This year marked Jon and my 40th anniversary.. To celebrate I thought I’d commission the talented Joan White of Wisconsin to recreate my favorite photo from beloved local photographer Rusty Cohn, He captured in Napa what I believe is the perfect moment of beaver pair bonding.
Joan liked it too and sent the sketch this week.
We had to flip the image because its on a beautiful cherry burl we selected prepared by her husband (also of 40 years!) had a mark that poked into the beavers head otherwise. She patiently tried a couple solutions and. I think this worked beautifully. She really is a rare and National Treasure.
I’ve raved for years about this cool illustration. Where is it from? Who drew it? I originally found it for sale on Etsy print but when I looked online there were similar illustrations from a long lost book. No one could tell me where or what. I asked European friends, Canadian friends, Google, Ai. I couldn’t find it. But I never forgot it.
Well now I know! The book is Woods Story from Elsa Ruth Nast from Fond du lac Wisconsin published in 1945. Her real name was Jane Werner Watson. and she became one of the best known authors behind The Little Golden Books series in the 50s. The pen name ElsaJane Nast was her mothers but she wrote a lot and used many pen names. She married the dean of Cal tech and settled in Santa Barbara.
Here is the book.
It was illustrated by an artist called “Masha” (Maria Simchow Stern) from Poland. Marie penned and illustrated the FIRST little golden book, The three little Kittens. She died in 1993 and a collection of her art and papers is at the University of Minnesota. I’m still looking up her obituary which was in the New York Times.
I ordered a copy of Wood Story just so I can see it in person. I love when mysterys get a good ending.
All this week I have been thinking about the story in SFGate where a coyote was spotted for the first time swimming to Alcatraz. A visitor saw it and talked to the volunteer who didn’t believe him until he pulled out his phone and showed her the video.
It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.
Mind you its a mile and a quarter swim from the city, which is why they put a prison there in the first place. The idea was that if the bars couldn’t keep you then the sharks would.
But not this coyote.
Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist and carnivore ecologist who has studied coyotes for UC Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences, has a couple of theories. First, she speculated the canine was most likely trying to find a territory of its own. She thinks the animal came from the pack that lives in the Coit Tower area, a territory that has very little green space, making the jaunt particularly appealing. Though coyotes usually seek out new territory in the fall through early winter, an individual doing so in January is not unheard of, Wilkinson said, especially since it’s now mating season for the animals.
That reminded me of beavers dispersing when the are ready to start out on their own. I imagine they go a little farther a field each day exploring and then finally day they are too far from home to make it back to the lodge by morning. They have no idea where the are headed or what they’ll find. And they are as ill equipped over land as this coyote was in the water. but still many travel across miles to find place to settle.
Wilkinson noted the coyotes on Angel Island likely formed their pack after one of the animals swam over and called until a mate arrived. She wondered if the individual on Alcatraz will try something similar.
Isn’t that an amazing paragraph? I think of that bedraggled coyote alone on landscape. “Island-of-the-blue-dophining it” without a pack as he scrounges for nested cormorants and gulls eggs and dries to find enough condensed fog to drink.
And waits for the full moon to HOWL for a companion.
Maybe Bernie Krause made the same mistake we all do. Maybe that fellow wasn’t looking for a mate. Maybe he was just looking for SOMEONE.
This year marked Jon and my 40th anniversary.. To celebrate I thought I’d commission the talented Joan White of Wisconsin to recreate my favorite photo from beloved local photographer Rusty Cohn, He captured in Napa what I believe is the perfect moment of beaver pair bonding.
Thanks Joan, And Rusty.
