Terrapene Studios

Atlanta Animal Welfare Examiner

2010-01-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

In addition to this blog, I am writing for the Examiner, as the Atlanta Animal Welfare Examiner. I will be covering animal welfare issues in the Atlanta metro area and Georgia in general from a No Kill perspective. I will also announce local animal welfare-related events and feature one or more adoptable pet per week, and write about a few herp-related issues. Have a story idea, event or pet you'd like to see featured? Send me an email. Check out my articles at:

http://www.examiner.com/x-35783-Atlanta-Animal-Welfare-Examiner

To receive email alerts when I publish a new article, click on the 'subscribe' button at the top of the page.

Interlude--Another Natural History Quote of the Day--Letters FromAlabama

2009-12-25T19:04:00.001-08:00

Fritillary on Blanket Flower 1 Copyright, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

I'll finish my review of Pleasurable Kingdom in my next post (with a more modern plot twist). Meanwhile, here's a plot twist to the story of animals and pleasure and science and natural history. Letters From Alabama was originally published in 1859. Yes, that's the same year as Darwin's Origin of Species, and quite some time after Descartes wrote his crap.

Food for thought on a day when you've probably already eaten too much.

Philip Henry Gosse was a young naturalist from England when he went to Alabama to teach school. He left after eight months, disgusted with slavery. The following is from p. 149 of the 1983 reprint:

"An eye accustomed to only the small and generally inconspicuous butterflies of our own country, the Pontiae, the Vanessae, and Hipparchiae, can hardly picture to itself the gaiety of the air which swarms with large and brilliant-hued Swallowtails, and other patrician tribes, some of which, in the extent and volume of their wings, may be compared to large bats. These occur, too, not by solitary and straggling individuals: in glancing over a blossomed field or prairie-knoll, we may see hundreds, including, perhaps, more than a dozen species, besides moths, flies, and other insects.

When contemplating such a scene thus thronged with life, I have been pleased to think of the very vast amount of happines that is aggregated there. I take it as an undoubted fact, that among the inferior creatures, except when suffering actual pain, life is enjoyment; the mere exercise of the bodily organs, and the gratification of the bodily appetites, is the highest pleasure of which they are capable: for as Spenser says--

'What more of happiness can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?'
Fate of the Butterfly

To look then on the multitudes of beings assembled in so circumscribed a spot, all pursuing pleasure, and all doubtless attaining their end, each one with an individual perception and consciousness of enjoyment, --what a grand idea does it give of the tender mercy of God, as a God of providence!

Let us extend the idea:-- there are about one hundred thousand species of insects known*; let your mind try to guess at the number of individuals of each species in the whole earth, (perhaps if you count the clouds of musquitos and gnats that issue from a single marsh, in a single night, it may assist you in the conjecture,) think of the other, less populous orders of animals, fishes, mollusks, testacea, animacules, &c., &c., reduce them to individuals, and you may have some distant approximation to one idea of Him, who "openeth His hand and satisfieth the desire of every living thing."EVERY LIVING THING! I have often thought that no one can appreciate the grandeur, the sublimity, of this sentiment of the Psalmist, like the devout naturalist."

*There are now over one million insect species known.

Belated Mini-Review of Balcombe's Pleasurable Kingdom and thoughts onNo Kill--Part 1

2009-12-18T23:32:00.001-08:00

George rolling on grass, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

Jonathan Balcombe published Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good back in 2006, but I only just got around to reading it. Clifford bought it for me. I have to admit to experiencing mixed feelings upon first holding this book in my hands, and not because of what Balcombe wrote--I recommend this book highly to any animal-lover, armchair natural-historian or biologist--no, my trepidation and annoyance was due to the presence of a forward by Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, and apparently mentor to Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of PETA, and a puff by Wayne Pacelle of HSUS. I had to wonder at Balcombe's taste.

I began by reading the foreward. Singer begins with an anecdote about dolphins surfing (not suffering), and goes on to say, "Despite such experiences--and growing up with a cat who certainly showed she liked being stroked--my focus has always been on animals' capacity to suffer, from the time I started thinking seriously about the ethics of how we treat them." He goes on to say, "But with all this emphasis on animal suffering, I and many others in the animal movement have neglected animals' capacity to enjoy their lives. Fortunately Jonathan Balcombe's book has restored the balance." I think that this book is excellent, thought-provoking, informative and an enjoyable read. I do not think that it has magically restored balance to the animal movement, and I offer as evidence the continued opposition to the No Kill movement of groups such as PETA and HSUS and of their respective leaders in particular.

Singer is clearly primarily interested in animals raised for food and for laboratory research. He does not mention the millions killed in shelters each year. I really wish that he had. He wrote about his cat. Pets are the animals whose capacity to enjoy life is most readily experienced , observed and shared by most people. Do Singer and others regard the tragic killing of millions of shelter pets as mere 'collateral damage' in their greater quest for a more perfect world? Most people with pets don't need to read a book to know that their dog or cat has the capacity to experience pleasure and the ability to seek it out. American 'shelters' deprive millions of animals of these things annually, and for no other reasons than laziness and adherence to entrenched and regressive views. The majority of these animals are not inevitably or irretrievably suffering. They're jsut homeless. They have the capacity to enjoy life. Singer could have said something about this. He maybe almost did. But he didn't. I'm disappointed in that, but he indicated a little chink in the old Benthamite armor. Suffering isn't the only thing. There is a whole 'nother facet to the lives of animals--pleasure. Hallellujah for that.

