Another day with minimal word count. The work deadlines have been met and today was quiet, but there are a lot of personal things that have been pushed off onto back burners for weeks that had to get addressed for my peace of mind.
So we’re 33% done with the month, but I’m only 15% done with the writing. I guess that I’ll have to make it up in volume!
Meanwhile, in a sunny spot on a cool and windy day, a new member of the yard guard has appeared. “Popcorn” sized, but stockier than all of the other baby lizards we’ve seen. Also utterly fearless. I was bringing in the trash cans and normally all of that rattling will spook them into cover from 30 feet away. Not this dude! I practically ran over him and he never budged. I went and got the camera, came back out, got down within about three feet of him, close enough so that I couldn’t focus the telephoto lens and had to lean back a few inches. He still never did more than a couple of twitches to verify that he wasn’t dead or frozen.
It’s not the huge swarm that have hit a couple times in the past two years, but the three or four at a time groups of painted lady butterflies seem to be far more tolerant of folks standing out in the yard with cameras looking for Northern Flickers.
Two in particular were landing on the ground near me while others flittered about. They would only stay put for a few seconds, but every time they landed they were getting closer.
They were landing on the dirt, just before sunset, and didn’t seem to be landing on flowers or plants and eating.
Once on the ground they would spread their wings like this, back to the setting Sun. Warming themselves? Drying their wings?
I think they’re migrating south from the Pacific Northwest toward Mexico and Central America, according to a couple of articles about them in the local papers.
Whatever. It’s still far better to be watching them than to be watching the news and reading social media.
It’s 12:44 and 88º – do you know where your lizard is?
Do you want to play the game? Do you want to look? Go ahead. I’ll put some spoiler space in here for you.
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While the lizards love the sun, they more like just being warm, and if that wooden edging piece is in the full sunlight it gets toasty, so they can snuggle up against it and hug it like a giant body pillow, sucking up infrared photons through their little, blue bellies.
Which means they can hid in the shade.
With their little heads poking out over the edge to keep an eye out for hungry predators.
You can see in the other photos that the roots of the big tree are just a couple inches behind him. As soon as I twitched, he was off the edging and onto that big root, where he blended in almost perfectly. Another twitch by me and he as climbing up the tree and making his escape.
That’s how you get to be a six-inch lizard or a ten-inch lizard instead of a two-inch “popcorn” hatchling.
A couple of days ago, near sunset, as I was taking trash out to where the bins are on the side of the garage, I noticed a single thread of spider silk floating overhead. It was connected to the garage room about 10 feet up, the other end anchored about 15 feet up to the Italian cypress trees next to the driveway. Along the line I could see a single large-ish spider working. I’m no expert on spiders by any means, but I think it’s an orb weaver?
Today when I was heading out to get groceries I went to look and see what might have been built up there, lit up by the early morning Sun.
It’s been moderately windy here for the last couple of days, so the web must be pretty sturdy to not get torn apart by either the tugging of those cypress trees as they sway in the wind or from the wind itself.
The circular portion of the web here is about three feet across, roughly the size of a trash can lid.
While orb weavers are reluctant to bite and their venom is mostly mild and harmless to humans, my biggest concern is having a web like this built at head level, not 15 feet overhead. If I blindly walk into this in the dark while taking the trash out at night, then A) I’m going to be flailing and making dance moves that have never before been seen by man, and; B) I’m going to pull every muscle in my body doing so.
It won’t be pretty.
The instinctive engineering skills portrayed here are amazing. Having acknowledged that, let’s agree to keep to our separate spaces. I won’t destroy hours of your work and significant amounts of your resources which you’re using to feed yourself, and you won’t scare the shit out of me at random times.
Do you see it? It’s a teeny, tiny little thing. From snout to back legs is maybe an inch – add in the tail and it might be two.
I’ve said it before, but I don’t remember ever having so many lizards hatching so late in the year. I’ve always seen the babies, the little ones, in the spring. Maybe in the early summer at the latest. Not this year.
Dr. Earyn McGee, of the famous “FindThatLizard” weekly Twitter events which I so dearly love, called these tiny guys “popcorn” lizards. Their main function in the universe is to be food for other critters and bigger lizards.
A few make it and get bigger. And I understand they need to be bigger to have the reserves needed to make it through the winter when they become dormant.
They become dormant in the winter because it gets cold and wet. Maybe they know something we don’t?
We’ve seen these dudes (or their relatives) in the past once or twice, but they’re not regulars.
Maybe it’s the grapes that brought them out. Putting a handful out is an experiment and they all disappeared in a day, so they were popular!
The “zebra-stripes” on the head make these guys stand out.
There were two or three flitting in, grabbing a seed or a chunk of grape, and flitting out.
They were fighting the mourning doves for the seeds. They may have been out of their weight class, but they were holding their own.
The Merlin app tells me that there are two similar species in our area. I’ve seen a Golden-crowned Sparrow once or twice, but never when I had a camera with me. They’re similar, but they just have one stripe on their head and it’s bright yellow.
The other is the Lark Sparrow, which has stripes on its head that’s more dark brown and white, and they go all the way around the head and down onto the throat, seven or eight stripes instead of three.
