Flap Flap Tweet Shriek Munch Munch Oh Noes

Sigh. I can’t deny it any longer. I’m a classist.

Most days over the past two weeks, I have caught, out of the corner of my eye, a larger-than-usual swoop of motion outside my office window. I look up and see a hawk arranging its wings and shaking out its feathers on the fencepost, sometimes two hawks in tandem, as the finches scatter and the lizards try to melt into the shadows.

Sometimes the hawks hop along the fence, craning their necks front and back to find the occasional bad-luck squirrel that is now trapped under the bottom rail, sprinting back and forth from post to post in a very existential game of hotbox, hoping that the hawk will be distracted by an easier-to-reach potential snack just long enough for the squirrel to make a final mad dash across the road, either to the sanctuary of the brushpile or into talon-ushered eternity.

When the hawk drops out of nowhere to explode a dove into a cloud of feathers and retreats to the fence or a tree with whatever scraps of meat might be left under all that fluff, I cheer for the hawk. When it alights with a drooping, bepawed slip of a ground squirrel, I am chagrined. When both hawks flap ever closer and finally take swipes at the terrified squirrel, I cringe and hope the birds go hungry.

I am fascinated by raptors. I love watching them, even when they’re not doing much of anything. But they force me to acknowledge a hole in my otherwise reliably rational perspective on the natural world. Rampant classism. Mammalian solidarity. It's not just because the little mammals are usually cute; if we're arguing aesthetics, the hawks are very handsome and elegant. It's simply that I don’t want to be eaten by a bird, or a komodo dragon, or--definitely not--by a flippin’ fish, not even during Shark Week, and so don't wish a similar Aves-Mammalia mashup on the rodents.

Coyotes noshing on squirrels? Aw, look at the puppy! Birds doing the same? Stop that!

Reunion

A few days ago I took a break from the interminable parent information sessions accompanying new student orientation at my son's university and spent an hour wandering the grounds and gardens on campus, getting to know the cool-and-mist-loving Pacific Northwest flowers and trees that are new to me. One flower in particular caught my eye, a stand of tall stalks topped with spiky balls in varying stages of bloom that shimmered purple.




















Half-bloomed, with bee; click to make life-sized.




















Fully bloomed, sans bee.

"They're wonderful, aren't they?" came a voice behind me. I turned to see an elderly man who I had not met, but whose crooked-toothed, lopsided grin was familiar.

He told me the plants were called globe thistles, and, chagrined, I glanced down at the thorn-tipped leaves and spiky stalks and said Oh, of course, a thistle, I should have looked at the foliage. These aren't like the thistles I grew up with. He smiled and told me about the globe thistles in his back yard, how they used to be covered with bees every summer, but that he hadn't seen a single bee this year and was worried that the hive had died or moved on. He asked where I was from and asked questions about saguaros and their flowers, and after a pause regarded the thistles again. "They're so fascinating, how different they look at different times. See these new ones that are all spiky and silver with a purple glow, and then these that have bloomed and are covered in almost a periwinkle?"

Yeah, I said, and then inside they have such a deep purple at the base of the blooms. Really striking. He leaned closer to a flower, examining it, and said, "You know, you're right. I'd never noticed that before. Nature is so wonderful when you take a moment to stop and just look at it. You'll always see something new," and I heard his words in his soft, measured voice and looked at his kind, gauzy eyes and gentle smile, and on that cool, overcast day a thousand miles from home I saw my grandfather again.

He wished me a good rest of my visit, I wished him luck with his bees, and he continued on to wherever he was walking. It was a good day.

Epic spiderwebs in Casa Bolt.

The spiders have been busy over the past few months, building haunted house-worthy webs high in every corner. We have been infested with gnats, so I'm letting the spiders stay, only occasionally brushing the outer extents of the webs away when they threaten to eclipse the light coming through the windows. The spiders need the web-building exercise anyway to work off all the annoying-flying-insect calories they've been ingesting.

This is how I ignore Arizona for a few minutes. I write about the desultory state of my housekeeping.

Bruce Wheeler came by this afternoon for me to sign his petition to get on the ballot for state representative. I happily signed and gave him five bucks and asked him to kick Russell Pearce in the balls when he gets to Phoenix.

