This is a Spectacled Owl from the recent Veracruz trip. Spectacled owls are boldly patterned, unsociable owls of tropical forests of Central and South America. This one flew silently in to check us out from its perch high in the canopy, and suffered to have its photo snapped illuminated only by a flashlight, and no magnification. They sport an excellent Latin name: Pulsatrix perspicillata, meaning “female pulsating one” referring to its accelerating pup-pup-pup-upupup call (Pulsatrix-perspicillata-1.mp3), and “conspicuous”, referring to its striking markings.

(Top photo A. Shock, Three Star Owl.)

To the left is a clearer photo of what a Spectacled owl looks like in daylight, taken in the London Zoo.

Vicki arranged for a tour of the Phoenix Herpetological Society (PHS) for some ASU colleagues. It seemed like a fascinating way to celebrate our anniversary (#24!), so E and I went. Vicki and her husband Calvin are long-time volunteers at PHS and they showed us around the facilities, which are up north off of Dynamite Rd in Scottsdale.

We swam a python, scrubbed an education ‘gator, and fed other alligators and a crocodile, tortoises, and iguanas of several species. By “we” I mean Vicki and Calvin, while the rest of us took pictures and asked questions. We helped a little, lobbing handfuls of produce at large lizards, poking expiration-date challenged chicken legs and donated elk shreds by the gobbet through chain link enclosures with tongs, to be snapped up by eager gator jaws. Iguanas adore grapes, and African tortoises love lettuce. A lot of lettuce. Each day crates and crates of produce donated by grocery stores go into the non-native tortoise corrals. Any idea you may have had of slow-moving giants lying about motionless is destroyed once you see a horde of tortoises trundling towards lettuce mounds.

We watched Tigger, an 11 foot Reticulated Pythoness swim in the pool, while wallabies cowered at a distance. Tigger was beautiful, and unlike most snakes I’ve seen swimming who skim the surface skillfully but with purpose (why does a cottonmouth swim a creek? – to get to the other side), she was swimming for pleasure, and loved to dive down to the very bottom, where small bubbles trickled up from her iridescent scales. She looked at home in the water, like a very long, sinuous salamander. Another “Retic”, Donny, returned from an event just before we left. He was still coiled calmly in his open traveling crate, a very sturdy, well-ventilated plastic trunk on wheels, waiting for several volunteers to lift him back into his regular habitat. Donny weighs something like 350 pounds, is 18 feet long, and hasn’t maxed out in length yet.

PHS is a place where unwanted/abandoned reptiles can find a home, where relocated rattlers live temporarily, and where herps used for education programs in schools and other venues both private and public are housed between gigs. Most of the animals we saw were either confiscated or abandoned — people leave critters in boxes on PHS’s doorstep, to avoid paying the drop-off fee. They’re homeless because of their owner’s inability or unwillingness to care for them as they grow larger.

More animals are coming in to places like PHS these days because of the current economy and rising foreclosures and evictions; it’s the same at dog and cat shelters, too. We shed a few tax-deductible dollars their way before we left: PHS survives mostly on green — money or the edible sort. If you ever see your local grocer throwing away produce (or meat), tell them about Phoenix Herp Society — daily donations don’t always match the tortoises’ (and gators’) needs. And seeing all those sheltered animals drove home the need to think before buying an exotic herp to bring home: many of the PHS’s tortoises, and even some of the snakes and monitors are available for adoption to suitable homes, a really hands-on way to help out (you need to apply, be approved and pay an adoption fee). Or consider volunteering, or hiring PHS to bring critters to a home birthday party or work event for a truly unique and educational experience. Check out their website for more options.

My recent post about our vet-irradiated cat Hector Half-Squid contained a visual joke about being able to find him in the dark, by showing a picture of his normal feline eye-shine generated by a camera flash. But there’s a real glow-in-the-dark kitty in the news: Mr. Green Genes. Here’s a picture of Mr. Green Genes glowing, in an excellent photo by Rusty Costanza of Newhouse News Service. The lab tabby fluoresces under ultraviolet light because of genetic material introduced into his cells by scientists at the Audubon Center for the Study of Endangered Species. They hope their findings will lead to methods of curing diseases by gene therapy. Check out the details in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, including a picture of Mr Green Genes in regular light: he’s a standard marmalade tiger!

Birds weren’t the only wonderful things to be seen on a recent trip to the Mexican state of Veracruz: there was clay! The capital city of Xalapa, perched on the volcanic shoulders of the Sierra Madre Oriental, has a world-class archaeological museum, Museo de Antropología de Xalapa (MAX), stuffed full of the cultural treasures of pre-Hispanic people local to the region. For someone who works in clay, these objects are endlessly fascinating and inspirational. Here are some of my favorites. Click on any image to see a larger version. Forgive blurriness; no flash allowed, so all camera work is hand-held in low light conditions, through the glass of display cases.

