…family and clients who enjoy, enhance, and support Three Star Owl.

Especially to two friends who generously shared their time, creativity, and expertise to make Three Star Owl a better artistic enterprise in ways I couldn’t have managed on my own.

Thanks to Jack Follett who made wonderful copper shelving for portable displays at Three Star Owl sales events.  He based the design on original shelving made awhile back by another good friend, Leslie Wood, in St. Louis.  Both the old and new shelving are strong, easy to transport and set up, and are so elegantly conceived and constructed that people come over to the booth to admire them!  Many thanks, Jack!

And thanks also to the inestimable Ed Bustya who created the threestarowl.com website for me, and who generously offers me the benefit of his experience with sales events, and ideas for outlets, ventures, and possibilities for new directions for the flight of Three Star Owl.  Much appreciated, Ed!

Ed and Jack have in common a deep appreciation of birds and the natural world, and each one spends a lot of time outdoors and traveling, Ed photographing, and Jack birding and volunteering for bird and wildlife related organizations.

Hope the coming New Year is a healthy, happy, and hopeful one for everyone!

Peace on Earth!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Three Star Owl

…bigger all the time.

…feels especially cranky.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

This weekend is Audubon Arizona’s fundraiser, Gifts from Nature, and Three Star Owl will be there with a selection of new and classic items for you to check out.  Come by and say Hi!  The details are on the flyer below!  Hope to see you there…

There have been many delays and distractions for the Stacked Toad Effigy Teapot: computer failure and restoration, other deadlines, and Thanksgiving, including a tragic Saguaro Plunge, details to be posted later.

But here is the next phase: the “lid” of the “teapot” is in place, and also the “finial” (knob), with Hector Halfsquid for scale.

This involved the addition of more toads — the final toads — to represent the top of the “teapot”.  The visual theme is toads-upon-toads, stacks of toads, piles of toads.  During the Couch’s spadefootlet episode, I was reminded of the toadly practice of Climbing On Your Neighbors.  When kept in captivity in large numbers, toads (and other amphibians and reptiles) will climb on each other with no regard for personal space, or any politeness at all.  I wanted to capture this “toe-in-the-eye” sense of physical involvement in the Toad Stack.  So on went two more toads, atop the base grouping of four toads.  Despite more than a week having elapsed this was not a problem, because even in the desert clay can be kept workable if enough dry-cleaners’ plastic and moist towels are employed. On the right is a shot of damp paper towels swathing the heads of the toads; they will need to be textured at some point, and if they’re too hard, it won’t work and the moist towels keeps the clay pliable and soft enough to receive an impression.

The effect of the two new toads, striving against each other on top of the pile, was what I wanted, but they needed a focal point — a flying insect they’re both trying to swallow.  This was the finial, or knob, of the “teapot” “lid”:

At this point, I always feel a piece is almost finished: the basic elements are sculpted and in place, there are at the moment no structural crises to solve.  But it’s far from the truth: a lot still remains to be done — texturing, refining shape detail (toes!), cleaning up stray clay bits and meaningless marks, applying decorative slip, etc.  For instance, I’ve forgotten until now about parotoid glands, which will have to be added.  And, other time-consuming details like compound eyes on the flying prey item.  So stay tuned for the next post on the effigy teapot: Texturing the Toad.

(Potential Toe Count: 104; Actual Toe Count: 49 so far; current Biological Digit Deficit, 53%)

Increments so far:

Why is a toad not a frog?

You almost certainly know this, but a toad isn’t a frog.