They’re very similar in size and coloration to the house finches. Any given morning we’ll have a couple dozen or more house finches out there when the seed gets scattered, so except for the head markings these guys fit right in.
A decent picture of the markings on the wing and back feathers.
This one finally marched up to the edge of the porch and started barking at me. I think the gist of it was, “We want more grapes! Where’s the good stuff, the fresh ones?”
I don’t know for sure (the little dudes don’t wear name tags) but I think it’s the same one from a couple days ago.
I saw him and froze, moving only enough to get my phone out of my pocket. He was really well hidden – at first.
However, the longer I waited, the more emboldened he got. I don’t know if it was curiosity or a territorial display. Either way, it makes for a lousy game of hide & seek.
Finally he was way up above the edge, fully exposed. I didn’t move, but another, bigger lizard ran by from left to right along the top of the rail tie and freaked him out. He vanished back over the side in a flash.
There was a truly spectacular ISS pass tonight, the station rising in the northwest just as it got truly dark and sailing about 80%+ across the sky before fading into darkness in the west. It was amazingly bright, something like Magnitude -3.9. I noticed the time just a minute before it was set to rise, so I didn’t have time to grab my camera and tripod and gear and get it set up in time. So I went out into the front yard and simply watched. It was wonderful.
The red-shouldered hawks were at it again, something like the 7th or 8th day in a row that they’ve been in the pine trees below us on the hill. I wonder if they might be building a nest nearby. For much of the time they were being raucous outside I was on a Zoom meeting and couldn’t go out to take pictures, but I listened to them from inside. They were loud enough so that the rest of the staff could have heard them if I hadn’t been on mute. I enjoyed listening to them, even if I didn’t see them or get any pictures.
I saw several lizards in the back yard, but never when I had my camera with me. I had my phone, but they weren’t that close, so I just let it go. We had a nice conversation about how warm it was getting again, nearly 90ºF today and getting even warmer for the week ahead. They enjoyed that news quite a bit, but I had to remind them to watch out for the birds. I’m not sure the hawks would bother with something as small as them, but the scrub jays and mockingbirds most certainly would.
The hummingbirds were out, starting to complain that the feeders are getting low. I was too busy today to clean and refill them, but I promised to look at it tomorrow. They’re fine for today, but they do get nervous. No pictures were taken.
The rose bush that had given me the one fantastic pink and white bloom a few weeks ago has decided to cough up a handful more. For some reason when I went out to get the mail I didn’t have my phone with me to take pictures. Huh! That almost never happens. But it did today. The blooms will wait for their closeups another day.
I happened to be out just before 17:00 when I caught the UPS 757 banked over right over our house to turn to final approach for Burbank Runway 08. It’s a regular flight, but sometimes they turn inside of us to the east, sometimes swing in more from the Porter Ranch area. It’s a honkin’ big plane (that’s an official aviation term) and when they cross overhead they’re just extending their flaps so it looks even honkin’er bigger. I just watched, enjoyed the way it floated through the air, listened as those two big engines spooled down as the power was pulled back.
All of these things happened without any photos to share or other proof that I experienced them. I simply experienced them and held onto the memories.
Which brings me to one of the two or three best scenes ever filmed:
This dude’s new and it’s unusual to see one this small this late in the year. Maybe six inches long, it sure was a pretty one. And utterly fearless!
Normally when they’re smaller-ish they’re skittish and will bail into the bushes at the slightest movement. It was outside the doors from the kitchen and I figured it would bail the second I turned back inside to grab the camera. Nope, it’s still there when I came back out and it never twitched, even when I got within maybe three feet of it and walked all the way around to get a good view of all sides.
I’m no expert, but my observation has been that we get a ton of the teeny tiny hatchlings in the spring, some that survive and get to this size in the summer, and by fall only the bigger survivors are still around. But I’e got some hatchlings in the front yard in the last couple of weeks, so it seems that cycle has been messed up.
The markings on its back are great. This is almost certainly a “blue belly,” but it was keeping that part of its anatomy hidden.
Another sign that it’s younger is the fact that it has all of its pieces. No missing toes or tail that I can see.
I thought it was being fearless in never moving, but it could have just been terrified and hoping that I didn’t see it. Not the best strategy. He’s brownish, on a brownish sidewalk, but he’s not that stealthy.
The other option was that he was toasty warm (it’s been cool and cloudy) and decided if he was going to die, he was going to do it warm. I can really respect that, not that I was going to harm him in any way to begin with.
Go! Reproduce! Stay warm! Eat ants! Get bigger!
You have nothing to fear from me! Now, those crows, ravens, hawks, mockingbirds, and scrub jays – they’re not taking pictures, they want to invite you to lunch!
Earlier this week there was a pair of red-shouldered hawks flying overhead, screaming, upsetting our local pair of red-tailed hawks, who promptly drove them off.
They’re back! I went out to the kitchen to get a soda and heard them screaming. I assumed that they were flying around again so I grabbed the camera. One was circling, but the other was roosting in the pine tree in the neighbor’s yard.
It camoflauges very well, doesn’t it? But you can see that pattern of black and white stripes on its wings, as well as the legendary red shoulder.
It was obliging enough to hop around so I could see it from the front.
Given that look, I’m glad that I’m not a squirrel or a mourning dove, a.k.a., “lunch.”
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 