Auspex

Once in a California Sierra
I was swooped down upon when I was small,
And measured, but not taken after all,
By a great eagle bird in all its terror.

Such auspices are very hard to read.
My parents when I ran to them averred
I was rejected by the royal bird
As one who would not make a Ganymede.

Not find a barkeep unto Jove in me?
I have remained resentful to this day
When any but myself presumed to say
That there was anything I couldn't be.

-- Robert Frost

I am pleased to learn from this video that French for "Oh, shit!" is "Oh, shit!"

At least in Quebec it is.

Billy, did Grampa ever tell you about the time he was briefly abducted by an eagle?

Update 12-19-12
Alas, it appears that the exclamation unbelievable is probably spot-on.

Well-done, though.


And always nice to find an excuse for a little Big Bob Frost.

Snapshot Sunday: What's With All The Screaming?

I was shifting the small goats' pasture to new ground today when I moved some old wood out of the way of the fence, and found this lady in an odd, knobby jumper:

 

Mother was not very happy about the roof coming off.  I only had my phone with me to further invade her privacy, so the photo is not what it could have been.

She's a wolf spider (family Lycosidae) and the kids have just hatched. That's their empty egg case she's carrying behind her like a limp balloon.  Once they hatch, they climb her legs and ride around on her back until they are big enough to go off on their own to hunt.

Field guide authors and nature writers feel the curious need to emphasize the "solitary" nature of the wolf spider, as if they were some kind of weird hermits in contrast to the normally highly gregarious arachnid clan.

Really? So carrying several hundred of your family members around as they jostle for position on your back for a good chunk of your own lifespan is not enough togetherness for any arthropod?

Macro Monday: Hornworms' Lament

“Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. Insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.”

-- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Our friend Andy spotted these two critters on the currant tomato that is growing rampantly in the washtub by the grape arbor.






They are larvae of Manduca quinquemaculata -- the five-spotted hawk moth -- aka tomato hornworms.

And they have munched their last nightshade leaves.

The stuff that looks like a a threadbare white shag carpet are parasitoids -- the pupae of a braconid wasp. As larvae, they already ate most of the insides of the hornworms, which maintain just enough life to cling to the branch where they stopped. (I took these photos on Saturday, and the worms are still where we left them.) Soon they will hatch out into adults and go hunting other hornworms on which to lay their eggs. I've never seen a hornworm with this heavy a parasitoid infestation. I guess they aren't any more doomed / dead than one with a few pupae.

I'm ambivalent about this particular horrible thing. The hornworms can really play hell with the tomatoes, and the little wasps are very effective at controlling them. But the adult moths are magnificent -- easy to mistake for hummingbirds when one first sees one -- and we have lots of tomato foliage. When I find a healthy hornworm, I tend to just stick it on a robust volunteer tomato somewhere away from the garden, or else on some wild nightshade.

The life cycle of parasitic wasps is the stuff of nightmares and the inspiration for some viscerally horrifying speculative fiction.

Detail

Macro Monday: Dog Eat Dog World

As I was showering this morning, I noticed two of the delicate, elegant spiders who typically occupy the corners and edges of the bathroom ceiling cautiously approaching one another.

Through the steam, they appeared to be the same species. Was I about to be a voyeur at the mating dance?

Alas, no. That was not a kiss that the victrix kept planting on the less fortunate arthropod as she systematically folded and wrapped eight now-ungainly legs.

By the time I got a camera and a chair, it was all over but for the dessication.

When we arrived home tonight, there was no sign there had ever been more than one spider.

Photo Phriday: Commensal

She hops up onto the back deck -- three steps up -- nearly every night, and stations herself by the glass door. There she picks off the bugs that hit the window and drop. I leave a light on in the kitchen for her, and try to remember to close the door so that she has maximum dinner-collection area, and also so I don't step in toad shit in the kitchen.

I bring her stinkbugs and Junebugs -- but never fireflies -- and she now hops towards me when she sees me coming out.

She's the only being I've ever seen who will eat a second stink bug.

The dogs have been lounging on the deck late nights in the heat. They politely give her a couple feet of space near the door, and she pays them no mind.

Everyone should have a porch toad.

Photo Phriday: Don't Mind Me

I'm just in yer pantry, peeing on yer M&M's

Photo Phriday: Leftovers

When the dogs started digging around in the snow in the parking lot at training last week, and then brought me ... remains ... my kneejerk response was to curse the redneck who had cleaned his kill on his tailgate and dumped the leavings where he stood. Common enough in state gamelands.

Yeah -- no two-legged mammal produced these leftovers. (Click photo to embiggen.)

Hawk or owl? I'm sure someone out there knows the agent of Thumper's demise.

Whoever it was, she likes meat and is not too fond of tendons or bone.

