It was supposed to have been just a quiet adventure. I was going to River Bend Park here in Fairfax County to try to find a Cyrano Darner; a state-rare dragonfly rumored to inhabit one of the ponds a mile or so upstream from the visitor center. I never got there. About 500 yards upstream, I saw a group of half a dozen vultures on one of the numerous rocky islets that dot the Potomac above Great Falls. They all looked like black vultures and I walked quietly to an opening in the vegetation lining the bank. I focused and shot maybe 5 or 6 photos of the flock. Finding vultures in a group is not all that unusual since they gather in sunny spots to bask and raise their low energy metabolisms to flight level. What was unusual, a small voice in the back of my brain was saying, was that they were all black vultures, not a red-headed turkey vulture among them. Black vultures will visually track turkey vultures to a carcass and drive them off when they get there.
The voice in the back of my brain was getting louder when I put the binoculars on the group and saw a pair of blue jeans draped over a tree branch. The jeans waistband ended at an old river worn log. The voice began to go off the chart when a vulture dipped its head down and I saw the exposed bones of the rib cage. The voice said, quite calmly, “We should go back and report this.”
I made my way back to the visitor center and found a uniformed park person at his desk. “I think I have found a body in the river” I said. His eyebrows rose, “Are you sure it’s not just a deer?” “Not unless they’ve started wearing Levis” I replied. I realize now that it sounded flip, but the twin ideas of “body” and “person” never made the connection. It was wreckage and it was human. Not someone’s kid or parent or whatever. Just a pile of bones in blue jeans. The park ranger walked with me to the point and glassed the thing in the river. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called it in. “Now the circus begins” he muttered.
First to arrive was the rescue squad. Their job, I gathered, was to ascertain that: a) there was a body and, b) it was dead. The ranger walked them upriver and when they got back, they began putting away the rescue equipment. It was now a recovery operation and legal issues reared their ugly heads. The Potomac River is technically all in Maryland, up to mean low water, a precedent dating all the way back to early colonial days. The body was in Maryland, Montgomery County, to be precise. Having grown up in Montgomery County and having lived along the river there for several years, I knew that the only safe places to launch a boat were at Cabin John, which was below Great Falls and impossible to traverse, or at Seneca, about 15 miles upstream from where we were. Montgomery told Fairfax to stand by. Meanwhile, Fairfax police began to arrive. A cruiser, then another, then another with an officer in charge. I was asked to wait so I could give a statement, having been the one who discovered the wreck. Helicopters began appearing overhead. US Park Police, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, News 7 and Fox. All holding station or buzzing up and down stream. One of the cops said Montgomery was putting in at Seneca and would be there within half an hour. One of the Fairfax Fire and Rescue people, who already had their zodiac in the water at the boat ramp scoffed. “Maybe an hour if they have someone steering who knows the line” meaning knew how to avoid the rocks and snags that make the Potomac such fun for kayakers. “We can have this guy in a bag in 15 minutes if they let us.” Somewhere along the way the “it” became a “he”.
I told my story to several cops in a row, uniform, uniform supervisor, homicide detective, cold case detective. The cold case guy noticed my camera and asked if I had made any photos. “Yeah, I wanted to get images of the vultures, but I think the body is in the pictures.” He asked if he could have my camera card so he could download the photos. Turns out that with digital, the first download is the official one and the one to be used in court. He promised to get the card or its replacement back soon. “We will take the images off if you don’t mind” he said. Sure, like I really want that in my camera—bad enough the image is in my brain. Last to ask questions was the WJLA reporter. She was pleasant enough in a wide-eyed gosh weren’t you scared kind of way. I gave some inane answers to the questions. Even spelled my name. So I made the news at 11, answering two questions. The caption labeled me as a hiker. Andy Warhol once said everybody gets 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t promise they would spell your name right.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Stone Monsters
It was a beautiful May day; the sun was shining, the sky blue, bird on the wing, and snail on the thorn. On the spur of the moment, I decided to go the National Cathedral to shoot gargoyles. I had read that the Cathedral had added a Darth Vader head to the collection and was eager to see it. I debouched from the underground garage near the north transept where I heard the Dark Lord was ensconced and gazed about. The bottom row of gargoyles were all there; the rattlesnake and the elephant with eternal mouths open to spout water (or boiling lead if you are a fan of the movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney Jr.). I was trying to locate Darth when a maintenance worker emerged from the basement. “Excuse me,” I asked, “I’m told there is a gargoyle of Darth Vader somewhere up there. Do you know where it might be?” He replied “Sure” and directed me up to a lonely tower where old bullet head was just visible. “Tell you what”, he said, “I’ve got some time left on my lunch hour—I’ll take you up there if you don’t mind the walk.” When gift horses stare one in the face, you don’t count teeth, and I enthusiastically agreed. Several stair cases, one elevator ride and a steel ladder later, we were up on the roof, over 100 feet up. “I’m not supposed to bring people up here due to liability, but just don’t fall off. OK?” We tracked around the transept, with “Bill” (not his real name to keep him out of trouble) giving a running narrative of all the gargoyles and grotesques along the way. “Bill” has been at the Cathedral for 25 years and knows every nook and cranny in the building. I squeezed through the passages between the flying buttresses trying to keep up and not miss anything. There were no fat hunchbacks. The sculptures were in themed pairs, flanking each gable, but from up top, they were seemingly out of kilter until I figured out the pattern. The penguin and baby made more sense when you knew the companion pieces were a polar bear and an old man.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Really Old Glory
The world is full of things that make you wonder “how the hell did they come up with that?” For example; who first came up with: “You know, I’ll bet that tarantula-looking thing we just pulled out of the water would taste good if we steamed it with Old Bay and figured out how to take it apart; and maybe dipped the edible bits in some melted butter, too.”
