It’s time for the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival, and Three Star Owl will be there in the big white tent, along with other vendors and exhibitors Thursday 28 April until Sunday 1 May, 9 – 5 Thu-Sat, 9 – 1 Sun.  Dead Horse Ranch State Park, Cottonwood, AZ.

Come on by and see what’s new!  The event is free, but a park entry fee may be required, although they may waive it for the Festival.

Click here for more info and directions.

Hope to see you there!

<< the Bundle-feather jar with Owl finial will be there (stoneware, 10.5″, A.Shock, 2011) And, definitely click to enlarge to see piece in truer, richer, color.

Though the lady bug life cycle has been covered here before, I can’t resist posting this photo of a brand new Lady Bird Beetle and its recently exited pupal casing.

>> the bug and the box it came in. Click to enlarge, it’s a nice big file (photo A.Shock).

Just a couple of days ago, I’d noticed the pupa on an artichoke leaf in the veggie garden. It was practically the first evidence I’d seen of the spring lady bug generation’s progress since finding the eggs on the cilantro earlier this month. Later, I’d only managed to find one active larva, so I was pleased to locate this pupa. Sunday morning I went to show it to E, and there it was — split open now, while its erstwhile occupant, having backed out of the crack in the posterior of the casing, pumped its new flight wings full of hemolymph in the bright morning sun. The unripe-tomato-y quality of the elytra at this stage is perfect, starting out transluscent waxy-yellow and slowly deepening to the familiar cherry-tomato red. The spots appear and darken gradually like darkroom images, gaining contrast and intensity as the carapace dries and hardens.

This time of year the world is pregnant with nests full of eggs, tiny cottontails hopping and hiding in the yard, fledgling birds following their parents food-begging insistently, new yellow-green leaves and catkins on the mesquite trees, and glorious cactus blooms.

<< Praying mantis egg-case on a Palo Verde twig (photo E.Shock). >> close-up of a mesquite catkin (photo A.Shock)

But as this acceleration of generation increases, we see another side of abundance: broken eggs on the ground, young birds not experienced enough to stay out of the street, small mammals learning the hard way about the swimming pool, an adult gopher snake swallowing a tiny cottontail.

Spring is a scavenger’s prime-time. We’ve been watching an Inca Dove carcass decompose under the tangerine tree. In the dry desert, this isn’t a grisly thing: if not enjoyed by raccoons, foxes, or feral cats, the soft parts are quickly consumed by the local scuttling scavengers, usually ants or dermestid beetles and the like. Inca Doves are small, anyway — there’s not much to them, and small bodies don’t have time to bloat, liquefy, or smell very much.

>> Inca dove skeleton (photo A.Shock)

Decomposition is short and if not sweet, at least efficient. What was an intact dove carcass lying in the leaf litter a couple of days ago was, by yesterday, an articulated partial skeleton. The head was gone, but the ribs were still festooned with a few feathers, and the pelvis dangled two femurs and a foot. The ants’ tidy de-fleshing revealed a possible cause of death invisible to us before: egg-binding. Look below the rib-cage under the vertebrae and pelvis, and you can see an intact egg, cracked but still heavy with its contents, in place in the abdominal cavity.

<< Here’s a side-view. The large blade-shaped bone on the right is the little dove’s keel, or breast-bone; the egg sits snugly — perhaps a little too snugly — under the tiny pelvis.

I don’t have my own photo of an Inca Dove — although they’re common in our yard, they’re camera-shy, at least in my experience. But if you need the reassurance of a living image, or more info about Inca Doves, click here, for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology entry on the species.

And just to sweeten the pot because after all it is the holiday season, here’s a photo I posted last spring, of two terribly tiny bunnies snuggled into the form their mother scraped out for them. Go ahead; click to enlarge to see their tiny fluffy details. It was either this or one of the gopher snake eating a baby cottontail, but I think I’ll save that for next Easter.

>> two infant cottontails stashed in a form (photo A.Shock)

This is the fourth installment of a series. Click on the link at the bottom of the page to continue to the next installment.  Or, click here to read from the very beginning. Previously:

Wayfarer was warming to her subject, the possible unsecured antiquity. “So you might say that we’re looking for an object like everything else around it, but not quite: an artifact with an accent.” “Well, the generator goes off at nine pm sharp,” Rankle interrupted her,” so if you’d like to see your little unsecured antiquity in the light, you’d better do it soon.”

