Voleopolis

We became voles in Native Eyes this week.

We drove down to Pescadero, had a challenging time with the bow drill on Tuesday night (the later and darker it gets, the harder firestarting seems), ate delicious fish provided by our fisherman, and crashed out. One of the Cultural Mentoring people helped me greatly with my bow drill technique, and then I joined the rest of the Native Eyes crew
sleeping around our fire circle. It was a frosty night, and even with my borrowed 15 degree bag I had cold spots and major trouble sleeping. I need a good sleeping bag.





The next morning we went out to Cloverdale Ranch to explore for voles. Out in the meadowy valley bottom, we got on our hands and knees and began rustling through grass and bull thistle (ouch!) in search of vole sign. Immediately apparent was a network of trails about one to two inches wide of packed-down dry grass, concealed under the layer of thatch: the characteristic grass tunnel systems of California voles. We followed the trails for hours, finding underground tunnels, middens, latrines, caches, chambers, nests, and what must have been miles of vole grass
trails. We mapped Vole City, played a tag game of voles and predators,
saw, stalked and chased real voles, and even got nibbled by voles in
their tunnels.





In the evening we traveled further South to log some more data points on our Cybertracker units and visited the Hypericum infestation there. Perhaps we’ll have more time to investigate the Hypericum next week.

Wednesday Dec. 3rd Bird Sit

In my last post I wrote, “On Wednesday morning we had an awesome and enlightening bird sit, which I’ll detail later on.”

Here are the details.

Native Eyes decided to get up extra early in order to settle into our sit before the RDNA-ers got to the meadow. We woke up slowly and ambled down to the meadow, fox-walking past feeding sparrows and curious hummingbirds, and were seated by 7 AM to anticipate RDNA’s scheduled gather-at-meadow’s-edge by 7.

I climbed over a few fences and sat near the Southwestern edge of the meadow, partway up the West ridge. The morning was densely fogged, the air saturated with floating wet droplets that clung to clothes, hair and eyelashes like frost. The fog obscured the East ridge and most of the meadow, hiding all of my classmates’ sit spots from view. The nearby sparrows and wrentits shuffled and hopped in the brush, active but hidden, keeping to the shadows in the challengingly obscured environment. Song interspersed with “Seeet!” and “Chip!” peppered the valley.

Then a high chitter began North of the meadow and swept South toward my sit spot, sweeping past in a rustle of leaves and chip-chip-chip of songbirds. Some of the birds popped out of their hiding places and stood sentinel for a second, twittering, before retreating into the bushes again. The feeling was one of of passing the news, and the thought popped into my head that this chorus must herald the movement of people out of tents and down the hill toward the meadow. That idea didn’t fit with the timing I was expecting for RDNA’s bird sit, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the birds spoke of the stirring of the RDNA folks.

The birds returned quickly to baseline behavior, and I wondered if there was anything to that wave of bird chatter, or if it was a coincidence of talkative birds. A garbage truck rumbled past, causing little concern in the hidden birds. My mind quieted down as I spread my senses out over the hillside and for an infinite moment the hillside was peaceful again – until a series of “chip! chip!” calls rang around the valley. A downy woodpecker began calling in the Ukes across the meadow, overlaying a background of junco chips, wren buzzes, and flicker “clear!” calls. I thought, “that’s probably the RDNA folks getting settled in the field,” though the fog was still thick enough to obscure my view.

After a few more minutes the fog thinned a bit and I could make out ghosts of Eucalyptus trees across the meadow, with a white-hatted human being seated at their base.

After the sit, I kept thinking about that wave of bird chatter. I remembered hearing something similar once before, when Native Eyes sat in anticipation of RDNA arriving at Cloverdale Ranch. I wondered if this was indeed a pattern.

When we debriefed the bird sit with Jon later in the evening, I mentioned the wave of bird chatter, and that I’d seen something like that before at Cloverdale. And it turned out that I wasn’t the only one who perceived this wave. Apparently, Jon has duplicated this effect for others by getting them to baseline with meditation, sitting them down in the woods, and asking another person to approach from further away with rushed or unaware body language. All members of the group then report seeing a wave of bird language pass through at far in front of, and at a much faster clip than the approaching person.

