Back in Los Gatos again. I went to my old high school today to give a talk on island biogeography to two periods of AP Biology before the trip to Santa Catalina Island tomorrow. I talked to some old teachers in the Science Department, but pretty briefly. I tried to go find teachers in other departments, but part of the main building was under construction and I couldn't figure out where some of the new classrooms were because the campus maps were all out of date. I ended up buying a school-grown pumpkin to carve for Halloween. Apparently the Science Club is still going strong, and has been taking a lot of field trips to Silicon Valley companies, which is good to hear.

Yesterday there was a talk about Joseph Grinnell, a great naturalist who was director of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1908 through 1939. Grinnell was a meticulous note-taker, so much so that his journals from surveys all over California are being used as a baseline for the Grinnell Project, an ambitious Berkeley-based collaboration to study how much Californian ecosystems and wildlife distributions have changed in the past hundred years. The hope is that there will then be a third survey a hundred years from now, but already they are finding some marked declines in the abundance of certain bird species in Yosemite, for example.

A crow just landed in our fig tree and flew off with a ripe fig. Down by the high school, the blue elderberries were ripe, and the willow leaves were covered in small granular insect galls. I heard that it looks as though Sudden Oak Death will soon spread to the South Bay, and people with oaks on their property are worried.