We have a loose house.

By that I mean that nothing — windows, roof, doors, plumbing — closes tight, seals off, keeps in, or shuts out. Anything. Everything — cold draughts, hot breezes, swirling dust, muddy floodwater, joint-leggedies, fur bodies, helicopter rotor din — it all comes in, then usually goes out again, unless it decides it’s nice enough to stay, or the cats find it.

From many angles, this is not ideal. But it’s never boring. We call it “living close to nature” and try to learn to appreciate having wasps’ nests in the door jambs, rock squirrels in the attic, leaf-cutter bees in the keyholes, Huntsmen and Cellar spiders at the top of the walls, praying mantises on the houseplants, and termites in the kitchen door frame. OK, to be honest, we haven’t yet learned to appreciate termites in the kitchen, although we haven’t evicted their larval selves yet, either. You get used to inroads, after a while.

>> Palo verde seeds of two types (photo A.Shock)

We uncovered the latest inroad yesterday while searching for a bag of sawdust in the garage: someone’s carefully harvested, cleaned, and stored seed hoard. It featured two different kinds of seeds, Blue Palo Verde and Little-leaf Palo Verde, neatly cached with a little fuzzed fiber as a casually engineered plug to keep the treasure from flowing down the fold of a burlap bag. It was nice work: no husks, droppings, or other pollution in sight. But no owner, either. It was probably one of the Other Mice, family Heteromyidæ, a pocket mouse or kangaroo rat (neither is either a rat or a mouse), most likely the former, which we see around the yard. Caches like this are generally stored underground, and in addition to nourishing the gatherers, provide one of the main ways Palo Verde trees propagate: seeds in a rodent’s forgotten subterranean hoard will germinate, just add monsoon rains. But this trove was high and dry, and the seeds would have languished without benefitting the tree.

And maybe not the pocket mouse who stuffed it into our loose garage, either. But we’ll never know — the human need for not sharing living space with chewing organisms (except dogs, for some reason) kicked in and we scooped up the hoard and spirited it away — a full 1/3 of a cup of pretty little hard, brown seedlets, the smallest ones speckled like the beans they are. Their fate is to be determined. I read that you can bake bread with palo verde seeds: like most legumes, they’re very nutritious. After all the rodent’s hard work, it seems like someone should eat them.

Now, does anyone have a recipe for termites?

Mellow from basking in the sun on the spiral stairs, the beeyooteeous Miss B was ready for her close-up, not at all a common occurrence.

This is a sight I often wake up to: a looming goofy fluffwad with alien eyes strung along the hand rail of the little loft over the bed, like a leopard on a limb.

If it looks dangerous, it probably is.  I don’t mean the cat; he’s a pussycat.  I mean dangerous to do, because it’s about fourteen feet up and Hector Halfsquid is a hapless clod.  He’s fallen off once (to my knowledge), startling us awake coming down thump next to the bed.  He landed on his feet — like a cat — on the carpeted floor, entirely unharmed.  If he’d landed two feet over, he probably would have broken our legs breaking his fall.

It’s particularly annoying because at a time when I’m so busy I don’t have time to write a proper post and can only fling up some cloying snapshot of the household furstock with a brief anecdotal caption, The Cats just loaf around the house 22 hours a day, lying about like flat pools of hot hair, not moving a muscle except to lazily stare at lizards through the sliding glass door and shed, giving off not only copious amounts of fur, but also the impression that this is exactly what’s expected of them.  And who has time to argue?

Our fence had some extra height this morning, and a glorious tail.  Do you see the fur anomaly?  I’m pretty sure it sees you.

It was obliging, and let itself be fully revealed.  Such a kitty-dog!  That’s a 6-foot wall it leaped upon with little effort.  They regularly use the block walls in the neighborhood like geometric trails, navigating nimbly with neat-nailed feet, safely above the jaws of coyotes and the hubbub of dogs.

So — finally! — photos of the neighborhood Gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus).  E was in the right place at the right time, or the fox was, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s another shot.  LOOK AT THAT TAIL!!!!!

The tail is key — here’s a bit reposted from an earlier post on our gray foxes:

Etymology

Foxes are canids, but not Canis, the genus of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals. The Gray fox has its own genus: Urocyon, which is from Greek ὀυρά, tail, and κύων, dog. Its species is cinereoargenteus, from Latin cinis, ash, plus L. argenteus, of silver. Put them together, and its name means “silvery ashy-black dog-tail“. In case you’re wondering, the genus of the Red fox and other “true foxes” is Latin Vulpes, meaning “fox”, which does NOT give us our word “fox.” That is said to be derived through Old English from Old German fukh (the modern German word for fox is fuchs), derived from the Proto-Indo-European root puk- which means “tail.”

Seriously, dude, the ears are a giveaway.

A scrape in damp soil in the shade of a shrub is desert cottontail air conditioning on a 100 degree afternoon.  A nearby brushpile makes a good escape plan, and there’s viral bermuda grass for grazing just a few feet away.  This is the rabbit equivalent of the dude with beers in his hat tubing down the Salt River.  The only thing missing is the smell of sunscreen, and blaring music. (Photo A.Shock, Canon EOS xti).