Category Archives: creatures

Marabunta!

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My friendly neighborhood spidey-librarian got me a copy of Six Legs Better – a book I’ve been interested in reading since Pluvialis pointed me at Charlotte Sleigh in a comment she made. I’m only 60 or so pages into it, but so far it’s really interesting – an examination of how the study of ants has linked back to larger topics in science and society. A nice middle ground between faux-Kuhnian relativism and ivory tower idealized science (Pluvi – what’s the right word for the latter?):

The scientists and naturalists discussed in this book studied ants for their own sake, and often did so with remarkable passion. They did not merely adopt ants instrumentally as vehicles for social and political agendas. Yet neither could they step outside the cultural frames within which they operated. In each case there was a two-way traffic between science and broader culture, with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition.*

To go along with the reading, I moved The Naked Jungle to the top of my Netflix queue. I gotta admit – all I remembered of the movie (from a Saturday morning creature feature long ago) were the !attack of the marabunta! scenes – turns out the movie is mostly about Christopher Leiningen’s psycho-sexual confusion regarding his mail-order bride. I can’t decide what the right frame is to put around Chuck Heston’s scenery-chewing – 50’s? Turn of the century? 1954’s idea of 1901? Or how it looks from where I sit right now? I couldn’t for the life of me move out of my right-here-right-now reaction to Leiningen’s problem – in a phrase, what a douchebag. Leiningen freaks when he finds out that his talented, pleasant and very attractive new wife is a widow – yes kids, another man has already had carnival knowledge of her. This is an especially serious issue because Leiningen is a virgin. I guess he has some 1st time performance concerns. Pinhead. I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Costello recently – Mystery Dance fits, but I really like these two bits from Two Little Hitlers:

You call selective dating
For some effective mating

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You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than

But, of course, the ants (standing in for the rainforest/Ma Nature) are held off, and Joanna Leiningen’s bravery wins her husbands heart. Yay!

Went off to the Manchvegas herp show on Saturday to pick up various and sundry food items. Andy the phasmid guy was there and had some young Macleay’s Spectres (Extatosoma tiaratum) – I couldn’t resist. I’ll post some pix when she’s a little bigger. In reading up on their natural history, I was semi-surprised to find a commensal relationship with – you got it – ants:

The outside material of E. tiaratum eggs consists of lipids and other organic compounds that ants identify as food. They carry these eggs to their colony, consume the edible outer portion, and dump the intact eggs into their waste piles.

Newly-hatched E. tiaratum nymphs are ant mimics and resemble the insects in whose nest they are born. Their aposematic pattern — orange head, white collar, the rest black — mimics the ant genus Leptomyrmex and makes them appear toxic. Although most adult stick insects are notoriously slow, these nymphs are speedy, active, and quickly make their way to the trees.*

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Last, but not least, this post over at BLDGBLOG caused me to immediately order Ant Farm: Living Archive 7(yes, I know I’m pushing it, connection-wise). It came in on Saturday – I haven’t had a chance to do more than leaf through it, but chapter/section/part III looks esp good – “Projects for a New Mobility”. Ferrocement! Inflatable structures! Media/culture jamming! Info on a current Ant Farm project here.

NAVHDA Natural Ability test

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Another busy doggy weekend. A Reader’s digest report: what were supposed to be showers yesterday turned into one long (9 AM-ish till later afternoon) shower – one might even, if one were not feeling charitable, call it a steady light rain. Luckily for those of us doing the Natural Ability test, the rain held off until after we’d finished the bird field segment. I had visions of soaking wet quail and young dogs realizing they couldn’t fly, zipping down the field and taking the quail out without a point. This time at least, no nightmare scenario. Dinah did me proud – excellent pointing, some trouble with the track  but once she solved the problem the best tracking performance I’ve seen from her yet, and big gusto in the water (I overheard one of the judges say something like “Now that’s what I want to see.”) She ended up with a Prize I – we’re going to spend the next couple weeks working on staunchness, then it’s off to find the real thing – paatridge and woodcock.

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No probem with fear of the outdoors here. A little later a plastic kiddie pool was found. These three miscreants filled it (using paper coffee cups and hands) with café au lait colored water (what my family calls ‘dog coffee’) and proceded to have a splashing contest. It was quickly discovered that sitting down hard produced a better splash than just jumping – luckily smart parents had dry clothes with them. I believe at one point – after the mud olympics were over – a couple trucks had piles of older bird dogs and children in them, snoring and steaming up the windows.