Eclipse

I had thought that I'd be posting amateur photographs of the solstice eclipse yesterday.

Skies were winter-clarified and bright, and the news was abuzz about the blood-red moon that we could expect. I researched photography sites for hints on using my modest digital camera, got out the tripod, and played with the controls. Had some normally verboten dinnertime caffeine, and stayed up.

At midnight the moon burned cold and high, sharp-edged and brilliant. The landscape glowed back. I could read by the light.

By two, the shroud of clouds was so thick that I could not find the moon at all -- premature eclipsulation.

Sunday night I'd been possessed by the urgent thought that it was time for the last of the excess cockerels to convert -- convert from hen-harassing freeloading loud-mouthed date-rapists into coq a vin and mole. I'd caged them up then, and spent Monday afternoon killing, plucking, and butchering them. I am prone to procrastinate those chores that require me to kill someone, and this task goes faster if PC is here to help, so this positive urgency was curious. It just seemed as if it needed to get done now.

Much like the wood-splitting that calls me out back nearly every day while the light fades. As the stacked cordwood piles up, I feel a little less nervous urgency in my bowels.

I was not born a medieval peasant or stone-age pastoralist; winter has not meant especial hunger and risk for me. But somewhere in the last 10,000 years of re-twisting DNA, there must be a gene that, triggered in the proper context, tells me: Cold out, meat will keep, you can't afford to feed that guy all winter, now is the time.

So at Yule we celebrate with fire and flesh.

Barn chores kept me busy yesterday, and it was coming on 6:30 when I remembered the bowl of rooster heads and innards chilling on the porch.

The dogs get the necks, gizzards, feet, hearts, lungs, enormous testicles, and livers. But the heads and guts are the portion of the other canids, the family of red fox who den in the hollow log at the far east end of our south pasture.

The fox stump is a perhaps fifty feet from their favorite lookout spot. Because generations of lazy farmers have nailed their fence wire to the trunks of trees, any tree that expires near the pasture edges must be cut at least chest-high, leaving a tall stump. The fox stump is too tall for my dogs to steal the foxes' tithe. As the tree's formerly living layers rot away, nails and staples and bits of wire appear on the pasture-facing side, as if exposed by rain on stone.

I've been bringing the slaughter remnants and the occasional naturally-expired bird to the stump since we got our poultry. I've never lost a bird to a fox. It's a contract enforced by Moe's diligent patrols and the block walls of the barn. But still, the foxes have been good neighbors. Polite. Deferential. Their tracks in the snow take a hard turn when they encounter the tracks that record Moe's perimeter -- the canids have an ongoing and subtle conversation, though I doubt they have often seen one another. For a dog or fox, scent is thought and intention distilled in time. Moe's perimeter, and Rosie and Cole's profane late-night call-and-response sessions, are no doubt what keeps the local coyotes at arm's length -- and whatever pushes the coyotes away is good for the foxes.

So the dogs and I walked out to the end of the pasture and left an offering feast on the fox stump at just about the moment of the solstice. We had the moon and sky back; I had not even brought a headlamp, whose beam shuts out the world. As we neared the house and barn, warm lights making embers of each window, I felt the great horned owl.

One never hears an owl, unless the owl intends.

I turned just as she landed on the top of the big hemlock that guards the outside curve of the lane. The dogs felt her too; they rushed the tree -- but silently -- and must have been circling its trunk under the dark cave of its branches.

The owl said nothing, just made a silhouette. I watched her for several minutes. But goats were yelling in their stalls about dinner.

When I came out of the barn ten minutes later, she had silently dissolved.

In the small hours this morning, Rosie stood at the bedroom window and growled profane threats under her breath.

This happens from time to time; usually I can make out nothing in the darkness. I believe her, but in winter, with all our creatures locked in after dark, the night belongs to the wild things.

This time, moon blazing once again and snowy world glowing, I could see the owl, posted on top of a defunct utility pole a hundred feet from the front door. She was scanning the garden, hayfield, and stone retaining wall for prospects of her own Yule meat feast.

Uncommon brightness illuminated the solitary life of a night creature on this, the darkest day of the year.

Drop in Any Time

Last fall, while we were racing to get the new roof on the barn, and songbirds all over the hemisphere were racing to get south before the food supply dried up, we had a visitor briefly drop in.

What happened was this. Ken and Matt and Bill were up on the barn. Jake and I were passing metal sheets up to them, fetching tools and materials, etc. There was a thunk on the new metal roof. Something slid down it and hit the turf with a duller second thud.



It was this guy. Haven't ID'd him (probably her?) yet. I bet someone here knows what kind of LBB she is. Some kind of thrush? A female red-winged blackbird -- thanks to Megan for the ID.

So I went and picked up the limp little panting birdie, and demanded to know WTF the guys on the roof were doing to the local wildlife.

