Creek Running North

Oh, what a beauty.

Beautiful songdog.

One of the jokes about coyotes, for all those outside California, concerns their scientific name, Canis latrans.

Being scavengers, coyotes are often seen along the highway, scarfing down roadkill. Since the California Dept. of Transportation is known locally as CalTrans, coyotes are called ...

Wait for it:

Canis CalTrans.

What a joy to see such a well-fed looking beastie so high on the food chain. Good for him.

awesome.  and jealous.

Hank lol.
I heart coyotes greatly.
I recommend http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/ heartily.

How wonderful to be so close to the wild one.

sravana, your link lead to this wonderful one.

Beautiful picture.

Yes, Lesley - and that woman also wrote a book on living gluten-free, for sale at Amazon.
FWIW, she mentions that the blog is 5 months behind Charlie’s actual age. That makes me happy, for some reason.

Though the image is quite striking, the fact that you are driving through the Sierra, crossing over Hwy 120 on Thanksgiving weekend, is a bit disconcerting.  One would have hoped the meadows would be covered in snow, and that the drive up Tioga would have required some degree of trepidation and anxiety.  But alas, that is not the case.  So, nice image, bad climate.  I would feel so much better if you had taken this in the golden rolling Pacheco Hills.

Beautiful.  The only photo of a coyote I was ever able to get was also in Yosemite - early fall, on the road to Glacier Point, in 1984 or so.  Very nice.

Bad snow years are good (fat) coyote years.  In the reverse situation, I’ve seen very skinny coyotes begging from XC skiers on the Glacier Point road.

Great, no snow!  Hopefully that means the trails will melt out quicker next spring!

Yeah, perhaps the trails won’t even need to melt out at all.  Of course then, the Bay Area water supply will be severely curtailed.  That will teach them for being all high and mighty about using water from the Sierra, won’t it???

Hail indeed to the prosperous yet sheepish Mr. C.

The snow comments, however, made me think of a question ideally posed to this group. If it strikes you as OT rather than graceful segue, you can feed me to a felid. (Note that while hungry canis importunes skiers, any cat would hunt. Gimpy gazelles!)

The short version: how can one bond children with nature and their environment, so that they will clutch at the treasures imperiled by climate change? 

The long version: I run a nfp that brings new books and pleasure-reading to low-income kids in Chicago-area after-school programs. At our pilot site, we’ve built and staff a reading room (1000 books and growing), which operates as a free book store, and locus for book clubs and read-alouds.

Kids at the site are entirely unplugged from nature, the environment, or the science of either. Their town is imploded industrial; its empty lots, long abandoned factories, and swathes of train tressels generate a certain (toxic) sense of expansiveness.

Mediated experiences, like zoos and arboretums, don’t seem to have sparked any sustained interest. Kids page through some of our glossier animal encyclopedias and Earth From Above, but still don’t examine the world before them. Suggestions that we use field guides to find the area’s plants and animals: meh. I point out cloud formations, and the luxuriant rooster scratching in a dirt lot amid a sparrow flock. They shrug. 

So: any ideas—from your own or another’s childhood-- as to how to forge some connections? What rang your chimes, from ages 6 to 16?  If you can suggest experiences to be paired with print, that would be aces.

These kids are starving for beauty and wonder. (Not the wonder of “who else will climb in my window\” that causes fourth grade girls to keep knives under their beds.) They need to track a dragonfly (oddly abundant this year), and examine a roadside sunflower, and even to love the possum—with his thousands of ineffectual teeth.

Sorry to leave you hanging there, spyder, but “roger” was one of the obnoxious trolls that has been trying to provoke things on this site for the last couple weeks. Missed him there.