Thinking about fall

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“One should not talk to a skilled hunter about what is forbidden by the Buddha” -Hsiang-yen

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A gray fox, female, nine pounds three ounces.
39 5/8″ long with tail.
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

– Gary Snyder

(more than) A couple links

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Signor Poletti puts up a kaiju Fickrset. Worth a look or two or three (also – check out COOP’s vinyls in comments).

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Bookride runs down prices on one of my top ‘want it, but can’t afford it’ books – Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons. Sigh.

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Peacay, at the always excellent BibliOdyssey, posts one that’s right up my alley:

The book’s [Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java] author was an enigmatic character by the name of Franz Junghuhn (1809-1864). He overcame depression and a suicide attempt as a medical student, a prison sentence following a pistol duel (he escaped), and a stint in the French Foreign Legion on his path to becoming one of the foremost naturalists in 19th century Indonesia.

This  plate reminds me a bit of a much later artist – O’Keefe:

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Click over and read – beautiful illustrations and a fascinating character.

Solms/AZP

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I spent an enjoyable and exhausting weekend helping (gunner, bird boy, gofer) at the Northeast NADKC Solms/AZP test. Solms is a test for young dogs (done in the fall after a spring Derby); the Alterszuchprüng is for older dogs. The same test is run – AZP dogs are judged to a higher standard. It was a good learning experience for me – reading the rules gives you a sense of what’s going on, but working the test really drives home just how important retrieving is.

Saturday was overcast for most of the day as Hanna came up the coast towards us. A good thing – even though it wasn’t really hot (high 70’s, maybe low 80’s) the humidity was so high that your body couldn’t dump any heat. One dog doing the rabbit track found the rabbit, lay down next to it to pant and recover for 5 minutes, then picked the bunny up and returned to the handler. I don’t know whether she got dinged for it, but if she were my dog, I would not have begrudged her the lie-down.

Sunday saw all the ponds full to overflowing in the wake of Hanna’s 3+ inches of rain overnight. Cool, dry and delightful – half as many dogs to test – a walk in the park.

Rather than my usual slide show, I’m just going to post a few (mostly off-topic) favorites; the whole set is here.

Heron rookery where we did the duck search. A funny contrast – we were a mile or so from a drag strip and every few minutes you could hear the cars staging and then running. Not as loud as our occasional gunfire, but plenty startling if you were woolgathering.

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Juvenile form of the official NH State Amphibian.

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On point.

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PUPPIES!

Falconry question

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So, let’s say I eventually realize my tongue in cheek dream of flying a Steller’s Sea Eagle on seals (on the pack ice up Newfoundland way). Further, we’ll allow that my exploits get me an invite to central Europe to visit with eaglers there. While there, my bird attacks Václav Havel. Does that count as flying at (wait for it) Czech?

I’ll leave it to comments/commentors to explain the bad falconry pun…

Something ate the Yellow Jacket nest

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A confession – with all the rain we had in July and August, the lawn in the back yard got away from me (not that I’m all that great about it when it’s not pouring). Finally some sun and dry weather – the low spot where the Siberian Iris live doesn’t have a quarter inch of standing water – I gotta mow! Way out back I discover a subterranean Yellow Jacket nest the quick and easy way; I mow over the entrance then get stung as I walk behind the mower into the stream of very pissed-off exiting hymenoptera. The good thing about letting the lawn go? The clippings were so thick that the wasps had trouble surging out – I only got stung once. The nest was in an out of the way place – I figured I’d leave it well enough alone unless/until there was another run-in. Last night someone solved the problem for me – dug up the nest and, I assume, ate the occupants (certainly ate the larva).

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I learned something new! I’d always assumed that burrowing wasps just constructed dirt chambers, like an ant nest. After seeing the paper strewn around, I looked it up:

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I also googled around a bit to see what might have caused the carnage.

Raccoons, skunks and other animals play a role in the demise of yellow jackets as summer wanes.  These foraging mammals will dig down into yellow jacket nests at night and devour the whole colony.  You might see the remains of such a repast, with bits of paper nest chambers strewn about. *

Sounds about right.

Fungus walk

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I took a camera with me this morning when I ran the dogs. We’ve had three weeks of very wet weather (a flash flood killed a girl a few days ago and a tornado killed a lady up the road in Northwood a week and a half ago) – if it’s not pouring all day, there’s almost always thunderstorms in the afternoon. I figured the wet ought to encourage fungi to fruit – turned out to be a good guess. I’ve pulled Toads and Toadstools off my bookshelf for re-reading; seems weather appropriate. Some pictures, then the slide show.

The Oyster River in August is normally low enough to walk across using stepping stones without getting your feet wet – this is obviously not a normal year.