They swore that the critter had just dropped like a stone out of the clear blue sky.

I put her in a box, intending to call the wildlife rehabber in Mars and drive her over as soon as we finished for the day.

But when I took her out for photos, so I could tell Beth what kind of bird had been flung from the upper atmosphere onto my barn, she seemed to have perked up a lot from the nap.

I relaxed my grip ever-so-slightly while I was taking a burst of photos with the sports setting of my camera, and captured this in the last frame:


Remember, on long solo trips, pull over and take a nap before you crash onto someone's roof.

Sacrifice

Our own Perfesser Chaos takes a reporter from The Allegheny Front on a tour of of the graves of our old hunting grounds.

We cavers have a grim category of stomping ground known as the "sacrifice cave."

A sacrifice cave is easily-accessible, near a road. It does not require an extended hike to reach the entrance, and the cave itself is non-technical in nature, requiring no special equipment or technique. It generally has a long history of local exploitation and "recreational" visits, often going back for centuries.

And it has already been trashed.

Any speleothems have been long-ago broken off by klutzes or thieves. Delicate habitat for troglobitic and troglophilic creatures is often beyond memory. There is trash. Graffiti. Miles of string. Party refuse. The remains of "campfires" lit by geniuses unclear on the concept of the chimney. And don't drink the water.

When someone new wants to try caving, we take him to a sacrifice cave. Ditto for kids -- cavers' kids, our nieces, troops of scouts whose leaders want to take them on an adventure.

When we train our SAR dogs for underground search, we almost always use sacrifice caves.

On the one hand, if the new guest turns out to be a klutz or a cretin, there is little harm that he can do that hasn't already been done. He won't be invited on a trip to a more remote, protected, hazardous and unspoiled cave.

On the other hand, the condition of the sacrifice cave becomes an object lesson and an inspiration for the sincere wannabe caver. Here's where treasure hunters took sledgehammers to the stalactite that took millenia to form. There were the delicate soda straws swept away by the leaden head of some galoot crawling around with a $3 flashlight in his teeth. Over there is the elfin corpse of a bat knocked from the ceiling last Saturday by a drunken frat boy. See what we have lost?



Later, when the initiate wriggles down a secret hole after a long hike along a remote limestone ridge, rappels two eighty foot drops, and traverses an exposed cleft to finally find herself gaping among grinning friends in a sparkling vaulted gallery of pristine speleothems, she will remember all those mud-smeared, battered and spray-painted sacrifice caves where she learned her skills and earned her invitation. And fiercely swear not here -- not ever.

Otherwise, it was no sacrifice, just another pointless atrocity.

Missing the Lesson While Learning It

The December 2003 Whole Dog Journal featured an interview with a pair of Sea World whale trainers.

Our friend and teammate Craig had a subscription, and handed me the issue when it was new. In one section of the interview, trainer Chuck Tompkins discussed the use of "negative punishment" -- e.g. withdrawal of food for noncompliance -- on the orca they were training. Here's the passage that I read aloud to him and Perfesser Chaos:

Tompkins: "Yeah. One of the first chances he got, Ramu showed us exactly how he felt about having things taken away from him, and how he felt about us.

"One of the first times I got in the water with him, he grabbed me by the waist, dragged me to the bottom of the pool, held me down there until I almost passed out, brought me up for a breath -- and then did it all over again. He shook me, tossed me around, raced around the pool with me in his mouth. When he had made his point, he literally spit me out onto the deck."

WDJ: "Yikes. and the conclusion you drew from this was?"

Tompkins: "I said to Thad, 'Oh my god! This whale hates me!' It hit us both like a ton of bricks. When push came to shove, we had no real relationship with that animal. It was a revelation."

WDJ: "And that's when you decided to try an all-positive training program with the whales instead?"

So, what became interesting about this passage were the different reactions the three SAR dog handlers in the room had to Tompkins' story.

• Craig was struck by how intelligent an animal Ramu had to be, to know just how long was almost, but not quite, long enough to drown a human being, and what it might mean to keep something that intelligent in a tank and make it do tricks.

• I marveled at how Tompkins missed the fact that the whale did not "hate" him. The whale held him in contempt, which is different. If Ramu had hated him, he'd have killed him. I especially liked the "spit me out onto the deck" image. Forbearance -- a mark of nobility. Also, "withdrawing rewards" as a form of "negative punishment" sounds very benign, until one reflects that it comes down to "Do as I say or I will starve you in this concrete tank, bitch."

• Ken -- the guy who cannot hear 90% of the simple declarative sentences that are uttered by his wife, the non-trainer who seems to be not paying attention at all most of the time -- Ken was the most astounded of us all, because it was obvious to him that the whale had trained all the trainers to behave exactly the way he wanted them to by administering one powerful correction to just one of them.

