Creatures

My childhood was a happy one, in which I was encouraged to look with great scrutiny at the living things surrounding me, great and small. One of my favorite photo series (taken by my mom, who kept a camera at the ready on the kitchen table for 15 years) is 4-year-old me in overalls, on a picnic table with green tempera paint and a miserable lizard. I remember dip-netting bullfrogs, making June bug "kites" with dental floss, squeezing Bess beetles just enough to hear them squeak, and an unfortunate incident with a brilliant green ground beetle--the kind that sprays hot acid out its butt as a defense mechanism. *I* was the miserable creature that time!

I've been reading E. O. Wilson's Naturalist, in which he explains how he became the appreciator of ecology that he is. Every time I see a new ant, I think of him, because he was an ant guy.

 

Red harvester ants on one of our favorite trails.

While I haven't set up a light sheet for moths yet--it's just now getting warm enough at night for there to be anything at the porch light--I've been keeping my eyes peeled for beetles and crawling things. We get a kick out of the Eleodes genus of darkling beetles, which we see frequently along hiking paths and the driveway. People around here call them stink bugs, because their defense mechanism is to stand on their heads and squirt a peroxide-based defense spray from their rears. It's pretty funny. Nature is pretty funny...except when it's not.

Western Diamondback, the king of the desert, and I'm not disputing the title.

After a delightful day in the Sonoran desert, where I was primarily looking out for big dangerous things--mountain lions, people--this fella brought me down to earth in a split second with an impressive show of hissing and rattling. You bet I hadn't seen it until it did, which I took as a welcome reminder to not be so lax about my surroundings.

So there it is, the first of a no-particular-order show-and-tell of my big zoo here! While I say that my childhood was happy, really it is happy, because I'm still in it. Go do something childlike today!