Balcombe begins the book with an exploration of how animals' capacity to experience pleasure is adaptive in the Darwinian sense, and how it is changing how we view animal minds and how animals are portrayed in the media.

For now, I'll leave you with a quote from the book:

"The mass media often perpetuate the stereotype that life is harsh and joyless for wild creatures. An article on Norwegian polar bears poisoned by toxic pollutants 'migrating' from industrial regions in the south describes the 'brutal, unforgiving' surroundings. 'From the moment of birth--even conception--animals here struggle against the odds. Most polar bears die before their first birthday.' It is sad that not all polar bears grow into adults, and a shame that humans are making things worse. And yet, a six month old polar bear has been suckled and nurtured by a protective mother, has experienced over 100 sunrises and sunsets, and probably hasn't bemoaned the transience of life. Most lives, even shortened ones, are probably better lived than not lived at all."

George, the dog in the picture above, is experiencing the pleasure of being alive. A few months ago, he was a skinny little guy on death row at a high-kill shelter in Georgia. He is part of the fortunate minority from that shelter. Most end up as rotting corpses in the county landfill, and that is unacceptable. He was lucky, but luck should have nothing to do with it.

Quote of the Day--Origins of Nature's Beauty

2009-12-01T23:11:00.000-08:00

"How can we explain the fact that animals which consistently try to remain hidden, or to repel others by their aspect, so often appear attractive, or even beautiful to us, which is the opposite of what we might expect? Should we not more often find them severely plain or repulsive, as some of them are? However, the elements of beauty--form, color, pattern and texture--are not absent from creatures that try to hide, to warn, or to repel. Feathers have such a pleasing texture that birds are seldom ugly. We enjoy the bright colors that so often proclaim unpalatability or venom. The pigments that color the exposed surfaces of animals tend to be deposited in definite patterns rather than at random. Fear need not diminish our enjoyment of cryptically or aposematically colored organisms, for most are not harmful; they ask only to be permitted to live in peace. When we add to all this our pleasure in using our eyes, recognizing forms and patterns, it is not difficult to understand why creatures that shun observation, or warn that they should not be molested, so often attract us by their beauty."
--A.F. Skutch, in his 1992 collection of essays Origins of Nature's Beauty (pp. 27-28)
This is the first of a series of interesting, usually natural history quotes I plan to post from time to time. Enjoy!

Dead Pit Bull Neuters Ed Sayres!

2009-11-18T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sick and tired of the lurid headlines about 'pit bulls' (many of which are about dogs that are not in fact 'pit bulls'), but this is one I'd actually like to see.

The picture at left is from the Facebook page of No Kill Now. It shows the abused pit bull Oreo just a few minutes before her execution. Her executioners were none other than the ASPCA, headed up by Ed Sayres.

Like many people, I don't see an irredeemably aggressive dog in this picture. Or this one. Or for that matter, this one. Nor do I see anyone wearing body armor. All the people in these pictures look pretty darned defenseless. Were they or the photographers in any danger? I doubt it.

I look at that expressive face and I see a dog uncertain about her future. She's been through a lot in her short life, thrown six stories and survived. The time leading up to that event had to be confusing, and undoubtedly psychologically painful. What kept her going? I think of her as a puppy, loved and cared for by her mother. In these pictures, she still has a puppy's face. She looks like she's wondering what will happen next.

These bipedal ones, you have to watch them, you never know what they will do next. They're unpredictable.

She has an open, inquisitive face, the face of an intelligent and soulful animal whose innate tendency is towards joy. She still has that face in these pictures, despite what she's been through--her mother's love, the warmth of her littermates, the carefree play of puppies, the terrifying rage of her 'owner', the incomprehensible hell of being pitched off of a roof, the moments in midair, the incredible pain of hitting pavement, the crunch of breaking bones, the awful cry she made upon impact, a sound so awful that you feel it in your bones, the people crowding around her, the ride in the back of a van, the veterinarian, anesthesia and surgery, waking up, her front legs in casts, her broken rib pinned, the kennel, the way sound reverberates off of the hard surfaces, the smells, the people. Always people, lots of them. They come and they go. They mutter things in a language she doesn't understand. Can she trust any of them? Hitting the ground after being launched into midair with rocket fuel of rage knocked the wind out of her. It knocked out some innocence too. She's wise to these shifty primates, that makes it hard for her to trust again, even though she wants to. She must choose wisely. Choosing poorly would be too much.

She's a terrier, she's nobody's fool. She knows that trust, once blasted away, has to be earned back. Some things can be accomplished on a tightly prescribed schedule, but working through trauma is not one of them. That takes time. It takes patience. And it takes trustworthiness. Dogs can smell b.s.

The ASPCA is wealthy. It is evidently not patient. It is not trustworthy. An organization's actions and persona reflect that of its leadership. Ed Sayres makes half a million dollars a year as the head of the ASPCA. He is evidently neither patient nor trustworthy. I must also conclude that he lacks empathy for people and animals, and therefore has no business heading an organization whose stated mission is to protect animals, a mission that is fundamentally based on empathy and the human-animal bond. There was no excuse for killing Oreo in the face of a qualified sanctuary ready and willing to take her. Where a true leader in the humane movement would have shown empathy, humility and cooperation, he had nothing to offer but spitefulness and self-serving tripe.

He has to go.

Oreo is dead.

Long live Oreo.

Turtle God Lives

2009-11-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

The picture shows a softshell turtle, not a sea turtle as claimed in the article. I'd love to know the real story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091110/od_nm/us_turtle_odd

October ground Skink (Scincella lateralis) and Other Finds on A Walk

2009-10-31T20:33:00.001-07:00

October ground Skink (Scincella lateralis), originally uploaded by Turtelle.

