Bluebird

Mammoth excavation

Columbia mammoth pair found in Castroville

Two giant mammoths that lived and died thousands of years ago have set off a full-scale scientific expedition across a mud-soaked farm field in - of all places - Castroville, the "artichoke capital of the world."

A single gigantic molar, countless fragmented bones, some reddish hair and at least one partial tusk are among the remains of those two huge beasts that are being excavated from clay-filled land just outside the Monterey County town by a team of volunteer scientists from local colleges and scores of their students.

A specialist from UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology, who more than five years ago excavated a mammoth of the same species along the Guadalupe River near the San Jose airport, is heading to the site this weekend to confirm the discovery, identify the bone fragments and offer the museum's support in pursuing the extraordinary find.

Special help

And a noted molecular biologist, who was the first to unravel the genome of the woolly mammoth, a different long-extinct species, is planning to sequence the DNA of this new-found pair - perhaps a mother and its infant - in a quest of clues to their evolution from a common ancestor that may have emerged on the scene some 55 million years ago.

Unlike the woolly mammoths of the ice age, which evolved to subsist in frigid Arctic regions and rarely grew as tall as 11 feet, this pair emerging from the Castroville mud is known as the Columbia mammoths, and their huge species - as tall as 14 feet - once ranged widely in California.

Other remains of the species have been found as far south as Florida and Central America. Just when Columbia mammoths went extinct is unknown - the best guess is sometime between 14,000 and 9,000 years ago, depending on their locale.

Secret location

The excavation site's exact location and the name of the farmer who owns the land are being withheld to prevent looters, souvenir hunters and the just plain curious from invading the fenced-in area.

The story of the expedition began just before Christmas, when the Castroville farmer's crew was grading a slope on his land to ready it for planting and about 2 feet of tusk and one huge molar clanked on the blade of the grader.

A knowledgeable member of the farmer's family quickly telephoned Mark Hylkema, the Santa Cruz district archaeologist for the state park system. "We think they've found a mammoth," Hylkema recalled she told him.

He rushed to see for himself that same day, then called two friends, Timothy King, an archaeologist and anthropologist at Santa Clara University, and Daniel Cearley, who teaches archaeology and anthropology at Foothill College.

"I'm an old campaigner around these parts," Hylkema said, "and I'm pretty used to hiking around this area in the wild when people find what are clearly artifacts from the Ohlone people or the early Spanish, or the foods they prepared. But this find was a lot different - and really exciting."

After carefully sectioning the area and deploying ground-penetrating radar from Cearley's archaeology lab, the scientists recruited students to dig and sift the sand for countless tiny fragments of bone.

The Castroville mammoth expedition has now found more of the tusk, four or five rib bones, and one or two long bones. Whether the remains are from the adult or the infant has yet to be determined.

"One of our students has found a bunch of coarse, stringy reddish-brown hair only about 30 to 40 centimeters (12 to 15 inches) below the surface, and we knew that with the ivory tusk and the hair, we might have enough to analyze our mammoth's genes for the first time," King said.

What's particularly important, he noted, is that the bones and at least the one tusk haven't been transformed into stony fossils, which could make it impossible to study their genes. The group has enlisted Stephan Schuster, a distinguished molecular biologist at Penn State whose team sequenced the woolly mammoth's DNA sequence less than four years ago.

(The woolly mammoth bears the scientific name Mammuthus primigenius, while the Castroville giants are Mammuthus columbi. Both are members of the proboscidean order, which includes today's African and Asian elephants.)

'Important discovery'

Mark Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology who has seen detailed images of the site, called it an "important discovery."

"While the remains of Columbian mammoths are not uncommon in the Bay Area, this discovery, particularly if they represent an adult and a very young individual of the same species, would allow scientists to compare their remains and reconstruct their growth and behavior," Goodwin said.

The Berkeley museum, he said, would be glad to serve as a repository for the material to make sure it is properly conserved "now and for perpetuity," while sharing the find with the public "as discussions continue on how and where these bones would go on future exhibit."

Meanwhile, Schuster said his team is "in the initial stages of testing if any DNA has been preserved."

"This find is special, with its state of preservation," he said. "This is a very unique opportunity for everybody involved, and finding hairs with such a find is unprecedented. It largely increases our chances to take a stab at the genetic underpinnings of this animal."

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/30/MNHR1IL2KI.DTL#ixzz1INY5o3i4

 

 

 

Oak Land missteps

Oakland gardener questions need for permit to sell produce

Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle March 31, 2011 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

04/01/11

Kat Wade / Special to The Chronicle

Farmer Novella Carpenter harvests Italian Swiss chard from her backyard garden in Oakland, where city officials say she needs a conditional use permit because she sells excess produce.

