Here are the Famous Fish Rocks, kept fresh with white paint by unknown artists in Trona, California.  I admit to disappointment when I found out they were not meant to represent T-rexes rising out of the earth to once again dominate the landscape, but, even if they’re just fish… really big fish… they’re excellent.  Each one is the size of a van. I will think of them as Dunkleosteus. The Famous Fish are easy to spot just north of CA State Hwy 178 en route to the Trona Pinnacles.

<< Fish Rocks (A.Shock)

The Trona Pinnacles were our destination: ancient underwater spring deposits now high and dry in the Mojave Desert.  They’re very large-scale versions of the tufa towers on the south shore of Mono Lake, further north, only there’s no water in sight. Predictably, the only creatures there other than ourselves were a traveller in a brightly painted hippy bus, a Rock wren, and a Raven.

The towers are up to 40 feet tall. >>

Perhaps you recognize the setting from Planet of the Apes, or Star Trek V: The Final Frontier?

Surely Shiva abides here.

And also here, at the Trona Community Methodist Church, which has seen fit to adorn its front entrance with smaller yet equally vigorous tufa deposits.  (Click to enlarge.)

Speaking of reverence gone awry, below is a bonus pop religious image of Shiva.  I find this version delightfully goofy: ascetic hermit my butt, there’s Tres Flores in those dreads — this is Shiva El Guapo.  It seems to be a portrait of the artist’s well-fed brother in law who wants to be an actor, rather than the standard idealized image of blue-male deity with the dreamy, stoned I mean introspective expression of the Lord of Eternity. His familiar smile and direct gaze are right out of an AFTRA/SAG headshot — instead of the blessing of Om and the Shiva-linga in his palm, this chap should be flashing us a confident thumbs-up, or making that “call me” gesture next to his Nagraj’s ear.

Sometimes when you say “Goats in Trees,” people say, “No way.”

Way.

Here are goats in trees.

(Photo by E.Shock; Oman, 2010)

…it’s a coil of tube-slush that blurped out of the hose this morning — yes, ICE!  So, the frost-cloth and styrofoam cups are stratigically positioned, ready to be placed over newly-planted herbs, and on tender cactus-tips late this afternoon: tonight is supposed to be the first frost of winter.  The hummers are hitting the nectar feeders hard.  (Photo A.Shock)

…for those of us who decide to enter the Fray, this is the kind of thing you’ll be up against:

Yes, the Holidays must be upon us, it’s the traditional Santa Hat-Wearing Wiener Dog on a Bun with Lettuce and Mustard Effigy Vessel (featuring removable lid), now appearing at your local discount department store.  Oh, Why didn’t I buy this when I saw it?

(cell phone photo A.Shock)

This was weird, and sad for sure.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned the unfortunate similarity of our swimming pool to the LaBrea Tarpits.  Especially in the summer months when there are lots of inexperienced young animals out and about, we often have to carry out water rescues.  Since my studio is at home and looks onto the pool, this is often in the nick of time: desert cottontails, house sparrow fledglings, tiger whiptails, european honeybees, beetles, moths, sunspiders, and even the occasional “cowkiller” (AKA velvet ant) have all been successfully fished out to live another day.

Unfortunately, not everything that takes the inadvertent plunge is so lucky, and daytime critters often fare better than nocturnal ones, because I see them, and can help.  So, often, the first thing I do in the morning is check the pool for watery unfortunates: the closer to the surface, the better: the bottom, not so good.  Most days, there’s nothing.  But one morning, I was surprised to see this Striped-tailed scorpion (Vaejovis spinigerus) standing on the side of the pool about 18 inches below the surface (the infrequent drowned scorpion we encounter is generally on the bottom, belly up).  The poor thing must have fallen in and, unable to get out, found itself a place to stand ready for anything, with its tail fully armed,  and stuck there until it expired.  I fished it out, and took some pix for reference, and left the soft, waterlogged body for something to make a meal of.  I never saw what scored it — probably cactus wren or thrasher — but it didn’t take long; less than an hour later the little body was gone.

Here’s a close-up of it, eye-to-eye, a view we don’t often see of these close to the ground tiny arthropods.  If you’re wondering how this mildly venomous stingy thing differs from the more venomous stingy-thing, the Bark Scorpion (Centuroides spp.), the thicker, bulbous tail with longitudinal stripes on each section is the easiest characteristic to note.  The Bark scorpion has a much thinner, more gracile tail and pincers, and often holds its tail coiled to the side.

(Photos A. Shock.  Apologies; since upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress, the editor doesn’t seem to support the “click to enlarge” feature… Don’t know what’s up with that, but I’ll fix it as soon as I figure out how.)

The sky on Saturday night was remarkable.

Somewhere south of the Phoenix area a big storm collapsed, and the gusty winds flowing down off the top of its towering cumulus clouds blasted a well-defined edge of dust that rolled outward for miles.  It’s called a Haboob — fans of the the movie “the Mummy” will know what a Haboob looks like with a scary gaping face digitized onto it — and we get them in the desert during the Monsoon season each summer, without the evil high priest Imhotep’s face on them.

The top picture shows the very moment the storm arrived in our neighborhood. This is looking up at the leading edge of the dust cloud — that’s the peach-colored part of the sky.  The blue is the normal as yet dust-free twilight sky.  The color in these photos is neither enhanced or incorrect — this is really what it looked like for about an hour.

The next picture was shot in the thick of the dust storm, when everything was engulfed by swirling dirt.  The nearby Papago Buttes are barely visible through the murk even though they’re only two blocks away.  For contrast below is a photo of the same butte and the same mesquites next morning, looking more like themselves.

