Dove Hunting and Tony Calvello - SF Graphic Artist

Unlike a Central Valley Dove Hunt

Growing up on our farm, one of constants was the dove hunt in September. This event was not like the gentile eastern U.S. or European affairs with horses, and hounds, brightly colored sporting attire, and verdant scenery. This was a more gritty event when my Dad and his Elks Club friends, many of whom were World War II Veterans, descended upon dryland prairie pastures at the back of our ranch in their pickups and cars, waiting for sunrise and the Mourning Doves' return from feeding on grain fields that had been harvested earlier in the summer. The birds would fly in waves, with the hunters then popping up from dry creek beds that ran through the fields, pointing their shotguns in the general direction of the approach, pulling their triggers, and waiting for the result. You knew when there was action by the bursts of discharged shells, and the instant there was a hit: the cheers from the entire party as a bird crumpled in mid-air from its flight path with gravity taking over, and the birds falling to the ground waiting to be found among the tufts of dried grass or brush. When recovered, the birds were slipped into the rubber-lined pouch that ran across the back of the tan-colored hunting vests - the uniform of the day. As the morning passed, hopefully the number of birds shot was directly inverse to the fewer numbers of shells that were held in the stretchable fabric that lined the front of their vests. The shells were within easy reach to reload the gun after each discharge.

Back then I used a single-shot Sear's 20 gauge shotgun - my younger brother the same brand, but a 410 gauge version. The two of us brought down more doves in a morning with a third of the number of shells as my dad's friends did with their semi-automatic 12 gauge pieces - a fact our dad often pointed out to his buddies. This must have been a point of pride, probably more a result less to do with our skill, but more to do with the men and their morning beer drinking.

With the passage of decades since those Opening Seasons in the 1960's, the routine seems much the same - just a lot fewer WW II Veterans to fill the ranks of hunters. An article in the local newspaper reports the annual late-summer tradition still continues. I still remember many of the hunters names: Norman, Kibby, Mic, Roger, Guy, Bob, Sheldon, John, Kim, and Jerry. Some of the names dropped from the ranks over time, and a few new ones added.

Jezebel the Hunting Dog

As part of the folklore from that past, it was reported that my dad's pointer named Jezebel once climbed up a broken down tree to retrieve a dove that landed in that snag. Several of the hunter verified the story, and Norman reported what he had seen to a friend who was a San Francisco illustrator. The result was a gift to my dad of a framed sketch  documenting the event, though stylized for effect: the dog hanging precariously from the tree, a dove in her mouth, and her wearing a vest like the rest of the hunting party. That drawing hung on my dad's office wall on the farm for decades, and then in his home office when he and my mom build in town after they retired in the eighties.

It wasn't until two years ago when Jan and I were helping take care of my dad in his home that I searched for information on Tony Calvello the artist. This picture finally hung on the wall of my dad's apartment when he moved to an assisted living facility in Sacramento. It was there as a nine-month reminder of the many people, and places, and times that had passed time with him. Jezebel now hangs on the wall of my home office where I see it every time I work at my desk.

Cooperation - No Idea When I Was A Kid

Change happens.

I had no idea when I was a kid that things would be different when I grew up. Our farm was about seven miles north of the Visalia city limits. I remember once when riding in our car with my mom and asking, "Would the town ever reach our farm?" Mom laughed and said, "No." It is interesting how the city limits now reach the levee banks of the Saint John's River - well on the way in the direction of the farm.

My folks now live in a development north of the old city limits - they sold out all of their land, the home I was raised in, and their farm equipment. I think the population of Visalia back when I was a kid was around 30,000 people, and as I remember, the cost of gasoline was around 33 cents a gallon - that was the price on the gas pump at the station where we filled up. Gas is over $3.00 a gallon right now, and the town's population is more than 125,000 - it was only 40,000 when I left in 1975.

As far back as I can remember, we grew a lot of cotton on the farm - Acala, a long staple variety of Upland cotton.  As of the late 1950's, we used weeder geese to control nutsedge and grassy weeds, but new herbicides came along that easily controlled some - Treflan, and hard-to-contol Johnsongrass - Ansar. The sounds and sights of crop dusters and the smell of defoliants at the end of the season were familiar every year. There were other names common to cotton: Calcot, Cotton Incorporated, California Cotton Planting Seed Distributors (CPCSD) , and Ranchers Cotton Oil.

Another tradition was the annual members dinner for the Visalia Cooperative Cotton Gin - the place where our trailer stuffed with our harvest would go to have the lint separated from the seeds. The dinner was held at the Dinuba Memorial Building  - the Veterans building in a town about 13 miles north of our farm. Other than having to sit through talks from the stage, a memory from each meeting was the match books that had a curious cartoon inside showing two mules that learned a lesson together about what cooperation can accomplish. I had no idea back then that the purpose for cooperatives was an expression of the cartoon series inside of the match book.