Dye stuffs fall into this category. Royal purple was produced in ancient times by gathering tons of Murex snails from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and letting them rot in huge vats. The resultant goo yielded a deep purple dye which turned indigo in the presence of sunlight (ultraviolet radiation). Ancient travel writers told of being able to smell the dye-producing city of Sidon from far at sea on shipboard while Sidon was still below the horizon.
I was recently rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and was intrigued by the chapter on domesticated animals. Diamond says that domesticated species share several characteristics including social behavior (humans can take over the top spot in the pecking order) and docility.
These criteria apply to mammals (except maybe cats) and explains why the ancient Egyptians, who went on a domestication binge, failed to domesticate the hyena or the hippo (although the why in this equation seems to be lost in the dim mists of history). Of the three species of domesticated insects, only one, the honeybee fills Diamond’s condition of sociality. Of the other two, silkworms are docile but most assuredly non-social, and the other, the cochineal scale, seems social only because it is sedentary and almost entirely females. Cochineal is a small scale insect feeding exclusively on prickly pear and closely related cacti.
Cochineal, though now no longer produced industrially, was at one time, the major source of red/scarlet dye in the world. Somewhere way back when, an unremembered Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer found red stains on his or her clothes after harvesting cactus fruits and probably thought: “You know, if we could produce this stuff in industrial quantities, we could revolutionize the textile industry”. Originally raised throughout the drier parts of Central America, cochineal was the source of scarlet dye, the color of Aztec royalty. It was farmed like any other livestock. Scale rancheros tended the prickly pear cacti and the herds of bugs, to the point of building small straw “barns” to keep the rains from dislodging the insects. Cortez brought back cochineal scales as part of the spoils from the conquest of Mexico—gold, silver, corn, chili, bugs.
The Spanish made cochineal production a state monopoly and a state secret, much the same as China had tried to do with silkworms centuries earlier and Venetians did with glass. As with the Chinese experiment, it didn’t work for the Spanish. Prickly pear with its attendant cochineal scales was smuggled out of Mexico and introduced into Europe, to desert islands such as the Azores and the Canaries, and as far afield as the Galapagos and Australia. Fortunes were made on the dye, which some early chemist discovered could be made colorfast with the addition of tin salts.
The English and Dutch, in particular, went crazy over scarlet. Painters like Ruebens used it with abandon (close examination of pre-Columbian renaissance paintings reveals no bright reds) replacing the red-brown kermes dyes (made from European bugs) on their palettes as soon as they could lay hands on the stuff. The uniform tunics of British soldiers (redcoats) were dyed scarlet with cochineal dye as were eight of the fifteen broad stripes on the original Star-Spangled Banner.
Following the invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the late 18th century, the cochineal industry collapsed, leaving acres of untended prickly pear in its wake. The insects, which are as domesticated as chickens, mostly perished from their island homes, leaving the cactus to run riot without anything to eat it. Prickly pear cactus has become a noxious weed wherever it was planted outside its original range.
Today, cochineal has come full circle; it is produced in small amounts in Peru and Central America and is exported as safe, USDA-approved food coloring. Cochineal red is a replacement for coal tar dye Red 40 which comes from petroleum. You may fondly remember coal tar dye Red 40 as what gave bottled maraschino cherries their startling red color. Nowdays, the red comes from bugs; kind of puts you off that next banana split, doesn’t it?
Dye stuffs fall into this category. Royal purple was produced in ancient times by gathering tons of Murex snails from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and letting them rot in huge vats. The resultant goo yielded a deep purple dye which turned indigo in the presence of sunlight (ultraviolet radiation). Ancient travel writers told of being able to smell the dye-producing city of Sidon from far at sea on shipboard while Sidon was still below the horizon.
I was recently rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and was intrigued by the chapter on domesticated animals. Diamond says that domesticated species share several characteristics including social behavior (humans can take over the top spot in the pecking order) and docility.
These criteria apply to mammals (except maybe cats) and explains why the ancient Egyptians, who went on a domestication binge, failed to domesticate the hyena or the hippo (although the why in this equation seems to be lost in the dim mists of history). Of the three species of domesticated insects, only one, the honeybee fills Diamond’s condition of sociality. Of the other two, silkworms are docile but most assuredly non-social, and the other, the cochineal scale, seems social only because it is sedentary and almost entirely females. Cochineal is a small scale insect feeding exclusively on prickly pear and closely related cacti.