The humans failed to see that "punishment" was working very well on them, even if it hadn't been working very well for them.

In the aftermath of Tilikum's fatal attack on trainer Dawn Brancheau, the three human corpses floating in this whale's wake are being spun as "accidents" because the whale was "playing."

Some game.

The whale was not angry, vindictive, cranky, testosterone-poisoned, predatory, or yearning to breathe free. There is nothing to take away from Ms. Brancheau's death beyond no ponytails in the splash zone, and under no circumstances will Sea World take any steps that will cut into its $2.7 billion business. Tilikum is a $10 million commodity. As the Baby Daddy* to two-thirds of Sea World's tank-bred orcas, he may be the most valuable livestock in the industry. He stays in the bathtub until he dies.

But that long-ago warning shot by Namu -- "this whale hates me!"

Now, the trainers who obediently stopped withholding fish from their masterful human trainer and became "pure" positive continued to get knocked around. But Tompkins had an explanation for that -- it was due to the previous training regimen, natch.

Maybe so. Tilikum, however, was snatched from Icelandic waters long after all the whale trainers went officially "purely positive." All the overt force was front-loaded onto the bad guys who kidnapped the whales from their families, and the background coercion of the tank walls and the fish bucket pushed beneath the crust of consciousness. So I guess that excuse won't fly this time.

Later in the interview, Tompkins describes "going positive" in his personal life after the revelation in the bathtub.

"I realized that I had effectively trained my family to see my car in the driveway and be all 'Dad's home! Run!' Even the dog used to hide when I got home!

That wasn't what I wanted; I wanted my family to be happy to see me, to greet me at the door. To do this, I had to stop 'correcting' everything that I saw that was 'wrong' and instead start reinforcing all the good things I saw in my family. I had to practice being engaged and enjoyable to my family. Now when I come home, everyone says 'Yay! Dad's home!' And my dog doesn't hide anymore, either!"

WTF?

Over the years I've helped many clients who had who had poor relationships with their dogs, and a few who had fallen into a poisonously punitive spiral that was hard to break, and probably met technical thresholds for abuse at some point before they asked for help. But I have never, ever, met anybody whose dog runs and hides when he comes home. Most dogs that are frankly beaten still run to fawn over their abusers; they may be crouched and peeing on their own feet when they do it, but they are coming out to greet that person.

Is it any wonder that this guy was ripe for a conversion experience?

Furthermore, notice that this is all about what he wants. He wants Mom to meet him at the door in pearls and high heels and hand him his pipe, Rover to bring his slippers, and little Mikey and Sarah to jump up and down and yell Yay Dad. And he figured out how to get what he wanted.

Has Tilikum?

Does he even know what he wants?

Whatever it is, it isn't forthcoming when he positively reinforces his captors with his spectacular cooperation. And it sounds as if his other plan isn't working out too hot either.

-------------------

* Orcas don't have a Species Survival Plan. They are corporate assets. There is no conservation value to the captive breeding program -- its only function is to engender more performers, and boost ticket sales when there is an adorable orca infant for the gawking. Be that as it may, if one is going to create a catastrophic genetic bottleneck in the very first generation of a breeding program, one might at least mitigate the damage to the future character of the inbred gene pool by not using a sire who ices a human being once a decade.

Sea Wolves are not Sea Dogs

An experienced orca trainer died today at Sea World Orlando. The Shamu of the hour, Tilikum, a very large, very aggressive bull orca who lives in solitary confinement and performs in a "non-contact" capacity for the whale show, pulled her into his tank and killed her.







By request, then, and with a disclaimer, a reprint of a rant I posted to a trainers' list in 2004.

No, this is not by way of blaming the victim. Those who work with large animals -- horses, elephants, cattle, whales, sharks -- accept certain risks. The risks are greater when an animal is known to be intentionally aggressive, as Tilikum is, but they are always there, even with the most "docile" large animal. Animal trainers are big girls and boys. If they don't robustly understand the risks, then they need to get into a different business. I have no reason to believe that Ms. Brancheau did not accept the risks willingly. She has paid for what may have been a few seconds' complacency with her life; there but for the grace of God go us all.

Elephant handlers in contact management husbandry setups are often berated by the PROC* partisans for using "force" in training and handling. It's widely understood that the alternative to handling with an ankus and a certain amount of posturing by the human is a non-contact facility. Elephants who are not trained traditionally are simply too dangerous to have access to their keepers. Trained elephants are still dangerous, but much less so -- more on the order of a crabby stallion than a five-ton sociopath.

Trained elephants get to have more interesting lives than those warehoused or displayed in non-contact facilities.