Firelight Blogging

It has simultaneously felt like a month that they've been here, and a day now that they're leaving. The family left me alone by the backyard fire about ten minutes ago. Tomorrow they head home to Flagstaff and Chicago, and life returns to the normal routine.

I miss them already.

The week was a mixture of familiar (Sweetwater Wetlands, Sabino Canyon) and new (San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area, Pima Canyon Trail) hikes. Birding took most of our attention, but other natural wonders couldn't be ignored.

Cooper's Hawk chowing down, Catalina State Park.

View across the arroyo from Romero Ruin, Catalina State Park.

Beaver attack, San Pedro National Riparian Conservation Area




























Cottonwood by pond, San Pedro NRCRA




























Bullfrog, SPNCRA

Snowy Huachuca Mountains over a pond, SPNRCA

Highlights included a Scott's Oriole on the Pima Canyon Trail, American avocets at the Sweeetwater Wetlands, and a yellow-rumped warbler on the San Pedro. And food, oh my goodness.

When my dad walked out the door tonight I hugged him and said you're the best, which here means I know you try your best and sometimes that doesn't even come close to being enough but I love you anyway. And they all hopped into cars and drove off.

They'll be back in December. I hope I'm rested up.

Today in Weird Sonoran Desert Biology

Conjoined rattlesnakes! Complete with mildly disturbing video!

The snakes will be surgically separated despite Mother Nature's clear intent to keep them superglued together at the head, since they apparently can't exactly agree on which direction to slither or what to bite, and will be live out their days in luxury at the Desert Museum in Tucson. Where they will never have to share snacks again. Stop by and say hi, hi when you get the chance.

Roadblogging: Seattle, Again

I spent the last 20 minutes wrangling with a post of photos and captions that did not want to line up properly. And finally said fuck it and deleted the whole thing. Instead of photos, words.

This is probably the last epic road trip I will make with my son for a long time, and certainly the last one of this nature, when he's still a kid--an almost-17 kid, but kid nonetheless--and there are a few vestiges yet of him looking to me to show the way. After two weeks and the long drive home looming in just a few days, we have simultaneously been gone forever and only just left.

Planning this trip I thought it would be mostly camping and fishing, with college visits the official excuse for taking three weeks of vacation to traipse across the Pacific Northwest. It hasn't quite turned out that way, with far more hotels and sushi bars than tents and wriggling silver fins and scales on the end of a line, but that's okay. He's not the dirt-rolled camping critter he was when he was five, and my aching shoulder is probably better off for having spent more nights on a bed than on a Thermarest. We never had much luck catching fish anyway, and our tortillas got soaked, so...

So we drive from city to city, mostly me behind the wheel but sometimes him as I clutch the armrest and try to keep my voice modulated. We take scenic routes when we come across them, the slow meander through the redwoods and the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge making up for the scuttled plans of camping on the Oregon coast, his unmasked wonder at the giant trees and quiet, impossibly green moss-draped rocks and rushing streams bringing me a deep satisfaction and pride. I am glad he has seen these things and found them beautiful. I am glad it was with me. Even though the larger waterfalls themselves were crowded with other tourists, we somehow managed to be the only car on the roads between them, allowing a slow, solitary exploration unintruded by other people.

He plucks a long strand of grass from the rock and pokes it into my ear as we walk up the trail and says nature fight! and grins.

Magic moments are hard to come by. I'll take these.

Recovery Package

Recovering? Yes I am. The family was here in various permutations for a week, and now that they've gone back home I have taken the deep breath I've been needing... and find myself wishing they were still here, or at least coming back sooner than they actually will. We did far less hiking this time around than in previous years, so I don't have many general-interest photos to share.

We did make it down to the Nature Conservancy's Patagonia-Sonoita Preserve on a horridly windy Friday to search for birds that, like us, weren't smart enough to stay hunkered down someplace sheltered. Sonoita Creek, fed by groundwater, flows perennially and is so clear and surrounded by greenery that it looks fake.






















Sonoita Creek burbling along.

Whimsy! Snakey decoration on handrail on Creek Trail.

The preserve has a few miles of interconnected trails, about half of which follow the creek before looping around through a partially burned mesquite bosque. The birdwatching was probably hampered by the wind, but we managed to spot a thick-billed kingbird (rare in Arizona), a Cassin's kingbird, several vermillion flycatchers or possibly a single, very energetic flycatcher, finches by the bucketload, a black phoebe, and a pair of gray hawks that we heard whistling for an hour and a half before we finally saw them wheeling in the updrafts.