Cochineal, though now no longer produced industrially, was at one time, the major source of red/scarlet dye in the world. Somewhere way back when, an unremembered Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer found red stains on his or her clothes after harvesting cactus fruits and probably thought: “You know, if we could produce this stuff in industrial quantities, we could revolutionize the textile industry”. Originally raised throughout the drier parts of Central America, cochineal was the source of scarlet dye, the color of Aztec royalty. It was farmed like any other livestock. Scale rancheros tended the prickly pear cacti and the herds of bugs, to the point of building small straw “barns” to keep the rains from dislodging the insects. Cortez brought back cochineal scales as part of the spoils from the conquest of Mexico—gold, silver, corn, chili, bugs.
The Spanish made cochineal production a state monopoly and a state secret, much the same as China had tried to do with silkworms centuries earlier and Venetians did with glass. As with the Chinese experiment, it didn’t work for the Spanish. Prickly pear with its attendant cochineal scales was smuggled out of Mexico and introduced into Europe, to desert islands such as the Azores and the Canaries, and as far afield as the Galapagos and Australia. Fortunes were made on the dye, which some early chemist discovered could be made colorfast with the addition of tin salts.
The English and Dutch, in particular, went crazy over scarlet. Painters like Ruebens used it with abandon (close examination of pre-Columbian renaissance paintings reveals no bright reds) replacing the red-brown kermes dyes (made from European bugs) on their palettes as soon as they could lay hands on the stuff. The uniform tunics of British soldiers (redcoats) were dyed scarlet with cochineal dye as were eight of the fifteen broad stripes on the original Star-Spangled Banner.
Following the invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the late 18th century, the cochineal industry collapsed, leaving acres of untended prickly pear in its wake. The insects, which are as domesticated as chickens, mostly perished from their island homes, leaving the cactus to run riot without anything to eat it. Prickly pear cactus has become a noxious weed wherever it was planted outside its original range.
Today, cochineal has come full circle; it is produced in small amounts in Peru and Central America and is exported as safe, USDA-approved food coloring. Cochineal red is a replacement for coal tar dye Red 40 which comes from petroleum. You may fondly remember coal tar dye Red 40 as what gave bottled maraschino cherries their startling red color. Nowdays, the red comes from bugs; kind of puts you off that next banana split, doesn’t it?
For Kay...
This scene is pretty generic; we’ve seen it scores of times—in Dr. No, an early James Bond movie, one of the evil Doctor’s henchmen releases a Mexican redknee tarantula on the slumbering Bond’s bed. Cue ominous music as the hairy monster creeps ever so slowly up towards the blissful dreaming victim. Bond awakens in the (ta-da!) nick of time, flings back the covers, and mashes the hapless spider with several well-aimed whacks from his elegant, handmade, rich Corinthian leather, Gucci loafer; the music climaxing discordantly with each strike.
Too bad neither the henchman nor Cmdr. Bond was able to stay awake during biology class. They would have learned that Mexican redknee tarantulas, for all their nasty looks, are really quite docile. This despite the fact that Sean Connery insisted upon a pane of glass to separate him (or his stunt double) from the creepy-crawly itself. Due to their size and conspicuous coloration, Mexican redknees are movie stars, also appearing in Raiders of the Lost Ark (in the opening scenes) and as the title role in Tarantula, a late 50’s horror film, wherein a giant mutant redknee develops a taste for pickup trucks.
In the wild, Mexican redknee tarantulas mate in the summer, shortly after the male sheds his exoskeleton for the final time and becomes fully mature, usually by the start of the rainy season (July and August). Mating occurs in or near the female's burrow, where the male uses his pedipalps (front limbs) to transfer sperm to openings on the underside of the female's abdomen. After mating, some females will try to eat the male, although this has never been observed in the wild (usually they just smoke a cigarette and cuddle). The sperm and eggs are stored in the female's body and not deposited until spring. In the spring, the female deposits hundreds of eggs and the sperm onto a silk mat she has made and then fashions into a ball or egg sack. Fertilization takes place in the sack within minutes and the spiderlings hatch in 3 months but remain in the egg sack for 3 more weeks. Once out of the egg sack, they spend 2 weeks in the burrow with mommy before they disperse out into the big wide world on their own. Males mature at about 4 years, females 2 to 3 years later. They are a long-lived species with females reaching 25 to 30 years; longer in captivity. Males only live about a year after maturity. Adult females are sedentary, with permanent borrows, but males wander the country side in search of mates, making them vulnerable to predators. (Sounds familiar.)
A nocturnal ambush hunter, the Mexican redknee tarantula is what ecologists call a “sit and wait” predator, preferring prey (insects, small frogs, small lizards, and mice) to come to it. The tip of each leg is sensitive to smells, tastes, and vibrations, and the spider uses it to detect prey or to avoid predators. The spider holds its prey with its pedipalps (front limbs) and injects it with venom delivered via two hollow fangs. This venom has a double component; a neurotoxin and a toxin which degrades proteins. The neurotoxin paralyzes the prey and the other toxin fraction begins digestion. Once the venom has acted, the tarantula is able to suck up the liquefied proteins and fats of its prey, leaving just a small ball of undigested bits.
The usually docile Mexican redknee tarantula has an unusual defense: when threatened, it flicks hairs off its abdomen with the hind legs. Known as urticating (irritating) hairs, they may cause a skin rash in humans. In rare cases, Mexican redknees may bite, producing results comparable to a wasp sting—there are no known human fatalities from the bite of a redknee. Mexican redknee tarantulas make popular class pets in elementary schools—you can get one from biological supply houses—beats the hell out of a hamster.
