Up north

It’s the time of year when I load the dogs up and head north of the notches (that part of NH on the north side of the White Mountains). Some photos, with commentary:

north

A pano of one of my favorite views. Not a good cover, but we just left one and this is much easier walking – a chance for Dinah and me to relax a bit.

White Baneberry

Berries! A not-good-to-eat one, White Baneberry

cranberries

and a quite tasty (if sour) one, the Cranberry.

And of course, humans leave their mark.

grave

A pile of rock with toys and a worn-out whirligig on top – I’m guessing a grave. Pet? I hope so.

crab trash

And I’m used to finding piles of trash at the end of tote roads (aka jeep trails) at the point they become impassable, but the debris is usually demolition waste, old teevees, that sort of thing. First time I’ve ever seen a pile of crabs. Thankfully, they’d been there quite a while – Dinah was neither interested in rolling in nor eating them.

Parrots as external memory

Shades of Humboldt’s Parrot (damn, that’s an old post!): “Widow Asks Public For Help Finding Missing Parrot That Speaks In Late Husband’s Voice” *

A San Juan Capistrano woman is asking the public for help finding her beloved African gray parrot.

Karen McIntyre said the bird’s absence is like losing a member of the family, in part because he spoke in her late husband’s voice.

“My husband passed away three years ago, and he still uses my husband’s voice to tell the dogs to be quiet, and he calls my son Patrick, or he calls my daughter Erin,” said McIntyre.”He picks up the phone and makes telephone calls in my husband’s voice.”

Decoy spider

And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.*

Not an exact verse match, because these greater spiders are not spiders at all – they are decoys made by a Cyclosa? spider.

From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.
Step in even closer and things start to get weird- that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?
It turns out the master designer behind this somewhat creepy form is in fact a tiny spider, only about 5mm in body length, that is hiding behind or above that false, bigger spider made up of debris. After discussing with several spider experts, we’ve determined it is quite probable that this spider is a never-before-seen species in the genus Cyclosa. This genus is known for having spiders that put debris in their webs to either attract prey or, as in this case, confuse anything trying to eat them.*
*
Spider collage
Images by Jeff Cremer and Phil Torres
*

From San Bartolo to Dookie in 1 move

This is just an ‘ooh, shiny’ post inspired by Darren Naish at TetZoo. By far the most popular photos in my Flickrstream are those of Heather Hurst’s amazing scientific illustrations of the San Bartolo murals. In this section, the young lord offers a turkey (on the right) and his blood – based on the tail feathers and location, I’m calling that an Ocellated Turkey.

San Bartolo mural - the king's journey

Artwork in this photo is painted by and copyrighted by Heather Hurst 2008.

Central America is full of critters with wonderful odd faces: Ocellated Turkeys, coatis, peccaries, tapirs, etc.

n85_w1150

(Hey, is that John McAfee hiding in the bushes? (Belize joke))

And the crux move – we shift turkeys slightly, and via Mr. Naish’s excellent The Other Turkey post:

turkey-vs-peacock-himitsunokare-600-px-tiny-Jan-2013-Darren-Naish-Tetrapod-Zoology

Which of course leads immediately to one of the finest music vids ever made. The visuals – perfect. And that organ figure kills me every time.

Johnny “King” Vulture out.

So, naturalists observe, a flea (Dino hunting II)

Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum. *

I noted in the 1st Dino Hunting post that Brian Aldiss had written a time-travel dino huting story; a bit of googling found it reprinted on line. I quote the whole thing because I don’t want to rely on the linked items staying put:

Claude Ford knew exactly how it was to hunt a bronto­saurus. You crawled heedlessly through the grass beneath the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semi-circle, in a snoring search for more sausagey reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle, and finally disappeared up its own sphincter movement. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

But as you, little mammal with opposed digit and .65 self-loading, semi-automatic, dual-barrelled, digitally-computed, telescopically sighted, rustless, high-powered rifle gripped in your otherwise-defenceless paws, as you snide along under the bygone willows, what primarily attracts you is the thunder lizard’s hide. It gives off a smell as deeply resonant as the bass note of a piano. It makes the elephant’s epidermis look like a sheet of crinkled lavatory paper. It is grey as the Viking seas, daft-deep as cathedral foundations. What contact possible to bone could allay the fever of that flesh? Over it scamper – you can see them from here! – the little brown lice that live in those grey walls and canyons, gay as ghosts, cruel as crabs. If one of them jumped on you, it would very likely break your back. And when one of those parasites stops to cock its leg against one of the bronto’s vertebrae, you can see it carries in its turn its own crop of easy-livers, each as big as a lobster, for you’re near now, oh, so near that you can hear the monster’s primitive heart-organ knocking, as the ventricle keeps miraculous time with the auricle.

