Rooster At Large

At the beginning of last summer, a rooster showed up mysteriously at our house. Just an update—he’s still around, and has pretty much been adopted by our landlord. Or perhaps it’s the other way around—in the morning the rooster will come around to their front door, cluck and crow, and get rewarded with a handout of several walnuts!

Horses! Horses! Horses!

Today my niece (7) and nephew (5, just) both participated in a horse show involving equitation, pleasure, games (egg-and-spoon, the equestrian equivalent of musical chairs, and other fun delights, culminating in the fancy dress show, horse and rider both).

Simon was done after his morning stint; Tesla carried on throughout the day. So did her dogged aunt. It was FREEZING, though not as bad as yesteray.

It’s a very long time since I’ve spent an entire day around horses, though I used to do it a lot. Through the energy and giggles of preadolescent girls I got some hardwiring back to days spent around jukeboxes in jodphurs. The smell of a stable/barn: it throws me back to a time when I wasn’t remotely concerned about who I was, but was desperate to know what a horse was thinking. The stable was a place where I really felt in control; I saw that countless times today.

There were lots of ragged lives around this show. A girl whose father was killed in a car crash two years ago in front of her, whose mother just remarried two weeks ago; a triad of sisters who are all homeschooled, impeccably mannered, with almost no money for clothes; the horse who can’t move for arthritis and other ailments but who seems too happy to put down. The woman who runs the whole show, Beth, has lost in the last three months three relatives including her mother, a cat, a dog, two horses, and almost her sanity. This is a partial list.

It was like witnessing a communal healing-gymkhana. Such a notion shouldn’t surprise me…

Avian Flu as Halloween Costume

I spent Friday afternoon helping some TV reporters from San Francisco while they interviewed Wildlife Health Center Director Walter Boyce—again—on the threat of avian flu from wild birds.

A reporter called Walter Thursday afternoon from Vermont saying there was a black-tailed gull on Lake Champlain, a bird that by rights should really be in the Sea of Japan, and did it pose any kind of flu threat? Poor Walter. He hadn’t had breakfast or lunch but he tried to answer as best he could, calling from Southern California to see if I knew anything about this bird (I didn’t, though I’ve seen one in Rhode Island) and whether it might be a vector for AI H5N1 (avian flu, the scary kind) (yes, it might, according to a Japanese paper published in 1982).

The Friday San Francisco reporters were interesting and after the interview we were able to talk about the world and Harriet Miers and Colin Powell and what might happen. I invited a couple of guys from the New York Times over for dinner last week after they’d locked their keys in the trunk. There are way more boring folks to run into in the parking lot as you leave to go home, for sure. The problem is that now there are so many of them. For now. Once the pandemic hits nobody will be the slightest bit interested in wild birds as vectors…

Above, left, I’m dressed as avian flu, talking to a veterinarian and a vet tech on either clicker-training (the witch is an authority on the subject) or West Nile Virus (the crow is an authority on THAT).

Psittacine In The Morning

Another exotic bird has joined Don Gallo about our homestead. For the past two mornings, we’ve heard and seen some sort of parakeet up in our nectarine tree and flying over from the osage orange a hundred meters distant. I don’t know of any psittacine colonies in Davis, though there are plenty in California. Pica saw some red about his face on an overall green body, which points toward him being a red-masked parakeet or a mitred parakeet, but as a likely escapee, he really could be anything. We won’t know until we get a better look.

Cleaning House

Before we got cats, cleaning the house was something that happened sporadically and usually in a flurry before someone came over. I fess up to having had completely unpredictable (and terrifying to Numenius) fits of cleaning here and there when the piles got too big or the dust bunnies got too invasive, but mostly it was pretty lackadaisical.

Cat hair makes this kind of housekeeping no longer viable. Parts of the house get cleaned (quickly) every day; the whole house gets tidied and cleaned (again, quickly) every week.

The colonies of spiders that used to thrive high in the rafters of the living room and in the bathrom and in the bedroom are definite victims to this new houseproud regime. If the duster doesn’t get them, the cats do. They are slowly migrating back outside.

Clicker Training Squirrels

The new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features forty trained squirrels, all opening walnuts with their teeth, sitting in a pristine room. Tim Burton was adamant about using live squirrels rather than computer graphics (fur looks cheesy in CG).

According to this article, many of the squirrels were bottle fed from babies and then trained using the standard operand conditioning.

I’m trying to teach our cats to come when called. This is difficult because they come anyway if they think there’s a treat in it for them, but it does seem to be working. I can get them to come from another room now.

A woman on the cat clicker list is training a bobcat kitten that has suffered head trauma and is not releasable. Within one minute, this biting, unhappy feline was putting nose to target. Within three minutes, it was jumping over a log.

For animals that are confined, this is not a circus trick. It gets them to exercise their minds and their bodies and to communicate with humans. Wilbur the bobcat can do a tremendous amount of good in captivity if he can be used for education purposes—which he can, once he stops biting.

Catching Up

Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.

Reptile Refuge

We went to the Sacramento Zoo today to take a class on drawing animals. Our instructor was Robert Dvorak, who taught the travel sketching course we took here in April. The Sacramento Zoo is a good size for this exercise, it being easy to do the rounds in a half-day. We started at the flamingos, visited the hornbills and griffon vulture, and ended up at the giraffes (a challenge to get all angles and legs on the page, particularly when they move) before breaking for lunch.

By that time I was in my rhythm. We continued on to the zebras, bongo-bongos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. We moved on to the big cats, but they were all in their shelters from the heat. We got the hint and proceeded to take refuge in the coolness of the Reptile House. A wise move, since it got to be 104° F today in Sacramento. The reptiles are fun to draw. They like holding interesting poses, the lizards have great scales, fringes, and eyes, and you can get up close to them. (None of them came through the glass, despite it being Harry Potter day.) At right is a drawing I did of a flat-tailed tortoise from Madagascar, done with a non-waterproof roller ball pen and light wash.

L'empereur

Waddle or toboggon if you have to, but do make it to see March of the Penguins, now playing on the independent movie theatre circuit. We went to see this documentary today about the breeding cycle of Emperor Penguins and thought it was fantastic.

One question I’m left with though is how did these penguins ever evolve to be laying their single eggs in the dead of the Antarctic winter?

Don Gallo

We’re not getting much of a chance to sleep in these days. The chicken who was present upon our return from North Carolina turns out to be a young rooster who has lately learned how to crow. Nowadays he does this outside our bedroom window, bright and early in the morning.

No one is sure where he came from. Not across the street—though they have had chickens there, there’s never been a rooster. Our landlady thinks somebody just dumped him off here. So far he’s survived the trucks zooming by, and the local coyotes (one of whom we saw from the train Sunday running off with a jackrabbit).

He’s pretty to look at, but I could do without the alarm clock!