Jump ahead 56 years, and there was an article in the USDA Rural Development cooperative magazine titled, When a Coop Dies. My mom told me about the feature story, about the Visalia Coop closing down because the acres of cotton once familiar to the east side of the San Joaquin Valley had been replaced by grapes, oranges, almond, and dairies - times had changed, agricultural geography had changed.

My dad was invited to cast an honorary vote on Sept. 11, 2006 with the board of directors to close out the coop. Even though the economics of the cotton industry and agricultural economy had changed, what hadn't changed is the need for cooperation - even when closing out a cooperative that had run its time of usefulness.

Applied Mathematics - Starlings in Flight

During early-spring, I saw a few European Starlings in our backyard at the bird feeder, but there have not been any in our backyard for months (1). At that time, I didn't realize that during the winter they are covered in white spots, and then turn dark in summer - the yellow beak was the characteristic that settled it for me that what I was looking at were starlings. These birds are native to most of temperate Europe and western Asia. Northeastern populations migrate south and west in winter to Europe, and further south to areas where it does not breed in the Iberian Peninsula and north Africa. Starlings have been introduced to Australia, New Zealand, North America, and South Africa - the first brought to North America by Shakespeare enthusiasts in the nineteenth century. European Starlings are now among the continent’s most numerous songbirds. For much of the year, they wheel through the sky and mob lawns in big, noisy flocks.

My son's Facebook page had a link to a flock of starlings in flight - complex amorphous formations that turned and folded into itself.

The video clip is dubbed over with music titled Forgive by an artist called Burial (2). I saw swarms of starlings in Oregon when out in newly established grass seed fields in early spring. They would land en mass in fields, and peck small holes in the soil between the grass seedlings. Though there was no way to plan ahead for making measurements to prove our hunch, we were pretty sure that the starlings were a natural control measure of gray garden slugs - another introduction into North America from Europe. The size of the flocks I saw in Oregon came nowhere close to the size of the one in the photograph to the side, or the video. A quick Google search turned up the abstract below from a scientific journal article that describes how the motion of birds in flight can be described mathematically in physical terms for particles, as well as information about Burial and his music. Using the Google translator, the English for the Russian title of the video is Birds Before the Tornado.

While watching the starling video, I remembered when growing up in the hot Central Valley of California, how in summer gnats would swarm together in their own distinctive fashion at dusk, while the air was perfectly still after a 105° F day. Across and down the road from my 

house, I would stir up the layer of dust on a short dirt road that led back to an old barn behind an abandoned farm house. As I shuffled my feet back and forth, the cloud would hover a foot above the ground below my knees like fog, while the gnats silently swam in unison above my head. I could stand there for what seemed like a long time - barefooted, only wearing short pants -  and squeeze the alkali dirt that felt like talcum power with my toes. That place off the asphalt was a refuge from the heat that still lingered in the pavement, as were the white painted lines - the only other cool place to walk back home where the shower was the next stop before my bed.

A computer simulation of gnats swarming can be found at this link.  The underlying assumptions used in the simulation are that gnats are always in flight motion - never stationary, and individual gnats will seek to stay within a given distance of the rest of the swarm. Given these assumptions it is natural that they will tend to fly in circular patterns around a common center. The simulation allows for gusts of wind to originate from the point of the mouse click and blow outward. Each gnat is affected by the gust in inverse proportion to its distance from the origin, and in a direction away from the origin. As I mentioned above, when I watched the swarms of gnats, the evenings were still - no wind at all, except for my breath that I held when the swarm came near me so I wouldn't swallow them.
___________________________________

Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model
  
Abstract. The aggregate motion of a flock of birds, a herd of land animals, or a school of fish is a beautiful and familiar part of the natural world. But this type of complex motion is rarely seen in computer animation. This paper explores an approach based on simulation as an alternative to scripting the paths of each bird

individually. The simulated flock is an elaboration of a particle system, with the simulated birds being the particles. The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is created by a distributed behavioral model much like that at work in a natural flock; the birds choose their own course. Each simulated bird is implemented as an independent actor that navigates according to its local perception of the dynamic environment, the laws of simulated physics that rule its motion, and a set of behaviors programmed into it by the "animator." The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is the result of the dense interaction of the relatively simple behaviors of the individual simulated birds. (3)
___________________________________

(1) However, I have seen starlings in our neighbors' yards across the street from our front yard. Sometime I need to begin doing an inventory of birds in front, because I suspect there may be other species present there. Our backyard, and those of our next door neighbors have virtually no turf, and are heavily wooded. In contrast, the neighboring yards up and down on the street side in front of our house are dominated by turf, and of course the open area caused by the road.

(2) Burial’s self-titled debut album was released May 15, 2006. While the genre is usually filed under dubstep, ambient and garage often get used to describe the album. The album was very unique and fresh when first released and quickly  Burial rose to the top of the dubstep scene. At that time, his real name was not known and he released his music simply using Burial - nothing like a little drama and mystery to stir up interest,  even though the artist wasn't looking for any.

(3) Reynolds, C. W. (1987) Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model, in Computer Graphics, 21(4) (SIGGRAPH '87 Conference Proceedings) pages 25-34.