Time for listening to the oracle is past: you’re beyond the stage for omens, you’re now headed in for the kill, yours or his; superstition has had its little day for today, from now on only this windy nerve of yours, this shaky conglomeration of muscle entangled untraceably beneath the sweat-shiny carapace of skin, this bloody little urge to slay the dragon, is going to answer all your orisons.

You could shoot now. Just wait till that tiny steam-shovel head pauses once again to gulp down a quarry load of bulrushes, and with one inexpressibly vulgar bang you can show the whole indifferent Jurassic world that it’s standing looking down the business end of evolution’s sex-shooter. You know why you pause, even as you pretend not to know why you pause; that old worm conscience, long as a baseball pitch, long-lived as a tortoise, is at work; through every sense it slides more monstrous than the serpent. Through the passions: saying here is a sitting duck, O Englishman! Through the intelligence: whispering that boredom, the kite-hawk who never feeds, will settle again when the task is done. Through the nerves: sneering that when the adrenalin currents cease to ?ow the vomiting begins. Through the maestro behind the retina: plausibly forcing the beauty of the view upon you.

Spare us that poor old slipper-slopper of a word, beauty; holy mom, is this a travelogue, nor are we out of it? ‘Perched now on this titanic creature’s back, we see a round dozen – and folks let me stress that round – of gaudily plumaged birds, exhibiting between them all the colour you might expect to find on lovely, fabled Copacabana Beach. They’re so round because they feed from the drop­pings that fall from the rich man’s table. Watch this lovely shot now! See the bronto’s tail lift . . . Oh, lovely, yep, a couple of hayricksfull at least emerging from his nether end. That sure was a beauty, folks, delivered straight from consumer to consumer. The birds are fighting over it now. Hey, you, there’s enough to go round, and anyhow, you’re round enough already . . . And nothing to do now but hop back up onto the old rump steak and wait for the next round. And now as the sun stinks in the Jurassic West, we say “Fare well on that diet” . . .’

No, you’re procrastinating, and that’s a life work. Shoot the beast and put it out of your agony. Taking your courage in your hands, you raise it to shoulder level and squint down its sights. There is a terrible report; you are half stunned. Shakily, you look about you. The monster still munches, relieved to have broken enough wind to unbecalm the Ancient Mariner.

Angered, or is it some subtler emotion?, you now burst from the bushes and confront it, and this exposed condi­tion is typical of the straits into which your consideration for yourself and others continually pitches you. Consid­eration? Or again something subtler? Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civiliza­tion? But that’s a point to deal with later, if there is a later, as these two hog-wallow eyes pupilling you all over from spitting distance tend to dispute. Let it not be by jaws alone, oh monster, but also by huge hooves and, if convenient to yourself, by mountainous rollings upon me! Let death be a saga, sagacious, Beowulfate.

Quarter of a mile distant is the sound of a dozen hippos springing boisterously in gymslips from the ancestral mud, and next second a walloping great tail as long as Sunday and as thick as Saturday comes dicing over your head. You duck as duck you must, but the beast missed you anyway because it so happens that its coordination is no better than yours would be if you had to wave the Woolworth Building at a tarsier. This done, it seems to feel it has done its duty by itself. It forgets you. You just wish you could forget yourself as easily; that was, after all, the reason you had to come the long way here. Get Away From It All, said the time travel brochure, which meant for you getting away from Claude Ford, a husbandman as futile as his name with a terrible wife called Maude. Maude and Claude Ford. Who could not adjust to themselves, to each other, or to the world they were born in. It was the best reason in the as-it-is-at-present-constituted world for coming back here to shoot giant saurians – if you were fool enough to think that one hundred and ?fty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex.