In debriefing the sit, and correlating events like the garbage truck and downy woodpecker calls with others, I found that the first wave of bird chatter did indeed coincide with the RDNA-ers waking up and moving toward the field. And the second wave of alarm also correlated with RDNA walking into the field and settling into the sit.

I've read about bird language in Jon's books, and I've listened to lessons on it on the "Seeing Through Native Eyes" and "Advanced Bird Language" CDs. But seeing and hearing this wave move through, generated by human movement far outside of my sensory range, was absolutely epic. It was not something that I ever expected given the information in books and CDs, and experiencing it firsthand in order to discover it for myself was a very important part of my bird language learning journey. It leaves me with more questions than answers, and will serve as a draw to go deeper into naturalist studies.

Do all humans push a wave in front of them, or can one learn to reduce and eliminate this effect? Do other animals produce their own waves? What does this wave say about those who create it around them? What does it mean about the human species, or about our culture, that we all default to pushing a wave of bird language in front of us?

Forgiveness and Evaluations

Before launching into my recap of this week’s class, I’d like to give some background to the events. This entry centers on a custom called Mihi Kala, a description of which follows. Also note, I managed to kill two sets of camera batteries in a row, one right after the other for no apparent reason, so I could not use my camera for this class and this entry will be text only.

Mihi Kala is a custom from Hawaii that centers on the asking and granting of forgiveness. It’s said before the thanksgiving for the evening meal, like a precursor to Grace. The intent of Mihi Kala is to relieve people of the dross of the day and thus to make space for thanksgiving for the gifts of the day. It is a simple process of speaking aloud the harms one has dealt others, the mistakes one has made, any actions one regrets or feels badly about, and of asking for forgiveness for those things. Once others grant forgiveness, it’s important that one also states forgiveness of oneself. This ritual helps bring everyone into presence with each other (and themselves), and what remains in a person after forgiveness is granted is genuine, peaceful thankfulness. Mihi Kala, if practiced honestly, brings the bothersome and painful mental stuff accumulated through everyday life out into the open and releases it with words of forgiveness, clearing the way for a genuine feeling of thankfulness to shine through one’s life.

In Native Eyes, we learned this custom after our buckskin day and crab feast. The seven of us gathered in the yurt and spoke in turn of our regrets and trespasses thus far in the course, and each in turn received forgiveness from the group and from themselves. As everyone said their piece, the spark of hot migraine pain that had been smoldering all day rekindled behind my right eye. When everyone else had spoken and it came to be my turn, I found couldn’t speak. A full-blast migraine blazed in my forehead and my throat tightened up, allowing no more than a squeak to escape. Swamped with pain, frustration, anger, and grief, I just sat in the circle and cried.

We ended the evening without my having said a word. I curled in my sleeping bag under the redwood tree for a long time, feeling the cool night brush by my face, waiting for sleep to bring an escape from the nauseating pain, and from the frustration at not being able to speak from my heart.

In the intervening week, my thoughts on Mihi Kala gestated and finally coalesced into a letter, which I sent out to the Native Eyes crew. Here is an excerpt of my Mihi Kala email:

… I find it very hard to own my flaws, and in asking for forgiveness I've got to state plainly that I do things wrong sometimes, and that I don't live up to my ideals. I think my rational mind panicked and hid at that, and all the more so at speaking from my heart about my own experience.

Please forgive me for acting pridefully, and for trying to look like I do things right all the time. I know this is a strong, entrenched flaw in my personality, and I don't think that just by identifying it I've released it. But I am working on it.

Please forgive me for being less observant and careful than I could be. I think despite my intentions I'm very callous, self-centered and ignorant at times, and I'm sorry for that. I feel like a clumsy toddler in a very subtle, complex and elegant world, but I know I have the potential to be just as subtle, complex and elegant. Forgive me for stumbling around in my self-centered focus and kicking up a bird plow sometimes, and for forgetting to be thankful or ask permission before taking something that I think I need. I have, of course, grown up in urban America, a culture that we all know promotes self-centered callousness. I'm working my way toward a dignified and present adulthood from an artificially lengthened clumsy adolescence, but I'm definitely not grown up yet.

