One of the signs that summer is winding down is the nightly mass migration of crows flying to their night roost. Sam and Katie King have had the best seat in the house to watch this interesting phenomenon. The backyard of their house on Hutchins in south Sebastopol opens onto the Laguna, with a long view to the north up the flyway.
“One day my son was like, “Dad, look at all the crows! We noticed them migrating or going to roost last year, but they were never in the numbers we’re seeing this year,” King said.
He said it starts around 8:10 every night and lasts for about 30 minutes.
“First it’s like a trickle, but then they just keep coming,” he said. He and his family have counted over 2,000 birds in one evening.
“It kind of taps into how wonderful it is to live where we live and gets people thinking about the Laguna and its waterways.”
Corvid Researcher Kaeli Swift, Ph.D. said “This is typical behavior especially in the fall and winter. Crows roost communally into the thousands (historically even hundreds of thousands) and so their dawn/dusk commutes can be quite the spectacle.”
Net positive
For the first time in a long while, the tennis courts on the El Molino campus in Forestville are once again playable, largely due to the patient and persistent initiative of Kimberly Burr.
Kimberly said that the effort began with her posting a very simple petition at the tennis court asking people if they would like the school district to try to save the tennis courts. She began showing up at West Sonoma County Union High School board meetings and raising the issue in public comment.
“I was initially told that the courts were being impacted by groundwater. Therefore, the campus might need to relocate the tennis court. The investment in the tennis courts was not a high priority. Having played on the tennis courts for many, many years, I thought the location was just fine.”
Her petition started gathering more and more signatures. “I had conversations with many people who remember the courts being in much better shape. And even some folks who played at El Mo for a decade or more had reluctantly decided that the courts had deteriorated so much that they could not play there, but would be going out of town to play tennis.”
She thought it did not seem far-fetched for the community that supports the school facilities bond measures to ask for some of those funds to be invested in the much-loved tennis courts. Her trips to many board meetings did not immediately produce results, but she kept coming back.
“At some point, the school board and staff decided they did have approximately $50,000 for the tennis courts, and they found a company who would sweep, partially smooth, and paint them for half that price.” The work was done last May.
Kimberly came to last Wednesday’s meeting to thank the Board, the Superintendent Chris Meredith and facilities director, Jennie Bruneman, for the improvements.
She shared with them before and after photos of the courts.
“I am very happy to say, even with only a small investment, the folks are grateful,” said Kimberly. “Maybe more funding will become available to bring the courts back to high standards for students and the supportive community.”
Changing of the guard at the Laguna Foundation
The Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation announced this week that they’d found a new executive director, Stacy Corless, who will officially join the foundation on Sept. 14.
The foundation’s former executive director Anne Morkill retired at the end of May, after working in the conservation field nearly 40 years.
“It’s never easy to step away from the work you love,” Morkill said in an exit interview in the foundation’s newsletter. “The past six years at the Foundation have truly been the highlight of my career … While it’s hard to say goodbye, I’m not going far. My husband and I plan to stay in Sebastopol, and I look forward to staying connected to the Foundation as a volunteer and supporter.”
Corless, the foundation’s new ED, hails from the eastern Sierra, where she was executive director of the Mammoth Mountain Community Foundation and a two-term Mono County Supervisor, representing Mammoth Lakes.
“I am honored to join the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation,” Corless said. “The Laguna is an extraordinary ecological treasure, and the Foundation’s mission to protect, restore and celebrate this watershed speaks directly to the work I care about most.”
And he’s also a poet…
One of the poems that Larry Robinson added to his Poem for the Day collection this week came from WSCUHSD board member Lewis Buchner.
At the end of the summer
At the end of the summer
my daughter came home
with her fellow camp counselors—
nine all told,
nine countries,
for showers
and meals—
puppies nearly grown.
I retreated to my desk—
a dharma talk on Zoom:
Iceland, the funeral
for the Okjökull glacier.
The plaque read,
“…we know what is happening
and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.”
At 5:00 this morning
the whole crew
flew off to Hawaii—
despite Hurricane Lala
waiting for them.
In grade school
we learned to duck and cover,
to get under our desks
while the air raid sirens
blared and blared.
Our kids
hear their own siren—
and yet they go.
Three thousand years ago
under the ice
a birch forest
flourished.
— Lewis Buchner