You try and halt your silly, slobbering thoughts, but they have never really stopped since the coca-collaborating days of your growing up; God, if adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it! Slightly, it steadies you to look again on the enormous bulk of this tyrant vegetarian into whose presence you charged with such a mixed death-life wish, charged with all the emotion the human orga(ni)sm is capable of. This time the bogeyman is real, Claude, just as you wanted it to be, and this time you really have to face up to it before it turns and faces you again. And so again you lift Ole Equalizer, waiting till you can spot the vulnerable spot.

The bright birds sway, the lice scamper like dogs, the marsh groans, as bronto sways over and sends his little cranium snaking down under the bile-bright water in a forage for roughage. You watch this; you have never been so jittery before in all your jittered life, and you are counting on this catharsis to wring the last drop of acid fear out of your system for ever. OK, you keep saying to yourself insanely over and over, your million dollar, twenty-second century education going for nothing, OK, OK. And as you say it for the umpteenth time, the crazy head comes back out of the water like a renegade express and gazes in your direction.

Grazes in your direction. For as the champing jaw with its big blunt molars like concrete posts works up and down, you see the swamp water course out over rimless lips, lipless rims, splashing your feet and sousing the ground. Reed and root, stalk and stem, leaf and loam, all are intermittently visible in that masticating maw and, struggling, straggling, or tossed among them, minnows, tiny crustaceans, frogs – all destined in that awful, jaw-full movement to turn into bowel movement. And as the glump-glump-glumping takes place, above it the slime resistant eyes again survey you.

These beasts live up to two hundred years, says the time travel brochure, and this beast has obviously tried to live up to that, for its gaze is centuries old, full of decades upon decades of wallowing in its heavyweight thoughtlessness until it has grown wise on twitter-patedness. For you it is like looking into a disturbing misty pool; it gives you a psychic shock, you ?re off both barrels at your own re?ec­tion. Bang-bang, the dum-dums, big as paw-paws, go.

Those century-old lights, dim and sacred, go out with no indecision. These cloisters are closed till Judgement Day. Your reflection is torn and bloodied from them for ever. Over their ravaged panes nictitating membranes slide slowly upwards, like dirty sheets covering a cadaver. The jaw continues to munch slowly, as slowly the head sinks down. Slowly, a squeeze of cold reptile blood toothpastes down the wrinkled ?ank of one cheek. Everything is slow, a creepy Secondary Era slowness like the drip of water, and you know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it all in.

Never mind! Quaff down your beakers, lords, Claude Ford has slain a harmless creature. Long live Claude the Clawed!

“You watch breathless as the head touches the ground, the long laugh of neck touches the ground, the jaws close for good. You watch and wait for something else to happen, but nothing ever does. Nothing ever would. You could stand here watching for a hundred and fifty million years, Lord Claude, and nothing would ever happen here again. Gradually your bronto’s mighty carcass, picked loving clean by predators, would sink into the slime, carried by its own weight deeper; then the waters would rise, and old Conqueror Sea would come in with the leisurely air of a card-sharp dealing the boys a bad hand. Silt and sediment would filter down over the mighty grave, a slow rain with centuries to rain in. Old bronto’s bed might be raised up and then down again perhaps half a dozen times, gently enough not to disturb him, although by now the sedimen­tary rocks would be forming thick around him. Finally, when he was wrapped in a tomb finer than any Indian rajah ever boasted, the powers of the Earth would raise him high on their shoulders until, sleeping still, bronto would lie in a brow of the Rockies high above the waters of the Pacific. But little any of that would count with you, Claude the Sword; once the midget maggot of life is dead in the creature’s skull, the rest is no concern of yours.

You have no emotion now. You are just faintly put out. You expected dramatic thrashing of the ground, or bellowing; on the other hand, you are glad the thing did not appear to suffer. You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men, squeamish. You tuck the gun under your arm and walk round the land side of the dinosaur to view your victory.

You prowl past the ungainly hooves, round the septic white of the cliff of belly, beyond the glistening and how-thought-provoking cavern of the cloaca, finally posing beneath the switch-back sweep of tail-to-rump. Now your disappointment is as crisp and obvious as a visiting card: the giant is not half as big as you thought it was. It is not one half as large, for example, as the image of you and Maude is in your mind. Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contraterrene caverns of your fee-fo-fi-fumblingly fearful id!

