My Life Flows On

Fall is here. Equinox was yesterday. The nights are cool now.

aristeros and I were heading out shopping last week when we saw two deer, a mother and fawn, run away from somebody's front lawn. This morning while walking the dog, I saw a [presumably wild] pig in the grassy area beyond the houses. The dog didn't seem to notice. Maybe I should bring a camera on these walks.

Our hummingbird feeder is visited by finches and woodpeckers. I don't think the finches can get anything out of it, but the woodpeckers certainly can. I bought a pound of sugar at the grocery last week; we'll see how fast that gets used up between woodpeckers, bats and hummingbirds!

Also, last Sunday aristeros and I watched people catch, take measurements of, and band hummingbirds. We each got to hold one when it was time to release it. I could feel its pulse against the palm of my hand.

When I exited the house this morning to begin walking the dog, I was excited to find a sphinx moth or hawk moth taking breakfast from the lobelias or whatever those red flowers are in our back yard border.

I can see how these insects would be mistaken for hummingbirds. The size and general body shape are about the same, they hover to feed rather than perching, and their wings move so fast they're a blur. The eyes looked small, not like huge bug eyes, although that may just have been some kind of weird pale and dark color pattern. I had to watch for several seconds to assure myself that it was not in fact a hummingbird, but the antennae and the fact that it curled its proboscis when it paused feeding were giveaways. I could kind of see the pattern on the wings, striped forewings and pinkish hindwings, and I think it may have been the same kind of moth that I noticed on the outside wall of our hotel at the last place, right before we moved:
(picture taken with crappy phone camera)

After staring for a minute, I moved toward the door to get a camera from inside, but the moth flew away. Still, that was a cool way to start the day!

About the hummingbirds: they've been at the feeder all morning. At one point, one was perched and feeding while a second one chased away a third. There has been much squabbling. An angry hummingbird is one of the funnier, and cuter, animals I've witnessed.

We've noticed a lot more insect life here than at the last place we lived. Beetles, ants, moths, flies — an annoying number of the latter two enter the house, but I don't want to spray poison around in case I end up breathing it or swallowing it.

Here's a more unusual visitor we observed last Friday evening: a stick insect on the outside of our patio wall.
( photo )

And, our rose bush with more flowers than in the last picture I posted.
( photo )

(cross-posted to urban_nature)
Last week, on returning from dinner out, we found a big hunting spider in the garage, next to the door to the house.

( spider #1 )

Two days later, I found a big hunting spider in the bathroom closet. My husband thought it was the same spider, but I thought the one in the garage was bigger.

( spider #2 )

At the end of the day, I trapped spider #2 in a cup and put it in the back yard. The dog followed eagerly, but I don't think he caught it.

The reasonably sized photos are linked to Flickr, where you can see huge versions for full detail.

AP: Calif. aquarium blames flooding on curious octopus

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Staff at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California say the trickster who flooded their offices with sea water was armed. Eight-armed, to be exact.

They blame the soaking they discovered Tuesday morning on the aquarium's resident two-spotted octopus, a tiny female known for being curious and gregarious with visitors. The octopus apparently tugged on a valve and that allowed hundreds of gallons of water to overflow its tank.

Aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent says no sea life was harmed by the flood, but the brand new, ecologically designed floors might be damaged by the water.

Compare with Otto, the mischievious octopus at the SeaStar aquarium in Germany (scroll down to the section in English).
Edited To Add: Here's a longer article on the incident.

---

AP: 13,000-year-old tools unearthed at Colorado home
By Alysia Patterson, Associated Press Writer

DENVER (AP) — Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people — ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists.

( more details )

What researchers found on the tools also was significant. Biochemical analysis of blood and other protein residue revealed the tools were used to butcher camels, horses, sheep and bears. That proves that the Clovis people ate more than just woolly mammoth meat for dinner, something scientists were unable to confirm before.

"A window opens up into this incredibly remote way of life that we normally can't see much of," Bamforth said.

The cache was buried 18 inches deep and was packed into a hole the size of a large shoe box. The tools were most likely wrapped in a skin that deteriorated over time, Mahaffy said.

( more details )

Only 18 inches deep! Imagine digging a hole in your yard and finding that!

The weather has been very consistent during the five weeks or so that I've been here: hot and sunny. The high temps were in the low 90s when I arrived, and have gradually moderated to the mid 80s and now the low 80s just this week. However, a day reaching 88F here does not feel like a day reaching 88F back east. The mornings are cool, in the low 60s, and the heat doesn't really start until around 11 AM. There is usually a pleasant breeze. Late in the afternoon it starts getting cooler again. Sometimes there is a brief rain shower after the sun goes down. So overall, it's not as hot as one might expect from reading the weather forecast.

