Liberty 4-H Club member Danae Burbank (with brown cow) took first in Senior Showmanship (for members 12 and older) in dairy cow judging at the Western Weekend livestock show. Janelle Kehoe of Point Reyes-Olema 4-H Club (walking behind Burbank) took second, and Michele McClure of Point Reyes 4-H (foreground) took third. Judging their animals was Kelsey Cheda of Petaluma FFA. Cheda is also the dairy queen for District 3 of the California Milk Advisory Board.

The Western Weekend that got underway Saturday in Point Reyes Station was strikingly different from the previous 57 celebrations. Some things lost; something gained.

The 4-H club members showing their cows in the opening livestock show, however, were as serious as ever. For weeks, 4-H’ers have been practicing showmanship: how to maintain poise while leading a sometimes-recalcitrant cow around a ring, how to groom it for competition, how to make it stand correctly for inspection (which includes keeping one hind leg well behind the other), and much, much more.

One youth was penalized when he could not tell the judge the exact date of his heifer’s birth.

Michelle McClure took first in senior Holstein heifer competition, and Nathan Hemelt took second. Both belong to Point Reyes-Olema 4-H Club.

Despite the extensive preparations that went into the livestock show, far fewer people showed up than in previous years. Those who did were mostly from West Marin’s ranching community.

The light attendance might be blamed on several things: overcast skies, no horseshow this year, no dog show etc. However, when I walked around Point Reyes Station’s three-block-long main street after leaving the livestock show, I discovered what was probably the main reason for the sparse attendance.

Nobody I encountered knew that the livestock show was occurring elsewhere in town at that very moment. Remarkable, given how small Point Reyes Station is.

Western Weekend Queen Shelley Schreiber with her mother Patti Collins, manager of the Point Reyes Station branch of the Bank of Petaluma. Schreiber handed out awards to some of the livestock show winners.

Instead of being held at the Red Barn, as it had been for decades, the livestock show took place in rancher Rich Giacomini’s large corral next to the Dance Palace. The West Marin press has to do a better job next year of letting people know where the livestock show is being held.

Ed Brennan of Point Reyes Station looks over the new West Marin Pilot while rocking on the porch of Toby’s Feed Barn.

Of course, the West Marin press itself was the source of some interesting news this week. The West Marin Pilot published its “Volume 1, Number 0.9” issue on Friday.

The odd number of the issue reflects the fact that the paper won’t begin regular editions until the first week of July. And by then, the weekly may have a new name. The introductory issue, which describes itself as “of, by, and for West Marin,” asks readers to suggest a permanent name.

Much of The Pilot’s staff, editor Jim Kravets, office manager Missy Patterson, advertising representative Sandy Duveen, historian Dewey Livingston, obituary writer Larken Bradley, and cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux, worked for The Point Reyes Light when I owned it.

That fact has prompted a comment on this blog from Jan Tacherra, who suggests the new paper be called The Pilot Light.

Point Reyes Light owner Robert Plotkin wrote in this week’s issue that his former bookkeeper Lashanda Goldstein was charming all the time she was allegedly embezzling from him.

Meanwhile, The Light on Thursday confirmed what The Marin Independent Journal had reported May 26; a former bookkeeper has been arrested on charges of embezzling $62,000 from the newspaper. The arrest came almost six months after a credit card company alterted Light owner Robert Plotkin to what allegedly turned out to be $23,000 in fraudulent use of the paper’s account.

The bookkeeper, who went to work for The Light in June 2006 as Lashanda Lewis, later that summer married Marty Goldstein and became Lashanda Goldstein. Just the champagne for her wedding probably cost $800, for among the charges on the company credit card last August was $800 for champagne.

When the charge was first noticed in January, Goldstein initially claimed I made the purchase. After I pointed out I had cut up my copy of the company credit card in front of Plotkin when I turned the paper over to him in November 2005, Goldstein suggested the purchase must have been made by her predecessor, but that didn’t hold up either.

Goldstein is alleged to have embezzled for everything from household expenses, to a laptop computer, to a new car, using the company credit card, writing checks to herself, and stealing petty cash, The Light reported.

In The Light’s account, which was written by Plotkin, he reported Goldstein was “lively, vivacious, and charmed Point Reyes Station.” Some of Plotkin’s staff, however, considered her more obsequious than charming. They have told me she put in short hours, failed to perform significant duties of the bookkeeper’s job, but continually fawned over Plotkin.

As an indication of the significance of the loss to The Light, which is published 52 times a year, The Independent Journal reported, “The $62,000 that was allegedly stolen is more than 56 times the amount of the newspaper’s top advertising rate, $1,102 for a full-page, color ad.”

I ran into a snake near the foot of my driveway last Thursday. Or, to be more precise, I managed to avoid running over it.

