mthew
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Didelphis virginiana
How sad to run across an opossum stiff with death and cold. This one was the size of a very large cat. I hope he or she was a great fount of progeny. The tail is finely haired. Magnificent and remarkable creatures with bad press. They snarl when cornered, they’re vicious in a cage. But…
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Superb Owl Sunday
The Blue Jays bought me here. This was a sighting in late September. In October, I found a single Great Horned Owl feather, its down all entangled so that it flew like a flag. Imagine, at night, the silent sweep of one of these large birds while the traffic grunts and vomits a few hundred…
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Homero Gómez González
At home, the oligarchs poison us slowly, with more shit in the food supply, more sewage in the waterways, more pollution in the air, water, and soil. Trump and his monstrous allies stand for profits over people, very much at the expense of our lives. (Their cultists, the Fascist Fifth of the population, are seemingly…
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Too Soon
*** By the title, I originally meant that these warm winters are disrupting phenology. But the news keeps crashing in. Republicans have made overt their war on our democracy. Their actions are most strongly felt at the border, where uniformed goons separate men and women, families from children, not unlike the Gestapo or SS. What…
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More Bits, More Pieces
Eumenes wasp mud nest pots. There were a dozen of these mantid egg cases in this patch of Rhus aromatica, the same spot I found the mud nests in. If there were sheep about, I say this was a bit of wool with a medium-sized marble in it. I am, however, hoping it’s some insect…
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Bits and Pieces
Jawbones. On iNaturalist, someone thinks these are Brown Rat. The coin is an inch in diameter. Same coin, different jaw. I pulled out the incisor: rodent teeth keep growing. 6mm long claws extracted from a pellet. Owls swallow everything. I’ve seen our local American Kestrels choked down the entire legs of their bird prey, talons…
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Raptor Wednesday
Squirrels and Blue Jays were in an uproar about this young Red-tailed Hawk. And when this mature Cooper’s Hawk landed briefly on the other side of the same tree, the mammal-avian alarms went haywire. Since I’d used a tree as a blind to get closer for the shots of the Red-tail, I couldn’t see what…
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Catalpa
Hey, wait a minuted! It turns out I’d never seen a catalpa seed before. The pods, sure, all the time, but always already empty. Both the Northern and Southern catalpas are found in our region. They also hybridize. And there are a number of other species in the Catalpa genus that have gotten around as…
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Monday Galls
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres… At the tips of a young oak, small round nestled in filamenty nests. Galls (not Gauls, pace Casesar) with exit holes. Big question in the wonderful world of galls is: what emerged, the gall inducer or the inquiline (parasite)? Not just on the bud tips. Possibly something in…
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Whale Ho
I came across some research that showed a Bombus bumblebee species whose members got physically smaller in competition with the commercial livestock that are honey bees. I was reminded of this when I read Richard J. King‘s reference to the shrinkage in the size of whales killed between 1900 and 1986, when the international moratorium…
Backyard and Beyond 