The context was, once again, a PROC trainer's relentless claim that all dog trainers needed to do was emulate the photogenic folks in the shortie wetsuits at Sea World, and it will all be hunky-dory. That "you cannot force a whale" and "you cannot punish a whale" -- so whale training defines the desirable methodology and outcome of a training program for a domestic dog.

But dogs aren't captive whales. For which dogs -- and their owners -- have cause to be very grateful.

Thus, my rant:

* * *

Take for example, the killer whale. How would YOU get a urine sample from a killer whale with his cooperation?

Janey Shaddrick

Okay, first, I would hire men with powerboats and harpoons and nets to terrorize and kidnap the whale -- a powerful wild predator with complex social relations and strong family connections -- pull him out of the water, rendering him completely helpless, and take him away from his family and his home range of many hundreds of square miles.

Then I would put him in a tiny shallow sensory deprivation tank, full of stinking chlorinated water, where his sonar signals and all his distress vocalizations bounce off concrete walls and come back to blast him.

Then I'd deprive him of his natural food and opportunities to hunt and eat normally, and force him to eat the frozen chum that I provide, by hand. (Has the Geneva Convention kicked in yet?) After enough time he might be Keikoized -- incapable of catching his own prey, and so completely dependent on hand-delivered chum.

Then I'd make all access to that chum contingent on him performing the "behaviors" that I require of him. No trick, no eat.

I'd also make his access to any social interaction with other creatures contingent on these "behaviors." Ooh -- ever hear of the Stockholm Syndrome? Well don't trust it too far, because orcas as well as smaller ceteceans attack their handlers with fair frequency. A captive wild "trained" animal is not necessarily tamed, and is never domesticated.

And all access to a slightly larger sensory deprivation tank and opportunities to move, play, and exercise mentally -- also contingent on these "behaviors."

I'll declare 50-70% compliance with my trick cues to be victory -- a "trained" animal.

If, after many years of this brainwashing regimen, I try to transfer the pool tricks to "open water" and the animal actually declines to make for the horizon, or comes back when very hungry (remember, can't catch his own prey anymore -- too debased), I will trumpet my victory. This whale chose to stay with me! When, as is more likely, he disappears entirely, I will keep that as quiet as possible.

Want to know the rest, or has that been "gentle," "positive," and "kindly" enough for you?

I am so @!^%ing sick of the "whale trainers can't use force" argument. What is done to whales is the most sickeningly violent "training" in the universe -- no cattle prods required.

BTW, I have no trouble getting my dogs to provide a urine sample, and it didn't take a clicker or a single cookie to accomplish it.

Eliminating on command is pure classical conditioning, and the dog's "reward" during conditioning is the satisfaction of bladder relief. No +R or -P or any other jargon or gadgets or ideology enter into the equation. Just condition the pup to associate the word with the peeing, and be ready with a pie plate when you need a sample.

The mechanics of cetecean micturation are obscure to me and no doubt present practical challenges, but I'm sure it's pretty much the same training process, once the atrocities are done with and the animal is physically contained and subdued. Mostly.

What's the mystery?

_____________

*Positive Reinforcement Operant Conditioning -- i.e., people who claim to believe in the Behaviorist quadrant** schema of all animal learning, but who explicitly discard three of those quadrants and further claim that all animal training need be only in the form of "positive reinforcement," frequently in the form of "free shaping." Many accuse anyone who either uses the other quadrants, or rejects the Skinnerian paradigm altogether, of abuse -- even "torture."

** Often called the "four quadrants" of behaviorism. But really, how many quadrants are there gonna be?

______________

Update: Sea World snatched tragedy from the jaws of decency. Had anyone in the captivity industry wanted to repatriate Tilikum in 1992, it might have been possible. Instead, Sea World essentially goaded the government of Iceland to Just Say No to releasing Tilikum and any other whales in the waters from which they were kidnapped.

The article that dropped the scales from my eyes nine years ago.

Six More Weeks? The Deuce, You Say!

The Weather Service would not commit yesterday. You might get a foot of snow. Or maybe about four inches. Who can say?


You bastards.

So, turns out, it might have been a good idea to bestir ourselves after Perfesser Chaos' last fire call last night and plow out the driveway when we had only 11 inches.

Because Tractor-San is a game little thing, but we cannot even raise the blade high enough that it does not act as an anchor.

A man might come tomorrow to extract us. I'm not sure what it's going to cost us. We've actually jumped the queue on account of PK being a firefighter. Even though his substation is only about a quarter mile away, he can't get there fast enough on snowshoes to make the truck when the pager goes off. Depending on where I sink the yardstick, we've got between 18-22 inches, and are going nowhere.

Meanwhile, we still have power, there's oil in the tanks, wood in the shed, plenty of toilet paper, half a case of home brew, a whole case of Mexican Coca-Cola, two bottles of rum, 80 pounds of beef scrap for dogs, and a couple new Netflix on hand.