The Unsecured Antiquity

Professor Einer Wayfarer hadn’t wanted an audience for her first view of the mystery object that had brought her to Beit Bat Ya’anah, but ultimately it hadn’t been possible to avoid it. She supposed it was her own fault: after her spirited exposition at dinner, everyone wanted to see what she was going to do. She felt she couldn’t refuse to satisfy the students’ curiosity – it was a legitimate educational opportunity for them – so she found herself following Wilson A. Rankle, marching downhill across the rough, stony soil of the moonlit compound to the lab, trailing a string of students and staff behind.

The one-room lab was the dig camp’s only intact hard-sided structure, left over from a failed settlement attempt in an earlier decade. Although recently painted, it was both shoddily built and structurally weathered – and it smelled like dry rot and insecticide – but inside there were cabinets and file drawers, a couple of light-tables, writing tables with archaic wooden school chairs with green backs and split black vinyl seats, and a banged-up dry sink that at night collected a surprising assortment of joint-legged samples of the local fauna that, once in, couldn’t escape its vertical sides. If the lab had housed a entomological research effort, this sink would have had appreciable scientific value, but as it was, everyone was merely repelled by what showed up in the porcelain trap every morning, and devised ways of not being the first one in who, by convention, had to liberate the leggy zoo with a four-by-six file card and a jam jar.

All the lab’s windows were high on the block walls. Many were painted shut, and those that weren’t opened just wide enough to let in small puffs of hot air and large numbers of moths and scarabs. The lighting was better than anywhere else in the compound, but still barely adequate for night work. This was where the senior staff and a handful of conscripted underlings worked afternoons and after dark, until the generator shut down, writing up daily reports, plotting features and matrices on maps of units, and recording on cards anything significant that came out of the ashy soil that day, which was a rare event. There was a skeleton library with basic resources: a beat-up first edition of Aharoni’s book in Hebrew, Shepard’s and Amiran’s books adjacent, dated but still useful, a few back issues of the BAR and JNES, and monographs and annual reports from other sites. There was one electric fan whose weak output everyone fought over except Shams, the dig’s meticulous draftsman/surveyor, who never sweated and was seldom seen without his stingy-brimmed panama hat, and who didn’t want a feeble breeze stirring his ink renderings even a little.

Now Shams, Zvia, Rory, about eight other grad students and staff plus the one eager undergrad named Eric – his neck still blotched and hot from the wasp stings – were sitting in the hard green chairs watching William A. Rankle rummage through a drawer.

“Where the hell is it, Ben-Tor?” he grumbled. It occurred to Wayfarer that the director didn’t know what he was looking for. Zvia went over and directly pulled a plastic bag out of the drawer he was disarranging. “Those are all in locus order, please, Dr. Rankle,” she pointed out, firmly. “Here; Dario said it’s this one.”

This reminded Rankle again of his missing staff member. He looked around, as if the young man might have somehow recently manifested. Not finding him, he asked, “Where did you say he is?” No one answered.

Wayfarer received the bag from Zvia, hefting it in her palm: it was weighty for its volume, but not large. She asked, “May I handle it?”

Rankle laughed. “Knock yourself out. It’s nothing special. Despite what Dario says.”

Dr. Wayfarer noticed Zvia turn slightly pink at the last part of this remark, as if it were directed at her. “Everyone’s an expert, aren’t they?” the professor commented neutrally as she took the object out of the plastic bag, and laid it on the table. Then she pulled out her glasses, and perched them on the end of her nose to take a good long look at the Object.

Evidently the AWOL Dario, whoever he was, had a sense of humor: after staring at it for no more than thirty seconds, she declared authoritatively, “Well, it’s definitely not a spoon.”

What she had placed on the table – the “mystery object”, the much-anticipated unsecured antiquity – appeared to be nothing more than a lump of broken pottery: a handle, evidently broken off of a medium-sized vessel, with a fragment of neck joining the two ends. There was no sign of surface decoration, such as glaze, slip or incision. The clay body was gritty and brown, and the item was neatly if casually formed. But Wayfarer wasn’t an archæologist; the unrefined ceramic fragment meant little to her, yielded nothing to her inexpert examination. She cleared her throat; a noise that sounded distinctly like hrrmph. “Someone tell me about the type of vessel this comes from. Please.”

Rankle prompted, “Ben-Tor?”

“Pottery man did that one,” Zvia said. “Since Amit wasn’t here.”

“Pottery man” — Amit’s grad student Lior — spoke up promptly, “Fragment; strap-handle. Probably from an amphora; retrieved from an Iron Age exterior residential midden, stratigraphically undatable; maybe a small Canaanite jar, originally for transport, maybe afterwards re-used for domestic wine storage.”

