I cross Little Chico Creek on Park Ave. about every day across from the Sicilian Cafe (eat there; they're fantastic). I make a point of checking in with this little fifteen-foot reach of the creek as a sort of informal pulse-taking. Not only does it seem like there's more water later in the summer than there has been for a while; but when I stopped to check out the wee fishes that I'd noticed earlier in the week (what are they? Trout? Like I should know)...I also espied two fat pollywogs who looked to be in the last push of their transmogrification. Fat bullets of future froghood with burly eel-tails, they did their little future frog thing, grubbing and shimmying and generally being OK with high visibility--if I could see them from the bridge, they were Out and Proud.
And then I saw something wonderful: in the creekmuck and vegetal dinge that flourished in this uncharacteristically warm and wet summer, I saw flicks of movement. One, two, twenty wriggling pollywogs burrowing into this sheltering furze like birds in a stand of blackberries. In that ripe moment it seemed like the creek bed was totally moving and alive with creatures engaged in the business of transformation, just under the skin of what I could see from the bridge.
I think this is unusual on a short timeline; certainly pollywogs in the creeks are a historical certitude, but what with the constant suck of water out of our hydrologic region it may be (becoming) something of a crap shoot. I also read on Big Chico Creek Watershed Alliance's home page http://www.bigchicocreek.org/that Chinook salmon were spotted in BCC near one of the campus bridges. Awesome, awesome, awesome!!
Life--it's excellent.http://www.reverbnation.com/artist/song_details/5538676
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