The preserve is notable not only for the year-round stream and numerous bird species, but also for its stands of old-growth cottonwoods, some of which top out at 130 years old and about a million feet tall. These are the oldest and largest cottonwoods on the planet.

Giant cottonwood.

After a day well-spent, we retired to my back yard and watched my aunt grill up slabs and slabs of ribs, and then we worked off dinner in the best possible way.

The family gathers 'round the TV machine to watch Rachel.

Tonight I'm watching basketball and thinking I'm pretty damn lucky to have been born into this family. Good times, people!

Surfacing for Breath

After a mind-boggling ten days without Intarwebz access, I am safely ensconced in my uncle's house in far west suburban Chicago. The last week was spent in the haven of McCormick's Creek State Park in southwestern Indiana, a place my family has been retreating to in one form or another for the better part of eighty years.

I have pictures out the ass, but my laptop isn't cooperating at the moment, so I'm borrowing my aunt's computer.

Anyway.

Following the road from the park gatehouse as it curves past the tennis courts and runs through the woods, you don't notice at first that the cabins are perched somewhat precariously on a thin thumb of level ground surrounded on three sides by massive sinkholes. The sinkholes are a quirky byproduct of the limestone foundation underlying much of Owen, Monroe, and Lawrence counties south of Indianapolis. As water courses between the underground layers of stone, caves are hollowed out. When the ceilings collapse, voila. Sinkholes the size of Assembly Hall.

The trail to the creek starts at the rear circle of cabins and follows a narrow ridge as it slopes steeply down, a merely large sinkhole on the right, a huge one on the left. They don't photograph well. Beech, tulip, and maple trees march resolutely down the sides of the holes, the giants growing up from the bottoms matching the crowns of their higher cousins despite being rooted some fifty feet lower. One hundred, one hundred and fifty feet they tower, the canopy blocking all but a few thin beams of sun. Maple branches break the middle layer into horizontal planes; young hickories and muscle elms elbow each other for the dregs of the sunlight nearest the forest floor.

On the floor itself, a profusion of plants covers the humus formed by fallen leaves. A grove of mayapples here, a riot of wild ginger there, nightshade and dotting everywhere. Occasionally a low moss- and fern-covered hummock of earth stands sentinel over a bleak oval depression, an open grave the sole monument to the giant tree whose falling and uprooting dug it. Eager saplings crowd the sun-soaked forest gap; only the fastest growing will eventually supplant the giant trees to either side.

Closer to the creek, the forest changes, a profusion of ferns and a parade of sycamores signalling greater proximity to the water table. Where the creekbend has washed away the soil beneath the sycamores, limestone cobbles are suspended in air by interwoven roots. Where the trees are long gone, the roots remain, a cephalopod of wood squirming in the mud, clinging to the rocks in futility. Dragonflies flit from weed to weed, water striders skim the surface of still pools, crawdads skulk beneath the rocks, and tiny bass and sunfish flee from your shadow.

The massive floods of early June have scoured the creekbed clean, leaving clear water mostly free of sediment, running cold and gurgling over the newly-dumped cobble bars. In the lower reaches of the creek you can stand on the bank eight feet above the water and look up to see muddy leaves and tree trunks above your eye level, a stark testimony to the volume of water that moved through here. The two-foot-diameter tree trunks piled like Lincoln logs speak to its violence.

On this day, though, the current burbles cheerfully along to the soundtrack provided by wood thrushes and the wood peewee. Notoriously difficult to spot, they are rendered even more invisible by a canopy that is twenty feet higher than the last time you were here. No matter. Simply hearing them is enough.

That's McCormick's Creek. For six blessed days, my heart was home.

Off to the Floody Midwest Edition

The annual escape from Tucson in June commences tomorrow; we hop the train in Flagstaff and head east and hope the railroad bridges in southwestern Iowa are still intact. The family is converging on a small state park in southern Indiana that has been our hearts' home for the past eighty years or so. Unfortunately, it's also located smack dab in the middle of the worst flooding Indiana has seen, ever. The park itself is up on a hill above the White River, but we buy our beer in the little town of Spencer, which is at the bottom of the hill and now under the White River. Hundreds of people have been evacuated so far. The river was expected to crest last night and recede through this week, but more storms are rolling in on Friday, right before we turn up.

