More iSight video silliness, but only about 24 seconds long. Hey, there’s a cat at the end, don’t complain:
Articles in category 'Animals'
I mean that in a good way, of course, and I’m talking about piñon jays like the ones below.
They sure look healthy, don’t they?
They usually travel in big flocks of several dozen or more. If they land at your bird feeder, look out — it can get like those old wildlife films of vultures descending on a zebra carcass. But they’re really very shy. The slightest movement send them off in a roar. For some reason, I’ve always liked these birds. They just make me feel good. It helpls that they’re shy, because I feel I’ve been rewarded when they show up. This wouldn’t happen if we didn’t live on the edge of the wide open spaces, either, because these birds don’t generally show up in town.
The reason I call them “high desert seagulls,” however, is for the “kee-kee” sound they make in flight. It does sound eerily like seagulls flying over the harbor.
Here’s something a little different to get you going today. I found this at one of my favorite weird Web sites, EnglishRussia.com [linked in sidebar], a Russian photo-blog that always has something seriously unsettling to offer. They’re calling this a “prehistoric fish,” and it does look out of time, but what the hell is it?
That is not a horseshoe crab
The above creature turned up in a deep construction ditch filled with water from “an underground river” in a place called Chelyabinsk. The thing is (supposedly) five feet long and the photos clearly show a thrashing tail. There’s a strong resemblance to a horseshoe crab here, obviously, except for the muscular tail. If anybody knows what this is, please leave a clue in the comments.
(Here’s what modern horseshoe crabs and their extinct relatives look like. It isn’t any of these…)
UPDATE: I didn’t get around to googling “Chelyabinsk,” but one of my commenters did: it may be the most radioactively contaminated place on earth! The people who say that resembles a certain two-inch shrimp and the “five feet long” guys may both be right.
He sleeps this way all the time. No, I haven’t tried it. Would you?
In the middle of the day, too
Egad! I just saw wet snowflakes blowing past the kitchen window. Maybe he’s not such an idiot after all.
The animals always interrupt, thank God.
Outside the kitchen window hangs a cheap bird feeder on a string. I filled it for the first time this season just last week with sunflower seeds that cost double what they did last year. The scrub jays don’t appear to care, but then they’re probably dizzy: the feeder is too small for them, and when they land or fly away, it spins crazily like a wobbly merry-go-round. The chickadees hang on but look confused. At the other end of the house, afternoon sunlight reflecting off the rotating feeder flashes like a strobe on the plastered adobe wall above my desk.
On the dusty, bumpy half-mile-long ride from the end of the pavement to our home out here in Llano, we always pass a rambling, ramshackle homestead sort of place on the north side of the road. A couple of the corrals are to the road, so we often see animals. Yesterday’s sighting featured a couple of horses, about two dozen sheep, and several goats all in the big corral together. Quite the sight. Occasionally we encounter a fellow on a horse herding the sheep and goats up the mesa with the help of a couple of little dogs. Some of the animals wear bells, and you can hear the clinking and clonking as they go by. Just gazing on the critters makes me feel a little more complete, resonating as it does with thousands of years of humankind looking after the animals — no, of conscious relationship with animals, nature, and the entire cosmos. It’s good to see these things. There aren’t many places left in America where you have to wait while a herd of sheep goes by, either.
That much at least is real and relevant, like my garden would have been if not for all the ‘hoppers, but the rest of this man’s life here in el Norte seems as paralyzed as it would be anywhere else.
* * *
I haven’t been able to write for months, not really write, the kind of stuff that gives me goose bumps. This isn’t “writer’s block,” though. Maybe I caught the planetary disease, the imagination-eating darkness that passes for reality and educated thought. It’s like we’re all in here together, only someone dimmed the lights, and now we have to punch our way outside and wait for sunrise.
Things haven’t always been this way. In the turbulent years of my youth, there was revolution and opportunity. You felt it in the air. Materially speaking, life was easier, facilitating taking risks: when I was a graduate student in ‘67-‘68, I supported a wife and myself on $150 a month. Tuition was $50 a semester, and married student housing was $18 per month. A visit to the doctor cost $5. My biggest expense was the $36 monthly payment for the new Volkswagen. When I started teaching at a junior college, my salary was less than $600 per month. Travel was cheap, and Motel 6’s cost $6. You could buy a house, but why bother? We rented a wonderful one for $75 (expensive at the time), had anything we wanted, and money piled up in the checking account — we couldn’t spend it fast enough.
