Clammy Groundcherries, Everted Opossums, and Art

I go on to the second barn, but find it full of honest machinery. It's a better barn with a better roof. I guess I like the skeevy one better. It tells more stories. 

I go a bit farther beyond the second barn and see a huuuge whitetail buck in the hidden meadow.

It's interesting how I have come to be able to tell a buck from a doe, naked eye, at such a distance. To judge the relative size of an animal that, through my iPhone, is but a dot, and know that it's really large, or at least larger than a doe would be. And darker. Bucks tend to be darker and bluer than does in fall.

 I long for my telephoto lens. I can count ten points on his antlers through my pocket Swarovski binoculars. 

Busted, he takes off. Wish I could do better than this, but I can't run with a 70-300 telephoto weighing about 8 lb. You can just make out the bone-white tips of the tree of antlers on his head.

Hope he made it through gun, bow, youth and muzzleloader seasons. Oh, and the three-day December shootin' spree. 

Chet and I move on down the road, noting a very nice patch of wild ginger still showing yellow- green! I hadn't known the leaves persisted so long into November. 

At the point on this beautiful road where I can see the little church, I always start to sing "Little Brown Church in the Vale," one of the songs my dad would sing as he took my mom, my sister Micky and me on long drives into the Virginia countryside when we were kids. 

Oh how I loved when he would sing. He could carry a tune, but his rhythm was a little off. It drove my mom crazy. Dale! You skipped two measures!

Of course we all sang along. Micky was really good at harmony.

I strove to be as good as she was.

She also drew better than I did.

Consider these things, how having a talented older sibling can burn a hole in the younger, less gifted one, make her long to excel.

My father knew about that.

It occurred to me as I uploaded these photos that I have never crossed the creek to snoop about in this church. For one thing, it looks like it's locked up tight. 

But maybe it's not. 

Shiver of delight if not.

Big disappointment if so.

I think that's why I haven't tried.

In such a public place my guess is it will be locked and barred. 

I'll get back to you on that.

It sits, a little jewel in the landscape. This spring I will go and see what's blooming around it, 

even if I can't get inside to sing and dream.

In November,  the damp bank of the stream was full of clammy groundcherries, Physalis heterophylla. 

I became enchanted by these members of the nightshade family. 

They were so similar to the tomatillos I'd grown all summer (which I adore; like a crisp, citrusy tomato!) that I wondered if they were edible.

Sites differ on that point. This one (Ohio Perennial and Biennial Weed Guide) states that the plant and unripe fruit are toxic. Yikes. Let me quote them directly: 

 Leaves and unripe fruits of groundcherries are poisonous and even fatal if ingested by humans. However, ripe fruits are not as toxic and can be made into jellies, jams, and sauces. 

Now, would you eat something that was described as "not as toxic?"

Pfft.

Me neither.

I'll settle for admiring their beauty. Don't miss the church, behind...

Ooh, ahh.

I'm going to try one next time I find them. Ain't skeert.

Speaking of not being skeert, I found an unfortunate animal. Do you recognize this foot?

Yes, that is an (almost) opposable thumb. But this animal has not developed an alphabet, 

nor learnt to grow grain.

Still, it is a marvelous foot.

We have not many truly scaly animal tails. By now, you have guessed whose foot that is, no?

If you are easily grossed out, you may want to put your hand over this next photo. I will tell you that this is what a turkey vulture does when it processes a Virginia opossum. Or a raccoon, or a cat or a groundhog. It turns it completely inside out, leaving only a head and the skin, the spine everted, and all the tasty bits gone.

 Which, if you're a Science chimp, you love, even as you gag a little.

Ready?

here it comes

 So now you  (gag) know. I took the color saturation down a bit.

 It helped.

Sometimes I wonder, if I were some big-deal photographer with a New York gallery show, if I put a huge print of a photo like that up on a well-lit white wall, with a label that said

Requiem: Didelphis

and there were long tables of wine and cheese and some helter-skelter jazz trio playing, would skinny young people in heavy horn-rimmed glasses and long black coats assume they were missing some Greek literary reference they really ought to know, gather around and speak in low tones of the immense loft of my artistry?

Then I trot on

behind my little black dog

who remembers where we parked.

Just below the tiny community hall where he inspected the privacy booths, and we'd voted, first thing that November morning.

Requiem for a Black Snake

A follow-up to "Looking Into an Owl." Amazingly, I had two wrenching roadkill experiences in the same day. Tough stuff. Here's what happened that afternoon. At least I was out of my pajamas for this one:

 I spent too much of today trying to understand the un-understandable. Like why someone in a white van would deliberately run over a beautiful black rat snake on my road, my chapel, my place of communion, when I would have been thrilled just to see one crossing. I knew the minute I saw the snake it was mortally injured.

But I stopped, to see if I could help.

 The poor creature was writhing away, slowly choking up its last meal, which turned out to be probably five meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus). It brought up three, an adult and two babies, but I could see there was at least another vole or two still in there.

