Just to even things up, here’s what it feels like to be BIRD-WATCHED:

(Photo E.Shock)

This is “Hoover” the semi-tame wild African collared dove who inhabits our neighborhood, wondering why we don’t have a handful of peanuts NOW.

To indulge in a moment of natural history, notice how the eye is set in a slightly pinched or narrow part of the bird’s head.  This enables both forward and rear vision, in addition to panoramic side-vision.  This eye placement is typical of prey animals (the pursued) rather than predators (the pursuer), whose eyes tend to be placed for superior forward vision.  Except for the beak (!), a dove’s head shape is very much like a rabbit’s.  Without the big ears, of course, which would definitely be an aerodynamic liability.

For other Three Star Owl posts featuring Hoover, click here.

Here are two new Spot the Bird photos.  The visual puzzle is the same in each: huge background, tiny bird.  No camouflage involved, none at all; just hiding against a big landscape.

The first photo of an enormous oaktree (?) in Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior Arizona, east of Phoenix, is a photo I took because the branches of this tree were so amazingly massive and lofty.  It was only when I got it home and onto the computer that I noticed there was a bird in the shot, because it had been silent.  Lucky it wasn’t a jaguar, I guess.  By the way, you’re not looking for an intrinsically small bird, just small by comparison to this tree.  (If you find the bird, click twice for a fairly clear embiggening of its image).

I think this second one is easier, especially if you click to enlarge. This photo, ostensibly of a robust saguaro behind a line of newly leafed-out mesquite and the foot of a basalt flow in back, shows a genuinely small bird — a moderately Dinky Dude of the Desert, in fact — doing its singing thing for spring. Hear the jingling sound?

Neither of these will be hard for everyone, especially for folks whose eyes are sharp from being out in the field looking for small things in big, leafy vistas.  I’ll publish enlarged versions of the pictures in a subsequent post.  Extra credit for IDing the birds to species (not that there’s a prize or anything, except kudos to augment your birding kleos.  And, to wax perturbingly didactic, EXTRA extra credit if you know the diff between kudos, Gk κῦδος, and kleos, κλέος).

And if you know what the big tree in the top photo is, please let me know, because I don’t…

Good Luck — I hope you SPOT THE BIRD!

For other Spot the Bird posts, go to the sidebar on the left, and click on the category, spot the bird.

(Top photo, A.Shock; bottom photo, E.Shock)

A while back, I posted about my process for making horned lizard bowls (affectionately known as Horny toads) from clay.  Here are the next few steps, all shown in one photo, below.

To the right is a now completely assembled and textured horned lizard, in the leather hard stage, drying.  In the center is a bone dry and partially tinted lizard — note that the clay is now a lighter buff.  I use a sponge and mute slip colors to give the textured skin a mottled appearance, like a horned lizard’s camo-flecked pelt.  (You may remember that slip is a paint-like water and clay mixture with mineral oxides and stains added.)   The colors, which look very contrasty and unnatural at this point, will calm down and become more subtle during firing.  Normally, adding slip is done no later than the leather hard stage to avoid flaking, but the refined slips I use have no problems hanging on.  On the left is a completed horned lizard awaiting its first, or bisque, firing. I’ve added the ants with a very fine brush (a 00 squirrel liner), also in slips.  This is a touchy job: the fine work requires a fairly long process of painting delicate lines — the more ants, the longer the work time — and a lot of handling of a bone dry piece with pointy sticky-outy bits.  If you’ve worked with clay you know that this bone-dry phase (where all the liquid water has evaporated from the clay body) is when a piece is at its most fragile.  On top of that, if something like a horn, a toe or a leg snaps off, it is difficult or even impossible to reattach it trustworthily.  Not that… ahem… that ever happens, or if it did I would admit it… These guys, Regal Horned Lizards, have 10 coronal horns, and so I have to be careful while “anting” them.

<< A favorite teeshirt of E‘s, a mimbres horned lizard design.  Nice depiction of the lateral spiny scales along its flanks.

A note on the ants.  They are Pogonomyrmex, a genus of harvester ants, called Pogos for short, understandably.  These are the guys you see issuing forth from their nests, with every seed and scrap of vegetation gleaned clean to the grit for a 5 meter radius around the entrance.  They have a potent and painful bite, but despite that, they are Horned lizards’ most favoritest thing to eat.  It’s tough to capture their essence in a sludgy, opaque medium like clay slip, because they’re waxy like tropical fruit: sort of clear but satiny, too.  I can get close to the effect by depicting them with highlights in white on their red bodies.

Pogonomyrmex ants photographed at Kartchner Caverns State Park (A.Shock)   >>

They’re extraordinary animals: physically very strong, and focused in their social pursuits, with big bolster-like heads (which appear to be larger than their abdomens) sporting impressive grasping mouthparts you would have no trouble seeing with your naked eye, if you got close enough.  Or, you can just click on the photo above — which I call Pogos Agogo — and look at the solitary ant to the lower left.

If you love excellent up-your-nose close-up photos of ants (and who doesn’t?) check out the site of Alex Wild, myrmecologist, or studier of ants.  Better still click here to see his photos of Pogo ants in particular, to get a much better view of the fearsome mouthparts than in my photo above.

Etymological side-bar. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles’ posse were the Myrmidons. μύρμηξ, myrmex, is ant in Greek.

You can see finished horned lizard bowls in the Three Star Owl Shop.