A Pacific gopher snake three to four feet long was warming itself on sunny patch of Campolindo Drive near the ends of Skip and Renée Shannon’s driveway, Jay Haas and Didi Thompson’s driveway, and my driveway.

Two other neighbors, George and Earlene Grimm, walked up when they saw me taking the snake’s picture, and Earlene told me she and George have counted as many as 15 gopher snakes in their yard.

Another neighbor, George Stamoulis, later told me he had picked up a gopher snake a few days earlier and found its scales to be pleasantly smooth as it wiggled around in his hands before he set it back down.

Gopher snakes are found coast to coast from southern Canada to the central Mexican state of Sinaloa. They are non-venomous although they don’t want you to know this.

“When disturbed, the gopher snake will rise to a striking position, flatten its head into a triangular shape, hiss loudly and shake its tail at the intruder,” the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum reports. “These defensive behaviors, along with its body markings, frequently cause the gopher snake to be mistaken for a rattlesnake.”

However, the museum adds, “the tapered tail, the absence of a rattle, the lack of a facial pit, and the round pupils all distinguish the gopher snake from the rattlesnake.”

The gopher snake is a constrictor, and it plays an important role in keeping my hill’s rodent population under control. However, it can also climb trees, and it will eat birds and eggs when the opportunity arises.

With all the birds, people, and snakes on my hill, this is sometimes a busy neighborhood. My stepdaughter Anika Zappa, who just visited me for a week, spotted a female raccoon on my firewood box looking in the dining-room window one evening and shot this photo.

No sooner had Anika departed than former Point Reyes Light reporter Janine Warner and her husband Dave LaFontaine showed up for a four-day stay. They had been here only a couple of days when Janine looked out my kitchen window and saw a blacktail doe looking back at her.

Like the raccoon, the deer was unfazed at being able to see humans just inside the window. However, were I to open an outside door, the wildlife would quickly back off.

Apparently, the wildlife on my hill have come to consider my cabin a cage. As long as my doors to the outdoors are closed, they presume I’m safely locked inside, leaving them free to wander wherever they please. When my cage door opens, however, they act as if we on the inside may be on the verge of escaping.

“Nature has wit humor, fantasy etc.,” wrote Novalis (1772-1801). “Among animals and plants, one finds natural caricatures.” His observation came to mind last week when I photographed this great blue heron standing watch over a World War II army bunker at the Muir Beach Overlook.

Novalis, by the way, was the nom de plume of Baron Frederich von Hardenberg, who was “one of the greatest early German romantic poets,” to quote The Encyclopedia Americana, and “exerted a strong influence on 19th century romanticism and the neo-romantics of the 20th century.”

In The Novices of Sais (a city in ancient Egypt), Novalis wrote (using the encyclopedia’s translation) that “the secret of nature is to be the fulfilled longing of a loving heart.”

I was reminded of Novalis’ second observation last weekend when I spotted a possum near one of my trees in broad daylight. Possums are mostly nocturnal, and I typically notice them around my cabin long after sunset.

Peeking possum

This possum soon hid behind the tree and began peeking around the trunk at something under my deck. I was naturally curious what that was but didn’t want to disturb the scene.

So I stayed inside, and presently a small, female possum came waddling onto my deck. I immediately recognized her, for most nights she checks my deck for scraps and birdseed, often climbing a lattice in order to drink from a birdbath on my railing.

Sorry, not interested!

The male hesitantly joined her on my deck, but there was nothing to eat and she showed little interest in him, so the timid male sadly waddled back into the grass. Courtship in nature, as among us humans, is seldom easy.

Also like us humans, much of the animal world in West Marin was sweltering in this week’s “heat wave.”

Whenever the days get as hot as they did Monday and Tuesday, the horses in Toby Giacomini’s pasture next to mine go splashing in his stockpond.

But to repeat Novalis’ observation, “Among animals, one finds natural caricatures,” and I occasionally see a horse immerse itself in the stockpond as if for a baptism.

Nor is that comparison as far-fetched as it may sound.

“If horses had hands or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do,” wrote the Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570-475 BC), “horses would draw the forms of gods like horses.”

“The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair,” wrote the French playwright Jean Baptiste Poqulin Moliere (1622-73). Indeed it is, and I’ve been keeping a record.

Now I don’t claim to believe in such miracles, but a recognizable apparition of Jesus (or is it Moammar Khadafy?) appears on the glass door of my woodstove almost every time I light a fire.

I’ve repeatedly cleaned all traces of soot and creosote off the glass, only to have the apparition’s sad visage reappear again and again.

Pilgrims, supplicants, and expatriated Libyans are invited to send comments to SparselySageAndTimely.com in order to receive information on visiting hours and donations expected at the door.