Four pairs of snowshoes, two pairs of skis, a case of toe warmers, and a gallon of gatorade.

Two feet of fresh powder sounds wonderful. What it really is is a shitload of work.

Sophia actually did some of the trail-breaking, but she is not particularly skilled at route-choosing, and tends to porpoise in aimless circles. Mostly it was up to Perfesser Chaos. The English shepherds were happy to hang back and let The Help perform this function.


Even where the trail was broken, the smaller ES had to porpoise to get through.


I only fell once. It's actually pretty hard to fall when the snow is over your knees, but the concealed tripwire brambles in the pasture finally had their say. Getting back up is not a straightforward exercise when one's skis are five-foot snow anchors. I got plenty of helpful advice on how to manage this task from the non-ski-wearing Peanut Gallery.

I think Cole might be carrying half his weight in snow dingles here. He also got to relive the testicle experience in gigantic ice form. It wasn't as good as he remembered.


Interesting that Barry White, who braved the same drifts, collected nothing. I think he repelled the dingles with force of will. He's never going to suffer that indignity again.

There were few game trails apparent, and only in protected lee areas. I'm hoping our trail-breaking will be a boon to the wildlife -- except for the tiny tunnelers and the hibernators, a snow dump like this one makes hard times for wild creatures. Our route coincidentally connects the deer bedding area in the pines on our north boundary with our neighbor's unharvested cornfield to the west. I figure that by February, that corn is forfeit to the local Bambis. I filled two feeders with safflower seeds and black oil sunflower, and hung out some more suet.

I opened the window for the turkeys to come out. Yeah, I was just messin' with 'em. They knew it, and did not take the bait.

Interesting that wild turkeys manage to survive even though their feet sometimes touch snow.

One hour of porpoising through snow higher than their backs has given us a houseful of very quiet dogs tonight.

Double-Suspension of Disbelief

The six of us drove from the Bay Area to the only motel near a Central Valley town where there are more coursing hounds than anywhere else on the continent. Hell, there may be more hounds than humans, amid the glass-flat, engineer-squared, desert cotton fields forced green by water wrung from the Sierras.


View Larger Map

Three humans and three search and rescue dogs rolled out of bed at o-dark-thirty and met our long-time correspondent,* Dr. John Burchard, and his colleagues George Bell and Vicky Clarke at the blinking stoplight in "town," before driving out to the unplanted -- therefore unwatered -- fields near the irrigation ditch.

With them were an assortment of the fastest quadruped predators on the continent outside of the cheetah pen at the zoo.

It was already summer, and for the sake of both hounds and hares, all coursing needed to be done before the sun could begin its relentless scorching.

The SAR dogs presented a conundrum. It was too dangerous to leave them in the car. Would it work to bring them along? Vicky briefly fretted about our GSD partner, Mel. Her hounds had never met another dog who was not a sighthound. Would they make Mel to be a coyote and try to hunt her down?

Not to worry. Mel and the two English shepherds, Pip and Rikki, had one thing in common with the salukis -- courtly dog manners.


Vicky asked for this picture, as proof that Joey and Mojo had met a pointy-ear and not served her as a giant 'yote. The SAR dogs walked as part of the human "gallery" when we slip-coursed with George's greyhounds; when the salukis were released to free-course, the SAR dogs moved out a bit more. Rikki even flushed a hare and futilely chased it until the salukis took over.

In slip-coursing, the humans walk a line through the grass and light brush, hold hounds by the most ingeniously-constructed leash-collar contraption. When someone spots a hare, he shrieks RABBBIIIITT, the hounds surge forward, the handlers let go of the T-handle of the lead, and the wrist loop engages the deadman release -- it all takes less than a second, and the chase is on.

George handed me the lead of a massive greyhound named Lionheart. I felt as if a total stranger had just trustingly handed me the keys to a Bugatti with his baby inside.**

As we walked and scanned for hares, I asked him about the breeding of these real coursing greyhounds -- what characterized the bloodlines of dogs who still hunt the way their ancestors did before the invention of the alphabet?

We cross track-bred dogs with AKC greyhounds.

Coulda knocked me over with a saluki's ear feather.

Why do you do that?

Because it works.

My brain raced with more questions, but I dropped them, because George had just given the final answer to any sensible inquiry about why an expert might do something a certain way. And because someone screamed RABBBIIITTT, and the chase was on.

It was over in less than a minute. The hare escaped through a fence that was so far away I had failed to perceive it. The hounds were colored dots in the distance.

When they returned at a more reasonable lope, they were done. The first order of business was to thoroughly cool them.


George took the greys home, and it was time to free-course the salukis. Contrary to the armchair fancier folklore I'd been fed, they hunted by scent like any other dog until they (or Rikki) flushed a hare.