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I think  one of the local bruins ate too many green apples and gave himself an upset stomach.

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The Sun God. It’s not hard to see why toadstools are so important to old religions and folkways. You’ve got solar discs and phalluses emerging spontaneously from Mom Earth – let the myth making  proceed!

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The big guy – Amanita. I still like Wasson’s  soma theory, even if there are other equally good candidates – its a rippin’ idea.

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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

A big nod to Lord Whimsy for the proximate stimulus and to the Querencistas, where fungoblogging is a tradition.

Zoos and Flies

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A recent post on the always excellent BLDGBLOG got me doing a little thinking. First, a long quote from the post:

I have to register my fascination again, however, with the idea that zoos actually represent a kind of spatial hieroglyphics through which humans communicate – or, more accurately, miscommunicate – with other species.
That is, zoos are decoy environments that refer to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo. One could perhaps even argue here that there is a grammar – even a deep structure – to the landscape architecture of zoos.
Zoos, in this way of thinking, are at least partially subject to a rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are intended to communicate – and how has this meaning been produced?
Landscape architecture becomes an act not just of stylized geography, or aesthetically shaped terrain, but of communication across species lines.Of course, this can also be inverted: are these landscapes really meant to be read, understood, and interpreted by what we broadly refer to as “animals,” or are these landscapes simply projections of our own inner fantasies of the wild? Or should I say The Wild?
While this latter scenario sounds much more likely to be the case – humans, like a broken cinema, always live inside their own projections – nonetheless, the non-human communicational possibilities of landscape architecture will continue to fascinate me.

Three observations – general, personal and tangential.

General. In the post-wunderkammer/boxes with iron bars era, zoos have tended to define their mission as a mix of conservation (breeding) and education (exhibits). The 2 pieces sometimes don’t align well; often species needing conservation may not be charismatic (lots of LBJs – little brown jobs – need help). Further – when trying to educate the public there’s the animal itself, its behavior (especially in groups) and its habitat. If you want to tie education back to conservation, informing people about the biome is critical – to paraphrase the real estate saw, it’s habitat, habitat, habitat. An accurate, naturalistic setting may not be what you want, though, if breeding is your goal. Keeping track of rations, who’s doing what to who, and controlling environmental parameters (I’m thinking of herps that need to be put in a rain chamber to kick off breeding, for example) may be facilitated by a less complicated – though still far from a white plastic box – enclosure. Two audiences for the landscape architect’s communication – the viewing public and the animals inhabiting the landscape. Two measures of success – does the public come away with a better understanding of how/where the animal lives (and pressures on same) and does the animal display the same range of behaviors it would in it’s home range and does it breed? It’s my impression that zoos deal with this tension by doing a lot of the breeding work off-stage where they can manipulate stimuli without having to worry about a bunch of follicly challenged primates tapping on the glass.

Personal. I keep and breed poison dart frogs. There are many reasons I enjoy them – behavior (parental care, especially), physical beauty, size (manageable); one ties in to this post – the opportunity to do some world-building. Dendrobatids and naturalistic vivaria go together like, I dunno, lobster and butter. You don’t need a planted tank to be successful with darts – lots of leaf litter, some film cannisters or a petri dish – depending on the species’ egg deposition preference – and a mister bottle will usually do the trick. It’s almost the reverse case – you can put PDFs in a planted tank and rather than destroying the plants and trashing the joint, they will settle in and, if you’ve done your world building well, thrive. To circle back to Geoff’s communication point again – I guess I’m trying to communicate with the frogs in an unnecessarily complicated way, with the complexity being for my – the observer’s – benefit.

Tangential. I’m reminded of one of the lines of polarity in fly (as in fly fishing) design: impressionistic vs. realistic. At the extreme, realistic flies don’t serve an aquatic audience at all  – they exist solely for the human observer. At the other end of the scale, impressionistic flies are all about trying to guess what attributes stimulate a take. Shape, size, material, etc, are all chosen as a best guess at what makes a hatching caddis look like food to a fish. It’s about listening to what the trout said. An anecdote (OK, it’s a damn fish story) – I was out at dawn once right around the June full moon fishing for stripers. There were fish all around me, but I couldn’t buy a strike. After flailing the water for a while I decided to stop and watch for a bit – I quickly realized that the bass were eating small seaworms that were swimming around near the surface of the water. I went through my fly box and cut the tail off the smallest, sparsest Deceiver I had, making it even shorter and wispier. I cast the fly out and let it drift with the current,  twitching it occasionally. I hooked a fish almost immediately. I guess the first step in communication with another critter is listening…