In an article on biological clocks, the Feb. 17-23 Economist noted, “People produce urine fastest at 6 p.m. They are most likely to develop an allergic reaction at 11 p.m. And 1 a.m. is a prime time for pregnant women to go into labour.” The Economist is British, hence the un-American spelling of “labor.”

If all this is true, I reasoned, 6 p.m. must begin a flush hour that follows the rush hour, so I called North Marin Water District and talked to Ryan Grisso in water operations. Is there, I asked, a spike in water use at 6 p.m. each day à la the supposed spike at halftime during the Super Bowl?

Ryan checked with his supervisor Brad Stompe and called back to say water use does indeed spike at 6 p.m. However, he added, it also spikes at 6 a.m., so he and Brad were unable to attribute the spikes simply to flushing. They could also have to do with people starting to cook, Ryan said.

It occurred to me, however, that numerous people get out of bed around 6 a.m., and at that hour too, their bodies would function in time with their biological clocks. All the same, the 6 a.m. spike wouldn’t necessarily conflict with the cooking theory, for much of the commuter crowd also starts fixing breakfast around 6 a.m.

For now, I guess, we’ll just have to leave it all dangling and pose another question.

Last week I photographed a raven perched on my birdbath as it tore apart some long, worm-like prey.

What was the prey? All I could tell for sure was that its hide was segmented, its flesh was bright pink, and it was surprisingly long. So I asked Point Reyes Station ornithologist Rich Stallcup what the bird was eating.

He wrote back that he although could not tell me precisely, it is probably a big grub (beetle larva) or possibly a larval ceanothus silk worm.

“It is not a snake, lamprey, or eel,” Stallcup added with good humor.

As it happened, I photographed a ceanothus silkmoth on my kitchen door a few weeks ago.

If that was one of its larvae being eaten, West Marin just lost a soon-to-be beautiful resident.

But then, there’s no figuring out animals, at least some of the time.

When I moved to Point Reyes Station 32 years ago, my former wife Cathy and I owned a Rhodesian ridgeback named Maria. Despite her size, 120 pounds, Maria was hardly an aggressive dog, but she was a guard dog. We had gotten her after finding prowlers peering in our windows while we were still living in Monte Rio. However, once we moved to Point Reyes Station, Maria’s main guard duties were reduced to scaring stray cats off our deck and lying on our steps keeping watch for our return.

When we did return up our driveway at the end of each workday, I always found it reassuring to spot Maria lying in the grass between the railroad-tie treads of our stairs.

Maria died almost three decades ago, so I felt a bit of déja  vu last week when I noticed a blacktail deer had taken over her lookout spot.

I’d never had a guard deer before, but I felt confident it would have caused a commotion had a prowler tried to climb my stairs while it was lying there.

We’ll end with another item from The Economist, which curiously refers to itself as a “newspaper” and not a news “magazine,” which it is.

The word “notorious” has been used facetiously so often that some people have forgotten what it really means. Just as a reminder, The American Heritage Dictionary defines “notorious” as “known widely and usually unfavorably; infamous: a notorious gangster; a district notorious for vice.”

Given what the word means, I was surprised this week by a large advertisement in the April 28-May 4 issue of The Economist for “the São Paulo Ethanol Summit 2007.” The ad proclaims that “Brazil [is] ahead once again” in renewable energy, and describes the summit as “the first event of global expression on this matter with the notorious presence of worldwide leaders, CEOs, scientists, researchers, economical and political authorities.”

Sounds like a “notorious” gathering, alright.

Despite not holding the reins on his team, the ever-political Sheriff Bob Doyle takes part in the Western Weekend Parade.

As some of you no doubt read in The Marin Independent Journal, atty. Ladd Bedford on April 12 filed on my behalf a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the County of Marin and sheriff’s deputy Josh Todt.

The lawsuit also lists as defendants “DOEs One through Five” be identified by “their true names [and] capacities when ascertained.”

In an incident which Sheriff Bob Doyle later blamed on my talking over the head of a “beat deputy,” I was chained and handcuffed on March 1 a year ago and taken to the psych ward at Marin General Hospital as supposedly being at risk of suicide.

Atty. Bedford in presenting a claim against county, which was routinely rejected, described what happened to me on that Wednesday morning while I was reading that day’s Chronicle and finishing breakfast:

“Without warning, a deputy from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department appeared at Mitchell’s home and asked to enter the residence. The deputy questioned him at length about his mental state and suicidal tendencies.

“Mitchell cooperated with the deputy and explained that he did not intend to commit suicide anytime in the near future and that he was not a danger to himself or anyone else.”

In fact, as atty. Bedford’s claim notes, I “was busy at home preparing for a court hearing scheduled for the following morning involving a civil matter and was preparing to receive two major achievement awards.”

The Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter was about to present me with a “lifetime achievement” award during a ceremony in San Francisco, and I was in the midst of lining up rides for friends attending from West Marin. Presenting the award would be KQED radio host Michael Krasny (to my left above) and CBS-Channel 5 news anchor Ken Bastida (to my right).

The second award was a Resolution of Commendation from the Marin Board of Supervisors on the occasion of my retirement. During the presentation ceremony, I would also receive US House of Representatives honors thanks to Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey.

I was hosting a reception in a Civic Center garden following the ceremony, and that week, I was working out the details with a caterer. Ironically, among the guests I had invited was Sheriff Bob Doyle, but after I asked him how it happened that I was mistakenly taken into custody, Doyle chose not to attend.

“Furthermore,” atty. Bedford noted, a windstorm Sunday night-Monday morning had ripped shingles off my roof, and I “had scheduled roofers to come and fix [my] roof in two days.”

After receiving my awards, I planned to spend much of the rest of the year taking a “victory lap,” to see cousins elsewhere in the United States and in Canada, I told deputy Todt. And, in fact, I subsequently did.

Well, what about next year, after my “victory lap?” Todt asked. Would I commit suicide then? I laughed and told the deputy it was a ridiculous question, mentioning a character in French literature who was about to commit suicide, but the national elections were that day, and he wanted to know who would win. By the time the results were in, I told the deputy, the guy was no longer interested in suicide.

You can’t predict how anyone will feel about much of anything in a year, five years, or 20 years, I pointed out with good humor. And if I were to someday kill myself, I twice told deputy Todt, “it would almost certainly take the form of smoking myself to death.”

Deputy Todt, who presented himself as having developed expertise in dealing with people in crisis, asked me a few more questions about suicide in general. Because of the generality of the questions, I told him what some important thinkers had written about it. Having taught college World Literature, I was familiar with, for example, what Herman Hesse in Steppenwolf and Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus had to say about suicide.

The opening sentence of Camus’ famous essay, I told Todt, is: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” However, I stressed that Camus also wrote that even if one decides life isn’t worth living, that doesn’t mean he will, or should, commit suicide. I quoted Camus as pointing out, “The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.”

The fact that I was conversant on a topic Camus considered the “one truly serious philosophical problem” apparently caused deputy Todt to assume I must be ready to commit suicide. I was then handcuffed, chained, and hauled off in the cage of a patrolcar to the psych ward. I didn’t resist; there was no point; but I was mortified.

“Mitchell suffered much of the day in an austere sitting room with drunks and mentally disabled people,” atty. Bedford’s claim noted. “Later that day, Mitchell was eventually examined by personnel at the hospital. Those personnel determined that Mitchell was not suicidal, that he had no emergent psychiatric issues, and that he should be released to go home.

“The personnel at the hospital called a taxi for Mitchell and arranged for payment of the $70 cab fare from the hospital back to Mitchell’s residence in Point Reyes. Mitchell gave the cab driver a $10 tip.”

I later complained to Sheriff Doyle that I apparently was taken into custody for merely giving straightforward answers to an unsophisticated deputy who was posing as sophisticated in such matters. “What got you into trouble,” the sheriff responded, “was answering the door.”

Wow! I had always considered the sheriff’s deputies my friends, and now the sheriff himself was telling me I was putting myself at risk by answering their knock at the door. “Unless they have a warrant,” atty. Bedford has since added. Doyle’s response was as threatening as Todt’s had been humiliating.

Doyle bristled when I pointed out that the timing of the deputy’s arrival that Wednesday morning was suspicious and that perhaps his deputies had been deliberately misled.

As it happened, I had learned at midday Tuesday that I had a court hearing with the new owner of The Point Reyes Light, Robert Plotkin, Thursday morning. After talking with atty. Bedford, I discovered I had only a few hours to collect witnesses’ statements against Plotkin and had begun doing so. Todt’s action effectively sabotaged my ability to adequately present my side of the case.

So why did deputy Todt come to the door that morning? Supervisor Steve Kinsey told me that, according to Sheriff Doyle, Lt. Scott Anderson, commander of the West Marin substation, sent Todt to my home in response to statements from Plotkin. In a deposition, Plotkin later admitted he’d told deputies I was suicidal.

The new owner of The Light Robert Plotkin lives well but currently owes former staff and his former printer thousands of dollars.

Before my lawsuit was filed, I told Supervisor Kinsey my main concern was to have government records cleared of my having been mistakenly taken into custody as supposedly on the verge of suicide.

In this age of Homeland Security checks and a few officers, such as Todt, who sometimes don’t exercise common sense, having a Sheriff’s Department blunder on my record could come back to haunt me.