Post-Vietnam inflation killed all that like a slowly clenching fist. But while a symptom, living standards aren’t the point, a fearless sense of freedom is. We had it once, and now it’s gone. Or so it seems.
* * *
Meanwhile back in Llano Quemado, without a moon, the hillside where we live is far enough away from town that we can see the Milky Way galaxy stretch from horizon to horizon. The other night I stood outside and tried to take it in: impossible, of course — the awesomeness is just too great to comprehend and takes us in. Standing there, I located the dark area near the middle, actually an immense dark cloud of gases at the galaxy’s core obscuring the stars spiraling in toward the super-massive black hole at the precise center of it all.
On the winter solstice of December 21, 2012, the Earth and the sun will be in perfect alignment with the galactic center. Ancient Mayan teachings pinpoint the date and give it great significance as marking the end of our current cycle of history. End of the world or not, what gives me pause is that stone carvings even mention an astronomical event last known to have occurred some 26,000 years ago! One thing that does for sure, though, is nail us to the planet, right through the heart.
Thinking about this makes me giddy, and I feel love.
On the dusty, bumpy half-mile-long ride from the end of the pavement to the funky old adobe, we always pass a rambling, ramshackle homestead sort of place on the north side of the road. A couple of the corrals are close to the road, so we often see animals. Today’s sighting featured a couple of horses, about two dozen sheep, and several goats all in the big corral together. Quite the sight. Occasionally we encounter a fellow on a horse herding the sheep and goats up the mesa with the help of a couple of little dogs. Some of the animals wear bells, and you can hear the clinking and clonking as they go by.
It’s good to see these things (there aren’t too many places in town where you have to wait while a herd of sheep go by, either). Just gazing on the critters makes me feel a little more complete. It resonates with thousands of years of humankind looking after the animals — no, of conscious relationship with animals, nature, and the whole damn thing.
I just found this great page for all kinds of astronomical data from the United States Naval Observatory and added it to the sidebar. What a fantastic reference! There’s even a daily photo of the moon, which I find damn practical and potentially life-altering. The moon is dependable, like God. It punctuates its phases with recognizable icons (circle, half-circle, crescent, nothing). There aren’t short moons (lunations) and long moons, all moons are the same (28 days + a couple heartbeats). You can take that to the bank. Your children can take it to the bank. Your childrens’ children can take it to the bank. In the forever department, this is about as good as it gets for us humans, yet I’ll wager the vast majority of people in the northern hemisphere went to bed tonight without either seeing the moon or knowing which phase it was in.
That’s why the more I think about how stupid our calendar is, the madder I get: a mangy, cobwebby net of barely-recognized pagan gods and old astrology in 12 sections stretched awkwardly over an honest orbit of the sun with 13 lunar cycles. One of these is arbitrary, irregular, recent, and beset upon by priests; the other effectively delivered from up on high for all eternity. You know the one we picked.
No wonder we’re all screwed up. Human beings have walked the earth for maybe a million years, and for all but the last thousand or two, we pivoted around the stars. We knew the moons and what each one meant. Our clocks were plugged in. Now, who even cares? Meanwhile, the living world goes on and on as if nothing had happened, and why shouldn’t it? After all, we’re the only ones out of sync. Is it any wonder we don’t recognize our mother?
On a deserted mesa dirt track just up from where I live, I saw something that I may never see again. It’s where I always go to walk, up to a certain overlook and then back down, with the mountains and a 90-mile view in front of me. Today, though, the miracle was at my feet.
I’d decided not to take my camera for a change. Its absence would at least provoke a bear sighting, I thought. But I’ve seen bears, so maybe something radical. Something outrageously special. And all because I’d left the camera at home. Boy, was I right.