When Joey and Dark Lady were in pursuit, Mojo was most ingenious as he tried to get a look at its trajectory.



The salukis were not as fast, and did not run as far (edit: as far away -- they ran for longer over a more crazed course), as the greyhounds, but they turned and strategized and provided an exciting chase at least twice. My blood surged with adrenaline shared by hunters in wide desert places since the Bronze Age.

I would not have been in better company if I'd been invited to hunt from the Pharaoh's chariot.

No jackrabbits were harmed in the making of this morning of hunting.

We did do considerable damage to some chorizo and huevos at an excellent Mexican greasy spoon.

Then to George's house, to spend the late morning studying astonishing videos and high-speed photographs of sighthounds running, turning, spinning -- hyperextending their joints in ways that humans never imagined before Muybridge.

It was John who had, years before, presented such definitive evidence for the functional necessity of front dewclaws that I was compelled to discard every bit of lore I had been fed for decades about the practice of amputating them. (And just in time for our first litter of puppies to keep their God-given thumbs.)

As we viewed another amazing image, one of our hosts mentioned that the double suspension gallop was unique, among dogs, to the sighthounds.

All galloping animals have a moment in the collected phase of the gait when the beast is airborne.


A dog or cheetah capable of double-suspension is also airborne at full extension.

And apparently, everyone knows that only sighthounds can do this. Ken and Laura and I were conversing with two of the world's experts on animal locomotion, and they were quite clear on this point.

Except ... I fired up my laptop and starting looking for this:


Pip had just spent the morning being emphatically not a sighthound in the company of both of them. She is not structured anything like a sighthound, doesn't do a sighthound's job, and isn't remotely as fast as a sighthound.

There is undeniably air under each of her feet in this photograph.

QED. Sighthounds do not have a monopoly on the canine double-suspension gallop.

What was striking was how delighted both men were to see the photo. How happy they were to surrender what they knew in favor of the new information. A lovely demonstration of the scientific worldview, and beyond that the generosity and confidence of temperament that prefers a novel and messy truth to a tidy and coherent conviction.

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Pupdate. I'm putting together a photo gallery of non-sighthounds airborne at full extension, here.

Reviewing the excellent photos people have been sending me, I need to specify that what we need is sequential photos of the animal airborne at both collection and extension.

Like this fabulous coyote.

Otherwise, there's no way to know that the dog wasn't leaping out of a different gait.

You can send submissions to the surname of this blog's author spelled correctly AT zoominternet DOT net

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* I don't think the dogs had been writing to him, though he'd be one to read and answer graciously if they did.

** Begging the question, who puts a car seat into a Bugatti?

Photo Phriday: The Only Thing Worse Than a Toad Living in Your Boot

Is, I am guessing, tucking in after a long night shift on bug duty, and waking up a few hours later because someone has picked up your house and is whacking it vigorously against another house in mid-air.

And then they stick a giant foot into your bedroom.

And then the yelling.

And then you get evicted.

Monochrome

I nearly stepped on this large, spectacular moth in the woodshed this afternoon.

I thought he was perfectly monochrome until I cropped in the photo; click the image for big, and you'll see the blue on his legs and a little on his wings, too.

What is he?

Update: Giant Leopard Moth

Photo Phriday: Perilous Nest

This kildeer (aka kildee) put her nest right by the gatepost to the barnyard at our friends' Rachel and Stan's farm.

I'm not sure whether to call it just "not a great spot" or simply evidence that this kildeer has always relied on the kindness of strangers.

At one point one of the horses opened a gate from the pasture and let the whole herd into the barnyard. We hurried to contain them again, for fear the great lummoxi would crush the nest. So maybe she has it all figured out. For example, she had the good judgment to live absolutely nowhere near George W. Bush.

When we first arrived, she was doing the usual broken-wing distraction routine. Later, we couldn't get her to leave the nest and perform this show for the camera. The sun was blazing (hence the harsh shadows), and perhaps she was unwilling to leave her eggs to roast.

I have watched these birds all my life, and have never been this close to one with such leisure. And I've only rarely found the nest. You do see the eggs under her, yes?

I never knew what extraordinary eyes they have.



And I could curl up and go to sleep on her tail feathers.

Photo Phriday: Omelette

This turkey egg was lying just like this in the middle of the gravel road at the State Gamelands where we trained last week.

The nature of the shell breach suggests an avian diner, as does the spillage left behind.

But how did a crow or other feathered nest-robber get the intact egg to the middle of the road without breaking it?

Velociraptor: Teenage Confusion

If I work on my laptop upstairs in the mornings, my eye is constantly being drawn to the west-facing window as chickens and guineas walk by, flap around, scratch for bugs, and discuss their interpersonal issues on the front lawn.