Nothing is left to you now but to slink back to your time-mobile with a belly full of anti- affairs; one by one, they gather up their hunched wings and fly disconsolately off across the swamp to other hosts. They know when a good thing turns bad, and do not wait for the vultures to drive them off; all hope abandon, ye who entrail here. You also turn away.

You turn, but you pause. Nothing is left but to go back, no, but ad 2181 is not just the home date; it is Maude. It is Claude. It is the whole awful, hopeless, endless business of trying to adjust to an over-complex environment, of trying to turn yourself into a cog. Your escape from it into the Grand Simplicities of the Jurassic, to quote the brochure again, was only a partial escape, now over.

So you pause, and as you pause, something lands socko on your back, pitching you face forward into tasty mud. You struggle and scream as lobster claws tear at your neck and throat. You try to pick up the rifle but cannot, so in agony you roll over, and next second the crab-thing is greedying it on your chest. You wrench at its shell, but it giggles and pecks your fingers off. You forgot when you killed the bronto that its parasites would leave it, and that to a little shrimp like you they would be a deal more dangerous than their host.

You do your best, kicking for at least three minutes. By the end of that time there is a whole pack of the creatures on you. Already they are picking your carcass loving clean. You’re going to like it up there on top of the Rockies; you won’t feel a thing. *

The first thing that struck me is how mean it is – nothing is any good. Neither the hunter nor the prey are treated sympathetically at all. Life sucks, then you die. But then I started thinking about the twist: the dinosaur parasites. I recalled reading something recently about Cretaceous lice – off to the google! Yep, I remembered right. Summaries here and here and a link to the paper via the graphic below.

dinolice

What keeps bringing me up short regarding Aldiss’ story is size. I don’t see any indication that the Cretaceous dinolice were the size of refrigerators. “Wait a minute,” you say, “Maybe Aldiss was using ‘lice’ generically.” Good point, and especially so since lice seem to be associated with either feathers or hair and I’m not sure what the current thinking on Diplodocid pelage is. So let’s put lice, specifically, aside and think about large skin parasites. There aren’t any. The largest creature on the planet right now live in a medium that is much more large-critter-with-exoskeleton friendly than air, and yet Wikipedia tells me that whale lice (not really lice) “length ranges from 5 to 25 millimetres (0.2 to 1.0 in) depending on the species.”* Do elephants have lice or ticks or mites that are, let’s say, softball sized? Nope. One explanation that makes sense to me is the problem of predation.

If you’re going to be confined (more or less) to the skin of your host, getting large just paints a “lunch is served” sign on your back. Better, apparently, to remain small and numerous. Am I crazy? I’m trying to think of a creature that is simultaneously large and host-oriented enough that it won’t leave a live host. Coming up empty.

Dinosaurs and Time Travel

Ripped from the Twitter headlines! The genesis of this post:

 

I’ll pull @aeromenthe’s excellent link out and embed it. L. Sprague de Camp’s (1956) A Gun for Dinosaurs:

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I think there’s a rule that any time travel yarn has to deal with a kill-yer-grampy paradox (did H. G. Wells address it? I honestly can’t remember.) de Camp’s universe won’t allow a paradox, but Ray Bradbury’s will – A Sound of Thunder (1952) is his time travel/dino hunting tale. Tangentially – while looking for an on line version of ASoT, I stumbled across a reference to another dino hunting story I’ve never read: Birian Aldiss’ ‘Poor Little Warrior!’

As regards time travel paradoxes, you’d need to go a long way to beat Heinlein’s All You Zombies. Warning – classic Heinlein attitude displayed throughout.

In A Gun for Dinosaurs, Reginald Rivers talks about using a .600 Nitro Express in the Cretaceous. A .600 NE is a huge gun, but whenever I think of dinosaur guns, one always springs to mind: the Holland & Holland Saurian 4 bore.