If that came as a surprise, it’s time for a speedy round-up of amphibian facts:

In general: toads have dry warty skin, frogs have moist slick skin. Toads need little or no water except to breed; frogs are usually amphibious. Toads have large kidney-shaped swellings behind each eye called parotoid glands; frogs have round hearing-related structures called tympani behind each eye. Most people think toads are gross but frogs are cute. That isn’t science; it’s just bad taste. Frogs croak, but many toads like  Woodhouse’s toads have beautiful muscial trills. ( If you were a Woodhouse’s toad, you’d think that was beautiful…) Toads have stout compact bodies with short legs for hopping; frogs are often svelte and long-legged for leaping.  Most frogs have webbed feet, most toads are not or only partially web-footed.  Frogs are more inclined to climb; toads are more inclined to dig.  Both can secrete irritating or even poisonous compounds that deter predators.

To the right above is a photo of a Ramsey Canyon Leopard Frog being aquatic.  Contrast it with the photo below it, a tropical toad from Belize. (photos, A. Shock)

In fact, these distinctions are generalizations and don’t hold true for every frog or toad. For more detail, I recommend the Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness book Amphibian, by Dr. Barry Clarke.  It’s meant for kids, but it’s really all anyone but a real herpetologist needs to get the gist of of toads, frogs, and caecilians.

Meet Miss Thang.  She is a female Costa’s hummingbird (Calypte costae), and unlike her purple-mustachioed male counterpart, she’s a plain green-gray above, and a plain gray-white below, with a chunky round body, almost no tail, and no neck at all.  She holds territory right outside our front door, as Queen of the Desert Garden.  The garden has many attributes valuable to a hummer: twiggy mesquites for roosting, a many-pointed DeSmet agave for perching, chuparosas with long-season blooms to feed upon, a freebie sugar-water feeder under the porch, and best of all, prime position from which to attract a showy male Costa’s who does looping, zizzing display flights for her each morning.  Although Miss Thang’s appearance is subdued, her personality isn’t.  She holds this valuable, resource-rich territory against all comers, including resident male Anna’s who are both brash and bigger, the summer tourists like Black-chinned hummingbirds, and any other hummers who may try to kype a slurp from the feeder.  The Gila woodpeckers are too big to chase off, and the Verdins seem to come and go with impunity, but other hummers at the feeder are given short shrift.  Speedy tail chases through the mesquite are frequent, although peevish scolding from a perch sometimes inches above the ground are often sufficient to rout invaders.  Her favorite perch from which to keep an eye on her real estate is a devil’s claw and obsidian wind chime, situated under the porch overhang directly outside the front door, shaded in the mid-day warmth, and dry in the rain.  At this time of year, when the door is open most of the day, we can see her perched alertly on the point of the devil’s claw for hours, spinning slowly as the chime turns in the breeze, chattering indignantly when another hummer flies through, or sallying forth to escort strangers right out of the yard.

Costa’s are desert hummingbirds.  They range from southern California, across the low deserts of Arizona, into Mexico.  The sources I’ve checked supply varying info about the yearly movements of Costa’s, giving an impression of the need for more research.  Some experts report they winter just south of our border with Mexico, others say the birds stay year-round in the low desert, some that they winter in the ‘burbs and breed in the less developed areas of the deserts; others just assert that their distribution is not well known.  In our yard in some years, Costa’s seem to be present in each month, with the largest number of individuals observed between June and December.  Some years they seem to disappear around the New Year and are scarce until late spring.  Now that we’ve packed the yard with hummer-friendly flowers (the photo above is Miss Thang’s demesne in full spring bloom) like chuparosa (Justicia californica), Mexican honeysuckle, (Justicia spicigera), Fairy dusters (Calliandra spp.), Desert lavender (Hyptis emoryi), native penstemons, various aloes, and sugar-water feeders, we seem to see more birds more of the year.

There’s been a female Costa’s hummer holding our front-garden territory year-round for at least two years.  We have no way of knowing for sure that it’s always Miss Thang, but of course it’s possible — it even seems likely.  We suspect she nests nearby — I’ve seen her gathering spider-webs in her beak — but have never discovered a nest. (Each year we do see young-of-the-year Costa’s in the yard, but we don’t know where they hatched.)