I'd like to ask Mikko especially for forgiveness, as well. I feel a familial closeness with you, and I have a tendency to get annoyed with family. Please forgive me for having a shorter temper with you than I have with others. I love you like a brother. I think perhaps I tend to have less patience with loved ones because I believe I can stop trying to prove myself worthy, and allow myself to have flaws like a bad temper. Regardless of the origin of my behavior, though, I don't like snapping at you Mikko. Please forgive me for being snappish and having a short temper, and for being prickly and distant at times. As with the previous issues, it's something I'm working on.

When I came back to Native Eyes the next week, all of my classmates except for Mikko had read and responded to my letter. I felt lighter having heard forgiveness from them, and I was touched that they empathized, but things also felt unfinished. I had not yet stated aloud forgiveness for myself, and I hadn’t heard anything about Mihi Kala from Mikko.

On Wednesday morning we had an awesome and enlightening bird sit, which I’ll detail later on. After mapping, Native Eyes broke from RDNA and piled into cars to go tracking in the Bolinas mudflats.

Except we weren’t just tracking. The staff had decided to pop-quiz us with a mock Cybertracker evaluation. The format was similar to the Alien Test in the beginning of the year, in that we toured a series of stations answering specific questions about the tracks at each one. We turned in our answers at each station, and were not permitted to discuss or comment on the station until everyone had turned in their answers.

It was fun at first, taking the time to examine tracks in as great a depth as I wanted and challenging my intellect with questions that danced beyond the edge of my understanding. But my weekly headache had resurfaced and with each wrong answer (and about half of them were wrong) I was getting tenser. I hunched my shoulders and curled my ribcage over the ball of fury growing in my belly.

We moved out to another station. When we passed a clump of tall grass the resident Marsh Wren started giving us hell, buzzing his little head off in our direction. I’m sure everyone else heard the little loudmouth rattling on about my bad mood, but at that point I was so off-balance over the test that I didn’t care what kind of bird alarms I set off. I was furious with the world for not providing me with the information to ace this test as I should, and furious with the Native Eyes staff for giving the test and smoking out all my ignorance and lack of skill. Mostly I was furious with myself for being so damn wrong.

Finally I realized that I had to relieve the pressure or I wouldn’t be able to participate in the activity. I decided that I simply wouldn’t turn in my answers, but I’d write them down and otherwise participate normally. I’d get the advantage of learning from the answers without having to expose my ignorance to the world. True, the stated reason for this test was not to evaluate us, per se, but to find our edges so that our instructors could teach us more effectively. But I still resented showing my ignorance.

When I decided to refrain from sharing my answers, I unexpectedly felt the pressure to be right lifted off. I straightened up, my belly relaxed, and began to breathe more deeply again. The wren quieted down, too. And at the end of the testing session I felt light and confident enough to turn in my answers anyway, even though I knew many of them to be wrong.

It helped that I got the last four questions right. But mainly I had desperately needed a respite from the parents-and-public-school-borne pressure to give right answers. I didn’t know how to stop applying that pressure to myself while still participating in the evaluation. After I removed myself from the evaluative context of the activity, though, I could engage on my own terms and I found that I could decide to let myself be wrong. At the end I found that I could judge my success not according to how many questions I answered right, but on whether I chose to move past old and damaging patterns of thought and begin to create new more effective patterns. Granted I fall into old patterns more often than not, but since I’m the only one evaluating myself using these criteria, I can decide to appreciate what progress I do make, rather than think badly about myself for the times I fall back into old patterns. Or I can choose to think badly about myself, as I often do. It’s my decision, not my teacher’s or my parent’s or my boss’s. And the wren, along with his passerine compatriots, will tell me with certainty whether I’ve released those old habits or not.

The following Friday, after class had been over for more than a day, Mikko and I were up predawn and getting ready for our internship with the Riekes Center. Mikko was sitting on my couch reading email as I packed up a lunch. He closed the laptop, walked up silently, and ninja-hugged me from behind, saying, “I love you too, and I forgive you.” I’d forgotten about the Mihi Kala email but now the remainder of a weight I hadn’t known I was carrying lifted, and I breathed easier.

The next morning I woke up with a single phrase resounding in my mind: “Thank you.”

Lots of Buckskins and a Food Fight

This past class was the day for animal connection. We had big plans for Wednesday evening involving forty freshly-caught Dungeness crabs, courtesy of our resident fisherman, so we arrived by car to carry all our supplies.

