Dog Days

We’re back from our trip to North Carolina and Virginia. The wheatfield is ready for harvesting: the wheat stalks all bent over. The peaches are nearly ripe. The Bullock’s oriole has stuck around, and there’s now a chicken in residence in the front yard.

It was a wonderful break. We got a good healthy canine fix as well—we spent time with two fine dogs. We met Tsuga, well known to readers of Fragments from Floyd. And we were guests of Emmett, Nicole and Mike’s dog, whom with we played many a game of hedgehog, not to mention sharing several shopping trips to downtown Carrboro. A sketch of Emmett is at right.

Caterpillaration

The painted ladies we saw in their thousands a few weeks ago have disappeared, but on Thursday I noticed hundreds of caterpillars on a section of the bike path between here and campus. Same on Friday.

They’re dark gray, spiky with bristles, and have intermittent yellow striping. Yep, painted ladies. They are looking for good sites to pupate, according to Art Shapiro. When the butterflies emerge they’ll continue north.

I saw one today getting nowhere fast on my window at work. I know you’re not supposed to intervene in these things but I helped it over to a spot where there was at least a bit of traction on the wall, unlike the sheer glass.

They are travellers, these creatures…

A Bee’s Course

In the 1960s, biologist Karl von Frisch came up with the hypothesis that honeybees communicate the distance and direction to nectar sources via a waggle dance performed in the hive. His theory was largely accepted, but some scientists argued that the bees who had attended the dance picked up the scent of the food source from the dancing bee and made their way to the nectar site by following the scent. Lacking a way to directly follow these bees en route, some controversy remained.

Technology moves along, and we are now able to attach harmonic radar transponders (weighing between 6 and 20 mg) to insects. In a paper just published in Nature, scientists used radar to obtain flight tracks of honeybees as they went out to find the food source after observing the waggle dance, thus directly confirming von Frisch’s theory. (Image courtesy of the BBRSC and Rothamsted Research).

Snail Day

There was light rain all day yesterday. Not so good for the Whole Earth Festival, but good for the snails.

Remembering Clive

My parents were given an unusual wedding gift: a German short-haired pointer puppy. He was there as I took my first steps, my first ride on a swing, my first birthday party when my English grandma came to California—his haunches quivering with pent-up power and spring, snipped tail always on the go. He herded me, and then my sister and brother, and barked at strangers and snakes. I remember the smell of wet dog in that foggy paradise of my early childhood with the Golden Gate bridge looming through the kitchen window, while the Cuban missile crisis droned on the black-and-white TV and then Kennedy’s assassination reduced the adults in the household to uncommunicative mourners. Clive was THERE.

Clive didn’t come with us to Spain in the mid-sixties. I think his attempt to get to my mother from the supermarket parking lot through a closed car window (he won) convinced my parents this might not be a great idea, especially since we were flying to New York and then going over to Southampton by boat. He was found a new home, and we were given a new puppy once we’d settled in Madrid by the friendly waiter at the Conde Duque where we stayed for six weeks while house-hunting—Blackie, a mongrel bitch who grew up to be more brown than black and who had a manageable level of energy.

A German short-haired pointer has just won the Westminster dog show (the one that’s spoofed in Christopher Guest’s hilarious Best in Show). Since poodles or poodle-type dogs almost always win, this is a welcome change. But I hope everyone’s watching their car windows, since this event always results in increased sales of the breed that wins Best in Show… visit your local shelter, people. There are lots of great dogs and cats waiting to be adopted.