Tarantulas are surprisingly delicate—a friend who grew up in the Canal Zone once told me about stepping on one in the bathroom—“it felt like stepping on a banana”. I leave the rest to your imagination. Books on keeping redknees as pets mention that they are terrified of heights and can die from falling only a foot or two onto a hard surface.
Unless he was planning on tickling 007 to death, the henchman should have chosen something a bit more lethal; perhaps the rabbit from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Bond, for his part, should have suavely thanked the evil Doctor for the new pet and mentioned that he was planning on donating it to the local orphan’s home as a cute and cuddly companion animal. But alas, when he threw back the covers, dashing the spider to the floor, the fall probably killed the poor creature outright and James didn’t need to get spider guts all over his hand-tooled, pabulum-fed, kidskin bedroom slipper, with the expensive tassels on the top. “Hello, front desk? Could you send someone to clean up a large squished spider? Oh, and maybe polish my shoes?”
Too bad neither the henchman nor Cmdr. Bond was able to stay awake during biology class. They would have learned that Mexican redknee tarantulas, for all their nasty looks, are really quite docile. This despite the fact that Sean Connery insisted upon a pane of glass to separate him (or his stunt double) from the creepy-crawly itself. Due to their size and conspicuous coloration, Mexican redknees are movie stars, also appearing in Raiders of the Lost Ark (in the opening scenes) and as the title role in Tarantula, a late 50’s horror film, wherein a giant mutant redknee develops a taste for pickup trucks.
In the wild, Mexican redknee tarantulas mate in the summer, shortly after the male sheds his exoskeleton for the final time and becomes fully mature, usually by the start of the rainy season (July and August). Mating occurs in or near the female's burrow, where the male uses his pedipalps (front limbs) to transfer sperm to openings on the underside of the female's abdomen. After mating, some females will try to eat the male, although this has never been observed in the wild (usually they just smoke a cigarette and cuddle). The sperm and eggs are stored in the female's body and not deposited until spring. In the spring, the female deposits hundreds of eggs and the sperm onto a silk mat she has made and then fashions into a ball or egg sack. Fertilization takes place in the sack within minutes and the spiderlings hatch in 3 months but remain in the egg sack for 3 more weeks. Once out of the egg sack, they spend 2 weeks in the burrow with mommy before they disperse out into the big wide world on their own. Males mature at about 4 years, females 2 to 3 years later. They are a long-lived species with females reaching 25 to 30 years; longer in captivity. Males only live about a year after maturity. Adult females are sedentary, with permanent borrows, but males wander the country side in search of mates, making them vulnerable to predators. (Sounds familiar.)
A nocturnal ambush hunter, the Mexican redknee tarantula is what ecologists call a “sit and wait” predator, preferring prey (insects, small frogs, small lizards, and mice) to come to it. The tip of each leg is sensitive to smells, tastes, and vibrations, and the spider uses it to detect prey or to avoid predators. The spider holds its prey with its pedipalps (front limbs) and injects it with venom delivered via two hollow fangs. This venom has a double component; a neurotoxin and a toxin which degrades proteins. The neurotoxin paralyzes the prey and the other toxin fraction begins digestion. Once the venom has acted, the tarantula is able to suck up the liquefied proteins and fats of its prey, leaving just a small ball of undigested bits.
The usually docile Mexican redknee tarantula has an unusual defense: when threatened, it flicks hairs off its abdomen with the hind legs. Known as urticating (irritating) hairs, they may cause a skin rash in humans. In rare cases, Mexican redknees may bite, producing results comparable to a wasp sting—there are no known human fatalities from the bite of a redknee. Mexican redknee tarantulas make popular class pets in elementary schools—you can get one from biological supply houses—beats the hell out of a hamster.
Tarantulas are surprisingly delicate—a friend who grew up in the Canal Zone once told me about stepping on one in the bathroom—“it felt like stepping on a banana”. I leave the rest to your imagination. Books on keeping redknees as pets mention that they are terrified of heights and can die from falling only a foot or two onto a hard surface.
Unless he was planning on tickling 007 to death, the henchman should have chosen something a bit more lethal; perhaps the rabbit from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Bond, for his part, should have suavely thanked the evil Doctor for the new pet and mentioned that he was planning on donating it to the local orphan’s home as a cute and cuddly companion animal. But alas, when he threw back the covers, dashing the spider to the floor, the fall probably killed the poor creature outright and James didn’t need to get spider guts all over his hand-tooled, pabulum-fed, kidskin bedroom slipper, with the expensive tassels on the top. “Hello, front desk? Could you send someone to clean up a large squished spider? Oh, and maybe polish my shoes?”