Wayfarer hrrmphed again; it was the closest she was going to get to wine tonight, apparently. But she nodded at Lior, summarizing, “An undatable storage jar handle. Thank you.” She placed her finger in the loop of clay and held the fragment up once more. The shape was unremarkable, the construction was unremarkable. It was merely household waste; part of a broken, discarded wine jar. Very disappointing. Worse yet, she found herself in agreement with Rankle: the object was nothing special. It was an unremarkable fragment altogether, with nothing at all to recommend it for her further notice.

She was about to say so when something stopped her. Pulling her blunt finger out of the handle and looking underneath it for the source of a sensation of roughness against her skin she asked, “Does anyone have a dental mirror?” One was handed to her, and she slid it under the strap of clay.

On the underside of the handle, where it was invisible to the eye but would have been felt with the fingers of anyone picking up or pouring the vessel, the mirror reflected a small textured mark. It had been pressed into the clay while still soft: a geometric, elemental symbol that was very familiar to Dr. Wayfarer within the narrow context of her own literary subject.

Was this what Avsa wanted her to see – not a piece of pottery, but a character? Characters she knew something about. A character, Wayfarer thought, she might be able to do something with.

To be continued…

To read Part 5 “The Character”, click here.

To the right is the photo key to the Rock wren of the current Spot the Bird. Rock wrens rock one of my favorite Latin names in the bird world (along with Upupa epops, the hoopoe): Salpinctes obsoletus. According to Choate, the name comes from Greek salpinctes, “a trumpeter” and Latin obsoletus, “indistinct”, referring to its ringing voice and drab plumage. These contradictory traits explain why the little bird is often heard before it’s seen.  Some of you who wrote to tell me you found it said that after not seeing it for a while “it just suddenly popped out of the picture”.  That’s the way it tends to happen in person with these guys, too.

Below is a rock wren up close, singing its song. You can see its long, de-curved bill, useful for probing rocks and crevices for insects and spiders.  It’s also good for carrying and manipulating small rocks: Rock wrens construct a pavement of tiny flat stones and pebbles leading up to their nest, which is concealed in a hole or crack in a rock.  No one (except the wrens) knows why they do this.  (<< photo E.Shock, taken at Fremont Saddle in the Superstition mountains) One thing the beak does not do is take up water: Rock wrens are thought to get all their moisture through their prey, and don’t drink even when water is available.

Speaking of water, E would like me to add that the rocks in the top photo, along Castle Hotsprings Road, are significantly hydrothermally altered.  You know, subjected to intense heat in a moist environment, either at depth, or nearer the surface, as in a hotspring.  I don’t suppose the rock wren cares, except that the hydrothermal process has left the rock cracked and full of holes, which is just what a rock wren likes.  Click here for a tale about another hydrothermally-altered rock that hosted many organisms.

….but not the quadrupedal kind.

One of the main attractions of following the Castle Hotsprings Road through the edge of the Buckhorn Mountains NW of Phoenix is the spring wildflower bloom. This past weekend the succulent plants predominated: Ocotillos were in full swing, and the prickly pear were starting to get the hang of it.

<< one solitary ocotillo bloom leans in close as if to check out the saguaro’s underarms. This one needs a caption, like those dweeby cactus humor books I remember from my childhood. Something like, “Stubble?, umm, I think you missed a spot.” (all photos A. Shock unless noted; click each to enlarge, it’s worth it)

This horizontal Englemann’s pear leaf sprouted buds like shrimp on a plate, instead of just around the top edge (photo E.Shock). >>

It must have been close to peak for the display of Englemann’s hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus englemannii) in explosive, glorious, hot pink bloom. The stems of these spiny succulents are only about a foot tall and their green skin is concealed by both long and short spines, so despite their numbers, the sturdy hedgehog clumps are easily overlooked for most of the year. But their pink-to-magenta flowers are up to three inches across, making flowering cactus stand out on the most brutally exposed slopes of rocky hills and arroyos. <<

They don’t need much of anything to grow or bloom — their preferred medium is stony, desiccated, mineral soil, sometimes in the scant shade of a shrub or larger cactus, sometimes not: they’re happy baking in the full Arizona summer sun, and can thrive in a crack in solid rock that even a rock wren would scorn.>>

<< One hog we found had the hugest flowers I’d ever seen: that’s E‘s man-sized palm for scale, not my girly-paw.