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Novella Carpenter took over a vacant lot on a hardscrabble corner of West Oakland eight years ago and turned it into a working farm of vegetables, goats, rabbits and, sometimes, pigs.

Carpenter milked goats, made cheese and ate much of the produce. She also wrote a popular book, "Farm City," about the experience and became an icon of the Bay Area's urban farming movement.

But the future of her Ghost Town Farm is in question. This week, Oakland officials suggested it may need to close. The reason: She sells excess produce and needs a costly permit to do so.

"It seems ridiculous," said Carpenter, 38. "I need a conditional use permit to sell chard?"

The news stunned the region's urban farmers and their supporters, who questioned how a fundamental human task that goes back millennia could become illegal.

"It's incredibly sad that people can't grow food and sell it to folks," said Barbara Finnin, executive director of City Slicker Farms, an Oakland nonprofit that runs produce markets and helps people start their own urban farms.

Profit, not personal use

The city planner who visited Carpenter's 4,500-square-foot plot at 28th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way said he sympathized with Carpenter, but the rules are clear.

Carpenter "is raising these things for a profit," said Chris Candell, a planner in the city's building department. "If you're doing this for your own home consumption, this would not be applied."

Though his report is not final, Candell said Carpenter probably has three options: pay for a conditional use permit, shut down the farm, or not change anything and face sanctions from the city.

The permit would probably cost several thousand dollars, Candell said, and Carpenter also would have to pay penalties for operating without such a license as she is now. Carpenter works about 25 hours per week at the farm and takes in only about $2,500 a year, before expenses.

Candell said a complaint about rabbits on the property led to the city inquiry. Carpenter believes the critic was upset because she was making rabbit potpies available for an $8 donation.

Carpenter taught herself to grow food and raise livestock. She went Dumpster diving in Oakland's Chinatown to feed her pigs and learned how to butcher from top chefs.

"I really like to feel connected to food and understand the stories of where my food came from," she said. "When I started, I did it to feed myself. Then I realized that in Oakland, people are really hungry. So people in the neighborhood came and picked food."

But she realized there were other benefits, too.

"A garden in the middle of a concrete jungle is a nice thing," she said. "The garden has become a community space. It's like a place of beauty as well as production. If you pick your lettuce, it just has more vitamins. ... We're told to go consume and just buy food, but I want to empower myself by growing it."

Crops in the city

Oakland is considered the center of the urban farming movement, with numerous nonprofits and individual farmers devoted to the cause. Sunset Magazine featured Oakland last year as a "town of the future" because of citizens' passion for the movement. Carpenter's farm was featured in the article.

But zoning regulations haven't quite caught up, planners and urban farmers say.

A conditional use permit might make sense for 40-acre farms, Finnin said, but not when the farm occupies one-tenth of an acre and beets sell for $2 a bunch.

Candell agreed that the zoning is outdated. But he said the rules nonetheless have to be followed.

"We've had (these rules) for 50 years or so, but we're stuck with them until they're changed," he said.

In San Francisco, where similar conflicts have arisen, Supervisor David Chiu and Mayor Ed Lee introduced legislation this week to allow growing and selling of garden produce in all neighborhoods. In Oakland, zoning officials and nonprofits have been working on new rules, which are to be debated by the City Council this year.

Guerrilla gardener

Carpenter said it has all been a learning experience. After starting out as a "squat farmer," she bought the plot for $30,000 in December. The previous owner sold it to her as a favor.

"It was so great squatting," she said. "I didn't have costs. I was a total renegade doing something totally illegal, but now that I'm a property owner, that's when they actually come down on me.

"I can't fly under the radar and be a punk anymore. I have to actually be an adult and deal with these things."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/31/MNE81INHVU.DTL#ixzz1IHs9mWNJ

Not Courtney Cox

Napa sheep slaughter solved: Culprits were cougars

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle March 31, 2011 04:12 PM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

(03-31) 16:12 PDT NAPA --

Six dead lambs were found scattered among leaves and brush in the woodlands of Napa County's Mount Veeder area, some half-buried and others just lying there after being dragged from the adjacent vineyard.

It was a massacre - in all, nine specially bred sheep had been killed, and some of them had been eaten - but the carnage was not the work of bloodthirsty humans as sheriff's investigators and the sheepherder had believed.

It was marauding mountain lions that killed the sheep, officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday.

"They found evidence of sheep and baby lambs that had been torn apart," said Tom Meadowcroft, the owner of Mount Veeder Vineyard, who was using the flock of sheep to control weeds on his property.

"Some were half buried. Others had been left there on the hillside. It's all evidence of mountain lions."

Napa County sheriff's investigators and sheep-owner George Richmond had erroneously concluded that three sheep found dead in the vineyard March 25 had been shot and that six others had been stolen, possibly for someone's Easter roast. They were all Babydoll Southdowns, a gentle breed with short legs that make it difficult for them reach grapes on the vines.