Surprising to me: nearly life-sized human figures in clay. I’d seen examples in stone (like the big Olmec heads, several of which are on display at MAX), or in bas-relief, but not in clay and modeled in the round. On the right, check out Xipe Totec “the Flayed One”, scary deity of death/rebirth wearing the skin of a human, flaking off him as it decays — a practice shown in Aztec sculpture actually carried out by priests, wearing the skins of sacrificed captives. This sculpture was made in 3 pieces: head, torso/arms, and pelvis/legs, and assembled after firing, saving on kiln space. Looks like ear bobs and head-piece may have been interchangeable, or made of another material that didn’t survive; musical instrument or other item held in hands missing?

Effigy vessels — pots made in the form of animals, human heads or figures, parts of humans (like feet), or plants — are common in many cultures in both the old and new worlds, but are particularly prevalent in Meso-America, and there are many fine examples in the MAX collection. Here is one with a bat, and an excellent Jaguar, complete with furry pelt, made by attaching small flattened balls of clay to the surface in exactly the same way as the flaking skin is represented on Xipe Totec. Note the bat’s “arms” are human arms supporting its wings. More on effigy vessels and Three Star Owl in a later post.

There is a gap in Three Star Owl postings between Cranky Owlet hears autumn and the Canyon Wren post. This is because for nearly two weeks I was in Mexico, looking at birds. Though the trip had long been planned and paid for, it was a strange thing to be doing while the US economy was falling apart. I was out of the country during the initial flap while the bailout was being tussled over, while the market was first plunging, while the vice presidential candidates were debating. These serious events made looking for birds seem both frivolous and fundamental simultaneously. Frivolous because spending money on vacation travel in a time of economic uncertainty seems unwise and even trivial. Fundamental because, well, the birds were still living their lives, existing in their environments as usual, evading predators, searching for food, migrating thousands of miles to distant wintering grounds, and observing this was a connection to an elemental reality.

The group I was with was traveling in the Mexican state of Veracruz to see, among other things, the spectacular flights of north American birds of prey funneled along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the famous so-called Rio de Rapaces. Osprey, Turkey vultures, Broad-winged hawks, Swainson’s hawks, Mississippi kites, Peregrine falcons, Merlins, and others, as well as non-raptors such as American white pelicans, Scissor-tailed flycatchers, Wood storks, and Anhingas swirl overhead in dynamic kettles, spiraling upward on thermals, rising like litter in a dust-devil until they are high enough to stream outward in a south-bound line, some to Central America, others like the Swainson’s hawk, all the way to central South America. Below, their vast exodus is mirrored by the southward movement of songbirds, some nearly at ground level: warblers, thrushes, shorebirds, flycatchers, dickcissels, vireos, grosbeaks, and other songbirds, heading southward mostly at night, stopping to rest and feed during the day in the resource-rich coastal plains, transitional foothills, and tropical forests of the moist state of Veracruz.

These are birds that we are accustomed to thinking of, imprecisely, as “ours”. They are ours, in a sense, because they breed in various parts of the United States and Canada. But for more than half the year, they live in regions closer to the equator, Mexico, Central, and South America, which countries have at least as great a “claim” to the birds as “we” do. They belong to both northern and southern America: this is a hemispheric, in some cases even global, avian economy, in which birds go when and where there is a living to be made, whether the seasonal draw is fruit, seeds, insects, other birds to eat, or survivable temperatures.

At that time, watching CNN in English on a hotel lobby TV hearing US announcers and US politicians expound, it was easy to think of all the economic turbulence as a US problem, with the rest of the world watching from a distance. That was until the the day before we left, when the peso, after a decade of stability at 10 to the American dollar, fell nearly 40 per cent in one day, largely because of the drop in the price of oil. Suddenly, like the movement of birds across the Americas, everything seemed closely related after all.

For the Pronatura Veracruz October 2008 actual day-by-day count of raptors seen, click here.

For an excellent read on the astounding fact and feat of avian migration, try Scott Weidensaul’s “Living on the Wind: across the hemisphere with migratory birds”. He’ll make you realize that migration is an even more amazing phenomenon than it seems. Chapter 5, Rivers of Hawks, is specifically on the Veracruz migration and its fairly recent discovery. As for learning about global economics, you’re on your own. I think we all need to start from scratch, at this point.

Photos: Top, (A. Shock), mural of a Broadwinged hawk and birdcensuser motif on the parapet wall of the Pronatura Hawkwatch site on the roof of the Hotel Bienvenidos, Cardel, Veracruz. Center: kettle of raptors, photo pinched from the site of the North American Ornithological Conference 2006, because I couldn’t get my camera to focus on all those little specks. Below: Osprey from National Park Service Padre Island website.