 6,000 each. Most are gone by early April….

“Buffleheads are cavity-nesters and are expanding their breeding range aligned with the increased human interest in Wood Duck boxes, which Buffleheads will [likewise] occupy.

“Hooded Mergansers are similarly expanding their range,” Rich added. “It’s one of the ‘side perks’ of Wood Duck-nestbox programs.”

Since 1955, the California Department of Fish and Game has annually made estimates, based on counts from the air, of how many breeding-age ducks are in their primary hangouts: “wetland and agricultural areas in northeastern California, throughout the Central Valley, the Suisun Marsh, and some coastal valleys.”

Weather greatly affects how many ducks nest in California. Two years ago, Fish and Game reported there were 615,000 ducks in their main nesting grounds, nearly a 50 percent increase from the year before, thanks to abundant spring rains that year. Approximately half the wild ducks in the state were mallards.

Fish and Game uses such estimates in regulating how many ducks hunters can bag in California each hunting season.

Last year, hunters nationwide shot approximately 16.6 million wild ducks, the Fund for Animals reports. That total is actually up slightly from figures half a century ago, as reported in The Encyclopedia Americana.

While Buffleheads and Greater Scaups are both hunted, roughly half the wild ducks shot in the US annually are mallards.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last Thursday proposed closing Tomales Bay State Park to save money, several knowledgeable people here doubt that will happen, especially if the opposition is sufficiently vocal.

Park visitor Dave LaFontaine of Los Angeles hikes through Tomales Bay State Park. Photos by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com.

The park, which includes Hearts Desire Beach, Indian Beach, Pebble Beach, Shell Beaches I & II, and Millerton Point totals 2,000 acres. It is among 43 parks statewide the governor wants to close to save a total of $13 million per year.

With state-government spending in fiscal 2008-09 now projected to exceed revenue by $14.5 billion, the governor has proposed slashing 10 percent from most departments’ budgets. That would reduce healthcare for 6.6 million low-income people in order to save $1.1 billion a year. Spending on public education (kindergarten through high school, junior college, the state university system, and UC system) would be cut by $4 billion.

The governor, whose personal wealth is more than $100 million (The San Francisco Chronicle has reported), proposed that spending on Social Services for poor families be cut by $390 million per year. Schwarzenegger would likewise cut child-welfare payments by $84 million per year. Aid to low-income people who are blind, otherwise disabled, or elderly would be cut by $300 million per year. Care for foster children would drop by $82 million per year.

“I have made it very clear we cannot tax out way out of this problem,” Schwarzenegger said. “There’s no reason to tax anyone because our system doesn’t work,” the governor added ambiguously.

Inverness resident Carlos Porrata was the resident ranger for Tomales Bay State Park when he retired in 2004. Carlos had been a state park ranger 28 years, including two in Samuel P. Taylor State Park and 24 years on Tomales Bay. Now a trustee of the Marin Community Foundation, Carlos wrote me, “I was very disappointed when I heard the news that Tomales Bay State Park was one of the state parks being considered for closure.”

“The Office of the Governor asked State Parks to come up with a plan proposal for a $17 million reduction for the 2008-09 fiscal year budget (a 10 percent cut). Most of the department’s budget is personnel, so the decision was made to eliminate positions by closing a series of parks.

“To choose which parks would be proposed for potential closure a set of filters (criteria) was developed. The filters were: 1) Can the park be physically closed to the public? 2) If the park were closed, would it save the amount needed? (In the case of Marin District, [the proposed closure] entails two permanent positions). 3) Closures would have to be spread around throughout the whole state.

“It should be emphasized that this is just a PROPOSAL and a lot of back and forth will soon start between the Legislature and the Governor’s Office. I do not think the [Marin] District has started conversations as to what closing Tomales Bay State Park would entail operationally or if there might be other possibilities to achieve the required [spending] cut.

A raft for swimmers at Tomales Bay State Park with Indian Beach in the distance.

“The closure of Tomales Bay State Park would certainly be a challenge. Although the entrance gate to Hearts Desire beach can be closed, we all know that the State Park beaches are easily accessible by boat and kayaks. Jepson Trailhead and the south boundary trailhead to Shell Beaches I and II are also easily accessible.

“I clearly remember having gone through this predicament in the early 1990s, and although a large number of positions were eliminated, park closures never materialized. A lot of [proposals] ended up being part of the process in the political dance between the Legislature and the Governor’s Office.

“If the closure of that jewel of the state parks were to become a reality, another big loss would be the Environmental Living Programs that are held at Indian Beach for fourth and fifth graders throughout the school year, a signature program for Marin District.

“The good news is that Tomales Bay State Park personnel would not loose their jobs; they would probably be reassigned to another one of the park units (e.g. Samuel P. Taylor), and two open positions would not be filled, achieving the savings needed.”

State Park maintenance worker Roberto Barajas on Sunday cuts up trees that fell against a Tomales Bay State Park building in the recent storms.

One of those who doubts whether much money can be saved by closing the state park is LeeRoy Brock of Point Reyes Station. A retired ranger at the neighboring Point Reyes National Seashore, LeeRoy was a ranger at Bandolier National Monument in New Mexico when it was temporarily closed two decades ago.

There was no way to keep the public off the land, he said, so federal employees were still needed to clean up litter, maintain facilities, and patrol the area. LeeRoy suspects the situation would be the same at Tomales Bay State Park. Like Carlos, LeeRoy said there are too many places to enter the park on trails or by boat to keep people out.

State facilities, such as those getting park-maintenance workers Roberto Barajas’ and Janet Tafoya’s attention after the last storm, will still need protection from the elements, not to mention vandals. But under the governor’s proposal, there would be no Hearts Desire’s entrance fees to help pay for the work.

