Gnomes of Oakland Go for a Ride

Giddyup! This is one of the Gnomes of Oakland riding on the Willie the Terrier. The Gnomes have short legs and can't run very fast so they have hired Willie to carry them around the Lake Merritt area when they travel under the cover of night. They like to stay close to the lake where they can gather clover, fresh water and some of the nicest twigs and paper scraps in town. During the day you can sometimes catch them resting on the telephone poles, which are not only their bus stops for Willie but also their preferred perches for keeping watch over the neighborhood. 

Length of guinea fowl feather: 2 1/2"

Day 78: The Gnomes of Oakland

For the past several months, four-inch-tall painted gnomes have been mysteriously appearing, bolted to the bottom of telephone poles, in the Cleveland Heights neighborhood of Oakland, CA.  Several bloggers who live there have noticed it and none of them knows who is doing it. The blog The Fairy Room has been documenting the phenomenon with lots of good photos and detailed descriptions. Check out their article and the photo album collected by David Colburn.

To honor this infestation of little friends of the forest (...well, urban jungle in this case, seeing as they are roosting in the heart of Oakland), I am posting several of my garden gnomes that I painted back in April.

Average length of feather: 1" to 2"

2/1/13 UPDATE: The Gnomes of Oakland are making national news (which you likely know if you are reading this blog post today). See my other post on the Oakland Gnomes and Google them. They have recently been covered by major news providers such as NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC. They have won a fight with the phone company and are not being evicted from their telephone pole nests. It's a great story.