This is a Spectacled Owl from the recent Veracruz trip. Spectacled owls are boldly patterned, unsociable owls of tropical forests of Central and South America. This one flew silently in to check us out from its perch high in the canopy, and suffered to have its photo snapped illuminated only by a flashlight, and no magnification. They sport an excellent Latin name: Pulsatrix perspicillata, meaning “female pulsating one” referring to its accelerating pup-pup-pup-upupup call (Pulsatrix-perspicillata-1.mp3), and “conspicuous”, referring to its striking markings.

(Top photo A. Shock, Three Star Owl.)

To the left is a clearer photo of what a Spectacled owl looks like in daylight, taken in the London Zoo.

Vicki arranged for a tour of the Phoenix Herpetological Society (PHS) for some ASU colleagues. It seemed like a fascinating way to celebrate our anniversary (#24!), so E and I went. Vicki and her husband Calvin are long-time volunteers at PHS and they showed us around the facilities, which are up north off of Dynamite Rd in Scottsdale.

We swam a python, scrubbed an education ‘gator, and fed other alligators and a crocodile, tortoises, and iguanas of several species. By “we” I mean Vicki and Calvin, while the rest of us took pictures and asked questions. We helped a little, lobbing handfuls of produce at large lizards, poking expiration-date challenged chicken legs and donated elk shreds by the gobbet through chain link enclosures with tongs, to be snapped up by eager gator jaws. Iguanas adore grapes, and African tortoises love lettuce. A lot of lettuce. Each day crates and crates of produce donated by grocery stores go into the non-native tortoise corrals. Any idea you may have had of slow-moving giants lying about motionless is destroyed once you see a horde of tortoises trundling towards lettuce mounds.

We watched Tigger, an 11 foot Reticulated Pythoness swim in the pool, while wallabies cowered at a distance. Tigger was beautiful, and unlike most snakes I’ve seen swimming who skim the surface skillfully but with purpose (why does a cottonmouth swim a creek? – to get to the other side), she was swimming for pleasure, and loved to dive down to the very bottom, where small bubbles trickled up from her iridescent scales. She looked at home in the water, like a very long, sinuous salamander. Another “Retic”, Donny, returned from an event just before we left. He was still coiled calmly in his open traveling crate, a very sturdy, well-ventilated plastic trunk on wheels, waiting for several volunteers to lift him back into his regular habitat. Donny weighs something like 350 pounds, is 18 feet long, and hasn’t maxed out in length yet.

PHS is a place where unwanted/abandoned reptiles can find a home, where relocated rattlers live temporarily, and where herps used for education programs in schools and other venues both private and public are housed between gigs. Most of the animals we saw were either confiscated or abandoned — people leave critters in boxes on PHS’s doorstep, to avoid paying the drop-off fee. They’re homeless because of their owner’s inability or unwillingness to care for them as they grow larger.

More animals are coming in to places like PHS these days because of the current economy and rising foreclosures and evictions; it’s the same at dog and cat shelters, too. We shed a few tax-deductible dollars their way before we left: PHS survives mostly on green — money or the edible sort. If you ever see your local grocer throwing away produce (or meat), tell them about Phoenix Herp Society — daily donations don’t always match the tortoises’ (and gators’) needs. And seeing all those sheltered animals drove home the need to think before buying an exotic herp to bring home: many of the PHS’s tortoises, and even some of the snakes and monitors are available for adoption to suitable homes, a really hands-on way to help out (you need to apply, be approved and pay an adoption fee). Or consider volunteering, or hiring PHS to bring critters to a home birthday party or work event for a truly unique and educational experience. Check out their website for more options.

My recent post about our vet-irradiated cat Hector Half-Squid contained a visual joke about being able to find him in the dark, by showing a picture of his normal feline eye-shine generated by a camera flash. But there’s a real glow-in-the-dark kitty in the news: Mr. Green Genes. Here’s a picture of Mr. Green Genes glowing, in an excellent photo by Rusty Costanza of Newhouse News Service. The lab tabby fluoresces under ultraviolet light because of genetic material introduced into his cells by scientists at the Audubon Center for the Study of Endangered Species. They hope their findings will lead to methods of curing diseases by gene therapy. Check out the details in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, including a picture of Mr Green Genes in regular light: he’s a standard marmalade tiger!

Birds weren’t the only wonderful things to be seen on a recent trip to the Mexican state of Veracruz: there was clay! The capital city of Xalapa, perched on the volcanic shoulders of the Sierra Madre Oriental, has a world-class archaeological museum, Museo de Antropología de Xalapa (MAX), stuffed full of the cultural treasures of pre-Hispanic people local to the region. For someone who works in clay, these objects are endlessly fascinating and inspirational. Here are some of my favorites. Click on any image to see a larger version. Forgive blurriness; no flash allowed, so all camera work is hand-held in low light conditions, through the glass of display cases.