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Backyard Stuff
Friday night, spring finally came home. I was on my back deck shortly after dusk, enjoying the first rain-free evening in a week. The spring peepers were calling up a storm from down the road. Next door, the grey tree frogs were in fine voice, building to a crescendo in the unused swimming pool with the flooded liner. The perfume of lilacs and a half-dozen other flowers spiced the evening air. I watched a big brown bat hawking for insects over the roof line. The bat had just finished a wing-over Immelman turn to grab a particularly tasty morsel when movement caught my eye on the silver maple in the corner of the yard. Glancing over, I saw a quick shadow flit from the maple to the old tulip poplar at the other end of the yard and heard the scrabble of tiny claws on bark. A small silhouette scampered up the trunk and launched into the air, for the next tree down the block. A flying squirrel; I always knew they were here but that was my first yard sighting. All we need now are a few exotic migrants from the Amazon and spring will be official.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
A Pirate Looks at 300
Old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everybody loves pirates, or at least the romantic notion of pirates. In reality, pirates, all the way back to Antiquity, were universally reviled as the worst sort of sea scum--to be exterminated without mercy. Julius Caesar was captured and ransomed by pirates as a young man. Years later, he returned to their lair and executed the lot. To this day Venetians celebrate the Feast of the Seven Virgins, commemorating the victory of the Cabinetmakers Guild in 1433 over sea rovers from Trieste who abducted a group of young brides and their dowries. The Cabinetmakers hunted the pirates down, killed them all, and retrieved the dowries (no mention is made of the erstwhile brides). My dad, in researching family history, found Triestini pirates (hopefully not hanging) on several branches of the Giraldi family tree. One presumes they called in sick for the Venetian job.
William Dampier always took pains to call himself a privateer. There was often a thin line between the two; privateers were hired men o’ war, with a warrant from the king or colonial governor to harass the enemy (usually the Spanish and later, the French). Pirates were out-and-out brigands, preying on any ship they happened across, regardless of nationality, including their own—that’s what got Blackbeard in trouble.
Born in 1651 and soon orphaned, Dampier received a good basic education in mathematics and literature, including Latin. With bleak prospects ashore, he shipped out as a sailor in the Royal Navy, learning navigation and gunnery. While still in his teens, he managed a plantation in Jamaica and worked as a logwood cutter in Yucatan. Logwood was used for textile dyes and made many a man wealthy; but not Dampier. He shipped out once again from Jamaica as mate on a merchant vessel and was the last to leave when the entire crew jumped ship in the Bay of Campeche, joining a privateer off to harass the Spanish and gather plunder in the bargain. Dampier was the first person to circumnavigate the world three times and was a keen observer of exotic places, people, and events. Unique among his fellows, he kept a journal of his voyages and published them upon each return to England.
I mentioned him to Pat around Christmas time, hinting for a copy of A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a recent biography of the old scoundrel. Instead she found me a Dover reprint of his Third Voyage Around the World in 1692. This is infinitely superior to any biography; Dampier’s voice comes through, unfiltered, across 300 years. The Dover edition keeps the syntax and spelling of the original; Dampier talks about Indian canoas (canoes) and guanoes (iguanas). His matter-of-fact descriptions of breadfruit, bananas, and “avogado pears” were their first introductions to the English-speaking world. Dampier sailed the West Indies as well as the East Indies and cruised the Galapagos Islands, writing extensively about the giant tortoises and marine iguanas he encountered. He ends each description of an exotic plant or animal with a comment on its culinary qualities. “Most sweet and wholesome a meat” when describing what is today an endangered species makes me cringe a bit, but perhaps we shouldn’t judge too harshly. These fellows were living on the edge and in one chapter, Dampier describes his timely acquisition of several sea turtles for provisions, thereby quelling an incipient mutiny. Had he been unsuccessful, he writes, the starving crew would have eaten the ship’s officers, including him.
Dampier always kept his journals with him, tucking them into a hollowed-out bamboo sealed with wax, when he was ashore trekking across the isthmus of Darien or hobnobbing with the locals on Guam or the Philippines. Dampier was the first Englishman to explore and write about Australia (New Holland). He gave the English language the word “typhoon” and, having survived a West Indian hurricane, was the first to figure out that these storms are giant whirlwinds.
The narrative of his first voyage was a huge best seller and brought him to the attention of Samuel Peppys and the Royal Society. An adventure-hungry public snapped up his books as soon as they were printed and clamored for more. Dampier became something of a cottage industry—anyone having any vague association with him published books of their travels under his “authorship” or just mentioned his name (“Sailed with Dampier against the Spanish”) in the title.
Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, calls him “Cousin Dampier” in the first chapter and uses Dampier’s voyage to Australia as the model for the Land of the Talking Horses in Gulliver’s fourth voyage. Daniel Defoe modeled Robinson Crusoe on Alexander Selkirk, the sailing master of a ship sailing in company with one captained by Dampier. Selkirk had grave doubts about the seaworthiness of the Cinque Ports, and asked to be put ashore. He was marooned for four years until Dampier, on his next round-the-world voyage and serving as navigator under another captain, remembered to stop and pick him up. (It turns out that Selkirk was correct in his assessment; the Cinque Ports sailed off, never to be seen again.) Defoe also borrowed from Dampier’s account of a “Moskito Indian” picked up from another island where he was five years marooned. Samuel Taylor Coleridge based the nautical bits of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as the description of the albatross, on Dampier’s observations. A century after their publication, Captain James Cook used Dampier’s books as a pilot’s guide for anchorages and prevailing currents during his own historic voyages throughout the Pacific. A half-century after Cook, Charles Darwin read Dampier for information on the natural history of South America and the Galapagos Islands. Dampier’s observations of prevailing winds in the South Seas were included the British Admiralty’s “Sailing Instructions” until the 1930 edition.