This little Ground Skink skittered across the dirt road we were walking on the other day. One thing I like about Georgia is herps and other "cold-blooded" critters being active this late in the year (well, not the ticks and chiggers and fire ants). Other finds along this walk are pictured below...

Another view of the skink:

A little Stinkpot, spotted by our dog:

A faded Buckeye perched on some gone-to seed member of the Asteraceae in a meadow that was teeming (by my standards) with butterflies:

Green Anole on Yellowing Tulip Tree Leaf

2009-10-11T22:17:00.001-07:00

Green Anole on Yellowing Tulip Tree Leaf, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

I think that Kermit the frog was actually based on a Green Anole (Anolis carolinensis). Jim Henson grew up in Mississippi, so he certainly had the opportunity to observe these winsome and entertaining insectivores. They're still active and I have seen quite a few this weekend, incuding a tiny hatchling. They are found in the wild throughout the Southeast, as well as in pet shops elsewhere. These animals remain relatively common due to their tolerance for human-caused disturbance (up to a point). There is some evidence that the introduced Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei) may negatively impact their populations. They are a common species that I would like to see stay common.

White Morpho

2009-10-04T17:34:00.001-07:00

White Morpho, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

This image of Morpho polyphemus is popular on my Flickr site. People seem to like how he (or she--I can't tell) appears to be looking at the camera, though that makes me think of the Far Side cartoon of the last thing a fly ever sees (one of Gary Larsen's trademark overweight women wearing cat-eye glasses and weilding a fly swatter, repeated as innumerable octagon-shaped tiles) only the view is me and my Pentax.

I think that this particular individual has somewhat crumpled wings, like it didn't emerge quite right. In the butterfly house there aren't any predators, so the butterfly's lifespan is probably unaffected.

EBT Nest With NINE Eggs!

2009-10-03T22:14:00.001-07:00

Read about it here, complete with video of hatchlings! Amazing!

Owl Butterfly on tree Trunk Close Up

2009-10-03T21:56:00.001-07:00

Owl Butterfly on tree Trunk Close Up, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

Another photo from the butterfly house at Callaway Gardens. I believe the species is Caligo memnon. Insect eyes are so inscrutable. What do they see?

Heliconius sp.

2009-09-30T22:47:00.001-07:00

Heliconius sp., originally uploaded by Turtelle.

Went to the Callaway Gardens butterfly house last week. I'm not sure what species this is other than that it is some type of longwing. It didn't match any of the species in the little guides that were provided. A couple of butterflies seemed to be obsessed with laying eggs on my camera, which was pretty strange. I wonder if these butterfly houses are allowed to provide them with their appropriate host plants. I'm pretty sure that they have to buy chrysales from licensed dealers and it may be illegal to breed exotic butterflies, so not providing host plants would prevent successful breeding.

Its great to be able to observe so many individuals of species I wouldn't otherwise see. Photographing them is still a challenge, even though they are in captivity, but not quite as difficult as photographing them in the wild. It was Blue Morpho Month, but I'm not sure that I got any Blue Morpho pictures. I got numerous photos of what I think are Owl Butterflies, a species that looks somewhat similar, and is even blue on the dorsal surface, but I'm no lepidopterist...

Chomper Meditating

2009-08-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

Another cat portrait with the 90mm. I hope to try it out on turtles and butterflies over the next couple of days.

Xavier

2009-08-24T22:27:00.001-07:00

Xavier, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

The Tamron 90mm macro arrived today and I was testing its other use--portraiture. Nice, sharp lens. Very smooth. I haven't seen evidence of the chromatic aberration that plagues my other lenses. The colors are very good and the length is good. I can get very close to flowers. I will try some butterfly and box turtle photography with it soon.

Beautyberry

2009-08-23T22:38:00.001-07:00

Beautyberry, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

The beautyberries are coloring up, starting with those low on the branches. I wasn't expecting to tsee this just yet. They are food for migrating birds, so fall migration is not far away. I haven't seen another fruit quite this color. This is another experiment withthe old 5omm manual lens. The pictures have a different feel than do my newer zooms, which is probably due to this lens opening up to f/2, but maybe something else is going on as well...

Sunflower Close-Up

2009-08-22T21:08:00.001-07:00

Sunflower Close-Up, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

An extreme close-up with limited color palette and depth-of field. A very few characteristics o this flower are emphasized--the yellowness and the tiny florets in the center of the disc...

Lady Mantis Bathing

2009-08-22T00:17:00.001-07:00

Lady Mantis Bathing, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

Actually, this picture should be entitled "Dude Looks Like a Lady Mantis Bathing" because the mantis is a male, based on his slim build and long antennae, I am told. He lived in a butterfly bush in the backyard for a couple of weeks and I photographed him many times. He didn't seem to go after butterflies, though, preferring to hang out low on the bush most of the time. I frightened him away one day by trying to move him higher up near one of the flowers for a picture. He flew off to a nearby holly bush and then a maple tree where I lost track of him. He was very tolerant of photography as long as I didn't try to pick him up. When I did, he decided that I was a predator and that location was no longer safe. I haven't seen him since. His flight was quite spectacular. The Asian painters really got it right back in the day. I howerver diodn't manage to get ny pictures of him flying.

