urbpan | This Journal is about Urban Wildlife

Just thought I'd remind myself.

Actually, this journal format (especially the Friends Feature) is so fun that I hope I can be excused for wandering from my original intention. I have several items relevant to The Urban Pantheist (for those of you who don't know, that's my zine about urban nature) and rather than clogging up Friends Lists with a long entry, I'll bullet them and hide them behind a cut.

- Boston Zine Fair I'm pleasantly shocked to discover that there is a zine event planned for March, 2005 http://bostonzinefair.org. Among the positive effects of this event is the creation of a deadline for me; apparently I am unable to create without a deadline imposed from an outside agent. We have (here's where I should begin, but never end thanking

cottonmanifesto, known outside of livejournal as my wife and co-zinester Alexis, for her partnership, love, devotion, and patience) almost all the material we need for a new issue, including some articles by other writers than us. Additionally, I'd like to produce a second issue of Urban Nature Walk, our second zine project, (meant to be more of an event series/collaboration, but which never took off the ground) meaning we will have to plan another nature walk and get some participants and assign them illustration/photography/writing duties.

Also, if you read Urban Nature Walk you saw my letter to various agencies inquiring about warm water mysteriously flowing into the Muddy River from a hidden source. Though I largely got the runaround, I think there's something telling about this news item: http://www2.townonline.com/brookline/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=129136
Essentially it says that while Brookline (the town the Muddy River, which flows into the Charles, flows through) was among the towns that was cited by the EPA for allowing sewage to enter the Charles, the citation was reversed for Brookline, because they are trying to do something about it.

- Cool Roadrunner Photo A rediscovered friend, (from whom I didn't get permission to use her name), former zinester of ABUSE, lives and works in Austin. Some weeks back I posted a photo of a large centipede found in her office building. From her office window took this remarkable photo of an urban bird that us New Englanders know only from cartoons. (The Tasmanian devil and American black duck are likewise more familiar to most people in cartoon form than as real animals.) http://home.grandecom.net/~rachel/images/acme.jpg

- Winter Solstice Happy Winter Solstice to all, especially to those who use the calendar given by Nature, as opposed to the bizarro piecemeal modern calendar cobbled together from dozens of different cultures, climates, times and eras. We are stuck with our melting pot calendar that names the ninth through twelfth months after the numbers seven through ten respectively. It's a cruel calendar, arbitrarily beginning a few weeks into winter, one week after the climax winter holiday which paradoxically occurs only a few days into winter, reducing the rest of the season into joyless coldness and depression, heightened by a "romance and love" holiday guaranteed to depress already suicidal singles, in February of all times. It's a calendar that a secular, pluralistic world must use, despite (once again) arbitrarily beginning at "the Year of our Lord." The best hope of ridding ourselves of this calendar is the practice of financial institutions--the real governors and government of us all--to begin the year in the middle of the summer.

- Winter Birds I just came back from a walk along the Muddy River, which has a thin scum of ice along its banks which in some places just barely coats the entire surface. Our population of non-migratory Canada geese was swimming downriver and their downy prows were pushing the ice aside making a tingly crackly sound. The dogs paused from limping and licking their frozen, salt-cracked pads to watch the geese raft by.

Also, the elevated green line tracks, which I mentioned a few months ago had been torn down, apparently served as a winter roost for starlings. These birds gathered in the spot that they had for probably dozens of generations to find the whole structure missing. The closest buildings has become their new roost, and hundred of starlings and pigeons now decorate the ledges of the block facing North Station. As this is part of my commute, I get to hear the delightful cacophony there as I buy a snack in the 7-11 and try not to get shat upon. If you haven't heard the sound of a flock of starlings, I would say it's in my top ten Urban Nature experiences. Maybe I'll try to photograph the roosting birds, although since they gather at dark, and are spread across an entire city block, it will be a difficult image to capture.

- Pale Male As everyone knows, the condo association in the New York City building that a famed red-tailed hawk nested on, removed the structures that anchored the nest, with the blessing of the Federal wildlife officials. I've read conflicting reports of the bird still bringing nesting materials to the site, of the condo association replacing the removed structures and on and on. I don't know what is actually happening. Suffice it to say, the bird will build a nest, somewhere. What I haven't heard is if the population of hawks in New York City has increased in the decade since Pale Male was noticed. He has raised 20 chicks, but where are they? Does a bird have to nest on the side of a rich person's house to be noteworthy? I'm still slightly bitter that one hawk in New York gets a book and a documentary, while a steadily growing population of Boston hawks is page 17 news.

- Joy, generosity, peace. These things are blessed all the time. Feel free to be joyful and jolly even when it isn't December 25th. Please give gifts whenever the spirit moves you, and not when you feel obliged to. And may you all live in peace, always.