At this point, I'm still not sure what form the final product will take. My group and I are still very much in the initial stages of planning and examining different ideas. Last Thursday we decided to head on over to the Glen Canyon Park area of Islais Creek to check out the things that we had talked about in class and do some observations; namely looking out for wildlife and any possible children walking through the park. Our walk began on the Elk Street entrance to the park and we decided to just go from there.
Just as before, the first things that I took notice of were animals. Again I saw a large number of birds and dogs. We also noticed that the day care center was open and that there were a lot of young children running around playing, screaming and laughing. As we continued down the path, something in the middle of it caught my eye... a dead mouse. When I pointed it out to my group members they were surprised to see something like that lying in the middle of the path and were curious to try to determine what killed it. Moments before while waiting for my group members, I had seen two hawks flying right above that section of the path (maybe they were fighting?) and had tried to take a video but only caught a couple of seconds of them before they flew out of range. Could there be a connection?
One interesting thing that really came to our attention while making our way through the paths (after having noticed the mouse) was the network of mazes created all the living things in the park. I first noticed that there were mice and gophers running through the grass and into holes all throughout the hills. We talked to a guy walking his 3 small dogs and he said that he had noticed a lot more of them in the last year. Suddenly I had the realization that their little mazes formed a community, much like the different communities of the city. Also, everything seemed to come into contact with the creek; a necessary part of life. Whereas we humans have seemed to forget and bypass the creek, the wildlife still communes and survives off of it; its still an important part of life.
Once this connection was made, I realized that just about everything creates a maze in the park... tree branches, the different paths, gopher and mouse holes, and even us when we map out our tracks on the GPS. I feel that this could be an interesting thing to examine... each one of us take a different subject and examine how a path or maze is created in all different manners around the creek. We already found out how easy it was to get lost in the jungle of plants and paths around the creek, as one little detour took us up to SOTA, then to a clearing with chairs, then to several dead ends all of which required us to climb over tree limbs and plants.
Basically, the idea of creek as the epicenter of all the life (human, plant and animal) is becoming our thesis.
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