It wasn't easy to identify the prey, slimed as it was, but I could see the incisors were yellow, not red, and rodenty in form, so that ruled out the only other like-sized short-tailed mammal it could have been, Blarina brevicaudata, the short-tailed shrew. Nope, it's a meadow vole.

And two babies, which probably wasn't an accident--it had probably surprised a whole family, grabbed the babies and then taken down the mother. The mother came out first, so she was taken last.

Now, any thinking farmer with a hayfield would be more than happy to have a black rat snake cleaning out the voles, but people who run over snakes on purpose don't think that way. Or at all. They don't know or care how the snake fits in the ecosystem; they don't know or care that it is a thing of great grace and beauty; all they know is they hate snakes because they know nothing about them; they fancy the snake is a danger to them, and they kill what they hate.

All without thinking or caring.

On my road. On my watch. And there was nothing I could do but stay with this poor beautiful suffering creature until it was finally still.

Chet Baker would not come closer than five feet. He was concerned for me, but he couldn't make himself draw any nearer. So he investigated the crime scene very thoroughly. Good boy.

 Then he turned for the car, but when he saw that I wasn't moving he came back to offer what solace he could. This is his Deeply Concerned face.

Within minutes the greenbottle flies were there, looking to lay their eggs, perhaps. I can't be sure, but this might be Lucilia sericata.  A beautiful name for a stunning fly.

I am sorry, Snake, but there are so many more thoughtless people than kind ones in this mean old world. I stroked its soft skin but it was already gone, gone to a meadow far away, to bask on a road without meanness or cruelty.

Which should be my road, this road that I love so well, but isn't.

Looking Into an Owl

 It was, if not an exactly typical morning in our household, not a terribly unusual one. Bill had just left for work when the phone rang. I know this means there's something to report, whether a turtle saved or a rare bird spotted or a fox crossing, or a roadkill that mustn't be missed. It turned out to be the last one.

 A barred owl had gotten hit while flying across the road not far from our house. Bummer, big bummer. Bill knew I'd want to examine it, and I did. I threw my camera over my pajamas and grabbed Liam, who was home from school for parent-teacher conference day, also in his PJ's, and jumped in the car. Time is of the essence with roadkills, because you don't want them to get any squasheder than they already are.

We were pretty late, by which I mean that owl was flat, and so was the pickerel frog he'd been carrying when he was hit. 

He had to have gotten the frog earlier, because it had been a dry night and there was no way a pickerel frog would have been moving out on the road. So I guessed that he'd just swooped too low as he crossed the road (owls do that) and gotten hit.

As soon as I started moving the owl around, looking at it, louseflies swarmed up out of its plumage, looking for a new, preferably live, host.

These bloodsucking flies found on raptors are flat and hard and quick, and they have excellent eyesight, being attracted to motion. The quick, rather than the dead. One landed on my arm and I couldn't blow it off--I had to grab it and throw it, and it circled and came back. Ecccch. It can't live on human protein, but it was hungry. Lousefly don't care. He's hungry.

Now, here's where it gets kind of gross, but fascinating. So if you're easily grossed out, and don't want to find out what the owl had been eating, just quit with this poignant feather photo and email a friend who also reads this blog to ask what the owl had been eating. But I know you're gonna look, because if you're that easily grossed out, you've either just started reading this blog and don't know what to expect, or you've left me a long time ago. Because the nature I know and love isn't all soft and pretty. And the stuff that isn't so pretty is usually more interesting, and it's what makes my canary chirp.

Ready?

I turned the owl over and found a bunch of what looked like plant material. My first thought was that the poor late owl might have been starving, because louse flies are usually more numerous on a bird that's otherwise compromised. Owls don't eat grass. What is all this green stuff? Huh?

I leaned closer, gagging a little, and yep, it looked like grass. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. But I knew I had to move the carcass off the road. And as I picked the owl up and slapped at the darn louseflies, a bolus fell out of what had been the stomach.

 Weird. More grass. More plant parts. What could be going on with this bird?

Being a Science Chimp, I had to know. So I picked at the stuff and what do you know? A praying mantis foreleg (far right) appeared in the mess.

 And then it all made sense. This owl had been eating praying mantises, and probably a lot of katydids, both of which are at peak abundance right now. And the green I was seeing was their wing covers, and the amber stuff was their membranous wings. Wow. That is a LOT of praying mantises. I'd guess 30 or 40 based on all the wing covers and legs I found.

 With delight, I imagined this beautiful little owl (it was very small, probably a male) swooping low over the goldenrod tops, picking off mantids and katydids with its yellow feet. And I wished hard that he was still doing that. But this owl had made his last big mistake, so I dropped him off into the weeds well off the road to return to the meadow and turned for home, with one thoroughly agog eleven-year-old who decided he would not be having sausage and eggs for breakfast after all.

Instead of getting soft and pretty, my day got weirder, but that's another roadkill post, isn't it?

An Arabesque Orb Weaver, hanging in the guardrail, made me feel a little better about it all. If life gives you roadkill, look at the stomach contents. You might learn something.