McCormick's Creek usually looks like this:

A mellow little waterfall.

This is what it looked like last week:


Less so.

Anyway. Should we come through the floodwaters unscathed, I have an additional week and a half in the Chicago area, most of which is likely to be spent playing cards and drinking wine on my aunt and uncle's back porch. Intermittent nature, culture, and drunken birdwatching posting from Chicago is possible in a couple of weeks, but given the current sorry state of our laptop's modem, it may be a check-back-in-July kind of deal.

Science Thursday

Today, a nifty tidbit about the mantis shrimp. 400 or so species within the order Stomatopoda are known, but researchers working on specimens from the Great Barrier Reef have discovered that one variety, the technocolored Gonodactylus smithii, have the ability to see a complete range of polarized light no other creature on the planet can, effectively opening up an entire world to them that is invisible to the rest of us.


Is that four linear and two circular polarizations,
or are you just happy to see me?

Sharp-eyed, gutter-minded readers will likely notice that the order name "Stomatopoda" means "mouth-footed" and genus "Gonodactylus" means "genital-fingered." I can't be the only one here having visions of thumb-wrestling with that special someone whilst strolling barefoot across a field blooming with chocolate chips and Twinkies. And the occasional stretch of neatly manicured pad thai lawn.

Weekend Snowblogging

The Doppler radar on the Weather Channel Friday night showed a slowly rotating giant pink pinwheel perched on the northern edge of the Tucson Basin. By Saturday morning our normally bite-sized mountain range had draped itself in snow to rear up from behind tattered clouds in terrible majesty and splendor. As usual when the snow flies, the highway up was closed at the base, so we contented ourselves with the view from Sabino Canyon.
















Boltgirl in peril!

No sign of mountain lions (other than this, well, sign). I did see some javelina and raccoon tracks in the sand on the edge of Sabino Creek, which was churning at a fairly good volume.

Snow-and cloud-crested mountains above the desert.

Snowy slopes from beneath a confused saguaro.

This might be the last good winter storm we get. Stay tuned for a killer wildflower season in the spring... which is due in about a month, I think.

Friday Random Linkiness

It's Friday and the database has been giving me fits all week. Who knew setting a bajillion filters to get validly comparable sets of artifacts would bring so many inherent problems to light? Who knew control units were such wicked BAD proxies for whole pithouses? And then didn't tell me? Sigh. The artifacts are telling me--screaming in my ear, actually--so I have quite a bit of work to do. Oh, Archaeological Record. You're such a fickle mistress.

Anyway. For a little padding while you sit back and marvel at right-wing talk radioites turning on John McCain (and Fox News labeling him "D-AZ"), we have Maddow on the apparent GOP loathing of their candidates this time around:

Need to say goodbye to Mittens one last time before he fades into the obscurity that only a made-for-TV-movie starring Matthew Fox as the Mittster could possibly dash? Lord knows I do after that lovely stepping-down speech.

In this time I war I have to now stand aside... I'd be making it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.. in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Here, let Jon Stewart help you with that.

And, finally, via Pharyngula, a kick-ass video of a Big! Ass! Squid!

Overdue Natureblogging

Tomorrow, Super Duper Tuesday insanity. Tonight, 5500' of Catalina Mountains serenity from last weekend.

















Peak peeking through the oaks.

The sun was just climbing high enough to paint parts of the creekbed with light, but the soaked sand was frozen, making for easy walking. It was cold enough for the spray from innumerable small waterfalls to freeze into icy shoulderpads on the nearby rocks.

Tiny fall, defiant ice.

Still puddles stranded by lowering water levels were skimmed over with delicate crystals.

Thin ice.

I moseyed up the Green Mountain Trail for about an hour and a half, stopping to take pictures and chase the sound of falling water up side drainages. My favorite is a series of half a dozen small pools stair-stepped up the slope near the trailhead; in the sand by the second pool I saw a lion track. The sun hadn't warmed the sand enough for it to have been thawed for long, so I decided against climbing to the top and returned to the main trail, continuing until wondering what was around the next bend was outweighed by sore knees and the need to get down the mountain to tend to real life.

