Our oldest cemetery, the Rural Cemetery, is only a ten minute walk away from my home. It's like entering a different world with old crooked trees, birds singing, soft paths and blissful shade. It's an oasis of calm and solitude. Now in spring there is an abundance growth of grasses - everything looks fresh, but soon they will turn brown and mowed so that they don't lend fuel to future wildfires.
In my last post I promised to show some of the birds that I had seen during my walk in the laguna a couple weeks ago. It was a beautiful sunny day, but as you can see in the photo above, there was still snow lying on the hills. It's always intriguing to see flowering trees and fields down here and the snow capped hills in the background.
I know that there are quite some Western Bluebirds in the laguna, but I see them only rarely. This time, however, I spotted them every time I walked here.
In the trees along the laguna I spotted so many herons that I stopped to count them. One tree was solely populated by Cattle Egrets, some Green Herons were visible, but most of all I saw Black-crowned Night-Herons. The male and female look alike, but it is easy to tell the juveniles apart. There were entire families roosting in the trees.
I love these guys!
The Red-shouldered Hawks were very active that day. Before I saw them I usually heard them, they have a very unique rather high pitched call. One of them was so kind to land in the tree near where I stood watching the Black-crowned Night-Herons.
After my walk I stopped on the other side of the laguna - I always wanted to explore the area here and I finally did it. While I was happily taking pictures of trees in water I discovered some big white birds swimming in the distance. I first thought they were swans, but when I observed them more closely I though they were behaving differently from swans. I tried to get closer where they were, and when I finally could see them much more clearly I realized that they were American White Pelicans.
I was surprised to see them here. At the ocean I have seen hundreds of Brown Pelicans and I always thought we don't have White Pelicans in Northern California. Well, I stand corrected. This seems to be the farthest North they get in the winter - seeing them North of the Golden Gate is, indeed, very rare, and I think this was an extraordinarily special treat. Once in twenty years...
This was such a wonderful day in the Laguna that was complete after I had discovered the field of mustard on my way back.
It's mustard season in Sonoma County, when the white mustard is blooming in the fields and in the vineyards. It is always a lovely sight that I never get tired of. A few years ago, the Geek and I went into the Dry Creek Valley to photograph the mustard in the vineyards, but this year I was passing this wide field when I returned from my walk in the Laguna. There was a dirt strip by the side of the road where I parked and started shooting the yellow mass.
I was lucky that I had taken my big camera that day, because I wanted to take photos of the birds in the Laguna (those pictures will turn up in this space soon). This was actually the first day this year that I was using the DSLR again. During the pandemic I had become really lazy and was mainly taking pictures with my phone. While I was photographing the birds and now the mustard I realized how much I had missed my big camera.
Mustard belongs to the Brassicaceae family. It is native to Europe, but is so common in North America by now that it is considered "naturalized". It turns up where the soil has been disturbed, I have read that it is good for erosion control and it supresses weeds. Recently I read an article about how it made its way to the California Coast and the findings were surprising. The scientists stated that mustard seeds were found in the bricks that were used to build the missions along El Camino Real and thus got into California. I thought that was an interesting but plausible theory.
Today I decided that winter is over - even though we are in the middle of a cold spell that still gives us warm sunny days but chilly nights, mornings and evenings. However, there are so many signs of spring around us that we really can't talk about winter anymore, at least not in this corner of the world.
Therefore, it's time to talk about what we ate in winter. Winter dishes are often a bit heartier than meals during the rest of the year. It seems that the short days and cold nights make us long for more comfort and warmth, and food is just the thing to give us both.
Our traditional New Year's Eve food is cheese fondue. We used to eat it with chunks of bread, but recently we discovered a healthier way to enjoy it - with roasted potatoes and brussels sprouts. It is 100% delicious and we didn't miss the bread one bit!
We love pasta and certainly had our fair share of it over the winter. A lot of these meals were new recipes that I tried out, most of them published in the New York Times. But we also enjoyed old favorites again.
