392 live and let grow

 

We drove out through Orinda to Moraga yesterday, to do maintenance on a yard we redid a few years ago. As we were rolling along through the hills, I was looking for a house with landscaping that matched the surrounding hills.

The hills are live oaks, golden grasses, and occasionally scrub brush like manzanita and what not. 

None of the homes have this. Occasionally there's a live oak, but mostly it's ornamental, non-native species. I didn't see a single home that looked like it had been plunked down in the rolling hills of green and gold. Everyone bent the landscape to their desires, and honestly, the result is a kind of shitty patchwork of bad ideas, invasive species, and unsustainability.

Then we get to our garden, and I proceed to tear about a hundred live oak saplings out of the ground. There's not a live oak on the property, but you can't stop these things. They're everywhere in those hills.

But hardly in any gardens. We have a devastating disease killing live oaks up and down the state, they're the iconic look of California, but nobody wants to let one grow in their yard, because, well, that would take a couple hundred years, and who has time for that? This baby needs to look good now!

All of which is a long way of saying, we could be doing a better job of blending in with the landscape.

Back in 2008-09, we had pigeons take nest on the fire escape outside our bedroom. They had two broods. We attempted to discourage them, putting up chicken wire and stuff, but they did it.

Two big things happened back then. 

One of the baby pigeons took a fall learning to fly, and got run over. Deb was devastated.

And then bird mites crawled from the nest, up through our bedroom window, and onto our bed.

After figuring out what was going on, we evicted the birds by simply lifting the piece of plywood that had been our "deck" and their roof.

But ten years later, DNA has returned the flock to the old ancestral breeding grounds. And theres no roof to remove.

When the pigeons were in romance mode, we hazed them, spraying water and trying to scare them away. But once there were eggs, and now babies, Deb has moved into full pigeon-lover mode. 

And now there's a raven that's come sniffing around, looking for a meal. So yesterday I was stringing up DVDs from the tree outside (apparently crows are more into streaming these days) and Deb was creating some sort of tinfoil device, not a hat, but an anti-corvid doohickey.

It was impressive watching this dump truck eat a couch. I'm pretty sure when whoever set it out and called Recology to "recycle" it, this isn't what they expected.

The disconnect between some people's riches and other people's poverty continues to blow my mind. If we could only figure out how to actually use all the stuff we create...