As one current state park official told me, it’s possible the Point Reyes National Seashore would try to acquire Tomales Bay State Park if it closed. That would be a shame, he added, for it’s already being run “efficiently.”

“This week,” Carlos said, “I will be writing to State Senator Carole Migden and Assemblyman Jared Huffman, sharing my concerns and disappointment about the proposed closing of Tomales Bay State Park, or any other parks, for that matter.

“Without taking away from the importance of parks and trails, however, I am personally very upset about the proposed cuts to the health, welfare and education of so many poor and needy children and families in California. They will be devastated by the draconian cuts that will affect other state agencies while the governor is willing to sink a huge sum of money into building a new death-row facility. Go figure.”

Tomales Bay State Park is rich in Miwok Indian middens. Its beaches are sheltered from the prevailing wind. And it is geared to families, who can park near picnic tables and barbecues overlooking the bay.

How did the park come to be? “Most of the Tomales Bay area lay untouched until the late 1940s, when developers discovered its beauty and began to purchase beachfront lands,” notes the State Park website.

“Local residents, fearing that the beaches would be closed to public use, formed a committee to help secure the land for park purposes. The Marin Conservation League, various conservation and civic organizations, and the state purchased portions of the area. On Nov. 8, 1952, Tomales Bay State Park was dedicated and opened to the public.”

“State Park Property. All features protected. This is your heritage. Help Guard It…”

Yet after all the work that went into creating Tomales Bay State Park, the future of its land is again in doubt.

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.

The first of three expected weekend storms blew through West Marin Friday, causing flooding, toppling trees, and closing roads.

Matt Gallagher of Point Reyes Station (using a shovel for a paddle) and Tony Smith check on Jim and Kathy Love’s levee road home. The Loves years ago raised their home on high stilts, so the living area stays dry regardless of what nearby Papermill and Olema creeks do.

Friday’s wind speed was at least as high as an East Coast hurricane.

On the Beaufort Scale used by mariners, winds reach hurricane force at 74 mph. The National Weather Service considers winds to have reached hurricane force at 80 mph. At 8:33 a.m. Friday, a National Weather Service monitoring station on Big Rock Ridge just east of Nicasio clocked the wind holding steady at 83 mph.

Exactly 23 minutes later, county firefighters received a call that a 50-foot-high tree had been blown onto a house at 25 Drakes Summit Rd. in Inverness Park. Although there was “major damage” to the home, no one was injured, Fire Capt. Joe Morena told me. He added that the house was sturdily built.

The backstop, infield, and outfield were flooded by Olema Creek Friday at Love Field next to the home of Jim and Kathy Love.

At least four inches of rain fell in much of Marin County, swelling West Marin Creeks, which flooded roadways. Around noon, Highway 1 was flooded between Point Reyes Station and Olema and between Bolinas and Stinson Beach. Papermill/Lagunitas Creek flooded Platform Bridge Road and (briefly) the Point Reyes Petaluma Road just east of Highway 1.

Calle Arroyo in Stinson Beach flooded, and Panoramic Highway leading over Mount Tamalpais from town was closed by fallen trees near Mountain Home Inn. Fallen trees also closed Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

Gary Cheda, owner of Cheda’s Garage in Point Reyes Station, told me his towtrucks pulled two cars and a van off flooded Highway 1 just south of town.

Gary said motorists increase their chance of stalling if they don’t proceed slowly on flooded pavement. Driving faster kicks up water into the engine compartment. When water gets into the cylinders, it can’t be compressed and piston rods are bent, he explained.

Although the creeks are not saltwater, Gary noted, they nonetheless are brown with “grit,” which also is bad for car engines. Grit can into engine rings and seals where it sometimes causes expensive problems, he said.

In addition to flooding, fallen trees and limbs that blocked roads made driving difficult throughout West Marin Friday. The fire captain told me county firefighters from the Point Reyes Station firehouse spent much of Friday clearing away downed trees.

After this cypress tree blew down across Highway 1 on the north side of Point Reyes Station Friday morning, county firefighters partly reopened the road, but the northbound lane remained blocked all afternoon while firefighters and Caltrans dealt with crises elsewhere.

Broken limbs also brought down powerlines, and parts of Nicasio were without power for a day and a half. Olema and parts of Inverness experienced shorter blackouts. Overall, relatively few West Marin residents experienced more than momentary blackouts compared with residents of East Marin (especially Sausalito, Mill Valley, and Fairfax).

Nonetheless, downed powerlines can be shocking, and this one at Cypress and Overlook roads in Point Reyes Station sparked a (very small) fire notwithstanding the rain.

Art and Laura Rogers of Mesa Road in Point Reyes Station found their road flooded by Tomasini Creek at noon Friday and had to take another route downtown.

Not only did downed lines, fallen trees, and flooding make it difficult for motorists to leave West Marin, Sheriff’s. Lt. Doug Pittman issued a plea over KWMR for West Marin residents to stay at home. Over the hill, traffic was in “gridlock,” he said.

The problem again was high wind. Shortly before 11 a.m. Friday, it blew over five semi trucks traveling in both directions on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, leading to bridge closures off and on all afternoon. But that was not the worst of it.

Within an hour of overturning big rigs on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, the wind blew construction plywood and planks onto Highway 101 in San Rafael. Clearing away the construction material, which came from the new Highway 580 overpass, and making sure no more would blow down halted Highway 101 traffic for most of Friday afternoon.

At various times, vehicles were backed up 10 to 20miles in both directions on the freeway, and thousands of motorists detoured onto surface streets in East Marin.

Bad as the weather was in West Marin, most residents had reason to be prepared; the county fire department Thursday afternoon called virtually every household here with a recorded message that warned about the severity of the stormy weather to come.

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.

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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).