View from Green Mountain Trail down to Thimble Peak.

The Catalinas kick ass.

Weekend Snakeblogging

A couple of hours after the world cup games Saturday morning were plenty for a leisurely jaunt up the Green Mountain trail in the Catalinas. I hadn't been on this one before; it's going to turn into one of my favorites, given my inordinate fondness for damp creekbeds, ferns, and big big rocks. The trailhead is at the back of the General Hitchcock campground, roughly 5,000 ft up, but you can pick it up by following the streambed that runs uphill behind the Bear Canyon and Chihuahua Pine picnic areas.






















Water strider (middle left) skimming along next to a ponderosa
pine reflected in a late-season pool.

The added bonus came on the way back to the truck, when I doubled my career snake sightings in the span of about fifty yards. First up was a two-foot Arizona Black Rattlesnake that was heading across a large rock in the streambed just ahead of me. Note to non-Arizona readers contemplating a hike here: don't mess with rattlesnakes. Give 'em a nice wide berth, take advantage of the zoom function on your camera, and move along.


















Mildly annoyed rattlesnake.

I immediately started paying much closer attention to where I was stepping, and a few minutes later did a better job of spotting the Sonoran Desert Kingsnake slithering across a remnant sandbar.


















Kingsnake.

Kingsnakes slurp up rattlesnakes like spaghetti, but this one was probably too small yet to pose much of a threat to the guy upstream. Isn't he handsome?


















Red next to black, friend of Jack.

Metamorphoses

Thanks to Typhoon Wipha, there is no WWC news to report, other than a gripe about the tardiness of the announcement that this morning's games would be postponed until tomorrow. FIFA didn't take action on Canada's protest against only two of the games being postponed, rather than all four, until well after Arizona bedtime, meaning I hauled my ass out of bed at two this morning for the Australia-Canada match only to be greeted by a replay of Austria-Norway. That is not a nice thing to do to a groggy girl. After no more than five minutes of staring uncomprehendingly at the TV, I trudged back to bed and some really weird dreams.

And I don't have the energy for Iraq or conservative Christian brothers--although I did send mine a nice assortment of Benny Hinn YouTube videos (this one first, then this one) for his birthday yesterday--so here's some nature writing instead, both of the back yard and big mountain varieties.

As summer transitions to fall, small non-mammals get about the business of genetic propogation. Two large sphinx moth caterpillars (often called hornworms) laid waste to my pepper plants about a month ago, pissing me off to no end but simultaneously impressing me with their voraciousness and staying power.






















Hornworm (look for the stripes and suckers) striking an innocent pose
amidst denuded stalks.

Their mandibles whir as they shear leaves off the plants, zip zip zip, plowing through them like a PhotoShop eraser tool through a mass of pixels. Then you poke them and they curl their front ends up in an attempt to impersonate an innocent leaf much like the one they were just now mowing down before you so rudely interrupted them. Pulling them off the stalk isn't going to happen. Their abdominal prolegs (the suckery feet on the back segment of the caterpillar) grab on and do not let go. And they also have the nasty habit of whipping their thoraxes and heads back and forth in an attempt to sink those garden shears of mouthparts into you. Fortunately for my fingers, I was attempting to dislodge them with a stick; I could hear the clacking of mandible hitting wood with enough force to leave little divots. The simple solution was to grab the little bastards with tongs and snip off the section of stalk they refused to let go, and then toss the whole package into the weeds at the back of the lot.

Fast forward a month and the big green guys have grown up into very handsome moths, about three inches long with wings patterned to mimic tree bark and exposed wood.

Sphinx moth trying to blend in to the chicken wire-covered fence post.

The adults make up for their rapacious juvenile habits by being prolific pollinators, which is a very good thing in these dark days for honeybees. I'm hoping this moth has enough of a nagging conscience to fly a little closer to the house and pollinate the few straggling flowers on the pepper plants.

The amphibians have been putting on their own life cycle show as the last of the monsoon runoff trickles away. A stream was still running through Molino Basin over the weekend, and its little pools were teeming with late-season tadpoles. They ranged in development from newly-hatched tads the size of small peas with tails (who are probably doomed by impending evaporation) to fully-formed toads. Most of the tads were fat grapes with leg buds, but the best was the little mostly-toad guy who still had a snippet of a tail.