Dampier was the first modern travel writer, giving first-hand accounts of his experiences and carefully pointing out any hearsay as such. Writer, traveler, navigator, hydrographer, naturalist, and buccaneer—how cool is that.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everybody loves pirates, or at least the romantic notion of pirates. In reality, pirates, all the way back to Antiquity, were universally reviled as the worst sort of sea scum--to be exterminated without mercy. Julius Caesar was captured and ransomed by pirates as a young man. Years later, he returned to their lair and executed the lot. To this day Venetians celebrate the Feast of the Seven Virgins, commemorating the victory of the Cabinetmakers Guild in 1433 over sea rovers from Trieste who abducted a group of young brides and their dowries. The Cabinetmakers hunted the pirates down, killed them all, and retrieved the dowries (no mention is made of the erstwhile brides). My dad, in researching family history, found Triestini pirates (hopefully not hanging) on several branches of the Giraldi family tree. One presumes they called in sick for the Venetian job.
William Dampier always took pains to call himself a privateer. There was often a thin line between the two; privateers were hired men o’ war, with a warrant from the king or colonial governor to harass the enemy (usually the Spanish and later, the French). Pirates were out-and-out brigands, preying on any ship they happened across, regardless of nationality, including their own—that’s what got Blackbeard in trouble.
Born in 1651 and soon orphaned, Dampier received a good basic education in mathematics and literature, including Latin. With bleak prospects ashore, he shipped out as a sailor in the Royal Navy, learning navigation and gunnery. While still in his teens, he managed a plantation in Jamaica and worked as a logwood cutter in Yucatan. Logwood was used for textile dyes and made many a man wealthy; but not Dampier. He shipped out once again from Jamaica as mate on a merchant vessel and was the last to leave when the entire crew jumped ship in the Bay of Campeche, joining a privateer off to harass the Spanish and gather plunder in the bargain. Dampier was the first person to circumnavigate the world three times and was a keen observer of exotic places, people, and events. Unique among his fellows, he kept a journal of his voyages and published them upon each return to England.
I mentioned him to Pat around Christmas time, hinting for a copy of A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a recent biography of the old scoundrel. Instead she found me a Dover reprint of his Third Voyage Around the World in 1692. This is infinitely superior to any biography; Dampier’s voice comes through, unfiltered, across 300 years. The Dover edition keeps the syntax and spelling of the original; Dampier talks about Indian canoas (canoes) and guanoes (iguanas). His matter-of-fact descriptions of breadfruit, bananas, and “avogado pears” were their first introductions to the English-speaking world. Dampier sailed the West Indies as well as the East Indies and cruised the Galapagos Islands, writing extensively about the giant tortoises and marine iguanas he encountered. He ends each description of an exotic plant or animal with a comment on its culinary qualities. “Most sweet and wholesome a meat” when describing what is today an endangered species makes me cringe a bit, but perhaps we shouldn’t judge too harshly. These fellows were living on the edge and in one chapter, Dampier describes his timely acquisition of several sea turtles for provisions, thereby quelling an incipient mutiny. Had he been unsuccessful, he writes, the starving crew would have eaten the ship’s officers, including him.
Dampier always kept his journals with him, tucking them into a hollowed-out bamboo sealed with wax, when he was ashore trekking across the isthmus of Darien or hobnobbing with the locals on Guam or the Philippines. Dampier was the first Englishman to explore and write about Australia (New Holland). He gave the English language the word “typhoon” and, having survived a West Indian hurricane, was the first to figure out that these storms are giant whirlwinds.
The narrative of his first voyage was a huge best seller and brought him to the attention of Samuel Peppys and the Royal Society. An adventure-hungry public snapped up his books as soon as they were printed and clamored for more. Dampier became something of a cottage industry—anyone having any vague association with him published books of their travels under his “authorship” or just mentioned his name (“Sailed with Dampier against the Spanish”) in the title.
Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, calls him “Cousin Dampier” in the first chapter and uses Dampier’s voyage to Australia as the model for the Land of the Talking Horses in Gulliver’s fourth voyage. Daniel Defoe modeled Robinson Crusoe on Alexander Selkirk, the sailing master of a ship sailing in company with one captained by Dampier. Selkirk had grave doubts about the seaworthiness of the Cinque Ports, and asked to be put ashore. He was marooned for four years until Dampier, on his next round-the-world voyage and serving as navigator under another captain, remembered to stop and pick him up. (It turns out that Selkirk was correct in his assessment; the Cinque Ports sailed off, never to be seen again.) Defoe also borrowed from Dampier’s account of a “Moskito Indian” picked up from another island where he was five years marooned. Samuel Taylor Coleridge based the nautical bits of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as the description of the albatross, on Dampier’s observations. A century after their publication, Captain James Cook used Dampier’s books as a pilot’s guide for anchorages and prevailing currents during his own historic voyages throughout the Pacific. A half-century after Cook, Charles Darwin read Dampier for information on the natural history of South America and the Galapagos Islands. Dampier’s observations of prevailing winds in the South Seas were included the British Admiralty’s “Sailing Instructions” until the 1930 edition.
