Early Sightings...

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The sand of the beach began to be cold to our bare feet; the frogs set up their croaking in the

marshes, and one solitary owl, from the end of the distant point, gave out his melancholy note,

mellowed by the distance.....

Two Years Before The Mast
Richard Henry Dana

http://treeinthedoorvideo.blogspot.com/2011/12/windy-day.html





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The next day he (Peale) was entranced by an American Dipper he watched bobbing up and down on rocks at the streams edge, then actually walking on the bottom where the transparent water was half a foot deep, and bobbing and popping back to the surface without any apparent effort. He became so engrossed that he forgot to collect the bird.

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California's Frontier Naturalists
Richard G. Beidelman

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I was in Bakersfield all last week, visiting my sister, and had this book along, which I had plenty of time to read while to trying to shake off a cold, which I needed to do so I could run up and down the basketball court tooting my referee whistle today and absorbing the usual, which I needed to do, too!..I guess...I got the book after doing a google search of Haenke, whose tale I learned of in the Crespi Diary book...actually, it was a sixteenth century drawing of Kelp and Sea Otters reproduced in the Crespi book that led to a lot of searches for these old exploring expeditions...we went to the Moon with cameras, and finally a geologist...these old expeditions took along best expertise of the time, which included artists...I'm trying to compile a timeline and list of these artists...I left the Diary with my sister, it will be my book to read on future visits, along with viewing the remaining 53 episodes of "Chuck"....anyway, did Muir know of Haenke?...brb...well, a bio movie has been made of Muir and one of the movie maker's is named Haenke, so search becomes problematic...I'm guessing Muir took botany classes before leaving off from college, and Haenke's adventures would have been familiar...Haenke has an arc, and Muir likely wanted to take Haenke's arc...anyway, this one post may be added to much...one of the little used features of blogs, is that you can put blogs inside blogs, by just adding to one post, (or 'thread')...drawback is that once past the current day, posts are no longer 'seen' by the spiders and added to newsfeeds....so those reading blogs, keeping current with their morning coffee, will simply miss authors' updates and adds and whatnot to earlier posts...anyway, anyway, it has been windy the last couple days, not unlike the day I posted to the blog the quote from Dana...  Dana by the way, was with Peale, but it is the other Dana, the one Mount Dana is named after, which I thought was named after Richard Henry, and was disappointed to learn otherwise after climbing it!...  But Richard Henry figures in book...I'm reading along in book, and one of the naturalists is finding passage on a sister ship of the Pilgrim  back to Boston, and I'm thinking, "is this Dana's time frame?"...and indeed it was...the naturalist, Thomas Nuttall...the blog has a couple Nuttall Woodpecker sightings...many of the critter names are from these early naturalists...and some mountains too...the Frontier Naturalists has about it 'early sightings', as it is peppered with singular sightings, many of which I'd like to post up...this book and the Diary are must haves for anyone's library who are out about with camera, binocs, loop...