The yard also hosts glorious males, staking out other food-plant and feeder-related territories.  In past years, a Little-leaf Palo Verde was favored by a bird we called “Cornerhead” because his gorget went from scraggly sideburns to full-blown Yosemite Sam whiskers over the summer into fall. This is his picture on the right.  This year, there’s a long-mustached male (it may be Miss Thang’s suitor) under the pine/palo verde complex shading an outdoor table.  He “sings” (an almost inaudibly high-pitched descending sibilance) and gnats under the branches, keeping interlopers off the feeder there, then withdraws to the thorny interior of a nearby lemon in the middle of the day.  He “sings” from there, too, invisibly in the deep shade which is the only reason we know he’s in there.

Etymology…

…of the scientific name of Costa’s hummingbird, Calypte costae, is less than satisfying.  On the genus, Calypte, Choate, in the Dictionary of American Bird Names, can’t do any better than “Greek, a proper name of unknown significance”.  If he were alive, Gould could probably give a better explanation as to why he chose this genus for the bold Anna’s and Costa’s hummers.  I would suggest that Gould had in mind the adjective καλυπτή, from the verb καλύπτειν, to cover (with a thing).  The adjective means “enfolding”, connoting a veiled or mantled quality, possibly referring to the gorget that covers the entire crown and throat of hummers in this genus.  As for the species, costae, that was given in honor of Louis Marie Pantaleon Costa, Marquis de Beau-Regard, which early 19th century French nobleman had an “imposing” collection of deceased hummingbird specimens.  Merde, alors.

Photos: All photos by A. Shock, Three Star Owl.  The odd quality of the first photo of Miss Thang is due to the image being shot through an old-fashioned heavy metal security screen.

Here is an image of a Costa’s hummingbird mug from Three Star Owl.  The interior is a beautiful rich mulberry, the glaze color I can manage closest to the color of a male Costa’s gorget.

The Stacked Toad Effigy Vessel is being built from the bottom up, with a brown, groggy, stoneware clay. The working composition is in my head, informed by pictures of desert toads on the work bench, and adapted as it goes. A small maquette modeled last week is nearby for reference, although the maquette has species other than toads in it as well. The Toad Stack is on the scale of a teapot, so in addition to being a Toad Effigy, it could be considered a Teapot Effigy as well: a vessel in the shape of a teapot, if your concept of teapot is broad. Perhaps it will be a Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy.

The Base Toad was modeled solid, allowed to set up to a manageable firmness, then hollowed out and slightly expanded in size by pinching. When firm enough, each limb was cut off one at a time, and a tool was inserted up the center to create a tunnel, then the limb was scored and slipped back into place. The smaller toadly elements are pinched informally into toadly shapes. Each new toad is added when the clay has “set up” — when it’s stiff enough to hold its shape, but still pliable enough to conform to the surface it rests on, and also support the next element. TOES are beginning to appear (Potential Toe Count: 72; Actual Toe Count: 19 so far; current Biological Digit Deficit, 73.5%). Because the interior is hollow, there are a couple of small invisibly placed outlets for air to escape. This speeds drying and will allow the piece to be fired without exploding as the heating internal air expands. When all toadly elements have been added, the surface will be textured in a toadly manner: bumps, bugs, and paratoid glands.

Useful tools: teaspoon and loop tool for hollowing; palette knife and small knife; Tiranti hardwood sculptural tools knobbed at one end and pointed at the other for smoothing internal seams and detailing; toothed metal rib; smooth plastic rib; cheap blow dryer for force-drying clay; wooden paddle made by L.

Our autumnal weather has slowed drying time, so there are lots of gaps in toadly modelling activity while waiting for wet clay to set up. These times are spent in making the next toads, working on other pieces, or going out for excellent sushi at Dozo. In order to prevent the Stack of Toads from settling under its own weight, it will stay loosely wrapped in plastic until tomorrow, with a smooth river cobble wedged under its left front limbpit to help support it until work can resume. What will the Toad Total be?

Increments so far: