Earlier this year, Sky Island Alliance presented their second annual Citizen Awards to people and businesses who have shown distinction in achievement, support or activism in the international environmental arena of the embattled Sonoran ecosystem. Instead of traditional trophies, SIA commissioned custom handmade plaques from Three Star Owl to honor the recipients. Each one was personalized with native species chosen for each recipient according to their field, interest, or accomplishment. Below are: Ray Carroll with Elegant trogon, Summit Hut representative with Coati, Sherry Barrett with Desert tortoise, Sergio Avila (SIA wildlife biologist), Carlos Robles and Martha Felix de Robles with Ocelot in an oak, and David Parsons with Mexican gray wolf.

The awards were thick stoneware tiles, modeled and carved in low relief and finished in mineral oxides and glazes. The project was a pleasure for me to work on for many reasons, not least because the species selected were ones I’ve been fortunate enough to see in the wild. And I was proud to have been part of the process of recognizing people making a difference in a critical effort. I hope to work with Sky Island Alliance again in the future. (My thanks to Shiloh Walkosak for finding me, everyone at SIA, and to Jessica Lamberton and Sergio Avila of SIA for sending photos.)

It is a long thin snake.

Working this morning in the backyard, E heard the scolding of cactus wrens, thrashers and other regulars of our deserty neighborhood. He tracked down the source: a sleek and mottled coachwhip marauding, trying to take advantage of the monsoon “bloom” of young animals. Coachwhips (Masticophis or Coluber flagellum) are swift and tireless daytime foragers, searching the ground for favored foods such as lizards, and easily climbing our shrubby, tangled palo verdes looking for eggs and nestlings.

They are patterned cryptically, and look like the long braided látigo used by Mexican stockmen. (We called these whips “bullwhips” as kids — favored souvenirs of weekends in Ensenada, primarily used to harass each other.)

The coachwhip’s pattern is surprisingly cryptic, because like the Gila monster, it’s pink and brown, yet it still manages to disappear effectively against pebbly desert soils, and is nearly invisible even slung in the green branchlets of a palo verde, where it looks just like a rosy-brown dead branch lodged there. They’re not aggressive animals — although irritable might be the word — and they’re more likely to use their notable speed as a defense than to bite, unless handled. The Coachwhip actually earns the rattler-hunting reputation the Gophersnake enjoys less deservedly, and will eat anything it can catch and swallow, including other snakes, even rattlers.

More info on the Coachwhip here, at Tom Brennan’s excellent website on reptiles and amphibians of Arizona.

On the left is a green limestone cylinder seal and the impression it leaves in wet clay. Six thousand years ago, it hung around the neck of a Mesopotamian scribe or businessman. Now it’s now in the Louvre and despite a nasty crack you can see lovely stout beeves in a wheat field marching around it, very pastoral and comfy. This kind of seal was used all over the ancient Near East (what we now know as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and other countries in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia) to authenticate inventories and letters written on clay tablets, clay sealings on rooms, jars and parcels, bricks, and anything else needing a stamp of approval or ownership. A combination of archaic in material and modern in use, cylinder seals were the stone rubber stamp of their day, highly portable and personalized.

Clay’s property of taking detailed impressions when moist hasn’t changed over the millenia and potters, now as then, take advantage of it. Many Three Star Owl pieces, like Beastie Ware, are textured with cylinders I’ve carved in clay and then fired, giving me a way to pattern the clay just as distinct and personal as fingerprints.

The rattlers below get lots of use in making “Crotalus” items, like this oval jar with a roadrunner on the lid.

For etymology enthusiasts: Crotalus, a genus of North American pit vipers including many of our familiar rattlers, is derived from Greek krotalon (το κροταλον), a type of rattle or castanets held in the fingertips. They were used particularly by revelers of Dionysus, making the apt connection with rattlers both for their sound and their cthonic origins. Incidentally, I’ve read that Arizona has more species of rattlesnakes than any other US state.

Thanks to Ed Bustya Nature Photographer and Web Dude extraordinaire, Three Star Owl is careening into the present with this fine site. Although right now I feel like Mr Toad on his Wild Ride, soon there will be a way for visitors to view and even shop for Three Star Owl clay items. So, welcome, and enjoy! And, Honk if you love Owls…

…and is mildly miffed.