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A little bit of history… Before there was modern smokeless powder, there was black powder. Both propellants get called gunpowder, but they are not the same thing. Black powder burns much more slowly than smokeless, and thus, with reasonable barrel lengths, just can’t produce muzzle velocities (how fast the bullet is going when it leaves the barrel) that hunters take for granted today. There are 2 terms in the equation for kinetic energy – velocity and mass. Since our black powder velocity is constrained, upping the mass is the option that’s left. The bore number is how may lead spheres of bore diameter it would take to get to 1 lb. A round ball bullet for a 4 bore weighs a quarter pound! Wikipedia’s entry on the 4 bore is quite good, if you’re curious.

I’m assuming the Saurian is built for black powder (or black powder equivalent) loads, though it’s somewhat academic. This is an art gun – an opportunity for engravers, smiths, stockmakers and cabinet makers to show their skills. I have an old magazine somewhere with more pictures of the Saurian – if I ever find it I will scan and post. The case, as I recall, included a glassed in area with a display of varous dinosaur fossils. Is the Saurian what I’d choose for my time travel dino hunt? Hell no. But it’s not like I’m going to have to choose anything any time soon.

And to finish, via @tetzoo, a major dino hunting disappointment.

Dinosplumes01

 

Khar Bii

Khar Bii is a televised ovine conformation show/Senegalese Idol/beauty pageant  on the air in (obv) Senegal. I heard about it this morning on NPR and loved it sincerely; I enjoyed Ms. Quist-Arcton’s report (she is always excellent), but I could have done without Inskeep’s mocking tone during the intro and outro. Yes, Steve, livestock are important to a lot of people, even in the developed west! Off to Youtube where a lot of the Khar Bii episodes have been posted. Here’s what’s billed as the finale:

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Francophones, help me out. I can pick out a bunch of French – mouton is, for example, prominent and I pick out bits of the explanation of toxoplasmosis, but I’m mostly lost. Is it because my French skills are so horrible, or are the presenters speaking a mix of French and Wolof? Or perhaps Dakar-Wolof? I think I heard ‘nyami’.

TIL (things I learned, in internetspeak):

  • How to spell Ofeibia Quist-Arcton’s first name. A lovely name.
  • “Wolof words in English are believed to include yam, from Wolof nyami “to eat food”, nyam in Barbadian English [3] meaning to eat (also compare Seychellois nyanmnyanm, also meaning to eat [4] )” *
  • Concours Culinaire sounds much more inviting that Cook-off.
  • Fufu! Disclosure – I knew about fufu previously. I am loving the notion of a beauty contest where cook-the-contestants is a prominent element.

Coyote, Badger and Bear

  • Cat Urbigkit posted an extraordinary sequence of photos showing a coyote and a badger hunting together (tiny amt of background here). Coyote and badger are important characters in western Native American myth – sometimes they cooperate, sometimes the trickster coyote tries to take advantage of badger and occasionally he succeeds.

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  • A very interesting post at The Atlantic by Emily Badger (I’m not making this up – check the by-line) on urban coyotes in Chicago and some speculation on what predator will citify next. I’m voting Black Bear – as Emily mentions, it’s already happening out west and in addition bears are happy omnivores & they’re well into exurban spaces here in the east (apparently Provincetown has an entire week during which they honor bears *grin*).
  • And proof that bears are here in the semi-rural east (aside from the bruin the dogs rousted out of my back yard a couple years ago) – we had a bit of excitement at work yesterday. There was a bear cub running around the grounds; no sign of mama bear, but everyone came inside for a bit. Baby bear was convinced to reverse direction: back to the woods and away from the highway he was originally pointed at. S/he seems small, but my knowledge of ursine development is pretty dang sketchy.

The cub came off the tree, made a break for it, got scared and…

…went back up the tree for a bit.

I wasn’t the only one snapping pics.

A Great Stirrer Up of Passions

Falconry, that is. Now that peacay has posted from The Book of the Hunt of King Modus &  Queen Ratio (what are you waiting for – click through – I’ll wait) I can turn this little bit of goofiness loose.

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N. B. I discovered the image only because peacay pointed me to the book pre-post – all credit redounds to him and all blame to me.

And some explanation for non-falconers: sure seems like the protagonist is trying to whup on one of his hunting companions with a lure. A slip is a chance for a hawk to pursue game – it can be screwed up innumerable ways, but mostly by flushing game before the raptor is in position.