Passion Vine on Fence

2009-08-20T22:53:00.001-07:00

Passion Vine on Fence copy, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

Here's a photo of passion vine (Passiflora incarnata) growing on a fence wire at Fairywood Thicket Farms. This Georgia wildflower seems fantastically, gratuitously complex, but then what in nature isn't? For some reason, this flower just makes you notice unexpected beauty and complexity. Missionaries were taken with it and attached religious symbolism to the various floral parts, using the flower as a teaching tool to spread Christianity. To caterpillars of fritillary butterflies, it is their host plant, and they make an interesting juxtapsoition with their food, all black and red and spiky and hungry, then they pupate into gratuitously beautiful chrysales and emerge as black and orange butterflies studded with pearly spots. They flit through the sunlight and nectar on zinnias and verbena and most any other flower. The fruits of this plant are hollow and rather tangy. I suppose the hollowness is how they got the name 'maypops', though May would be very early for them around here.

Ernest

2009-08-19T22:06:00.001-07:00

Ernest, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

I dusted off my old 50mm 'normal' lens, circa 1983. Pentax says that the new digital SLRs are back-compatible with their old manual lenses from the film era and even with the screw-mount ones, provided an adapter is used. Of course, just mounting an old lens on a new camera won't make it autofocus or communicate things like f-stop to the camera's computer, but with a couple of adjsutments outlined in the Pentax manual and the Magic Lantern guide, the lens worked just fine, though compared to my zoom lenses, it is tiny. Focusing is completely manual and only the center focus point is available with this lens. Focusing is slower than it is when using the manual setting with the newer lenses for some reason. Since there is no split screen, I have to rely on the focus alert and it sometimes allows the focus to over-and under-shoot the mark a couple of times before accepting it. Still, this lens lends itself to candid and hand-held shooting a lot more than do the larger zooms, including the one that covers 50mm. Having f2 available is great for available light photography, and Pentax's shake reduction is in the camera where it belongs, so it applies even to this lens, enabling sharp hand-held photography at 1/30 second.
This is Ernest, who I raised from the time she was 11 days old. Yes, she. I can't sex kittens to save myself, and by the time I figured it out, I'd already named her. It doesn't even seem strange to me.

Hawkmoth on Butterfly Bush

2009-08-18T22:37:00.001-07:00

Hawkmoth on Butterfly Bush, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

I'm not sure why I like this picture. Maybe its the lighting. The hawkmoth is blurred by motion, but it is very difficult to freeze their motion even in bright light. This animal, whose scientific name I still have to look up, is nectaring at a butterfly bush. The y can be mistaken for hummingbirds for their appearance and behavior. The larvae are called hornworms. It amazes me that a caterpillar can turn into something like this.

Hibiscus With Green Lynx Spider

2009-08-17T23:11:00.001-07:00

Hibiscus with green spider 2 copy, originally uploaded by Turtelle.

I took this photo yesterday, immediately after a rain shower. The spider is a green lynx spider Peucetia viridans (Hentz). Now that I am becoming a more proficient and prolific photographer, I will try to post the "Photo of the Day" to this blog, which I have been neglecting in favor of Flickr. Here I will post more extensive information on the natural history of my photographic subjects, and the story behind each picture. This particular picture is an example of how macro photography enables you to notice things you would ordinarily overlook. I have a particular affinity for things ordinarily overlooked, and in general, I think I'm a pretty good observer, but I didn't even see this spider when I first took the picture. I was photographing the hibiscus and only noticed the spider whan I reviewed the images a few minutes later on the LCD screen. I would have liked to photograph the spider against the red petals, but then he probably positioned himself on the green sepal deliberately, so I didn't try to interfere. These spiders are known for preying on insects regarded as both harmful and desirable. They even make a habit of eating wasps and other stinging insects.

Disappearing Box Turtles

2009-07-05T19:07:00.001-07:00

I stumbled across this blog post. Its a few years old, but when you're dealing with animals capable of living 160+ years in the wild, a few years isn't that long. I'm not exaggerating when I say 160+ years old. It's actually been documented. The pictures here are of Boxie, a local celebrity in her hometown in Massachusetts. Every once in a while, somebody finds her and it makes the local news. As you can see, she's had initials and dates carved into her plastron (something that is painful for the turtle, as the shell is made of living tissue, so don't do it yourself). Unlike many other turtles with initials and dates carved into their plastra, the second round of carving was documented in letters, giving it credibility. The first two young men to carve their initials and dates into her were killed in a war a few years afterwards. The next person to carve his initials recognized those of the two fallen soldiers, and wrote a letter to their families. These pictures were taken in 2005(not by me).

The war the two soldiers died in?

That would be the Civil War. Although it shows the wear of years, you can still make out the year '1861'. In order for these carvings to have been made, she had to have been full grown at the time, something which would take 15-20 years in Massachusetts, so at a minimum, her hatchdate would have been sometime in the 1840s, possibly sooner.

She hasn't had an easy life, yet keeps plodding on.

Respect your elders.

Thanks to Sandy Barnett for the photos and the story of Boxie.

Convergent Evolution?!

2009-07-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Fun With Camera RAW

2009-06-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

This image was originally taken with an inexpensive 5MP Kodak point-and-shoot. I liked the composition, but the image had problems. I tried various fixes in PSE7 and in Picture Window, but then read that it was possible to open a JPEG in Camera RAW of PSE7 and to manipulate it there. This strategy seemed to yield the best fix so far. Others looked garish. The window screen is a necessary but problematic part of the picture. It evidently threw the original exposure off quite a lot.