Surprising to me: nearly life-sized human figures in clay. I’d seen examples in stone (like the big Olmec heads, several of which are on display at MAX), or in bas-relief, but not in clay and modeled in the round. On the right, check out Xipe Totec “the Flayed One”, scary deity of death/rebirth wearing the skin of a human, flaking off him as it decays — a practice shown in Aztec sculpture actually carried out by priests, wearing the skins of sacrificed captives. This sculpture was made in 3 pieces: head, torso/arms, and pelvis/legs, and assembled after firing, saving on kiln space. Looks like ear bobs and head-piece may have been interchangeable, or made of another material that didn’t survive; musical instrument or other item held in hands missing?

Effigy vessels — pots made in the form of animals, human heads or figures, parts of humans (like feet), or plants — are common in many cultures in both the old and new worlds, but are particularly prevalent in Meso-America, and there are many fine examples in the MAX collection. Here is one with a bat, and an excellent Jaguar, complete with furry pelt, made by attaching small flattened balls of clay to the surface in exactly the same way as the flaking skin is represented on Xipe Totec. Note the bat’s “arms” are human arms supporting its wings. More on effigy vessels and Three Star Owl in a later post.

There is a gap in Three Star Owl postings between Cranky Owlet hears autumn and the Canyon Wren post. This is because for nearly two weeks I was in Mexico, looking at birds. Though the trip had long been planned and paid for, it was a strange thing to be doing while the US economy was falling apart. I was out of the country during the initial flap while the bailout was being tussled over, while the market was first plunging, while the vice presidential candidates were debating. These serious events made looking for birds seem both frivolous and fundamental simultaneously. Frivolous because spending money on vacation travel in a time of economic uncertainty seems unwise and even trivial. Fundamental because, well, the birds were still living their lives, existing in their environments as usual, evading predators, searching for food, migrating thousands of miles to distant wintering grounds, and observing this was a connection to an elemental reality.

The group I was with was traveling in the Mexican state of Veracruz to see, among other things, the spectacular flights of north American birds of prey funneled along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the famous so-called Rio de Rapaces. Osprey, Turkey vultures, Broad-winged hawks, Swainson’s hawks, Mississippi kites, Peregrine falcons, Merlins, and others, as well as non-raptors such as American white pelicans, Scissor-tailed flycatchers, Wood storks, and Anhingas swirl overhead in dynamic kettles, spiraling upward on thermals, rising like litter in a dust-devil until they are high enough to stream outward in a south-bound line, some to Central America, others like the Swainson’s hawk, all the way to central South America. Below, their vast exodus is mirrored by the southward movement of songbirds, some nearly at ground level: warblers, thrushes, shorebirds, flycatchers, dickcissels, vireos, grosbeaks, and other songbirds, heading southward mostly at night, stopping to rest and feed during the day in the resource-rich coastal plains, transitional foothills, and tropical forests of the moist state of Veracruz.

These are birds that we are accustomed to thinking of, imprecisely, as “ours”. They are ours, in a sense, because they breed in various parts of the United States and Canada. But for more than half the year, they live in regions closer to the equator, Mexico, Central, and South America, which countries have at least as great a “claim” to the birds as “we” do. They belong to both northern and southern America: this is a hemispheric, in some cases even global, avian economy, in which birds go when and where there is a living to be made, whether the seasonal draw is fruit, seeds, insects, other birds to eat, or survivable temperatures.

At that time, watching CNN in English on a hotel lobby TV hearing US announcers and US politicians expound, it was easy to think of all the economic turbulence as a US problem, with the rest of the world watching from a distance. That was until the the day before we left, when the peso, after a decade of stability at 10 to the American dollar, fell nearly 40 per cent in one day, largely because of the drop in the price of oil. Suddenly, like the movement of birds across the Americas, everything seemed closely related after all.

For the Pronatura Veracruz October 2008 actual day-by-day count of raptors seen, click here.

For an excellent read on the astounding fact and feat of avian migration, try Scott Weidensaul’s “Living on the Wind: across the hemisphere with migratory birds”. He’ll make you realize that migration is an even more amazing phenomenon than it seems. Chapter 5, Rivers of Hawks, is specifically on the Veracruz migration and its fairly recent discovery. As for learning about global economics, you’re on your own. I think we all need to start from scratch, at this point.

Photos: Top, (A. Shock), mural of a Broadwinged hawk and birdcensuser motif on the parapet wall of the Pronatura Hawkwatch site on the roof of the Hotel Bienvenidos, Cardel, Veracruz. Center: kettle of raptors, photo pinched from the site of the North American Ornithological Conference 2006, because I couldn’t get my camera to focus on all those little specks. Below: Osprey from National Park Service Padre Island website.

…and gets extremely small.

My friend Kate McKinnon recently posted that she has a hard time seeing owls in the wild, and she takes it personally. Well she should, because an owl’s Primary Goal other than to eat something, is to escape detection, by you, by me, by a thoughtless human with a crossbow, by the other bigger owl, by sharp-eyed prey, and by Kate McKinnon. We are all of us intended to Not See Owls.

Owls have many tools for escaping detection: cryptic coloration, shifting outline often modified with cranial feather tufts, motionless roosting, self-effacing habits, and nearly silent flight. They are chromosomally adept at Hiding in Plain Sight.

Seeing an owl is a lightning bolt, a mistake, a gift, a shock, a plot by crabby song birds. A sighting is usually because someone who knows where an owl day-roosts points it out, or we hear one call and get a glimpse as it glides across a dark sky, or because wrens and chickadees and jays fink it out. If the owl is seen, a small owl will shrink or stretch, and squint to hide its telltale eyes; a big owl might merely turn its head, or not, because though it prefers to not be seen, it isn’t too worried since you cannot fly. If you spot an owl don’t point or wave the hands, it might make it flee. If you remain still and quiet, they often will too, allowing a few photos, especially if they are rock stars like certain Mexican spotted owls in southeastern Arizona, who frequently host googly-eyed camera-toting visitors like me in their woods.

Here are some things to do if you wish to see an owl: put up a nest box; go on an owl prowl (check Audubon groups and raptor education outfits in your area); keep your ears open; look for owl pellets and whitewash under horizontal boughs close to the trunk; inspect the tops of saguaros at dusk; look in every tree/cactus hole you know of that’s above head height; go into the woods at night; watch the news (urban owls often wind up on TV, like the famous Scottsdale Safeway Urn-nesting Great horned owls); make secret offerings to the Great Owly Entity. But remember, owls’ desire to escape detection is greater than our ability to find them. Good luck, and Good Owling.

photos by A. Shock: Great horned owl with downy chick manifesting as barkless tree skin, San Pedro River, AZ; Mexican Spotted owl pair manifesting as dappled sunlight through branches, Huachuca Mountains, AZ.

This is our black and white kitty, Hector Half-Squid. A while back the vet discovered he had a benign thyroid tumor which was making him thinner and thinner. We chose to treat it with medicine you swipe in his ear, he chose to develop a strong allergic reaction to the medicine. (Have you ever seen a kitty with swollen lips?)

So last week Hector underwent last chance treatment: the same procedure undergone last season by Diamondbacks pitcher Doug Davis, injection with Iodine-131. The only cells in the body that take on Iodine are those of the thyroid, which then don’t survive the isotope’s radioactivity.

The clinic keeps the treated kitties until their levels of radiation emission are safe and low enough to send them home (as determined by the Arizona State Nuclear Regulatory Commission). But for two weeks we need to wash our hands a lot and “limit snuggling time” to half-an-hour a day. This is hard on everybody because he’s a snuggly boy, and dear to us.

So far, so good; but only time will tell if the treatment has been effective. At least in the meantime we can always find him in the dark.

Photos by A. Shock

There are wrens in our desert world. Big, raucous, busy Cactus wrens are always here. And there are wrens that pass through: eye-browed and long-tailed Bewick’s wrens in spring and fall; a Rock wren usually comes around a few times in the winter, and even a House wren once, on its way to its breeding grounds uphill from here.

Today we had a new-for-the-yard visitor: a Canyon wren “jeeting” around on the back porch. It was early morning, and we were up for our Papago Park walk, but before we left I spotted a small dark form flitting in and out of small spaces under the bentwood rocker. At first I thought it might be a rodent, but after better looks, it proved to be a Canyon wren, its cinnamon and gray back and white throat clear even in the early light. It was actively foraging first on the canes of the chair, and then between the flower pots by the pool.

Canyon wrens live in arid places, but usually not in lowland deserts. They are characteristic denizens of precipitous canyon terrains in higher elevations, like the Mogollon Rim or the Grand Canyon, the Superstition Mountains, and such hard-surfaced vertical spaces as those, where their clear descending call rolls down the rock, and absolutely means “Desert Mountains” to many of us who live or visit there. Perhaps there’s a downward movement of a small percentage of the birds from higher elevations for winter, so some birds must pass through occasionally, but it’s a bird we’ve neither seen nor heard in our yard before, nor in Papago Park, where the buttes provide habitat more like what it would naturally occupy.

Canyon wrens are structurally specialized for probing stony crevices for delicacies: their bill is long and straight, and according to Sibley, their spine is attached to the skull at the back, instead of from underneath, which gives the small bird both maximum probing capacity and a nearly constant upward-tilt to its head.

Amazingly — it’s a very active subject — E managed to get these two photos of this morning’s bird, a bit blurry but very identifiable. The last we saw of it was its little rusty tail disappearing into the dark spiny interior of the Mexican fan palm. Then we lost track of its “jeet” call, and we didn’t see it again.

For the record, this week in October seems to be one each year when it’s possible to find species on the move: last year, this was the part of the month when an Ovenbird, a tiny, unexpected out-of-range thrush-like warbler made a brief appearance under the backyard mesquite, as if it belonged there. White-crowned sparrows have also recently returned for their winter stay, making themselves known by their characteristic and pleasing song, along with the male Red-winged blackbirds, who trickle in a few at a time and stay until spring.

To hear a Canyon wren sing go to ASU’s Ask a Biologist and under “Sound files” click on “click to open” then click on the right-pointing triangle to play.

Photos by E. Shock.