Kinsey did his best to intercede on my behalf but got nowhere. Doyle and the County Counsel seemed to think I wouldn’t risk the embarrassment of publicly admitting what happened to me. That’s the way rape victims were intimidated from pressing charges until the courts stopped identifying them by name.

Because Sheriff Doyle refused to take an administrative action to clear my name, we now have a lawsuit that will set the record straight and inevitably cost county government thousands of dollars to defend.

I need merely to look out my cabin windows to see it all around me, among the deer, horses, and red-winged blackbirds, among the raccoons, steers, and bluejays. It’s the unending struggle by each species to maintain its pecking order.

The pecking order, which is sometimes called “dominance hierarchy” or “social hierarchy,” when talking about humans and other mammals, takes its common name from the fact that it was first observed among poultry.

As Wikipedia explains, “The top chicken is one which can peck any chicken it wants. The bottom chicken is one that lets all the other chickens peck on it and stands up to none. There are chickens in the middle, who peck on certain chickens but are, in turn, pecked on by other chickens higher up on the scale.”

Like other young animals foxes play-fight to establish dominance. I photographed these red foxes across my fence on neighbor Toby Giacomini’s land. The fox described below was the locally more-common gray fox.

You can observe pecking orders in prisons and schoolyards. In his 1960 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey (1935-2001) portrays a sane man, RJ McMurphy, who cons his way into a mental institution to avoid a short prison term for petty crimes. Once in the institution, McMurphy immediately asks his fellow wards America’s eternal question, “Who’s the head bull-goose loony around here?”

Pecking orders are more pronounced among some species than others, I’ve observed. With red-winged blackbirds, for example, maintaining their chosen spot at the feast of birdseed on my railing is more important than eating it. Brown towhees and Oregon juncos, on the other hand, worry far less about who’s at the head of the table.

I once asked Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans why some birds are more aggressive toward their own species when feeding than are other birds. Evans said he wasn’t certain but theorized that birds whose diets are limited to certain food would likely protect it more aggressively than birds that eat a wider variety of foods.

While social hierarchies are supposed to exist within a species, there are obviously similar hierarchies among species.

The cutest little roof rat you ever did see stretched like a first grader at a drinking fountain to get a drink from my birdbath at twilight Thursday.

Last week, I was watching a towhee pecking at a scattering of birdseed under my picnic table when a roof rat ran out from behind a flowerpot and drove the towhee off. I’d never seen such a thing before, but the towhee seemed unfazed. It merely hopped three feet away and started in on another scattering of seeds.

To some extent size determines which species dominates which. A possum will scurry off if a raccoon shows up. But as I observed Tuesday night, a raccoon will flee a much-smaller fox.

Usually, confrontations between raccoons themselves are limited to growling and, like blackbirds, fluffing up to look bigger.

But I’ve also seen raccoons fight, and they were savage.

Although raccoons have fearsome canine teeth, the little gray fox I saw Tuesday clearly had a much-larger raccoon buffaloed, if you can stand the metaphor. And even if you can’t, this column is over. But if someone knows why a raccoon would be afraid of a fox, please send in a comment.

Too many rainbows? The first week of April, it rained at my cabin virtually every day or night. A factoid reflected in this photo from my deck is that the sky is always darkest outside the arc of a rainbow. The reason is a bit complex, but if you want a good explanation, check the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research website: http://www.eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/

Rain having fallen almost every day or night since April began, the grass in my pasture is high, and neighbor Toby Giacomini’s stockpond is full. Water districts like late rains so their reservoirs are full going into the dry months.

All the same, I’m already ready for May. So are half the people in West Marin. The other half (apart from ranchers and water district operators) are a contrary lot; more than a few of them are here because they’re not wanted someplace else, or because they are.

In any case, the minute someone mentions being tired of rain, someone else pops up with with Al Jolson’s (at left) 1947 lyrics: “Though April showers may come your way,/ They bring the flowers that bloom in May./ So if it’s raining, have no regrets/ Because it isn’t raining rain you know. It’s raining violets.”

On the other hand, April showers may cause some of us, who in school had to plow through the field of English literature, to instead recall the grim opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Wasteland:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”

In the late 1960s, I taught English Literature, World Literature, and Journalism at Upper Iowa College. I liked teaching the poetry of Eliot (below right), but I prefer listening to Chaucer’s, the masterpiece of which is The Canterbury Tales written in Middle English during the late 1300s.

So I was a bit surprised when almost 40 years after I left teaching for newspapering, it suddenly dawned on me last week that the opening lines of The Wasteland satirize the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales:

“Whan that aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour.”

In Modern English, that would be something along the lines of: “When April with its showers sweet has pierced to the root the drought of March and bathed every vein the moisture whose essence begets the flower.”

