Entry for February 10, 2008

On weekends when i actually take the time to ponder things, I come up with some pretty obvious yet often ignored ideas.

An idea that hit me yesterday was the incredible coincidence that people meet others so like themselves online. One of the people is my friend Eric. While we grew up in different places and have never met , the sheer coincidence of our "meeting" here on 360 is amazing to me. He was in the military in Europe; I taught school at a military base in Germany in the late 1970's. In our online dialog, i find that he and I used to own the same type of car, had the same kind of love for British sports cars, enjoy writing for fun but loath doing it for work, and have a passion for photography. I really get caught up in the whole six degrees of separation thing.

Speaking of which, if you look at it in a convoluted way, I have a contract to work for a government agency. If I do the six degrees me>client>clients Boss>Agency Secretary>Governor...wow, Governor is five steps away...of course anyone above client does know i even exist, so its all fantasy.

Another thing is the place where you live, and things we take for granted. I live in California on the periphery of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, actually in the Cosumnes River drainage, which is farm land just south of the every expanding Sacramento urban sprawl. On a trip to nearby Lodi, we often take the farm roads over using the freeway, since being old (over40) we dont think driving 80 in a 60 mph zone is a good idea, which earns the ire ( and finger salute) of those who opt to drive that way...In traveling this route, we pass through the Cosumnes River Preserve , which on weekends is populated by as many photographers as birds. While slowly driving past the extravagantly equipped photo hobbyists, I noted there was nothing really to get excited about, the usual mallards, coots, etc.

Then about a 1/4 mile down the road I saw them, and stopped the car...in a field flooded with water, a group of sandhill cranes eating in the early morning sun! Being the camera nut I am, I fetched the FujiFilm digital from my enormous handbag and took a couple of pictures, unaware I had not reinserted the memory card..

In looking up information about them, found this tidbit:

The Nature Conservancy started buying land here in 1984, purchasing 85 acres of rare riparian valley oak forest. By 1987, with help from Ducks Unlimited, the preserve had added more farmland and wetlands. Within a few years, other agencies and organizations jumped aboard, including the federal Bureau of Land Management, state agencies, the County of Sacramento, and private landowners. Now, the protected area has grown to 45,000 acres, including 1,200 acres of wetland and more than 1,500 acres of riparian forest.

It is in this protected area that has many as 4,000 Sandhill cranes winter from Alaska, Canada and Siberia.. Picture by Rick Lewis