New book explores the wildlife that call Sonoma State University home

New book explores ‘the bestiary’ of Sonoma State

The campus of Sonoma State is not typically the kind of place where one would think to go in search of nature, particularly with so many parks and open spaces to explore in Sonoma County.

But while it sits at the far reaches of suburban Rohnert Park, it is much closer to the wilds of Sonoma Mountain. In the 61 years since ground was broken on the university, the landscaping has filled in with trees, plants and ponds and an abundance of wildlife.

The campus was built on a former seed farm, making it a blank slate for planners and designers. Only two trees — a eucalyptus and a cypress — grew on the barren 215 acres that made up the initial campus footprint. (SSU has since grown to 269 acres).

While not native, both of those trees willfully survive to this day. But over time, mature redwoods and many other trees, shrubs and plants have been planted and flourished, unfolding into a landscape as inviting to wildlife as humans.

As the students came, so did the animals, from western pond turtles and double-crested cormorants, to silvery gray foxes and the occasional lion or bobcat loping down from the nearby mountain.

Sonoma State was alive with human and animal life when Lakin Khan arrived to take a job as an office administrator in the math and biology departments in 2001. In the years that followed, she took respite from the hours hunched over a computer by walking the campus, taking long strolls at lunch or running campus errands on foot whenever possible.

And it was on these walks that she began noticing “the turtles basking around the ponds,” the butterflies in the butterfly garden, western gray squirrels and the abundant bird life: egrets, owls, nuthatches, goldfinches, chickadees and juncos.

Eventually she was inspired to write about what she observed in a series of columns she called “Nature’s Way” published in the employee newsletter.

They were more than field notes. Lakin drilled down. She was compelled to research the evolving campus ecosystem through guidebooks and other reference materials, and by talking to gardeners, arborists, professors and other experts.

She studied the history and the geography of the area. Lightly embroidered into each piece were personal reflections that touch on more universal understandings, as she put it, “of our behavior as humans as revealed by our relationship with nature.”

Those essays, written between 2005 and 2009, became the foundation for a new book: “Home Turf: A Bestiary of Sonoma State.”

Designed by veteran graphic designer Gary Newman and illustrated by retired SSU art professor Shane Weare, the slim volume of lyrical essays also became her thesis for a graduate degree in creative writing. (It is available at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, on Amazon.com or by emailing lakhan@sonic.net.)

“The book is more of a nature essay book about the environment, and the idea of the natural environment and the built environment being one place,” said Khan, a writer, English teacher and director of fiction for the Napa Valley Writers Conference.

It was her SSU adviser, writer Noelle Oxenhandler, who suggested “the bestiary” approach. Bestiaries are descriptive books devoted to creatures, both real and imaginary, such as the phoenix or the half-man, half-lion manticore.

Bestiaries have been around for nearly two millennia, first showing up in a Greek text known as “The Physiologus” in the second or third centuries C.E. The first phrase of that text mentioned the “Bestiarium vocabulum,” which translates to “a catalog of beasts,” according to Khan.

But bestiaries are not natural history books merely describing the physical and behavioral characteristics of animals, she said. Woven in are myths, stories and legends, observations passed down orally by people who may never have seen or heard the animal themselves.

Bestiaries by medieval times would take on a moralizing tone. For Khan however, the bestiary was a literary device to explore the 269 acres of Sonoma State and its plant and animal life. All the creatures she does encounter and write about are real.

On a recent day in late March, she spotted a Cooper’s hawk in the redwoods along the front entrance, heard a red-shouldered hawk cry overhead, encountered squirrels out by the creek and Canada geese on the President’s Lawn.

There was a bonanza for bird lovers, from mallards and oak titmice to ravens soaring overhead. And, to her delight, a former colleague beckoned her to the upper floor of the newly restored Stevenson Hall where expansive windows offered a bird’s-eye view into the branches of a redwood tree where a great horned owl was chilling out.

Other campus workers reported foxes out and about that same morning near the Green Music Center.

“Do we have to go to a park to see nature? Do we have to go out in the middle of nowhere to see nature? No. Because it’s right here,” she said. “We live right in it. I’m interested in that interface, and where we are and how nature adapts to us.”

She trains her lens on the busy animal activities taking place quietly in a sort of parallel universe to the students. She speaks of the feral cat colony that once lived on campus and how, when the cats were herded up and removed, the rats took over.

She writes about watching the interplay of wildlife, such as swallows that inhabited the eaves of Salazar (the former library).

“ The Cooper’s hawks would nest in a great oak tree by Salazar. They could just shoosh down and grab lunch,” she said.

A lifetime nature lover

Khan said it was her younger brother, Jonathan Willard, who was instrumental in helping her learn to identify birds while growing up in New York state.

“We moved around a lot because my dad worked for a power company — all through New York state,” said Khan, who lived in Sonoma County for many years before moving to Marin.

”The one constant was we had a place north of the Adirondacks. We would spend the summer there. There was no TV. No electronic anything. We swam all the time and walked around the woods. You learn to be around creatures and birds. I wasn’t good at identifying … but we did learn if you sat still long enough with a peanut in your hand a chipmunk would come and get it.“

A younger brother attuned to nature’s rhythms taught her to identify the animal inhabitants of the Great North Woods.

“Any walk with him is punctuated by stopping to look or listen to a bird,” she said, “usually with an identification, even as a youngster.”

She also found a kindred spirit in Weare, who taught printmaking during 30 years on the SSU faculty and whose artist wife, Sally Weare, is a member of Khan’s longtime writing group, which also encouraged her to publish her naturalist essays.

“When Lakin asked me to do the illustrations, I didn’t hesitate because we were in harmony, the moment we were friends,” said the 86-year-old artist, who also has been a keen observer of nature going back to his youth growing up in rural Cornwall and Hampshire in England.

“We had the campus in common and an interest in the campus,” Khan said of her collaboration with the artist. “We would take walks on the campus. It was like buddy walking. We were always pointing out the same thing, and talking about birds and plants. Shane knows a lot about animals and plants.”

Khan writes fondly about the wild barn owls that took up residence in the high corners of the inner courtyard of Stevenson, who would gobble up the rodents and leave their castings — the indigestible bones and fur — scattered along the edges of the quad.

Since the buildings’ recent makeover, which involved enclosing the quad into an atrium for students to gather, Khan wonders what befell the owls that used to live there.

There are many places to spot wildlife.

She became intrigued by the western pond turtles, whose natural habitats are under threat, and the ubiquitous red-eared sliders, released pets that have become invasive, that sun on the pond.

And there is the Butterfly Garden, created 30 years ago by SSU’s lead gardener Karen Tillinghast and several students and adopted by the Santa Rosa Garden Club. It is more than a collection of nectar-rich flowers, but an ecosystem, she discovered, fed by the nearby creek.

In Khan’s bestiary, she finds a metaphor between “the web” of the butterfly garden, as Tillinghast called it, and a college campus, which provides “the social, intellectual and physical nutrients in proximity” to students, many only recently emerged from adolescence and in need of a safe and supportive environment.

Khan said she is working on developing some Walking the Campus workshops or tours in the near future, to share with others the discoveries she made over many years looking up and looking down and noticing what others may have missed.

Staff writer Meg McConahey can be reached at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5204.