Tadpole, not thrilled to be in my hand.

Tiny almost-toad, basking on the boy's finger.

With the last of the young critters trundling toward maturity, fall is in the air. My own tad accompanied me on this trip, to my delight, nearly full-sized himself at 15 but still happy to build temporary dams across the stream and examine the toads-in-progress before gently slipping them back into the water.

Birthday Chaos

Oh, the day started promisingly enough, Coffee Times coffee in hand, annual pass to the Catalinas stuck to the windshield, all ready for a drive up the mountain with stops at various vista points to play in the water that's still bravely holding out against the sun and evaporation.

Stream bubbling past a tree growing between granite boulders in Molino Canyon.

A few remnant puddles stranded high up on the tops of the boulders on either side of the stream were indicators of the awesome torrent that rushed through here last week. Today it was a lovely cool gurgle perfect for wading and splashing.

The next stop was a couple thousand feet higher, up in the ponderosa forest near Bear Canyon. The slope of the streambed here is gentle, creating a wide channel with interesting sandbars, meandering among the pines. Although it was reasonably early in the morning, I didn't see much in the way of wildlife; a large orange dragonfly buzzing the surface of the pool on the left side of the sandbar and a lone waterbug doing the backstroke were about it.

Cool, shimmery water pooling near Bear Canyon.

A lovely morning. Until I walked back to the BoltMobile, at which point I noticed a large puddle that definitely was not there when I pulled off the road. A glance at the radiator and finger-poke into the puddle confirmed that my truck had decided to celebrate my birthday by spewing coolant like an excited and, let's admit it, probably non-Cub outfielder with a bottle of champagne after Game 7.

This meant making the 45-minute drive back down the mountain and into town with the heat on full blast to keep the engine temperature needle just below the red. What's open on Saturday? Why, Pep Boys (shudder), of course. Jesus.

Boltgirl's day takes a turn for the worse.

Four hours and $416 later, I had a shiny new radiator and a big-ass hole in my credit card. And just after finally paying off the summer train tickets last week. Happy birthday to me! Luckily, I have good friends who are happy to drive across town to rescue me and take me shopping to make me feel better.

New Merrell Chameleon Webs make everything sunnier.

So all in all, not a bad day. Not the cheapest day I have ever had, but hey. Forty is better than dead.

Urban Nature Blogging

A couple of monsoon babies made their appearance last week. I noticed this little guy in the back yard, hanging out on the bench under the mesquite tree. It was about 3/4 of an inch long and kept its pinchers at the ready, although it never took any swipes at my fingertip.
















Blurry mantis nymph.

The pictures of the baby desert cottontail turned out better. This is one of the gaggle of rabbits that lives under the fence behind the office, sunning themselves in the parking lot, dashing off under the shed when people get too close. This baby could fit inside a large grapefruit if he tucked his ears in a bit.

Tiny desert cottontail.

The eastern cottontails I grew up with look strange now when I go back to Chicago, their stubby little ears seemingly out of proportion to their bodies. The desert bunnies' ears evolved long in response to the hot climate, their increased surface area of thin skin over a network of capillaries providing an efficient heat-dispersal system. The eastern cottontails' ears stayed small for the opposite reason, of course, that being heat retention in wintertime.

We used to see a family of Harris hawks prowling the neighborhood near the office, hanging out in the upper branches of dying trees and the tops of power poles. They moved on a little more than a year ago, and since then the rabbit and ground squirrel populations have exploded. Coyotes will figure it out soon enough, I suppose, and maybe the Harris hawks will come back to displace the Cooper's hawks that prey on the doves. Until then, we will burble over the baby bunnies.

NatureVideoBlogging With Boltgirl: Cicada Cinematography!

Production values are grievously lacking, but here are the little monsters in action. Turn up your volume all the way to get the vaguest idea of what it really sounds like.

Magicicada sp.

They are... everywhere.

Sunday morning I decided it was time to seek out the 17-year-olds of Cicada Brood XIII in person. I have a long and complicated relationship with these bugs, although most of it revolves around the hideously large, plump, and green annual version. As a wee child in southern Illinois I would be out on a fine summer afternoon, minding my own business, climbing a tree, when crunch, my hand would come down on a shed exoskeleton stuck on a branch. Or I would be skipping barefoot down the sidewalk and crunchsquish, would tromp on top of a dead or dying bug.