The final photo shows an infamous 2003 Haboob dramatically engulfing the Phoenix suburb of Ahwatukee.

Our little Saturday Haboob was impressive-looking on the ground here, but as far as monsoon events go, it didn’t live up to its own visual drama.  Often these storms are accompanied by destructive winds, and followed by drenching, flooding thunderstorms, but this one brought none of that, at least in our neck of the woods.  We must have been right at the edge of the storm as it breathed its last gust.

(Photos: top three: A.Shock; bottom, from Wikimedia Commons, with a thank you to the  anonymous photo sharer who generously posted it there)

…in which Galactic Possum battles the Celestial Army of Campervans and nearly always loses.  Nearby constellation Ferafelis vorax waits to feast on the carnage.  Visible only in the Southern Hemisphere.

(A.Shock 2009, 6″x9″ Watercolor, gouache and charcoal)

If you were a parrot, would you live in this chilly realm?

Yes, if you’re a Kea.  A large, endemic NZ parrot, the bronze-green Kea (Nestor notabilis) spends most of its time in high alpine areas and steep rocky valleys of the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island.

Kea can be easy to photograph because of some bad habits they’ve taken up, like hanging around places where people park cars in mountain turnouts, hiking huts, and ski areas.  They are industrious, strong-beaked and curious, and will methodically shred back-pack, tent, or windshield wipers just because it’s entertaining. The Department of Conservation has had to put up signs about this mischievous beakhavior:

Their destructiveness has gotten them into a lot of trouble with people, and although things are slightly better now that they are fully protected, Keas have had a bounty on their heads most of the last century, as sheep killers.

(This is as controversial an issue in NZ as wolf-attacks on humans in the US: do they or don’t they?  Apparently, video exists of Keas consuming flesh off the fatty area above the kidneys of living sheep…)

Though they spend a lot of time on the ground, Keas are strong flyers, and we were lucky enough to see a pair larking and calling loudly from over a high patch of beech forest in craggy, snow-dusted Fjordlands terrain.  This is more satisfying than seeing them scouting for food from tourists at the entrance to the one-way Homer Tunnel where vehicles must wait for up to 15 minutes for a green light.  But it’s easier to get photos of them there, and here’s one of a Kea doing a pretty good impression of a roadrunner.

(Photos, Top: E. Shock; Kea and Kea running, A. Shock)

Cactus wrens are a large (for a wren), lively, and common presence all over the low-elevation deserts in the American Southwest.  The photo to left left shows one sitting on a cholla branch.  They do that a lot, often while making all sorts of  mechanical-sounding vocalizations like drbrdrbrdrbrdrr or krakrakrakrakrakra.  Cactus wrens are expert at landing on, perching on, and building in fiercely prickly vegetation, usually constructing their unruly globular “kitchen sink” nests weaving fiber, litter, twigs and plastic safely into the protective arms of seriously spiny cactus species like cholla.

Last week we found a Cactus wren dead in our yard, stuck in the leaves of a yucca.  Here’s a photo I took of it (take my word for it, the spotty plumage is diagnostic):

This was certainly sad, but it also seemed very odd.  We couldn’t tell how the bird died, but there it was, a sorry speckled-feathery carcass wedged in the leaves of a Soaptree yucca.  Was it stashed there by a predator?  Not likely; there are predators that do that, but they don’t frequent our yard.  Did it die in the foliage above and fall there?  That doesn’t seem likely, either — it was wedged in tight, and somewhat horizontally.  Did it get stuck there, somehow, maybe a foot caught in the narrow leaves?  Possibly.

Here’s another wren story, not sad and perhaps enlightening.

Just a few days after the macabre yard find, E and I visited Boyce Thompson Arboretum, and paused on our walk for a few moments to watch a pair of Cactus wrens (Campylorhyncus brunneicapillus) busily working on a nest in the upper branches of a tree Prickly pear, a really tall variety of Opuntia. You can see the main support pad in the photo on the left, with the fibrous nesting material sticking out to the right, and the streaky bird’s head poking out to the left.  The wren was about to launch itself into the next plant over, a Soaptree yucca, to continue rummaging between the rigid leaves to gather tough hair-like fibers (visible especially clearly in the carcass photo above) that grow along the yucca stem at the bases of the leaves.  It did this over and over again, each time going deep into the spiky growth to tug and pull at the free building material to use in its nest.  Below is the best photo we managed of the wren reappearing with its beak full of yucca fibers.  Considering the tough and pointy nature of the vegetation as well as the close quarters, it looked like hazardous work, although poking around in nooks and crannies, probing with their narrow, strong beak, is what cactus wrens are built to do.  (I’ve tried to extract unwanted volunteers like fan palm sproutlings and African sumac seedlings from inside yucca clumps, and let me say that gloves, eye protection and long sleeves are often not up to the task.)

So did our hapless yard wren get caught somehow while carrying out this dangerous domestic mission?  We can never know for sure, but it seems in the realm of possibility.  It’s hard out there for a bird.

(Top photo, from Wikimedia Commons, by Mark Wagner.  Other photos by A&E Shock)

Another dire tale of cactus wren-related nesting mishap casts the spectre of botanical revenge on this story: a couple of years ago, the continuous plucking of fiber off of a hairy “Old Man” cactus in the yard by a diligently nesting Cactus wren denuded the plant’s crown so much it experienced horrible sun-burn, and died.

…your guarantee it’s a genuine artefaux.

(watch for it…)