The two predators watching each other in this picture are Xavier the Maine Coon cat, and Broken Claw the praying mantis who hung around the backyard garden area almost two years ago. Her missing left claw made her easy to recognize, but didn't appear to shorten her life span. She was at least 4" long. Insects grow big in the South (more on that when I post on Hercules (a.k.a. Rhinoceros) Beetles). Mantids are catlike in a variety of ways, from the shape of their heads to their behavior--watching and grooming, for example.

Here is the original image as it came out of the Kodak:

Learning Photoshop

2009-06-29T23:00:00.001-07:00

I've been learning to use image editing software, experimenting with Photoshop Elements 7 and with a trial version of Picture Window. These two images illustrate the dramatic improvements that you can make to an image with a little effort in PSE 7. On the right is the image as it came out of the camera, with only a watermark added. On the left is the same image with some sharpening and adjustments to contrast and color saturation. I think its pretty dramatic. The picture still needs some work in terms of noise reduction. I took it soon after I got my new Pentax and I was still very early on in the digital learning curve and shot it at a high ISO.

I'll be posting on my turtle telemetry soon. Meanwhile, here's a great blog post on the wonders of modern radiotelemetry and its use in wildlife research.

P.S. I had forgotten to mention it initially, but when I was taking this picture, I'd been interested in the butterfly. Only after a minute or so, did I even notice the little mantis observing both of us. He (she?) was probably too small to take on this butterfly, though I could be wrong. In any case he didn't try, just watched. Most predators probably just watch most of the time, just noticing what is going on around them.

The image starts to tell a story.

Happy World Turtle Day!

2009-05-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

Happy World Turtle Day! Over the next couple of days, I will be releasing my first transmittered turtles and re-starting the blog after it's hiatus over the past couple of semesters. Check back for photos of the transmittered turtles and random bits of Georgia natural history.

New Life

2008-09-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year. Eggs laid in the ground two months ago are now hatching. Clifford and I made a fortuitous discovery while walking our dogs on some woods owned by friends of ours. A rare sight, because they are so secretive. These little guys (or gals) hatched into a dry world. We are in drought and the ground they were laid in is parched, the path surface, except in the spot where their mother had months ago methodically dug a small flask-shaped hole, was like pavement.

The two hatchlings still had their rear halves stuck in their eggs, the dryness made it difficult or impossible for them to free themselves. One had apparently done most of the digging to re-open the nest chamber, and was making his way across the path, pulling himself along with his front legs. The other remained in the nest chamber, his rear end similarly trapped.

We had some water in a canteen so we moistened them, allowing the flexible-shelled eggs to take up moisture and become pliable again, so that they'd be able to free themselves.

Baby box turtles in the wild are a rare sight and to find two in one day is a real treat.

Another herp sighting for the day was an unusually pale-colored toad.

High Summer

2008-07-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

It's high summer in Georgia. Insects calling and jumping through my barely-mowed yard (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers cicadas). Black-and Yellow Argiope spiders, some quite large, are weaving their orb webs to glint in the sun and catch insects, some almost as big as they are. The silk anchor lines are amazingly tough and resist rather than break when I accidentally walk into them. There are many more dragonflies than last year and at dusk, a small army of toads (Bufo americanus and Bufo fowleri)emerges from wherever it is that they hide during the day, to hop in search of insects in the relative cool of the night. Most frogs seem to be done calling for now, but at dusk or at the suggestion of rain, the occasional Cope's Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis)will trill. I've been working on my Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina)research, doing some sketching and painting, strategizing about a website to promote my artwork and building a few rain barrels. Lo and behold, they work! I'm also working on a few new county records for some local herps, inspired by my volunteer frog call monitoring and the new Amphibians and Reptiles of Georgia, which I highly recommend. More on the new county records in a future post...

Pictured above is a newly transformed Cope's Gray Tree Froglet. I took this picture at my backyard frog pond last year. Perhaps this little gem is one of the ones I can hear trilling when it rains.

Terrapin Diary

2008-03-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

Herps are waking up in Georgia. In the past few days I've seen several anoles and helped my first turtle of 2008 across the road--a musk turtle, Sternotherus odoratus.

I also learned about something called the Wayback Machine that has enabled me to find most of the Photo Diary of a Terrapin Researcher. I'm pretty happy.

Here are a couple of photos from the above mentioned site.

Snow

2008-01-19T21:58:00.000-08:00

Snow today. Just a flurry by New York standards, but a big deal here. Large wet flakes swirled in spirals through the air. A mixed flock of birds at the feeder, which is not far from the tree pictured here last spring with a male cardinal in its branches. Included in the flock was at least one Brown-Headed Nuthatch, a species I'd never seen before moving to Georgia. Here it occurs along with the more familiar nuthatch that has a black head. The brown is a plucky little bird that doesn't let anyone bully him. There was a brilliant male cardinal too, though he seemed more interested in driving off the two female cardinals than he did in eating, or were they immature males--not sure what to make of that. Picture this area colored white and animated by busily feeding birds. Chickadees, yellow finches, a plump house finch that liked to hog the feeder. The cats enjoyed the show and Max, our ancient Pomeranian, enjoyed puttering around in the snow, something he hasn't done in almost three years. The winter weather seemed to give him added energy.

Ring around the moon

2008-01-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

We're expecting 1-3 inches of snow tomorrow. Tonight ice crystals in the atmosphere enclosed the moon in a wide circle--the sort of thing that would be difficult to photograph at all and impossible to capture what it was really like, to be there and see the curvature of air delineated that way by moonlight, which is, after all, reflected from the sun, shining somewhere far away. It was fleeting, gone now, I don't know how long it lasted and I didn't try to photograph it. Maybe I should've.

