Keep Your Day Job
When he’s not busy being the big boss at Stacey’s at Waterford in Dublin, drawing his popular weekly Dilbert comic strip poking fun at cubicle culture, presiding over his multimillion dollar Dilbert empire, or blogging about everything from Pakistan to the state of humor in America, author and entrepreneur Scott Adams is pumping up his new book, “Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!”

“My blog inspired it,” Adams says, adding that the book gave him the freedom to tackle a broader range of topics and he doesn’t have to be politically correct. “Stick To Drawing Comics” is a collection of his amusing musings on offbeat topics such as toothpaste smuggling and a dose of advice on things like how to appear smarter than you are. Take a virtual tour of the book on Second Life, and check out Scott Adams’ blog at www.dilbertblog.typepad.com/ The cartoonist lives near his restaurantin Dublin with his wife, Shelley, and fam-ily, but hopes to build a new home inPleasanton if he persuades the neighborto let him. (That is another story.)Next on the agenda for Adams is the upcoming 20th anniversary of Dilbert, one of America’s most beloved cartoon characters. The strip appears in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages. Stay tuned for word on what’s on the drawing board to mark that milestone.

Smile Bella!
Sneak a peek at Bella, Dublin’s resident Golden Eagle, on the city’s solar-powered Eagle Cam now through June when breeding season ends.

“The resident pair start preparing the nest in December. She typically lays about the third week of January,” says Colleen Lenihan, a raptor biologist at H.T.Harvey & Associates who keeps tabs on Bella. “They haven’t taken a year off. She is one of the most successful females in this whole population.”

Lenihan says there is a large nesting population in the Livermore area, too, and elsewhere in the East Bay, but development is slowly trimming their numbers. “It is one of the highest density areas for Golden Eagles,” she adds. “Their behavior started to change last year… they changed their perch sites so they weren’t staring at the development. Their activity is shifting away from the development area. To help them, we’ve planned some good insurance policies…. We have put up a couple of nest platforms further away from the developed area.”

Bella isn’t what Lenihan calls the shy raptor. “I don’t usually name them. But I call her Polly instead of (Bella) because she had two husbands for three years. One was 007. That’s called cooperative polyandry… and it’s pretty rare. Her first husband likely died. Now she only has the second husband.”

Consultants conducting an environmental review for the Dublin Ranch project discovered Bella’s nest years ago. The city quickly established a Golden Eagle view-shed buffer zone between private open space and development to preserve the habitat of the species. Since then, Bella has successfully fledged one to three young almost every year. In 1994 the city put in a webcam to give the public a bird’s eye view. Visit www.ci.dublin.ca.us