With all this going on and the “male foweles maken melody,” wrote Chaucer (right), “thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”

Eliot naturally saw April more darkly and went on in The Wasteland to ask, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?”

Personally, I am not one of those folk longing to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury or anywhere else (too much walking); my view of April is certainly less gloomy than Eliot’s; so I was almost taken in by Jolson’s advice:

“When you see clouds upon the hills,/ You soon will see crowds of daffodils./ So keep on looking for a bluebird/ And listening for his song/ Whenever April showers come along.”

As it happens, I planted daffodils along my driveway last October. Five weeks ago, Dee Goodman, formerly a Point Reyes Station innkeeper and now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, arrived for a visit. On her first day back in town (above), the daffodils I’d planted came into bloom.

Dee, however, observed that if West Marin residents were to follow Jolson’s advice and search the hills for daffodils following April’s showers, they’d miss them by at least a month. “A better flower for April would be the Forget-Me-Not,” Dee suggested, having just noticed them in profusion along Nicasio Valley Road north of Moon Hill.

Eliot, no doubt, would have agreed.

One of the odder events in this long-running saga called Nature’s Two Acres occurred Saturday night. (The two acres, of course, is my pasture surrounding this cabin in the hills above Point Reyes Station.)

It all began when Dee Goodman, who is visiting from Mexico, and I went out on my deck at twilight Saturday to enjoy the view. For a while, we sat on patio chairs drinking coffee, but as the evening grew chilly, we went back inside.

While outside, I had set a nearly full mug of coffee on the deck, and probably because Dee and I were talking when we went indoors, I forgot to take the mug with me.

As it happens, I drink my coffee with a fair amount of those sweet, flavored (hazelnut, vanilla nut, or crème brulé) creamers made by Nestle. I am not alone in enjoying coffee thus diluted nor, as I’ve now discovered, is my species.

Later last Saturday I was working at my computer when around midnight I went downstairs for a bite, and to my surprise, a possum was on my deck lapping up my forgotten coffee. Before long, he had emptied the mug. I wasn’t worried and laughed to myself that if a possum could digest roadkill, it could digest a mug of coffee.

Still writing in my loft at 2 a.m., I went back down to the kitchen, and as I headed toward the refrigerator, I immediately spotted the possum. It had returned and was now outside my kitchen door.

It’s fairly common to see a possum scurry when scared, but I can’t say that I’d ever seen a perky possum before. One mug of coffee, and this little guy was wired.

The possum was pacing back and forth outside my door, climbing on and off the railing, and occasionally poking around my covered firewood (above). Again amused, I decided to give the perky possum a slice of bread. The possum started when he heard me unlatch the kitchen door, but rather than scurrying off, he made a dash toward the opening.

From what I’ve observed, possums don’t see diddly squat at night (although they’re supposed to) and depend almost entirely on smells to guide them. I’m not at all sure this possum even saw me, but he sure smelled food in my kitchen. I had to bean him with a piece of bread to keep him from running into the cabin.

As he ate it, I tossed out a few more pieces and he spent the next 10 minutes running around the deck, sniffing for crusts.

The moral to all this, I suppose, is that if your neighborhood marsupial is too prone to playing possum, just serve him a cup of coffee.

SparselySageAndTimely.com previously quoted Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evens as saying, the “common opossum” is not native to California but rather the Deep South and was introduced into the San Jose area around 1900 “for meat, delicious with sweet potatoes.” By 1931, possums had spread as far south as the Mexican border but did not reach Point Reyes until 1968.

Luckily for possums, the Point Reyes National Seashore hasn’t any plans to exterminate the hundreds, if not thousands, of them in the park although like the white deer they’re not native.

When the National Seashore opened in 1965, possums were just arriving in the park while the non-native white (fallow) and spotted (axis) deer had been living on Point Reyes for 20 years. But unlike the white deer, the public hasn’t shown particular interest in possums, and the National Seashore administration in its perverse fashion targets its eradication programs on non-natives that appeal to members of the public.

Why? It’s simply a matter of Calvanism reminiscent of the Puritans’ ban on bear baiting (siccing dogs on a chained bear). The Puritans weren’t particularly upset by cruelty but didn’t like to have the public enjoying itself so much.

I happened to photograph three Brewer’s blackbirds last Sept. 20, the day Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez drew applause at the UN by comparing President Bush’s supposed sulphuric stench to the devil’s and the day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Bush clashed in the General Assembly over Iran’s nuclear program. Chavez’s sarcastic comments were, in fact, mild given that the Bush Administration had taken part in a 2002 coup that tossed Chavez out of office, only to have Venezuela’s poor take to the streets and reinstall him two days later. The widespread applause Chavez and Amadinejad received in the UN General Assembly made this picture seem symbolic: Chavez (at left) eats the lunch of a frustrated President Bush (center) while Ahmadinejad ominously looks on.