On the other hand, there is no escape from the sunshine. I think I've experienced two overcast days here, and both of them were during my first week. There are no trees except those brought by people. Here on Moonbase Bravo, the residential neighborhood of the senior officers is lushly planted with mature trees, so it has as much shade as I'm used to back home. The other housing areas have fewer and smaller trees, and the areas for doing business -- office space, warehouses and the like -- have no trees or shrubs around at all. Most of the buildings are unadorned concrete boxes. In between is scruffy grass, dirt, or asphalt.

The dirt here is pale, mostly beige, more reddish in some areas. As I've mentioned, there are some modestly sized mountains a short distance to our west, only about a 15 minute drive. Horizontal stripes of various shades of beige, tan, and rust are clearly visible in the rock. There is another little mountain to the south and a few more mountains some distance off to the east, breaking up the horizon line. There aren't gentle, rolling hills leading up to the mountains as there are where I grew up, but rather more abrupt changes in the terrain, with the land being quite flat otherwise.

The landscape is not desert in the sense of bare sand dunes. There are little bushes of different kinds, grasses and weeds. All the plants that grow any higher than a foot tall seem to have spines and thorns on them. I've even seen one kind that looks like it's composed entirely of thorns. There are plenty of yuccas and prickly pear cactus growing wild. The yuccas had just finished blooming when I arrived here, and their shriveled, wilted flower stalks are still poking up, twice as tall as the rest of the plant.

We've seen bunnies around, both jackrabbits and the ordinary cottontails we're used to from back home. The jackrabbits are bigger and have noticeably longer ears and legs, and their ears are tipped with black. We haven't seen any squirrels at all. I'm guessing this is because of the lack of trees. There are grackles, which I'm familiar with from college; they act kind of like pigeons but are much more noisy. While walking in the nearby county park, we saw a flock of quail cross the road in front of us. We found a dead lizard behind the washing machine last week and haven't seen any indoors since, so perhaps that was the only one.

AP: 'Goose Whisperer' bonds with park birds - Yahoo! News

[..snippage..]
At age 23, Martin Hof has developed an unusual approach to managing urban geese populations that is gaining adherents in the animal-friendly Netherlands — the first country in the world with an animal rights party in parliament.

"It's all about respect for the geese," he says.

The main problem at the Hof van Delft and most parks is that the birds have been allowed to overbreed and are clashing with the humans whose territory they share. But rather than destroying them, Hof finds new homes for the geese, dividing them along family lines to reduce the trauma of the move.

On the other side of the equation, he works with the humans who consider the geese as either pets or pests. That means discouraging feeding the birds and educating city workers on preventing the animals from overbreeding in the first place.

[..snippage..]

Gerard Zwart of the Amsterdam's public health agency, which has hired Hof's company for several projects, says the city has been so influenced by his thinking it plans to rename its "Vermin Control Service" to the "Nature Management Service."

The cost of using Hof's service is about the same as the old eradication program, he says. A typical job of relocating 30 geese would be about $2,000-$3,000.
[..snippage..]

I think the most important point of this article is that the more humane method of controlling the geese population is just as cheap as the conventional method.

A few months ago, the large park across the street from where I work had some people with shelties or border collies (are those the same thing?) chase away the geese from the pond, and the geese stayed away for several days, but the dogs were only there for one week, and the geese are back now.

I've been neglecting to mention that it's cottonwood seeds-blowing-around season.
Informative link #1 | Informative link #2
<:)
- - -
EDIT: I'd been thinking about taking an explanatory photo at the park, but someone's done it already. See informative link #3 as referenced in the 1^st comment below.

Here's something I never thought of before.
AP: Researchers: Baking impacts Puget Sound

SEATTLE - Researchers at the University of Washington say all that holiday baking and eating has an environmental impact — Puget Sound is being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla. "Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness."

Keil and UW researcher Jacquelyn Neibauer's weekly tests of treated sewage sent into the sound from the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia showed cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla levels rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike right after Thanksgiving.

[..snip..]
So far, the research has turned up no evidence that snickerdoodles are harming sea creatures, but their research does lead to some serious environmental questions. Fish rely heavily on their sense of smell to locate food, for example, and, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream to spawn.

[..snip..]
Keil's findings present a light side of what scientists say is potentially a serious situation. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies have documented that antibiotics, contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other substances pass through the sewage system into waterways.
[..snip..]

(cross-posted to urban_nature)