Richmond noticed that the gate, which has a pass code, was wide open. A sheriff's deputy spotted wounds in the back of the head of the dead ram, ewe and lamb and concluded that they were gunshot holes.

The news created an uproar in this normally peaceful wine-growing region northwest of Napa, where there have been several recent burglaries. The missing sheep, all but one of them young lambs, added an element of mystery to what looked to everyone like a diabolical crime.

That all changed when a federal trapper found the missing lambs' carcasses in nearby woods, Meadowcroft said. The trapper told Meadowcroft that more than one mountain lion, probably a male and female, had killed the sheep in the vineyard, dragged them down a hill, ate some of them and buried the others for later.

"I imagine their appetite was satiated," said Meadowcroft, 50, of Kentfield, who was grazing sheep on his 2 1/2-acre property for the first time. "What a feast."

Meadowcroft suspects the vineyard gates either blew open during heavy winds or were left open, but experts say it wouldn't have made any difference for the sheep because cougars can climb fences.

Mountain lions are found in most wildland areas around the Bay Area, but attacks on livestock are rare, said Zara McDonald, executive director of the Felidae Conservation Fund, a Marin County nonprofit dedicated to the protection of wild cats.

McDonald said deer make up 80 percent of their diet, but mountain lions are opportunists and will go after easy prey when they see it. They typically kill with a bite to the back of the neck and head, which would explain why the punctures on the dead sheep looked like gunshot wounds.

Killing rampages like this one are unusual but not unheard of, she said.

"Sometimes if they kill one it sort of drives the predator instinct and that will trigger them to continue to kill," McDonald said, "kind of like a housecat playing with a toy."

McDonald said folks in the area need not panic. Cattle, horses and people are almost never on the mountain lion menu, she said.

The fact that pumas and not people were responsible actually makes things a little better, Meadowcroft said.

"I'm relieved to know that what caused this was part of the cycle of life," he said. "I hope it gives comfort for people to know that it wasn't some crazy sick person out there."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/31/BAVP1INGPN.DTL#ixzz1IE9VytM6

Shop class for all ages

Kindergarten Shop Class

Drew Kelly for The New York Times

Rose O’Neal, 11, used a crosscut saw in a miter box to cut rails for a step stool she is building in a class at the Randall Museum in San Francisco. More Photos »

By JULIE SCELFO

Published: March 30, 2011

IN honor of President’s Day last month, Deb Winsor, a carpenter with a workshop in Brooklyn, led a crew in the construction of an 8-foot-wide model of the White House, complete with north and south porticos and two dozen hand-painted windows.

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After reviewing the plans with the workers, Ms. Winsor, 50, supervised them as they laid out two-by-fours for the front and back walls and then hammered the studs and plates together with three-inch nails. Next, she watched as some of them raised the walls and sheathed them in plywood while others used an electric jigsaw to cut bases for the portico columns. Finally, one of the carpenters used a screw gun to attach a flagpole to the roof and secure the pediment to the freshly painted facade.

At quitting time, the workers removed their protective headphones, put their tools back in their holsters and cleaned up their work stations. Then they gathered up the wooden toys they had made during break and ran to the door to greet their parents.

“Good job today,” Ms. Winsor hollered cheerfully at Oscar Markowitz, a 5-year-old boy with orange hair, flushed cheeks and a big grin, one of a dozen children (including the reporter’s son) participating in a weeklong camp she was holding at Construction Kids, her workshop on Flatbush Avenue.

“Tomorrow we’ll build a log cabin,” she added, as a 9-year-old boy walked by on handmade stilts.

Ms. Winsor started Construction Kids two years ago, after she conducted a one-day building project at her son’s preschool and was deluged with requests from parents and teachers for more. And while it might seem like something fairly unusual — teaching young children to use power tools — it is one of about a dozen such programs across the country that allow children to hammer and drill to their hearts’ content.

Just as legions of Americans in cities and suburbs have discovered the joys of working with their hands — building their own chicken coops or brewing artisanal vinegars — many are now encouraging their children to do the same, by giving them the opportunity to learn how to handle a hammer as well as they use an iPhone.

At the nonprofit Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston, children from 4 to 17 are designing furniture and learning joinery techniques in woodworking classes and an off-site program taught at local elementary and middle schools.

The Randall Museum, in San Francisco, has had a children’s woodworking program for two decades, but in recent years it has doubled the number of its classes and added one for preschoolers.

The three-year-old Makeville Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which bills itself as a “hands-on lab for craft, building, art and invention,” added a workshop building last year so children as young as 6 can take classes.

