Sacked out

Male red kangaroo, LA Zoo.

Walter the squirrel

We have this squirrel that lives around our house. He's kind of a doofus. It's a good thing this is a predator-free environment, sometimes he makes enough racket in the trees that you'd think a couple of sasquatchi were getting it on. I call him Walter, in honor of Walter Sobchak. He's fat, noisy, but basically harmless, and if that isn't enough to earn the name, check this out:


He's also curious and if I'm out and about sometimes he'll just plunk down and watch me. Which affords me the opportunity to practice digiscoping if the birds aren't cooperating--which, lately, they ain't been.


Last Sunday afternoon, he was up on top of the telephone pole next to the driveway, chittering away at me in between breaks to groom his fur and--I am not making this up--scratch his pits. I hauled out my little scope and started snapping.


The lowest useful magnification my scope will do is 30x. To get this last shot, I had to open the gate to the back yard and go all the way to the end of the property just to get a wide enough field of view. That's a good problem to have.

Rocket, man

London is totally into rockets and space right now. Like, he knows more about the US manned space program than I did two months ago. For Halloween he wanted to be a rocket. And not just any rocket, but specifically the Mercury Redstone. And he was _adamant_. I admit to trying to deflect him onto a path that would be simpler (for me), but he stuck to his guns.

Thank goodness for posterboard and black duct tape.

Oklahoma tetrapods

This one's for Darren. The poor guy is working on at least two books, several technical papers, and keeping up two blogs, not to mention being a husband and father with an infant to take care of.

So here are some tetrapods for ya, Darren, from my recent vacation to Oklahoma. I think we've seen that my skillz at identifying non-sauropods are definitely sub-1337, but I will do my manful best. Everything is arranged in accordance with the Great Chain of Being, of course.

I reckon, given the brown coloration, the light spot on the eardrum, and the north-central Oklahoma locality, that this is a Plains Leopard Frog, Rana blairi. I can say for certain that it was too fast for me to catch.


Bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana. We saw this dude sunning himself every day.


The same, or at least a very similar, frog on a different day.


A juvenile watersnake in the genus Nerodia, but no tellin' what species. Note cow poop for scale.


Shed skin of an unidentified serpent.


My brother and I were walking along the creek near the house when we spotted this subadult raccoon, Procyon lotor, moving upstream.


It didn't seem unduly exercised by our presence, so we tailed it for thirty yards or so until it disappeared into some brush.


Nearby we found this skeletonized paw from a nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus.


Also this mostly skeletonized bobcat, Lynx rufus. I boiled and peroxided the skull and it is now sitting on my desk at work, distracting people who come by to give me more work. One of the ribs was broken and healed.

At last we come to the pinnacle of evolution, the saurischians.


A Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula. This one was in the top of a tree at my in-laws' place in Oklahoma City. Interesting bird to watch but irritating to listen to; it sounded as if it had eaten a squeaky wheel and dying cat and was trying to vomit them both out at the same time.


A red-winged blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus. The wheat fields around my parents' place were full of these things.


Arf. I saved the best and worst for last. Best because this was the toughest photo of the bunch, and therefore the most satisfying. Worst, because I am probably going to choke on the ID. But here goes anyway. At first I was thinking that that the beak was too thick for it to be anything other than a finch. But further reflection (i.e., randomly thumbing through Sibley's) suggests another, more likely alternative: a Dickcissel, Spiza americana.

That's all I got. Coming soon: selected tetrapods from the LA Zoo.

The ratite clearing house post

Darren's post on my emu dissection pictures inspired me to bring all of my ratite blogging together in one place, for the convenience and edification of all.


There's the original emu dissection post and and the immediately subsequent rhea dissection posts (two links). Note the striking difference between the comparatively large, normally-folding wings of the smaller rhea (below) and the silly twig-wings of the much larger emu (above).


Emus use their inflatable throat pouches to make booming calls. I was fortunate enough to witness this and engage in a bout of reciprocal burping with an emu at the Merced zoo, which I covered here.


