A Most Casual Birder on Father's Day

Viewing kinds of jays in a Sibley Guide

My dad enjoys watching the passing's by while sitting on the patio area in the front of his and my mom's house - the neighbor's kids, cars, joggers...even the different birds. I remember out on the farm how any bird that wasn't game and which he didn't know its name was a "dickey" bird.⁽¹⁾ Now, away from the farm and in town, any bird is of interest. I stopped in to visit this past weekend on my way to business meetings in Fresno and Parlier at the beginning of the week. It was nice timing since Sunday was the first Father's Day that I had spent with him in more than 20 years. While enjoying the early morning cool air, I pulled out my bird guide and cleared up a question Dad had the day before about what kind of jay was hanging around the yard - he thought it was a Blue Jay; my mom - a Scrub Jay. Looking at the color plates in my Sibley Guide,⁽²⁾ the controversy was resolved: Scrub Jay. Seeing is believing - Mom was right.
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(1) Dickey-bird definition.
(2) The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America.

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.