Kids’ Carpentry, an “after-school math enrichment program” that has quietly served Northern California for nearly 30 years, just opened a branch in Minnesota, has added a new program in Berkeley, Calif., and is preparing to bring its woodworking classes to six more cities in the Bay Area by the end of the year.

And so many parents have been trying to get their children into the Tinkering School, a sleepover summer camp in Montara, Calif., where children 8 to 17 build sailboats and treehouses, that the program recently opened in Austin, Tex., and plans to expand into an entire K-12 school in San Francisco in September; programs in Chicago and Buffalo, N.Y., are in the works for 2012.

“There is an awakening going on for sure,” said Doug Stowe, a longtime woodworker and educator in Arkansas, who was named a Living Treasure there in 2009 for his efforts at preserving and teaching the craft. Since he started a blog five years ago called Wisdom of the Hands, named after the program he founded in 2001 at Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs, Mr. Stowe said parents, educators and woodworkers from around the country have been contacting him for advice on starting projects and classes in their communities.

“Up until the early 1900s, there was a widespread understanding that the use of the hands was essential to the development of character and intellect,” said Mr. Stowe, 62. “More recently, we’ve had this idea that every child should go to college and that the preparation for careers in manual arts was no longer required.”

Somewhere along the way, he added, “we have forgotten all the other important things that manual training conveys.”

PREVIOUS generations may have learned to use tools at their fathers’ or grandfathers’ workbenches, but today’s parents often need woodworking classes themselves before they can pass along the knowledge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/garden/31kids.html

 

Land slide in the Bay Area

Hercules: Oozing hillside threatens 8 homes

A waterlogged, collapsing hillside in Hercules has slopped onto four homes and is threatening four more, prompting authorities to evacuate all eight.

Four were red-tagged last week, which prohibits residents from entering, and the city limited residents' access to four more on Tuesday as the hillside, soaked after weeks of heavy rainfall, continued to slip.

"The landslide has wrecked these people's lives," said Joseph Loo, who lives across from the eight threatened homes on Carson Street. "These people are losing their homes, their biggest investment, and now they have nowhere to go."

The hillside above Carson Street has been shifting on and off for at least a decade, city officials said, but the recent downpours have hastened the slide into backyards and under foundations of the upscale neighborhood in western Contra Costa County.

Last week, mud oozed so close to four of the homes that the city ringed them with barricades and yellow safety tape. Inside the homes, workers could see cracked walls, broken windows and tilting floors where the mud pressed against the structure of the house.

All four of those homes were already vacant, in part because of landslides. An additional house, at 215 Carson St., was razed several years ago when the advancing earth ruptured the foundation.

The City Council was on the verge of declaring the area a disaster zone, to obtain state funding to repair infrastructure damage and help homeowners.

The Refugio Heights Homeowners Association owns the hillside and should be responsible for whatever havoc the hill creates, said Hercules associate city engineer Erwin Blancaflor.

"We've tried everything we could, but it's private property," he said. "Right now, we're just monitoring the movement of the dirt."

A call to the homeowners association was not returned Tuesday. Neighbors said that residents have been in lengthy disputes over liability with the homeowners association, city and the developer who built the neighborhood in 1987.

Landslides have plagued two other East Bay cities in the past week.

In San Pablo, three homes were evacuated after a slide between Wyman and Hillcrest streets. The city has been removing trees, working with county and state officials and geotechnical experts, and setting up a donation fund to help displaced homeowners.

In Pleasanton, a landslide on Pleasanton Ridge destroyed a water main Friday, disrupting water supplies to 160 homes. No homes were damaged.

Hillsides are more vulnerable to landslides in the spring because the water inside the soaked earth begins to expand when the air temperature rises, forcing large chunks of a hill to move, Blancaflor said.

In Hercules, the landslide is about 300 feet wide and 150 feet deep, pushing 818 tons of mud onto the homes below.

"I've looked out my window and watched it move," said Stephen Richardson, who lives across from the affected homes on Carson Street. "Everyone keeps looking for someone to sue, but the hill just keeps coming."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/29/BAGK1ILVSJ.DTL#ixzz1I7qEDmg0

Most unhappy-making

Mussel quarantine issued

for California coast

 

Associated Press March 29, 2011 04:29 PM Copyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

State and county health officials are warning recreational shellfish gatherers that it is unsafe to harvest shellfish from the California coast.

The California Department of Public Health says elevated levels of two toxins have been detected in mussels along the coast _ and severe poisonings could result in death.

The department's annual quarantine usually takes effect from May through October, but testing found the toxins in mussels. There is no known antidote to the toxins.

The quarantine includes all bays, harbors and estuaries. Commercially-harvested shellfish are not included in the quarantine.

Consumers of sport-harvested clams or scallops are advised to eat only the white meat and discard dark-colored organs and viscera before cooking.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/03/29/state/n162921D78.DTL#ixzz1I2qH8s1h