It's a history filled mostly with intense heebie-jeebies.

I know cicadas are utterly harmless. I appreciate their interesting life cycle. I chuckle at the consternation hordes of them are able to produce in rational human beings, myself included. None of that stopped me from even beginning to resent the catalpa trees in my hometown since they seemed to be a particular favorite congregating place for the little bastards.

Anyway. Sunday afternoon we were off to the Morton Arboretum in the western suburbs, since we heard the cicadas were there in pretty impressive numbers. "Pretty impressive" may be accurate if it can be construed to mean "holy fucking shit" times about a million. Cicadas flying through the air. Cicadas buzzing around trees like bees around the snowcone booth at the county fair.

The visuals were nice. But the audio portion of the presentation was mind-blowing. We could hear them through closed car windows driving the city streets on our way to the arboretum, at least when the car slowed down. Actually on the grounds, the sound was much louder. And then we parked to hike into the woods a bit, where it was louder still, growing louder and louder the deeper into the trees we walked. Maybe a quarter of a mile in the sound was absolutely punishing on the ears, a steady pulsing background sound topped with a second song that rose and fell as hundreds of thousands of bugs vibrated their abdominal membranes in unison. I have never experienced anything like it.

Back at the arboretum visitor center, I grabbed a "Cicada 2007" t-shirt and took it to the nice older lady at the cash register. As I reached down into my bag to get my wallet, I noticed a cicada on my shirt, crawling on my right boob, and took great pride in not yelling or flapping around. I calmly flicked the bug off, not viciously, I didn't think, just, uh, forcefully enough for it to land about ten feet away. The old lady sighed sadly, "Ohhh..." I thought about apologizing, but did I mention it was on my boob? So I just shrugged and handed her my debit card, you know, the one with my undeniably female first and middle names printed on it, and she recovered and finished the transaction, smiled, handed me my stuff, and said, "Have a nice day, sir."

Shite.

Despite the gender confusion, Morton Arboretum is highly recommended, with 1,700 acres of trees and plants from different parts of the world, lovely loop roads to drive, and maybe three times that amount of trails to walk through the woods and around lakes. There is a children's garden and a nifty hedge/evergreen maze to get lost in, and the details of all of it are very nicely done.

In Which We Are Stymied By Ancient Technology

In this case, it's my aunt's ten-year-old laptop that's holding me back. I did manage to find the USB port hidden on the back, but it needs drivers to make my nifty little Mimobot work, and lord knows I've crashed this poor machine more times in the past four days than I care to remember, so downloading drivers probably isn't an option.

So no pictures for now. What are those other things I use here from time to time... oh, yes, words.

Yesterday morning as I sat praying that the laptop would decide to come back to life before anyone noticed I'd killed it, I watched a male cardinal and his fledgling get harrassed to distraction by a cowbird fledgling. Initially it was just the pair of cardinals, the parent on the feeder and the fledgling on the ground in full feed me squawk and flutter. The parent flew down and back up several times, filling its offspring's gaping mouth, until the cowbird showed up and started its own food demands. Overwhelmed by the show, the cardinal ignored its own fledgling, making a couple of trips to feed the cowbird until the young cardinal rushed it and momentarily drove it off. 'Ray for cardinal Jr.

Cowbirds are a parasitic species that lay their eggs in other birds' nests. They typically have a shorter brood time than other birds, gaining their chicks an extra few days to build up strength to either kick the other eggs/hatchlings out of the nest or out-compete them for food. The cowbird food-demanding display is loud and aggressive. Couple this with the tendency of adult birds to respond to an open squawking beak rather than the specific type of bird it's attached to, and you get cowbirds eliminating their competition in the nest and generally wreaking havoc on local songbird populations. Watching the young cardinal drive the cowbird off before its befuddled parent could feed the damn thing even more was gratifying.

The rain that relented for most of the day has returned, bringing with it a cool breeze sweeping a steel sky that looks and feels more like October than June. The redbud tree's flat planes of leaves dip momentarily with each raindrop while the ferns shudder beneath them. The oaks remain unperturbed. Birds and chipmunks and squirrels are hidden away now as the rain sends ring after ring expanding on the pond. The desert is very far away now as I am nestled in the green.