About halfway up the hill, something wriggled in the road 20 feet head, then got still. As I came up on it, it wriggled again: a horned toad trying to get traction in the fine brown sand! But what was wrong with its right hind leg? My God, there was a baby horned toad riding on its mother’s (?) back! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The two lizards stayed frozen while I squatted down beside them, and then I saw a second baby in the dust behind the first two. The baby on its mother’s back was spotted like she was, while this one matched the color and the texture of ground it sat on. The mimicry was utterly perfect. The late afternoon sun illuminated the camoflaged tableau with golden yellow light. My camera, if I’d had it, would have been 18 inches from the horned toad family, who stayed holding their position until I stood up. It would have been a photo to end all photos.
I got to see lots of horned toads in Abilene. I learned how to pick them up, lightly scratch their bellies, and put them to sleep. In junior high school, we’d anesthetize a couple and lay them on their backs inside a girl’s desk before study hall. After a few minutes (after the desk was occupied), the lizards would wake up and start to skitter around. The resulting scream when the desktop was opened was always worth the trouble.
But never have I seen baby horned toads, much less one riding on its mother’s back. (I didn’t know they did that.) As I stood up, the critters acted restless but pretty much stayed put. They were in the middle of a path where a passing ATV could hurt them, so I tried to shoo them across the road with my cap. This almost worked, except that each one took off in a different direction: the mother shook off her rider and scooted across the road, one miniature dragon ran between my legs, and the other one decided to finish my hike for me.
Ignoring the mother, who hadn’t gone far, I quickly captured the two little ones, who were amazingly stupid and practically ran into my hands. I walked back to where the mother sat and laid the itty-bitty horned babies less than two feet away, then hurried out of sight. If they can’t get back together after that, it’s their fault, I told myself. But mostly I was just stunned by the privilege I’d been granted.
I’ve been walking this earth for an awfully long time, staring down at the creatures by my feet, and I can count the horned toad sightings since my teenage days in West Texas on the fingers of one hand. But babies besides, and camoflaging themselves to boot. Up close, in perfect lighting, and me with no camera so I’d pay attention.
We took a ride on the Cumbres & Toltec Railway on Friday. About 10 miles from Taos on the way back from Chama, we saw two llamas with a baby in a field beside the highway, maybe 60 or 70 yards away. The adults were trying to butt a coyote that kept jumping and snapping at the little one. I stopped the car and got out to yell at the coyote, who saw me right away and moved off a little distance. The longer I stood there, the farther away he walked, a little at a time, with backward glances over his shoulder. The llamas didn’t seem all that excited. This kind of thing must happen all the time out in the boonies.
For some reason, I didn’t take a picture. That’s the way it often is in real life.
I was sitting in this same chair late the other night. I’m always in this chair (God bless laptops).
Looking down at some small movement on the rug, I saw what I thought was a cricket slowly walk out of sight around the cofffee table. Maybe I should get up and kill it, I thought. Crickets chew on things, don’t they? — or else hide in corners and make a racket. I wouldn’t want to have to get up out of bed and find the bastard like I’ve done more than once in my life. But I didn’t want to get up then, either, so I let him go.
A few minutes later the “cricket” came back, inching toward me rather recklessly, I thought, because he wasn’t giving me a choice. This time I did get up, walked to the kitchen where I tore off a small piece of paper towel to keep the bug-goo off my fingers while I crushed the bugger, and came back to my chair. When I bent down to do the deed, I gasped: in the dim, shadowy light between the coffee table and the sofa crawled not a cricket but a FROG! A tree frog, of course, slightly longer than my thumbnail. A beautiful light tan color with dark brown eyes, he let me pick him up without a struggle.
While not as physically entertaining as the flying squirrel trapped inside our basement back in Maryland, the little frog was much more god-like and miraculous: there had to be such creatures here, though I’d never seen one. Back East, sure, especially after a heavy thunderstorm that knocked them from their leafy perches, but not in a semi-arid region above 7,000 feet.
I set him down outside among the leaves inside the planter barrel just outside the door. it was raining intermittently, spitting just a little. Maybe he’ll be okay there for the night, I reassured myself, disappointed that I had to break off the relationship.
A frog, man. No bigger than a lima bean, right here in front of me, in my own house. An adobe house in New Mexico. Is this coming through?