This picture is (obviously) a saguaro cactus in bud. These cacti are held sacred by Native Americans, I've been told, who consider them ancestors in plant form--people who, after death, took the form of cacti. They are certainly about as humanlike as a plant gets, with their upraised arms and individual personalities.

Juxtaposition

2008-01-17T23:25:00.000-08:00

Ice coated the needles on the pine trees along the road , catching the light as I drove to school--nature's fiber optics, transmitting a message of senseless (perhaps) beauty.

This picture was taken in Tucson. Arizona has several species of hummingbirds. Georgia has only the Rubythroat, and they are way South on their wintering grounds right now. I just thought it provided a contrast to the weather we're having.

Sleety night in Georgia

2008-01-16T23:06:00.001-08:00

Snowflakes swirled all over campus this afternoon. I strode down the steps of the Biology building, past a woman with her umbrella. she expressed surprise, "Won't it get all over you?". Well, yeah. "Isn't it wet like rain?". Its made of water. People around here were in a panic about weather that I recognize as halfway decent by New York standards.

Still, it was possible to appreciate snow as magical because it was an event, not a constant presence accompanied by months of unrelenting grey skies.

I wonder how the lichens are doing.

And the turtles.

The picture was taken last spring and is of lichens growing on a fruit tree--Usnea strigosa and Parmotrema perforatum, which seem to frequently grow together. Lichens are fascinating, and if you ever have the chance to look at them under a dissecting microscope, do so--they look so strange, and yet they are everywhere (everywhere with decent air quality, that is) and often unnoticed. they are ecologically significant, yet ignored. Lichens are pioneers on bare rock, food for arctic animals, and have unusual chemistries and very complicated lives. They have to somehow coordinate reproduction of two different component species to make one lichen. They have strange and beautiful forms. There is a huge book about them by Irwin Brodo, well worth looking at if you get the chance. The lichen flora in this part of Georgia is more diverse than anywhere else I've lived, possibly even seen. Areas in Texas, such as Enchanted Rock, have interesting lichens, but Georgia is hard to beat.

Things you don't see in Georgia

2008-01-15T23:43:00.000-08:00

A few pictures from back in Tucson--scenes and creatures you won't see in Georgia. Each place has its own particularities. The Arizona mountains, the Georgia piedmont. The destert tortoise, the gopher tortoise. Arizonia opuntias are different from Georgia opuntias, and yes we do have native cacti here. There were some growing in scant soil on the granite outcrop, alongside mosses and lichens. Related, but different species grow in the desert, as part of very different communities. Life goes on about its business, but only in particular places. It is delineated. It is particular. It is constantly changing, even if very slowly, slower than the pace of a tortoise or a cactus or a landscape.

Lichen Photos Delayed

2008-01-14T23:26:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those days, so I never got yesterday's photos from the camera to the computer, but I will do it within the next couple of days. We may actually get some winter weather here in Georgia over the next couple of days.

You might think that these two images are a strange juxtaposition--a picture of the Grand Canyon and one of the late and much-missed Blizzie sleeping on the couch. Both are sources of inspiration and meaning. Many artists take inspiration from landscape in general, as well as particular places. I've done more so with individual living things in general, and in particular. Cats are wonderful sketching subjects, both for what they are and the shapes that they make (and because sometimes they actually stay still), and Blizzie was a great cat.

Visited the outcrop--pictures tomorrow

2008-01-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

We went back to the outcrop today, and it was beautiful, but it was remarkable how much it had changed since the other day. The colors of the mosses and lichens had lost some intensity in dring. Indeed, some of the mossses had blackened up. The stream area was reduced. The light was different. Resurrection fern growing on the biggest cedar was lush and green. That growing on a smaller cedar a few feet away had already shrivelled and curled. A Virginia pine grew at the base of the outcrop, looking visibly different from all the loblollies. Pinus virginiana looks craggy like pines in a Chinese painting. Even stunted loblollies never look like that. This is a great place to look at vegetation zones. The plants and lichens grow in distinct pockets that relate to water and soil availability and probably other factors as well.

Tomorrow I'll get the pictures out of the camera and onto the computer. For now, this is an ink painting of a sleeping tabby cat. I did this a couple of years ago, using Chinese ink and a Chinese brush on Chinese paper. I'd been practicing painting orchids in the style I was learning in, you guessed it, a Chinese painting class. I was well warmed-up when I saw one of my cats dozing on a chair. I put a sheet of paper on the red felt and sketched her. SHe is constructed of her stripes. I had this image put on some items through Cafe Press.

Another picture

2008-01-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

Didn't get to the outcrop today, we'll go tomorrow. Instead, here's another picture from the enchanting Joyce Kilmer Forest.

Nearby Nature can be Unexpectedly Outstanding

2008-01-11T20:46:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, Clifford and I went on a little expedition to a granite outcrop community not far from where we live. A friend of ours knew of our interest in lichens (really cool organisms that are really two organisms living in close symbiosis) and such and told us about this place but didn't indicate how truly spectacular it was. It was a magical garden of lichens and mosses, many different species. There was an ephemeral stream still running across the bare rock from last night's rain. Massive cedars grew where there was enough soil. There was some invasive privet, but the place seemed to be holding its own much better than the other outcrop communities I have seen. This is the finest example of this type of plant community that I have seen anywhere, and it was hidden in plain sight.

The picture on the left is an example of how massive the Tulip Trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) are at Joyce Kilmer. This forest was never cut. This is what these trees can do. The ones in my yard and the ones from my childhood home, though not saplings by any standard, are still mere youngsters compared to these giants, these elders.