Now that the Park Service has bought the farm, and rancher Rich Giacomini’s cows no longer give Point Reyes Station its traditional redolence, perhaps it’s time for a new town mascot to replace the Holstein.

Having often sat on the bench in front of the Bovine while eating a sweet roll, I would vote for the Point Reyes Station’s ubiquitous blackbird. Not only do Brewer’s blackbirds strut about the sidewalk in front of the bakery looking for crumbs, hundreds of them often flock across the street in the Bank of Petaluma’s pine trees, where their chirping creates a din that’s audible a block away.

Although set off by several white feathers, the red on a Tricolored blackbird’s wing is far less noticeable than on a Red-winged blackbird’s. Tricolors are often found in the company of Brewer’s and Red-winged blackbirds.

On Point Reyes Station’s main street, the blackbirds’ best show occurs in Spring when they brood in the trees and hedges around the bank and neighboring market. The typical drama consists of Palace Market customers parking their cars and walking through the store’s parking lot, only to suddenly flinch and look around in bewilderment after an unobserved blackbird pecks them on the head as it flies by.

Indeed, Brewer’s blackbirds seem fearless during the brooding season. I once saw a blackbird peck a housecat on the head along Mesa Road behind the bank. When a second blackbird pecked it, the cat ran across the bank’s parking lot and ducked under a car.

I was impressed that two birds could have a cat on the run, but the show was just getting underway. There was no stopping one particularly aggressive blackbird that landed under one side of the car, causing, to my amazement, the cat to dash out from under the opposite side.

Blackbirds are members of the Icteridae family, and “the big flocks of Icterids in West Marin,” Point Reyes Station ornithologist Rich Stallcup told me this week, are made up mostly of Red-winged blackbirds, invariably with a sprinkling of Brewer’s and Tricolors.

A mix of Brewer’s and Red-winged blackbirds on my railing.

The flocks that gather on powerlines along the levee road around sunset each evening, are Red-winged blackbirds, Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans pointed out Wednesday when we ran into each other at the post office.

Blackbirds typically head to their roosting site “from 30 minutes before sunset to 15 minutes after sunset,” researcher Gordon Boudreau of Santa Rita Technology in Menlo Park reported to the Third Vertebrate Pest Conference 40 years ago at the University of Nebraska.

Boudreau added that although the bulk of a Red-winged flock has reached the roost site by 15 minutes after sunset, “stragglers continue to arrive for an additional 15 minutes.” All but the late stragglers habitually “pre-roost” on elevated perches nearby for varying lengths of time before moving into the night roosts.

“These pre-roosts may be atop their roost vegetation; it may be in trees or on powerlines a quarter to a half mile away. Late-arriving stragglers fly directly to the night roost.”

Why do blackbirds chatter so much when they flock together? Both Stallcup and Evans attributed the noise to their being “gregarious.” Said Stallcup, “They chatter incessantly as do all animal groups that can.”

Evans added that even small shorebirds continually chatter when in flocks although usually too softly for us to hear.

The Brewer’s blackbird (seen here) is named after 19th century ornithologist Thomas Mayo Brewer of Boston. Brewer’s blackbirds (Euphagus cynanocephalus) are protected under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but their survival, Wikipedia notes, is of the “least concern” among protected birds.

In fact, most ornithologists don’t consider the Brewer’s blackbird a “migratory species” at all. The birds do, however, move from place to place seeking abundant sources of food, which for them is mostly insects, spiders, and (particularly in Fall and Winter) seeds.

“During the day,” Boudreau reported, “wintering blackbirds alternately feed and then loaf, depending on the availability of food. Feeding in open fields is usually [done] in leapfrog fashion, in which all move in one direction, the rear birds rising and landing ahead of [those in front].

“If undisturbed, this feeding pattern continues until the end of the field is reached whereupon the flock may move to another spot in the field or fly to a different area.”

Ornithologist Rich Stallcup of Point Reyes Station on Wednesday noted that “at least some of the birds” in this field uphill from my cabin are Tricolored blackbirds.” (At upper right, for example.) Tricolors are nearly “endemic” in California although their worldwide population is small, Stallcup added.

While blackbirds benefit agriculture by eating enormous amounts of caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers, and other destructive insects, they can also consume large amounts of grain and seed. And when in season, fruit and nuts are also part of their diets.

At the third Vertebrate Pest Conference held back in 1967, researcher Boudreau revealed he had found a way for farmers and ranchers to avoid losing grain, seed, and nuts to Red-winged blackbirds. After experimenting with scarecrows, explosions, shotguns etc., he concluded the only control that works is “biosonic.”