Tuesday night we gathered in the yurt to share stories of the week, and heard some tales of the many felines that had come to feed on a nearby deer carcass. After the stories we returned to our camp, rekindled the fire, and discussed the next day’s activities. Though RDNA was skipping their usual bird sit, Native Eyes decided to have one anyway, and to investigate the deer carcass.

Tuesday morning’s bird sit was once again dominated by accipiter signatures. I have to admit that I’m getting somewhat impatient with these avian predators, and I’d really like to see some other bird patterns.

We gathered in Tent City next to the garden gate to poke around the kill site, and though the carcass was supposedly only two weeks old, little enough was left. Skin was a leathery tent over rough-gnawed bones, but maggots still squirmed in the dark places. It was a small deer, probably a yearling, with the bones mostly intact through gnawed at some of the ends. The ribcage was whole, but the limbs were disembodied and strewn widely. The ears had been removed and were lying lonely in the leafmold. Clipped fur was everywhere. Some speculation had been that this was a cougar kill, but I’m reluctant to draw that conclusion, as the bones were whole and the site so exposed. My opinion leans toward a smaller feline.

After the investigation we gathered again in the yurt for an unanticipated fashion show starring the Buckskin Brothers (Jay, Matt, and Ned), kicking off our animal-intensive day.



I became an annoying shutterbug for this class, and as a result I’ve got a pretty complete photographic hide tanning class for this blog. So what follows is my parroting of Jay Sliwa’s, Matt Berry’s, and Ned Conwell’s lesson in wet-scrape braintanned buckskin, based on this book:



First, skin the animal. The Buckskin Brothers said they prefer to do this while hanging it by the neck. Start by cutting up the midline of the belly from the anus to the throat, being careful not to puncture the gut cavity or it’ll get really really messy. Then cut across the body from ankle to ankle, forelimb across to forelimb and hindlimb across to hindlimb. Here’s a little photo of the cuts sketched out. Please note that it is not in fact a drawing of an alien.



Then set your knife down (well out of reach lest you be tempted to pick it up again) and use your hands to work the hide free. Knife nicks, even small shallow ones, will become a weak spot and then a hole over the course of the tanning process, so don’t give yourself the opportunity to make that mistake.

Then flesh the hide. Use a stout beam supported so that it stands up at an angle, like so:



Place the hide fur-side down, draped over the end of the beam. Lean against the butt of your beam to hold the skin in place as you scrape away from you down the beam. Begin scraping with a flat, dull impliment. Don’t worry about scraping too much. As long as you use something dull, rather than a knife, you shouldn’t damage the hide. The goal here is to remove the meat, fat, membrane, blood vessels, and such that still adhere to the hide after skinning.



Then, soak the hide in an alkaline solution, a process also known as bucking. This phase is what gives buckskin it’s name, not the sex of the deer killed for the hide. Buckskin can, in fact, be made from doe skins too. You can use either wood ashes or lye to make the alkaline solution, and unfortunately I don’t remember the proportion of lye to water. For wood ashes, you use the floating-egg-test: If a fresh egg sinks, you’ve got too little wood ash. If it floats on it’s side, you’ve got too much. If it floats end-up, with a circle about the size of a quarter poking out of the water, you’ve got the balance right.

I didn’t catch the length of time necessary for bucking, but braintan.com says that the soaking continues until the hair at the neck is easily pulled out.



After bucking you’re ready to scrape. Take the skin back to your fleshing beam, this time placing it hair-side-up, and again leaning on it to hold it in place. Begin scraping off the fur with your dull fleshing implement, starting near the rump where it’s easier. You’ll notice that a layer of the skin tends to scrape off with the hair – that’s what you’re going for, anyway. The fleshing took off the innermost layer of skin, the loose fibers, membrane and blood vessels and such, and the scraping will take off the outermost epidermis and grain layer of skin. You’ll be left with the middle fiber layer, the part that will become the finished buckskin.



Skin has multiple layers. Tanners identify (more or less) four layers. The epidermis and grain layers are the outer two where the hair is anchored. These two layers consist of loose fibers held in a mucous matrix. The third layer down is the fiber layer, a strong, interconnected matrix of fibers. The bottom is a thin layer of loose fiber. You want the strong fiber matrix for your hide, not the mucous matrix. Scrape it all off!