Tomorrow, I will return to the granite outcrop, this time with my camera. I wasn't expecting to be impressed enough to need it today, but astonishing things really do lie just outside the front door.

Another rainy night in Georgia...

2008-01-10T22:39:00.000-08:00

Saw a toad hopping around this evening, before it started raining. Somehow, he must have known. The rain has been enough to refill the garden pond completely. The water had gotten really low, due to a leak. The pond must have been deliberately and cleverly placed in an area that collects water, 'cause we sure didn't get 9+" of rain! The frogs are happy to have their home restored. Perhaps more interesting mushrooms will pop up. Last time it rained, we got a crop of a really bizarre one I had never seen before, the dog stinkhorn. Brilliant red and resembling, not a dog, but a part of a dog, actually part of a male dog, to be more exact. They are in the genus Phallus.

The image here is one I took while hiking in Joyce Kilmer Forest back in July of '06. I have a huge backlog of digital photos, including pictures of box turtles for my research, to go through. The choice of this one was pretty random, but the image of an old growth forest does contrast remarkably with the 2nd growth I'm used to seeing. Read Maloof's Teaching the Trees. The Tulip trees in this forest are truly massive. The huge entanglements of roots are unlike what you see in 2nd growth. There is much more understory vegetation. It is good to be reminded of these things. I need to keep in touch with the 'small picture', especially since, in coursework at least, this semester deals more in 'big-picture' subjects--geography and earth imaging. You can see many things you never could before with these technologies, but must not lose sight of the familiar.

Academics

2008-01-09T21:09:00.000-08:00

Today was the first day of the new semester. I'll be taking some subjects that are completely new and unfamiliar to me--GIS for instance. I'm already impressed with what a powerful tool GIS can be, with a very wide range of practical applications. Today my husband also got his paper published. It's based on his PhD research on children and nature and is published in the online journal Children, Youth and Environment, it's entitled "Fostering Children’s Connections to Natural Places through Cultural and Natural History Storytelling".

Here's, for no particular reason, an amusing little brush and ink sketch of Ernest, a somewhat mischievous and moody little cat. I was going to post a sketch of turtles mating, but I'll have to save that for another time, as the file is too large.

Rainy night in Georgia

2008-01-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

We're getting some much-needed rain tonight in Georgia. The turtles will be appreciating that. Classes start tomorrow. I've been thinking about things that inspire me. One was the Photo Diary of a Terrapin Researcher, but that seems sadly, unaccessible now. I read some good books over break. One I particularly enjoyed was Vincent Dethier's Crickets & Katydids: Concerts and Solos--wonderful natural history writing about insects, acoustic biology and his early science career , back in the 1930's.

On rainy nights in very early spring, or late winter, Spotted salamanders embark on their breeding migrations. When I lived in New York, that time would be a couple of months away. The range of this species includes Georgia, and I'll have to find out when they come out down here. They are large salamanders, glossy black with bright yellow and sometimes orange spots. I did an illustration of one for a bookmark from Acorn Designs. The image here is a scratchboard drawing, the one on the bookmark is with a technique similar to the one i used with Big Mamma Snapper. Scratchboard involves India ink on a clay-coated board. The clay coating allows you to scratch out inked areas, so you can draw in black and in white at the same time, and also make changes without starting over completely.

Big Mamma Snapper

2008-01-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

Another semester is about to start and I'll be TAing some introductory biology labs, getting started on my thesis project and taking a some geography classes. Since its late, I thought I'd pull something out of the ol' archive. I had this image made into notecards, which are available, just email me. The original is 22"X30"--a "larger-than-life" format for an animal surrounded by larger-than-life stories. The model for this drawing was a decent-sized gravid female that my brother plucked off the road just before she could step into four lanes of heavy traffic. I happened to be visiting that weekend so he brought her home in the back of his pickup to show me, and in hope that I'd know what to do. Evidently, she was trying to make her way from her home in the reservoir to some remembered or imagined nesting area across the road. When we returned to the place, all I could see there was a gas station and a parking lot, maybe she had her sights on something, some wild place beyond the gas station. The chances of her making it across were nil, nevermind that she'd then have to return to the reservoir or travel overland to another body of water. There were once days when these animals could do that. Not just days, but millions of years, and the impulse to do so remains. One thing people often exclaim when seeing one of these creatures is, "They look so prehistoric!" They do. Snapping turtles have looked like snapping turtles for a mind-bogglingly long time. A recent molecular study has shown a surprising lack of genetic divergence across the species' range. Its not really been explained yet why this is. I'd have to look at the paper again for the details. Their impressive ability to travel overland, at least before their habitats became so fragmented, doesn't seem sufficient by itself to explain this. Another mystery from a common animal that is becoming less and less common.

Their larger-than-life reputation has a dark side for them. A lot of people seem to think it justifies mistreating them. I stopped showing this image to any but a select few people for a while because of the number of gory snapper stories people insisted on telling me upon seeing it. The stories invariably ended badly for the snapper, and none of them were accidents. What made them think I wanted to hear their crap? I spent many hours carefully rendering the many different textures, and noticing how remarkably they contrasted with the eyes. The eyes of a snapping turtle are so beautiful--four tiny perfect compass points in each, and sparkling, and set into the massive head, the big inverted basin of a shell, the wrinkled and scaly skin. The whole animal is capable of disappearing or going unnoticed in a moment if in the right habitat. They know the use of motionlessness, and of resembling mud.