Native solitary bees buzz in and out of the cuplike blooms, sometimes invisible except for waggling stamens deep in the throat of the flowers. Click on the photo below to see a bee-butt poking upward, right next to the apple-green pistil, which hasn’t opened fully into its star-shaped ærial panoply. You can also see the formidable armory of spines on the fleshy, water-hoarding stems. Even javelina are discouraged by them, although I’ve seen otherwise imposing boar javelinas with lips daintily reddened by the petals of the flowers of a “claret cup” hedgehog cactus. This petal-snacking would be considered hog-on-hog predation, except that neither javelina nor hedgehogs are actual pigs.

This past Saturday, E and I took a Sunday drive.  We got out into the desert, to look for things. Normally, April is a good time of year for wildflowers, but due to the late freezes this year’s show is a bit sporadic — some things, like the Paloverde trees, are spectacular.  All over the desert (including in our yard) they’ve been like long-lasting fireworks-bursts of yellow against the blue sky.  But the more delicate, ephemeral blooms have been absent or delayed.  Luckily, in the desert there’s always something to find, showy or not, even when it nearly blends into its surroundings, like the Rock wren on the previous post (have you spotted it yet?).

And like this stone-colored wild burro, grazing in a cobbly wash off of the Castle Hotsprings Road, NW of Phoenix.  She was standing out in the open so calmly we nearly drove by, thinking she belonged to a nearby cabin — we only stopped when we realized she wasn’t hobbled.  We’d seen wild burros up here before on a hike — the Lake Pleasant area is famous for them — but this jenny wasn’t far off the road, and although she was watchful of us, she didn’t run.  Like the Rock wren, wild burros are often heard before they’re seen; our last sighting commenced with loud, unearthly braying coming from a ridge behind us.  When a dog at the cabin started barking at us, this jenny turned and gave it a very loud, nostrilly huff of warning and airy disapproval of its racket, then she moved up the wash in search of greener, quieter forage.

(All photos A.Shock)

It’s been a while since we’ve had a SPOT THE BIRD.

Rock wrens, Salpinctes obsoletus, live among rocks in the arid mountain and desert west.  Here are some rocks.  These rocks are along the Castle Hotsprings Road between Phoenix and Wickenburg, AZ.  There is a Rock wren in these rocks.  If you could hear the wren, it would be singing its spring song which sounds a little like a small mechanized Mockingbird, and also calling “zhe-deeee zhe-deee,” etc (or, if you prefer, “tick-ear”).

Remember, you are looking for a tiny tiny grayish bird among big rocks.  You should be able to click once or twice on the image to enlarge it, although that will make the search a good deal easier.  Answer to be published later.  As usual, no prizes, but I’d love to hear from you when you locate the wren.

(Photo A.Shock)

Yesterday an MLO (Medium Large Owl) emerged fresh from the kiln, all mute greens and golds, looking wind-blown and content.  I’d built this owl outside on the back porch, in a plein-air studio annex location during our in-between-not-too-hot-not-too-cold season, and I put it back outside to save indoor shelf space. Anything on the porch is considered Part of the Field by the local wildlife: the raccoons drink from the water bucket on my work table, the finches and doves and cactus wrens forage around it, and Hoover the hand-tamed African Collared Dove, perched on it, hoo-ing, as he had all through the construction process.

<< Hoover on MLO (all photos A.Shock, click to embiggen)

For him, landing on the clay owl’s head to cock his seed-beady eye at me and beg for safflower and peanuts is no different from landing on a branch or a chair-back to seed-schnorr.

So, the next time you’re tempted to try to “scare birds” from your roof or garden with one of those Plastic Owls, here’s your pin-up poster of how effective it will be: Not.

Still, Good Feathery Detail is its own virtue — this plastic Snowy Owl purchased here in Phoenix (and fully 100% guaranteed to be totally unrecognizable as a threat to desert birds) became ours simply on the strength of its shapely molding and piercing yellow eyes.  It stands impotently in our herb garden perfectly disregarded by greens-pecking quail hens and greedy-cheeked rock squirrels.  Still, despite slightly opaque corneas (UV causes cataracts, you know!), you can tell from its expression that it takes its job very seriously. And in fact, we never have had even one lemming in the garden yet.

By the way, the Medium Large “Windblown” Owl (18″, top photo) will be available (without dove) at the Three Star Owl booth at the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival at the end of the month.  It’s hand-built, glazed stoneware, one of a kind, and perfectly suited to deter pests (or not) in your garden or outside living space.  (The cheap plastic snowy owl effigy is not for sale, sorry; we fear too greatly potential inroads of the arctic vole here in Phoenix.  You can’t be too vigilant when it comes to inroads, or so our governor tells us.)