4/29 Lecture: The Art and Exploration of Creating a Bird Book
Adrian Cotter
Note: This is out first of many talks outside of the Randall (the Randall is undergoing reconstruction through until the Fall of 2016). Make sure to note the date, time, and location. We won’t likely to be on the third Thursday too often.
Also, I had incorrectly noted the date on earlier emails. The talk is Wednesday April 29th.
The Art and Exploration of Creating a Bird Book
Guest Speaker: Keith Hansen
7:30pm, Wednesday, Apr 29th, 2015
FREE at Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA
Keith Hansen is a wildlife artist who specializes in the inspirational and accurate portrayal of birds.
Cedar Waxwing by Keith Hansen
His most resent endeavor has been a 14 year project illustrating the book “Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status and Distribution”, authored by Ted Beedy and Ed Pandolfino. He illustrated about 1,400 portraits of the 320 species that occur annually somewhere, anywhere, and everywhere in the Sierra. He will be talking about the production of his illustrations and the birds themselves.
If you can’t make this talk — his workspace, The Wildlife Gallery” is located in Bolinas California where people can view originals, prints, and the various works that are on display (and the birds visible outside his window!).
More about Keith and his work can be found at keithhansen.com.
(A nod to Jim Ansbro for the title!)
Joel Pomerantz (my partner in this lecture business) talked to us on March 19th, 2015 about his research into the flood of 1862. At first he did not find a whole lot, until he stumbled across the term “freshet”. That opened up a whole new line of research — which led to this wonderful and somewhat unconventional lecture — a “choose your own lecture” adventure: offering a list of topics on which he could speak.
He did give some background to start. The term “atmospheric river” is a relatively new one. I hadn’t heard of it myself until I heard a lecture on drought last fall, but it popped up in the news a lot at the start of our winter storm cycle (the threat of which caused more chaos than the actual event this year). These rivers in the sky are actually the delivery mechanism for a lot of moisture from the the equator to landmasses. The moisture isn’t necessarily even visible from space only recently have microwave satellites been able to track them.
One of these rivers pushes up toward the northwest, and under certain circumstances, storms in Alaska (the results of other atmospheric rivers) push these rivers further south into California. The total water in these systems can be huge (10 to 20 Mississippi’s worth), and what fell in California in 1862 was exacerbated by a drought in the prior year, and a hard freeze that followed. What measurements we had: San Francisco saw 24”-37” of rain in January alone (19-20 is the average for the year). In gold country there was 108” in a month.
All this wrought terrible destruction, pretty much every mill, ferry, and bridge were washed out (many many deaths happened with people trying to cross rivers), tens of thousands of dead cattle washed up on beaches, low lying farms inundated, Sacramento flooded.
continued on the website...
sfnhs.com/2015/04/05/the-noachian-freshet-the-great-flood-of-1862/
May 27th – TBD: (Green Apple Books on 9th Ave)