Its not inevitable that people react negatively to them. My nephew, who was about 9 months old at the time was delighted with her, watching her intently and waving his arms and giggling whenever she moved. He saw no need to conform to someone else's nonsense.

We debated what to do with her. Usually, if it is safe for you to do so, you should help a turtle across the road in the direction they were headed, as turtles are notoriously committed to their decisions, but in this case there didn't seem to be any nesting habitat for her to head for. Translocating turtles is problematic, because they need a habitat that they know in detail in order to survive, and because moving a sick animal (which may not even look sick at the time) could introduce a disease to a healthy population, as has happened with the desert tortoises and gopher tortoises. Removing them from their habitats is wrong and often illegal as well. In the end, we returned her to the reservoir and watched her swim off, kicking up a cloud of mud as she went, and hoped that she found another place to nest--one where she'd be able to make both the nesting and return journeys, where her round, white eggs, buried underground, would be warmed by the round, white sun, and unnoticed by predators, to hatch into minute versions of their mother and fathers, emerge from the ground, blink the soil from their eyes, and head for the water.

You may kiss the shell...

2008-01-06T20:49:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of watercolor and pen-and-ink sketches of the head of a juvenile box turtle, done on the Ecus paper I mentioned in an earlier post. The original images are both very small, which is why you can see the grain of the paper. They are about life-size or slightly larger (the originals relative to the turtle that served as model, that is). I did these a couple of years ago.

Box turtles are an animal with a most unusual type of charisma. I was reading the paper today and came across an article that mentioned something called The Box Turtle Bulletin, in a context that seemed to have nothing at all to do with our chelonian friends. It turns out that a speechwriter for some senator included a line about how gay marriage would lead to some sort of slippery slope (it would have to be pretty darned slippery) resulting in people marrying box turtles, and this line made it into a national newspaper. I'm not sure what led this speechwriter to look beyond the barnyard and into the woods and prairies. Maybe he or she was tired of the same old livestock all the time. Archie Carr once said "Everybody loves box turtles", but I don't think that's what he had in mind. Anyway, the publisher of The Box Turtle Bulletin was evidently taken with the remark and saw some useful metaphor in it. I like to collect quotes about turtles in general and box turtles in particular and I have to say that this was a new on on me.

Recent turtle sketch

2008-01-05T22:03:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent sketch, a portrait of an Indochinese Box Turtle, Cistoclemmys galbinifrons, who resides at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. I did this sketch a couple of weeks ago (12/21/07). I'd done a few sketches already that day and was standing near this animal's aquarium, and she (I think she's a she) called to me. I don't mean with words, or even any sound at all--she just seemed to look like "draw my portrait". I intended to sketch her quickly and then move on to the other exhibits, but that wasn't to be. She stayed very still, one eye cocked downwards, watching me watch her, the entire time. I'm pleased with the result, which doesn't happen all the time--most sketches have good elements and not-so-good elements, I'm either "on" or I'm not, this time I was "on", or I should say, we were "on", because I think that this little turtle participated in this venture at least as much as I did.

This species is also called the Flower-Backed Box Turtle, because of the beautiful patterning usually present on the shell. This individual is less gaudily marked than some I have seen in photos, and what she has is partially obscured by algae, but she certainly has a captivating personality, an endearing and winsome face. This species also used to be placed in the genus Cuora, but evidently, recent re-examination of their evolutionary relationships, probably using molecular data, has landed them in the genus Cistoclemmys. Regardless of how we call them, they are among the species caught up in the Asian Turtle Crisis. Don't know what that is? Try http://www.chelonia.org/ for starters.

I did this in a 7"x9" hardbound sketchbook using Pitt brush pens, one of my favorite sketching media--they are very responsive and come in a good array of colors, and they are lightfast and waterproof and don't usually bleed through sketchbook paper, and they don't have that nasty chemical smell of some markers. I like them because they require (or allow) me to be both fluid and committed at the same time--no erasing with permanent marker. All lines are permanent, so you have to be open to creating a drawing that includes all the lines you made, or you have to start over. Bente King used to tell us about an art professor she had back in Denmark--he didn't allow the students to use erasers in his class--"If you can get it right the second time, you can get it right the first time", he would say. I'm not opposed to erasers--I use them when I draw in pencil, usually planning something more formal than a sketch--but there is something liberating about the discipline of not using them, at least after you've made the proverbial "first 1,000 mistakes".

A strange thing happened while I was sketching --I kept getting referred to as "he", usually by parents explaining to their children what I was doing. Now, I have short hair, but no shorter than a lot of women have, and the lighting in the exhibit space was pretty dim, but seriously...

Back after a long hiatus...

2008-01-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm about to start my 2nd semester of grad school, and to get my box turtle field research underway. I've taken many digital photos in the past year or so, but only now am I finally getting around to uploading them. I'll post current natural history photos as I take them and include some from the past year's archives (read: backlog, avalanche, etc.). I'll also include examples of my artwork, both current, recent and archived. Here are some examples of artwork from the past 4 or so years...To the left is a Paphiopedlium orchid in ink wash technique, a method that involves building tone very slowly with many layers of dilute India ink. I learned this technique from the late Bente King when I was at Cornell. It is a very meditative way of working, and while I don't do it often enough, I've done some of my best work with it. For ink wash, I like Canson Montval paper best, though when I do watercolors, I prefer Arches or Ecus (hard to find but great for watercolor with pen-and-ink). If anyone knows where I can get some more Ecus, let me know...

Introducing Terrapene Studios

2007-02-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

The Terrapene Studios blog will showcase my natural science illustration work .