Ben Sharpsteen '16

The late Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen, who directed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo, has a lesser-known credit on a bronze plaque near the UC Davis Airport: benefactor of the Antique Mechanics Club.

In 1976, the student club was able to move its antique tractor collection into new facilities—four old airplane hangars and a fenced yard—with the help of a $40,000 donation from Sharpsteen, who in 1914–16 attended what was then the University Farm.

Fast forward to 2004. Enter collection manager Victor Duraj ’91. While not an “imagineer” like Sharpsteen was, Duraj is an engineer with visions of transforming the facility into a visitor destination, part of a string of parks he would like to see created with farm and environment themes on the outlying western edge of campus.

A Sharpsteen illustration from the 1916 University Farm yearbook, Agricola.

Duraj may be wishing upon a star, but he and other club volunteers are good at seeing possibilities in other people’s cast-offs, building things from scratch and breathing new life into broken things—all on $2,500 a year in donations.

Duraj, an associate development engineer for the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, is getting students involved in his facility make-over dreams. Landscape architecture students, in a spring course taught by lecturer Cathy Wei on computer-aided design, drew up a “landscape for tractors” with gardens, a small farm, children’s play areas, picnic areas, a café and tractor exhibits with a town square motif.

Making big ideas a reality will be a challenge, acknowledges Duraj. But, he says, “You never know what will happen.”

GAME OF CHICKEN

Sports commentators had a field day after UC Davis poultry scientist Francine Bradley said San Francisco Giants fans were using the wrong symbol, rubber chickens, to insult opposing pitchers’ bravery.

Chickens are not “chicken,” Bradley says. “It’s a uniquely American preconception, and it’s an unfortunate one. I guess Americans are pretty chicken-illiterate.”

In other parts of the world, the gamecock is a symbol of aggressiveness. In Europe, the bird appears on soccer team jerseys and the label of Britain’s Courage Ale.

After Bradley publicly defended the bravery of chickens, her comments appeared on sports pages across the country, with some commentators poking fun of her. Bradley remains unflappable. “As a poultry scientist, I am not cowardly. I am happy to stand up for accuracy and for chickens.”

LOW-CARB DUCK DIET

More than 200 ducks make the UC Davis Arboretum their home. How many of our web-footed friends could live there if they ate only a natural diet of seeds, slugs and bugs—no bread or cracker crumbs?

Somewhere between 2.92 and 24 ducks, according to students in a conservation-planning course who compared the ducks’ need for food and space with what’s available in the arboretum.

For fun, wildlife biology professor John Eadie also calculated how much bread the existing duck population would need if that’s all they ate: 38 loaves a day, or more than 14,000 loaves a year.

Too many ducks causes problems for the arboretum’s plant collections, the waterway and the ducks themselves, who are more likely to get diseases like botulism. “I’m certainly not saying we should get rid of the ducks; we all love them,” Eadie says. “Rather, it’s a question of balance.”

SHINING LIGHT

Michael Siminovitch, co-director of UC Davis’ new California Lighting Technology Center, has developed a stylish lamp that is as bright as a 150-watt incandescent lamp but uses just one-fourth the energy.

Siminovitch and fellow co-director Konstantinos Papamichael both worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before coming to Davis to launch the new center. And Siminovitch’s lamp is named, fittingly enough, the Berkeley Lamp. As for future products, Siminovitch says: “Yes, the Davis lamp is high on the list.”