Scorched Flora & Snatched Fauna

 I seem to have developed a thing for trying to save scrawny trees. When I had such a notion last spring, near where I work at SF’s Civic Center, it met an ignoble end. 

 Sometime earlier this summer there was a fire in the old campground out on the former naval air station, where I walk the pups. The kids sometimes party out there at night, and occasionally the homeless spend a night there; it isn’t hard to guess how it started. Most of the burn evidence is gone and green was sprouting again by autumn, but you can still see some evidence of the fire.

While some underbrush and a tree were burned out, I noticed that  one tree (with supporting poles), while scorched, seemed to have survived.

While Alameda is nothing like SF for homeless encampments, there’s still evidence people bunk down for the night out here, such as this windbreak devised in the old campground:

 The police presence is thin late at night. Last New Years, a few of us dog walkers noticed someone had rammed the campground’s fence. The new gap in the fence lines up with a straightaway approach from the main gate (you can just make out the approach under the branches below)—it’s not hard to imagine some revelers gunning it down the straightaway and, for whatever reason, not turning away at the last minute. On New Years Day the evidence included parts of the undercarriage strewn among the smashed branches, twigs, and leaves of the bush they took out—ten months later most of the debris is gone but the gap remains. (The deep ruts made clear they couldn’t extract their car–in desperation they must have gotten a friend to come and tow the car out.)

Btw, the skinny tower just beyond the car’s windshield (and behind the left edge of the tree) is a practice fire tower; those four T-shaped odd towers to the left were used by the Navy to test jet engines. One of the dog walkers who grew up here says they roared pretty loud when they fired those babies up. 

But at the burn site, a forlorn little tree had survived. Last July, August and September I brought buckets of water out about once a month and poured it into the ground around this little guy (hoping it didn’t need drought and dormancy in summer, and I was doing more good than harm).

 It did have green branches coming up from its base (the Mrs. calls them “suckers”) and I took them as a good sign—until I came back and someone had cut them all away. (Huh?) It may have been someone from the east bay park service for all I know, but still, wouldn’t a little tree like this need all the functioning greenery it can get? Look close and you can see the raw spots, below.

 Well, we’ve made it through the dry season, now comes our Mediterranean climate’s wet season. The tree looks to be the same species as one of its neighbors; hopefully they’ll both thrive this winter and have lots of new growth next spring.

I like the campground. It’s a pretty netherworld. It’s not hard to imagine what it once was, when the gates were manned by armed guards, and retired veterans came in their campers and used the hookups here to spend the night.  

It’s a huge political football here in Alameda, how the vast old naval air station will be reused. I’m sure much good will be done–if they also figure out a way to get all the extra people on and off the island. But for now, the old and abandoned remains beautiful to me, just as it is.

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Our Edie Girl – Mighty Squirrel Hunter

 Our dear Edie girl lives a good life—plenty of walks, lots of tummy rubs and affection, a couple days a week with her pals at doggie day care. Sure, she’d rather have more people food in her diet than doggie kibble, but until she starts bringing home a paycheck, chicken and lamb kibble is what she gets. Still, that’s not the biggest frustration for our girl. That would be the tantalizing closeness of jackrabbits springing from cover, the taunts of squirrels just out of reach. (And they do taunt her, pausing on lower branches to chatter insults, stopping on the fence, squirrel aroma perfuming the air, with teasing tail twitches as they jabber at her.)

 Edie will spend the day on our back deck, watching them down in the yard until the torment gets the best of her and sprints down to chase them up trees. She will lay down by the pear tree, hoping they will forget her until she makes her charge, missing again.

 Until last weekend. We were in our small front yard, Mrs. O tending her garden and me digging a hole for her to transplant a bush, with the dogs hanging out close by. I monitor them more closely in front, obviously, with traffic out on the street and passersby who might fear dogs. And they do push the envelope, moseying out to the sidewalk, but obey when I scold them. Out of the corner of my eye I was suddenly aware of an unusual commotion; the dogs rounded the fence into our neighbors’ yard. Preoccupied, I glanced around to see a squirrel tossed in the air. Those squeamish about such matters should skip the next paragraph.

 It startled me; then I told my wife that Edie had finally gotten a squirrel. Ernie knew it first, and his hunting instincts had kicked in, too, as he was close on Edie’s tail. I’m not sure what had gone on in that squirrel noggin—maybe it had wanted to cross the street and thought it could get past her. Anyway, what I saw was her tossing it in the air to break its spine. When I approached she backed off, deferring to the alpha, and I shooed the dogs back into our yard. The poor little rodent was trying to drag itself under a car. It’s not easy for me to feel sorry for any of them—given how they chew up our deck and the wiring for our deck lights, how they dig our yard into a checkerboard, how they uproot our planters, but you hate to see anything in pain. I took the shovel I had been using and gave it a quick jab at the curb to end its suffering.

 We threw it away in the trashbin in our sideyard, and Edie went to hang out there, near her inexplicably discarded trophy. It must have seemed so unfair. Finally she had gotten one, and rather than winning praise and adoration, we’d tossed it in that smelly old bin. Another example of the perplexing behavior of humans.