Later on I posted briefly about kiwis. Also, people loved the gross photos enough that I felt compelled to share pix from dissecting a hyena, which is not a ratite but also flightless and still pretty cool.


Finally, I bought together my biological and then-nascent astronomical obsessions and turned some of the emu gore into a planet.

If you find anything dead, or get to cut something up, or have some other cool interaction with the natural world, post it and tell the world!

Theropods of Claremont, or, learning ornithology in front of a live audience

Every day between about 5:30 and 6:30 PM I have no scheduled obligations, my driveway is out of direct sunlight and there are lots of birds about. And, as luck would have it, I have a small Maksutov-Cassegrain which functions as telescope by night and a spotting scope by day. So I started photographing birds.

I won't lie to you: this started out as basically onanism with a telescope. You know, I couldn't get what I wanted (moon, planets, etc.), but I could still get something.... But against all odds I started to get interested in who's around. I finally knocked the dust off my copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, which until the past couple of weeks had gotten about as much use as my copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare (i.e., it looked nice on the shelf, and implied erudition I don't actually possess).

This evening was particularly good; in an hour I saw and photographed five species. That's nothing by the standards of real birders, but for me it was a record. All were perched at one time or another in the top branches of a tree three houses down, or on the power lines at the end of the block. The tree is 70 yards from my driveway, and the power lines are a bit farther. I took all the photos with an Orion Apex 90 scope, Orion Sirius Plossl 25mm eyepiece yeilding 50x, and a handheld Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. Many thanks to Alan Shabel for help with the identifications. Here they are:


A Northern Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. One of several in the neighborhood. I see them mainly when they come perch in the top of the target tree and scare off my intended quarry (see below).


A Band-Tailed Pigeon, Columba fasciata. I didn't know this was anything other than a feral Eurasian Rock Dove (i.e., regular pigeon) until I checked Sibley's. A strikingly beautiful animal, for a pigeon. I've seen these before, and just didn't know what I was seeing.


An Acorn Woodpecker, Melanerpes formicivorus. Today was the first time I'd actually seen one of these things around here, or ever identified a woodpecker to species. He spent quite a while tearing up our municipal infrastructure. Maybe I can score some stimulus bling for something called woodpecker monitoring.


Oh, now this little fartskin was a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Didn't even sit still long enough for me to get the scope properly focused. Wham, bam, what the hell was that? I think, based on the reddish throat and face and black-and-white striped breast, that this is a Red-Throated Pipit, Anthus cervinus House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus (thanks to Neil for the save, and for making my secondary title even more appropriate). But for all I know it might be a Rosy-Bummed Sky Kiwi or a Uruguayan Yaksucker, neither of which are covered by Sibley's. Perhaps I got the expurgated edition.


Those are all great birds, but the one that got me into this crazy pursuit is this little fellow, this particular individual, a male Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, whom I spotted a couple of weeks ago buzzing about like a tiny helicopter or a slightly-larger-than-average bumblebee. Belying his clade's reputation, he does sit still from time to time, almost always on this exact spot on this exact branch of the same exact tree three houses down. You'd think that regularity of habit would make him easy to photograph. But he has a couple of traits that I'd never read about which make him a frustrating target. First, he's psychic; if I raise the camera to the eyepiece or, heaven forfend, call someone over for a look, he's gone. Sometimes for the rest of the day. Second, he's happy to show me his iridescent green back all day, but only rarely will he turn around and flash the iridescent red feathers that cover his face and neck.


Finally, finally today I got this shot. This is the same bird as in the shot above, about two minutes later. When the sunlight catches those feathers, the effect is unbelievable. One look at that and you might start to understand why a grown man would spend an hour every evening looking through a thermos-sized telescope at a thumb-sized bird half a block away. But when he turns around, away from the late afternoon sun, the effect is lost, and the feathers are a flat dark red, a bit like dried blood.


And like that, poof, he's gone.

Starscaping

Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.


In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!