Dampier was the first modern travel writer, giving first-hand accounts of his experiences and carefully pointing out any hearsay as such. Writer, traveler, navigator, hydrographer, naturalist, and buccaneer—how cool is that.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Fairydiddles
It’s dark, it’s cold, and the wind is howling through the trees like a choir of banshees. I’m standing with feet slowly going numb, on the back porch of the Long Branch Nature Center in deepest darkest suburban Arlington, Virginia, waiting on the appearance of wood sprites.
Although they are real creatures, as serious about making a living as any Internet tycoon, fairydiddles or flying squirrels have contributed to enough ghost lore in North America to qualify as semi-mythical. Readily entering houses, flying squirrels get into small spaces in search of food. Attics are a favorite haunt. Stories about spinning wheels turning without human assistance may be laid at the furry feet of these wee beasties who like nothing better than an exercise wheel, no matter what the original purpose.
About a third the size of their more familiar cousins, flying squirrels come out about an hour after dusk. They are actually more common in the mid Atlantic than grey squirrels, their bigger cousins. Being small, quick, and above all, nocturnal, they are usually seen, if at all, as a pale flash in the night woods or a dark shape against a full moon. Of the fifteen or so species world-wide (mostly in Asia including the four-foot long woolly flying squirrel), we have two; the southern and northern species. Northern flying squirrels are found in the mid Atlantic in the mountains in pockets of boreal forest left over from the glacial days and stranded on mountain tops like Dolly Sods in West Virginia. Their southern kin are everywhere else.
Flying squirrels rely mostly on nuts as winter food. Since they have small mouths and can’t stuff their cheeks like chipmunks; they must gnaw a hole in the nut to be able to grasp it while they scamper and fly. They also have a unique way of dining. Grey squirrels chew an acorn to bits while eating it; you find a pile of shell fragments. Mice leave a jagged edge as they gnaw through the shell, bisecting it like you would a soft-boiled egg. Flying squirrels will chew a round hole in the nut and extract the meat. The nut shell looks like an olive minus the pimento. While they will eat peanuts (everything is attracted to peanuts from mice to grizzly bears), flying squirrels prefer hickory nuts and hazelnuts are at the top of their culinary chart. Food not eaten on the spot is cached in scatter hordes, a few nuts here a few there, in hidden locations throughout the forest canopy. In spring and summer, flying squirrels become ravenous carnivores, feeding on large insects like grasshoppers, katydids, and moth larvae and adults. They will eat bird eggs and nestlings and the young of other squirrels, including those of their own species.
Until the babies are about three weeks old, their mothers cannot tell them from other baby flying squirrels and will care for and adopt anything cute and cuddly that they happen across. Researchers at VA Tech discovered this when a family of flying squirrels moved out of their damaged tree hole nest. The mother took a baby in her mouth and sailed off to new digs and came back for the next. The researchers would add a new baby to the nest every time she left. Twenty or so babies later, they came to the conclusion that: a) flying squirrels can’t tell their own babies from others, and b) flying squirrels can’t count.
Not only are they lacking in mathematical skills, flying squirrels can’t really fly, either. Among the mammals, only bats are capable of true powered, flap-your-wings to get where you are going flight. Flying squirrels, however, are champion gliders. They possess a specialized flap of skin, the patagium, stretching from the front legs to the back legs. This flap gives them an enormous (relative to their size) area to act as an air foil. The furry tail spreads out flat for additional airfoil area. Contrary to belief, the tail is not a rudder—flying squirrels steer by swooping and banking, much like a paper airplane. When they get to the target, they use their momentum to scoot 180 degrees to the opposite side of the tree trunk in a singe movement. This disappearing act is an anti-owl maneuver--owls are the flying squirrels’ major predator but owls must learn to counter the flip-around-the-trunk move by flying past and snatching backwards with their talons as they sweep by. In some areas where the owls have figured this move out, flying squirrels numbers are kept low. In areas with less adept owls, flying squirrel populations boom.
Flying squirrels will sometimes crash-land. They have extremely long whiskers which they point forward as they glide. The whiskers act as an early warning system; if they touch a surface first, indicating an incipient crash, the squirrel is quick enough to adjust and land more or less correctly. Flying squirrels are very noisy little beasts; they chatter constantly, even in the air. These vocalizations are so high-pitched as to be inaudible to adult people, and it was once thought that they served as a form of echo location. Up stepped our friends from VA Tech once again with another experiment. They set up a maze and let flying squirrels traverse it in low light conditions. With their outsized eyes exquisitely adapted to dim light, the squirrels had no problems navigating the maze to the reward (you guessed it, peanut butter). When the lights were fully off, leaving the maze in complete darkness, the squirrels crashed into the walls with happy abandon. The conclusion--flying squirrels don’t echo locate (at least not well) although they are very chatty.
A pale flash in the dark and the scrabbling of small claws on bark announces the arrival to the bait of the first customer of the evening. As if by magic, a small face appears on top of the squirrel roosting box, grabs a peanut, and vanishes. The flying squirrel gnaws a small hole in the nut shell to carry it away. I can hear rapid munching noises from the other side of the trunk, moving higher up into the canopy. Flying squirrels need at least a foot of elevation for every two feet they soar. The squirrel climbs to the top of the old oak and launches; we follow the flight with the beams of our flashlights, watching it hit the air brakes and flip upwards for landing on a hickory down the valley. A flip of the tail and the fairydiddle is on the far side of the tree and gone to hide the peanut for future meals.