Isn't that what lawns are for?

Later in the day they generally move further afield. I suspect they are hunting for earthworms in the more closely mowed lawn area. The first time I saw a hen pull one out, just like a robin does, I was quite surprised. Didn't know they did that. Once the sun is well up, the worms go below and the chooks go looking for other things to eat.

This morning the fog was so thick in our little cleft that, despite the dogs' early patrols, I didn't let the birds out until about 9. Was aware of the usual activity in my peripheral vision as I returned email, then did a quick whiplash when this walked by:


It was still quite foggy, so the picture quality (even with electronic enhancements) is not great.

He's a young jake, and he was checking out the two hen guineas. By the time I ran downstairs, got the camera, ran back up and threatened the dogs with lifelong enrollment at a PetsMart clicker class if they didn't keep their gobs shut, the hens had moved off a little, possibly having concluded that the New Guy was a boring geek.

But my largest guinea cock had not:


The guinea is mostly feathers, and is fluffed up in a threat display. The jake, though not a big turkey, is probably three or four times his body mass. The guinea is no older than, and probably several months younger than, the jake.

Nevertheless ...

A little mean guy on his home turf can trump a lot of muscle.

I can't wait to see what transpires as breeding season approaches for both species.

Not to mention, what happens when we get our domestic heritage-breed turkeys in.

Hunger Moon

The Hunger Moon is waning.

As part of our gift-with-purchase of New Improved Warmer Planet, we've been enjoying the first real winter in over a decade here, and she's a doozy. Persistent snow cover instead of our usual "look pretty and white for a day and then melt into muck. Epic northwest winds; I now own two new lawnchair cushions, some fiberglass roofing, and a mysterious linoleum kinda thing, while my Republican neighbors a half kilometer to the east are no doubt rejoicing in their acquisition of several thousand asphalt shingles and an Obama yard sign. Deep cold.

My main occupation these days consists of

Warm up the tractor
Fire up the tractor
Plow the driveway
Plow the driveway some more
Hand-shovel the especially tricky bit just below the curve
Admire my capable plowmanship
Watch the wind fill in the especially tricky bit just below the curve
Call Ken to tell him to park up top if he wants to leave in the morning

We were lucky to get a few days of ice-free driveway during which our oil vendor could get a truck down the drive; Ike knocked down plenty of firewood, and we've been cutting and splitting, but it won't be seasoned until next year. It could have been a tad nippy.

But this whinging about the cold from someone who has a pantry and fiberglass insulation does not impress the other residents here. There is not an animal alive in our woods who has lived through such a winter. Probably their grandparents never experienced a winter like this one. The only memory of snowdrifts and crust, no way to get to food, is written in their genes.

The voles and field mice have it pretty good when there's a crust. Most of their predators can't get through. Not counting these guys.



They are well-insulated under there, and can get to food caches. A shallow snow-tunnel is also nicely-lit; it must be a bright and pleasant time for the little mammals. The snow-fossil runs revealed during the oil-delivery thaw remind me of the Uncle Milton's Ant Farm I had as a kid.



The rabbits are living pretty close to the bone. A crust is a good running surface for them, but it locks up the better part of the food supply. The trees and shrubbery are paying for it.



And the high-fiber diet is evident in the dry, woody pellets at their scrapes.

The slash piles from where we've cut firewood out of the Ike blowdown are a favorite food source for the rabbits, and for the deer who yard up in the white pines on our north property line. There's a well-trodden detour from their perennial Bambi highway to this pile in the south pasture; most of the twig tips are roughly clipped off now. In future years I'll remember not to chip or burn this stuff up until spring.



Songbirds, too, are in shock. It's been eight or ten songbird generations since we've had deep winter here. Why are the berries and grub trees covered in ice? I made suet blocks with safflower in them.


I do not know what the turkeys are eating, or how they get it.

The few remaining groundhogs are holed up, heedless of Phil.

Our predator population is significant, but not varied. Fox tracks -- straight, purposeful, single-tracked and direct-registered -- are thick in the woods and fields -- except near the house and barn.


I have to credit Moe and his homies for their diligent patrols; the brushy buttcrack below the barn is bunny central, providing the cottontails with cover, food, and a built-in goon squad to keep Reynard at bay. We've yet to lose a chicken to a predator. (Sound of knocking on bentwood arm of the Poang.) On snow-free days, Ken puts the dogs out to conduct their Secret Service sweeps for a while in the morning, then opens the pop-door for the chooks.

Despite their sincere efforts, the dogs pose little direct threat to the rabbits, who can skim along atop the crust while the relatively lumbering canis lupus familiaris crack through. Except for Rosie, who does a pretty fair Legolas impression on the crustiest days.


The byword for the next six weeks is conserve.