The trick is to tape record the alarm call of each kind of blackbird, which is quite “species specific,” Boudreau reported. These alarm sounds are then “amplified and projected at the birds through loudspeakers. The method is highly effective if the proper sounds are used.

“[An alarm call] indicates the presence of a predator and is usually well developed in gregarious species.” Blackbirds tend, Boudreau had observed, “to avoid areas where these sounds are present.”

Interesting aside: By 1979, twelve years after Boudreau presented his findings, Lee Martin of BlueBird Enterprises in Fresno told a subsequent University of Nebraska conference that by then biosonic controls were in use internationally to keep gulls away from major airports. He suggested they also be used to keep migrating birds from resting at industrial-waste ponds where they frequently ingest lethal amounts of waste materials.

I’ve yet to hear any biosonic blasts of bird alarms in West Marin, which suggests the local blackbird population isn’t too serious a problem for all the ranches, airports, and industry here. Just for housecats and springtime shoppers at the Palace Market.

With my neighbor’s housecat keeping them company, eight blacktail deer spent Wednesday afternoon grazing and chewing their cud in the fields around my cabin.

Housecats don’t bother blacktails, unlike the coyote that crawled through my fence in January and caused the deer to immediately scatter.

A blacktail doe watches a housecat on a woodpile washing itself.

Before we go any further with this, however, let’s get our terms straight, for the word “deer” is constantly evolving. Our word “deer” comes from the Old English word “deor,” which referred to animals in general, of course, including deer. In Middle English, the language of Chaucer (c.1343-1400), the word was spelled “œder,” and The American Heritage Dictionary notes it could refer to all manner of creatures, including “a fish, an ant, or a fox.”

Even in the plays of Shakespeare (1564-1616), who wrote in Modern English (albeit of the Elizabethan variety), the meaning of the word remains uncertain. In King Lear, Act III, scene iv, the Earl of Gloucester’s much-abused son Tom Bedlam (disguised as Edgar) laments, “Mice and rats, and such small deer,/ Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”

What does all this mean? “Deer is a commonly cited example of a semantic process called specialization, by which the range of meaning of a word is narrowed or restricted [over time],” the dictionary explains.

Male North American blacktail, white tail, and mule deer are ‘bucks’ while male European red deer are ‘stags.’

Had Shakespeare lived 10 million years earlier, however, Edgar’s lament might have made more sense. As Bruce Morris writes for Bay Nature, “All three major deer species native to North America (blacktail, whitetail, and mule) trace their ancestry back to a primordial, rabbit-size Odocoileus, which had fangs and no antlers and lived around the Arctic Circle some 10 million years ago.”

Based on DNA tests, Morris adds, “researchers theorized that whitetails (Odocoileus virginianus) emerged as a separate species on the East Coast about 3.5 million years ago.

A blacktail buck, characteristically stretching his neck low to the ground, sniffs for a doe in estrus.

“They apparently expanded their range down the East Coast and then westward across the continent until reaching the Pacific Ocean in what is now California some 1.5 million years ago. Moving north up the coast, they evolved into blacktails.

“Columbian blacktail deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) are the subspecies of blacktails native to the Bay Area.” According to the California Department of Fish and Game, there are now approximately 560,000 deer in all California, about 320,000 of which are Columbian blacktails.”

A seemingly perplexed fawn watches as the doe runs away from the buck, who licks his nose in to help pick up her scent.

Morris reports that “blacktails have a typical lifespan in the wild of seven to 10 years, but they can survive in suburban habitat for as long as 17 to 20 years if unmolested.”

The breeding season is in November, notes Mary Ann Thomas writing about West Coast blacktails from Southern Arkansas University. Gestation lasts about 200 days with typically two fawns born. The fawns’ camouflage spots begin to fade after a month.

“Suburban deer have minuscule home ranges, measuring three or four blocks for females,” Morris notes in Bay Nature, “whereas wild deer inhabit territories that extend for several miles.”

While mountain lions, and occasionally bobcats and coyotes, prey on deer, the biggest threat to West Marin’s blacktails are motor vehicles. In fact, being struck by automobiles is the biggest killer of deer nationwide: more than one million a year.

Connecticut alone reported that between 1995 and 2000, the number of deer struck by cars in that state tripled while the number struck by airplanes nationwide has averaged almost one a week for the past 10 years. Or so says Benner’s Gardens, which makes deer-fencing systems.

A young buck on his hind legs nibbles on my honeysuckle while his mother watches.

Here’s a final bit of deer nomenclature for those still puzzled by the Golden Hind. The Encyclopedia Americana notes, “The male deer is usually called buck, but the male red deer of Europe is a stag, or when mature a hart. The female is called a hind or doe.”