You may also notice that the epidermis and grain layers have become somewhat blue-gray, translucent and very slimy from the bucking. I used that difference in appearance and texture to know when I’d finished scraping an area, since often the fur comes off more easily than the grain. The underlying fiber layer is cream colored and more opaque, sticky-rubbery rather than snotty-slimy. Once again, scrape away – you won’t damage the hide with too much scraping, as long as your implement is dull.

Once your hide is cleaned of fur and grain, rinse it with fresh water. Now it’s time to wring it out. Here’s a fun method taught by Jay Sliwa:



Hang up the hide, with just the very end flopped over a pole to keep it in place.

Take the dangling end and loop it over your pole.

Roll in the edges of the hide, so that you have a wet hide donut hanging from your pole. Insert a strong stick into the donut hole.









Begin twisting and wringing out your hide.



Twist till it seems you can’t twist anymore.



Get a friend to help if you need to, or if you just want to have more fun with it. Twist it up some more. Blot with a towel.



Untwist, and twist it up again in the oposite direction. Once you’ve gotten as much water out of the hide as you can possibly get it'll look white and opaque, rather than translucent. Then stretch it out again.



And now it’s time for the brains. According to the Buckskin Brothers, every animal has enough brains to tan it’s own hide, but if you don’t have the brain from your animal you can use pig brains sold in butcher shops instead. I’ve also heard of using egg yolk. In any case, what you're looking for is an emulsified oil, one that will stay in solution and penetrate the skin rather than separating out and floating to the top. Brain is, according to many, the best for the job.



Make a brain shake by blending (or squishing by hand, yum) the brains and warm water. No one seems to have a solid proportion of brains to water online, though I probably have this info in my notes (when I find them I’ll know). Since animals have enough brain to tan their own hides, take more or less as much brain as would be present in the living animal and mix it with enough warm water to make a thin gooshy milkshake consistency.

Make sure it’s well squooshed and without lumps, and mix it with enough water to cover your hide.



Then put the hide in a bucket with the brain water and let it sit. According to the Buckskin Brothers, it only needs to sit for about 20 minutes, but longer is OK.



After braining, it’s time to work the hide dry. This is probably the most energy-intensive step of the whole process. Working the hide until it’s completely dry will help keep it from stiffening up. Apparently, one of the most common issues for beginning tanners is that their hides turn stiff after braining, a problem that crops up when you let a wet or damp hide sit without being worked. A possible solution is to rebrain the hide and work it dry again. So choose a sunny, dry day, or sit by a fire, and work that hide until it feels completely dry.



A vertical cable stretched from a tree limb to the trunk, or from an overhead beam to the floor, helps. Stretch the skin against the cable, formerly-furry-side out, so that the innermost side of the skin touches the cable. Work it back and forth, pulling on either end so that the whole hide slides over the cable with each tug.

The final step, smoking, is not strictly necessary and indeed fancy white buckskins are not smoked. However, if these white buckskins get wet they will revert to the cardboard-like state that all that work over the cable was intended to avert. So smoking waterproofs the hide, while creosote and other resinous substances in the smoke help to preserve it.



For our class, Jay put together a sweet smoking setup. He dug a U-shaped hole, rocket-stove-style. He attached a roughly 3 foot length of stovepipe to one branch of the U, and put a pot lid over the other. We had a fire going close by to furnish coals, and a bag of punky brown-rotted wood to toss on the coals to make smoke.

Jay attached a canvas skirt to the top of the stovepipe. Then he took two otherwise finished but unsmoked hides and glued the edges together with Elmer’s glue to form a bag, and attached the neck portions of the hides to the canvas skirt, then hung from a treebranch. Here’s the finished setup:



Jay then took coals from the fire, dumped them down the hole under the pot lid, and tossed in some punky wood after. Smoke began leaking through holes in the glued edges of the hides, permeating the area with a sweet, sharp scent. After a few hours Jay turned the hide bag inside out to smoke the other side, revealing beautifully tanned buckskins:



That evening Native Eyes organized a crab feed for the 40 students and staff of RDI, with fresh crab caught off the Bolinas coast by our very own Native Eyes fisherman, along with copious salad and a ridiculous amount of dumpstered bread and pastries.





It was exhausting and chaotic and glorious. Anything that ends in a spontaneous lemon-wedge fight is worth the time and effort.