Although they are real creatures, as serious about making a living as any Internet tycoon, fairydiddles or flying squirrels have contributed to enough ghost lore in North America to qualify as semi-mythical. Readily entering houses, flying squirrels get into small spaces in search of food. Attics are a favorite haunt. Stories about spinning wheels turning without human assistance may be laid at the furry feet of these wee beasties who like nothing better than an exercise wheel, no matter what the original purpose.
About a third the size of their more familiar cousins, flying squirrels come out about an hour after dusk. They are actually more common in the mid Atlantic than grey squirrels, their bigger cousins. Being small, quick, and above all, nocturnal, they are usually seen, if at all, as a pale flash in the night woods or a dark shape against a full moon. Of the fifteen or so species world-wide (mostly in Asia including the four-foot long woolly flying squirrel), we have two; the southern and northern species. Northern flying squirrels are found in the mid Atlantic in the mountains in pockets of boreal forest left over from the glacial days and stranded on mountain tops like Dolly Sods in West Virginia. Their southern kin are everywhere else.
Flying squirrels rely mostly on nuts as winter food. Since they have small mouths and can’t stuff their cheeks like chipmunks; they must gnaw a hole in the nut to be able to grasp it while they scamper and fly. They also have a unique way of dining. Grey squirrels chew an acorn to bits while eating it; you find a pile of shell fragments. Mice leave a jagged edge as they gnaw through the shell, bisecting it like you would a soft-boiled egg. Flying squirrels will chew a round hole in the nut and extract the meat. The nut shell looks like an olive minus the pimento. While they will eat peanuts (everything is attracted to peanuts from mice to grizzly bears), flying squirrels prefer hickory nuts and hazelnuts are at the top of their culinary chart. Food not eaten on the spot is cached in scatter hordes, a few nuts here a few there, in hidden locations throughout the forest canopy. In spring and summer, flying squirrels become ravenous carnivores, feeding on large insects like grasshoppers, katydids, and moth larvae and adults. They will eat bird eggs and nestlings and the young of other squirrels, including those of their own species.
Until the babies are about three weeks old, their mothers cannot tell them from other baby flying squirrels and will care for and adopt anything cute and cuddly that they happen across. Researchers at VA Tech discovered this when a family of flying squirrels moved out of their damaged tree hole nest. The mother took a baby in her mouth and sailed off to new digs and came back for the next. The researchers would add a new baby to the nest every time she left. Twenty or so babies later, they came to the conclusion that: a) flying squirrels can’t tell their own babies from others, and b) flying squirrels can’t count.
Not only are they lacking in mathematical skills, flying squirrels can’t really fly, either. Among the mammals, only bats are capable of true powered, flap-your-wings to get where you are going flight. Flying squirrels, however, are champion gliders. They possess a specialized flap of skin, the patagium, stretching from the front legs to the back legs. This flap gives them an enormous (relative to their size) area to act as an air foil. The furry tail spreads out flat for additional airfoil area. Contrary to belief, the tail is not a rudder—flying squirrels steer by swooping and banking, much like a paper airplane. When they get to the target, they use their momentum to scoot 180 degrees to the opposite side of the tree trunk in a singe movement. This disappearing act is an anti-owl maneuver--owls are the flying squirrels’ major predator but owls must learn to counter the flip-around-the-trunk move by flying past and snatching backwards with their talons as they sweep by. In some areas where the owls have figured this move out, flying squirrels numbers are kept low. In areas with less adept owls, flying squirrel populations boom.
Flying squirrels will sometimes crash-land. They have extremely long whiskers which they point forward as they glide. The whiskers act as an early warning system; if they touch a surface first, indicating an incipient crash, the squirrel is quick enough to adjust and land more or less correctly. Flying squirrels are very noisy little beasts; they chatter constantly, even in the air. These vocalizations are so high-pitched as to be inaudible to adult people, and it was once thought that they served as a form of echo location. Up stepped our friends from VA Tech once again with another experiment. They set up a maze and let flying squirrels traverse it in low light conditions. With their outsized eyes exquisitely adapted to dim light, the squirrels had no problems navigating the maze to the reward (you guessed it, peanut butter). When the lights were fully off, leaving the maze in complete darkness, the squirrels crashed into the walls with happy abandon. The conclusion--flying squirrels don’t echo locate (at least not well) although they are very chatty.
A pale flash in the dark and the scrabbling of small claws on bark announces the arrival to the bait of the first customer of the evening. As if by magic, a small face appears on top of the squirrel roosting box, grabs a peanut, and vanishes. The flying squirrel gnaws a small hole in the nut shell to carry it away. I can hear rapid munching noises from the other side of the trunk, moving higher up into the canopy. Flying squirrels need at least a foot of elevation for every two feet they soar. The squirrel climbs to the top of the old oak and launches; we follow the flight with the beams of our flashlights, watching it hit the air brakes and flip upwards for landing on a hickory down the valley. A flip of the tail and the fairydiddle is on the far side of the tree and gone to hide the peanut for future meals.
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