Here is a close-up of the finished surfaces of the same Beastie Pitchers shown in raw clay a couple of posts ago. They, and other functional and sculptural ware, will be offered for sale at the upcoming Three Star Owl Open Studio, coming toward the end of this month! Stay tuned for more details.
Last post was the New Year’s first bird — a frosty Costa’s hummingbird — but this one is the Year’s First New Bird, and it’s a hummer, too.
We just returned from Baja California, and in the mission village of San Javier on the dramatic east side of the Sierra de la Giganta in Baja California Sur, Xantus’s hummingbirds (Basilinna or Hylocharis xantusii) were much in evidence. They’re pretty little birds, medium-sized for a hummer (about the size of Anna’s) and colorful, sporting a bright red bill, buffy chest and belly, azure and emerald green upper-parts, black throat, blue-black forehead, a white line behind the eye, and a cinnamon tail.
Behind the Misión San Javier de Viggé-Biaundó, in the three-hundred year old olive grove planted by its founding Jesuit missionaries, Xantus’s hummers zipped back and forth, feeding on chuparosa flowers
sprawled over the bulky stone walls (photo right), perched in the thin tips of the olive branches (below), and scolded each other. This is a hummer that lives no where else on earth but central and southern Baja California, and we had tried unsuccessfully to see it once before on an earlier Baja trip, so it was delightful to get so many good views.
(All hummer photos thanks to E.Shock and his magic big little zoom lens, in difficult light conditions with tiny moving targets! Click to enlarge.)
The man whose shares his name with the bird had an interesting history: Xántus János, 
John Xantus de Vesey (left), was a Hungarian exile who came to the US in the middle of the 19th century, and worked with Hammond and Baird
(also names familiar to birders and biologists). He had a short-lived consulship in Mexico — according to Wikipedia he was dismissed for ineptitude — but was there long enough to collect a specimen of this endemic hummer.
In his lifetime, Xantus’s name was also attached to a blenny, a croaker, a gecko, a pelagic crab, a murrelet, a wrasse, a night-lizard, and several plants. In addition, according to an anecdote recounted to me by a Baja historian, during his consulship Xantus left quite a few of his own chromosomes in the local gene pool, along with his Hungarian family name Xántus, which reportedly can still be found as a surname in Baja.
>> A durable little male Costa’s hummingbird, perched two feet off the ground on an aloe-tip, in the gray light of a below-freezing desert dawn, the first morning of the year also the coldest of the season so far. (All photos A.Shock — click to enlarge!)
Moustachios a-flarin’ >>
Above: slurping at the feeder:
It’s surprising how often the shutter captures an extended hummer-tongue:
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, Costa’s hummingbirds are year round birds in our yard, although in the winter months their numbers can be sparse. Currently, I know of one male in the yard, this one, who holds court at the feeder hung in the palo verde shown here, and one female, who hangs out at a feeder at the back of the lot. Gnats must be scarce right now, but the Chuparosa (Justicia californica) — so favored by the little flower-feeders that the bird gives one of its Spanish names to the plant — are in fine bloom, their red tubular flowers full of sweet nectar.
It’s not a reindeer, and it doesn’t have a red nose. But, a yule mule deer licking its nose with a pink tongue is as close as I could get…
(Muledeer in Hualapai Mountains, AZ; photo by E.Shock)
A looming Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) casts a long shadow in the late afternoon sun, standing on a bermed farm road east of Phoenix (photo A.Shock). Despite its scientific name, it was being silent, and not vociferus at all. And despite its common name, ungulates don’t have to worry, but you invertebrates? — quake in your lowly, mud-coated exoskeletons.
As fabulous a bird as our North American Wild Turkey undoubtedly is, there is a turkey more wonderful still: the Ocellated 
Turkey (Meleagris ocellata) of tropical Central America.>>
On this Turkey Day feast your eyes on the glory that is the iridescent El Guajolote Supremo — eaten nearly to extinction because it apparantly tastes as good as it looks. 
Now it’s protected, and currently can be found primarily on the Yucatán Peninsula, and a limited number of other spots and preserves including Quintana Roo, Campeche, and Guatemala. (These photos were taken by A and E Shock at Chan Chich Lodge in Belize in 2007. Be sure to click to enlarge!)
As long ago as the Old Kingdom (the middle of the third millenium BCE), the Egyptians used the eye of the Falcon — the eye of Horus, the falcon-headed deity — as an apotropaic, or protective symbol, wearing the still-popular faience amulets as personal ornament, or tucking them into the wrappings of mummies.
The Left Eye of Horus, also known as the Wedjat Eye, was known to be particularly potent, and its resurrective power was demonstrated by bringing Osirus back to life. According to the British Museum:
The name wedjat means ‘the sound one’, referring to the lunar left eye of Horus that was plucked out by his rival Seth during their conflict over the throne. The restoration of the eye is variously attributed to Thoth, Hathor or Isis. The injury to the eye and its subsequent healing were believed to be reflected in the waxing and waning of the moon.
Horus’s falcon counterpart is said to be the Lanner (Falco biarmicus), a falcon of southern Europe, Africa, and the middle east. We don’t have Lanners living wild in this hemisphere,
but most falcons display the typical black “speed stripe” below the eye, like cheetahs, which is the distinctive characteristic of the Wedjat Eye symbol. To illustrate, here’s a detail of a clay portrait of a native falcon I recently completed: the left eye of a male American kestrel, the smallest falcon in North America, and terrorizer of finches, grasshoppers, and small rodents.
Really, I don’t know if a Kestrel’s eye is so much a bringer of life, as it is a see-er of lunch, but, that’s life-giving to a kestrel, if not to the lunch.
Some readers know that the E who appears occasionally in this space is my husband, Everett Shock.
Some readers also know that he’s a geochemist on the faculty of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the department of Chemistry at Arizona State University. But up until now, no one knew that an organism has been named in his honor. It’s official, and in print — a newly identified archæon discovered living in the very hot water of a geothermal spring at Yellowstone National Park: Thermogladius shockii.
Thermogladius shockii: if your Latin’s 
a little creaky, that’s New Latin (the “made” Latin of scientific names) for “Hot Sword of Shock”. The transmission electron microscopic photo F to the left shows why — according to M.Osburn and J.Amend, the authors of the article in Archives of Microbiology, some individuals sport “occasional stalk-like protrusions.” (TEM images from Osburn and Amend, 2010)
But the “thermo” of Thermogladius doesn’t really refer to anatomical hotness (despite any claims to the contrary). Thermogladius is a genus of HYPERthermophiles, tiny, single-celled, anaerobic cocci who prefer to live in very hot, nearly boiling, gas-rich water fermenting complex organic substrates. What a way to make a living!
Congratulations, E!
Which feels worse, the hollowed out jalapeño or the worm what done it?
Go ahead; click on it just to make yourself miserable.