Archive for the ‘Nature’ Category
Critters You Might Have Missed in the Great Outdoors
This posting is to share a few images from the Great Outdoors taken the last couple of weeks. First, my friend the tussock moth caterpillar. This fella was munching on a milkweed plant. I like its colors, the fact that it looks sort of like a fly I’d use to try to catch a trout, and also because word tussock is the only word I’ve found that sort of rhymes with buttock.
This fella made himself comfortable in a red cup attached to a pole under our bird feeder.
This is a baby cardinal taking a bath in our water dish.
She was apparently quite dirty and spent a fair amount of time correcting that problem. I took several photos including this one where her head is turned sideways.
A few days ago, I found this unfortunate moth outside in my front yard. I usually don’t pick up dead things, but thought it was cute. So, I, took it inside for a photo or too. On our kitchen table, of course.
LeptoMan, a moth/butterfly guy at work, identified this as an underwing moth (Catocala relicta) that hangs out on birch trees. We don’t have a birch tree, but our neighbor does, which means it’s all my neighbor’s fault that the moth died, I’m sure. Luckily, as I had hoped, my moth friend had a really cute face. It’s one reason I like moths.
And then I ate the moth because I wanted to know what it tasted like. Not really. I took the moth back outside, said, “God bless the fuzzy moth,” and buried it. I also wiped the table off.
So there you have it. A few critters from the Great Outdoors. Some, like the caterpillars and moths, will be pretty scarce soon, so get outside NOW before it sNOWs.
Little Birdie on the Big Plane
While I thought that a dog, a cat, a ferret, some fish and 10 or 11 hamsters was enough to care for and interact with, my husband, Mark, did not. He wanted a bird. And in particular, a bird that would sit on his shoulder, talk to him now and again and just pal around. He looked high and low, north and south, and found a guy in Florida that spends his spare time breeding mynah birds.
Like every other critter that has come into my house, I knew nothing about mynah birds. And I knew even less about how to get a small bird from Florida to Michigan. It turns out that all we had to do was pay the seller for said bird and allow him to make arrangements for the bird to come by airplane. Then all we had to do is make plans to be at the closest international airport to pick up said bird. Then we had to wait for a hurricane to blow through Florida. Then we had to wait another week for the seller to obtain the proper container for shipping said bird in the cargo section of an airplane. Finally, two weeks later, we went to the airport to pick up said bird.
Mark was so excited about his new pal that we left at 2:30 to pick up a bird whose plane was to land at 5:00 at an airport that was only 1.5 hours away. That means I had a long time to hang out outside this building.
I also had plenty of time to take photos of the plane the birdie might have come in on.
The 5:00 plane the little birdie was on became the 5:30 plane and it was around then that we learned it can take another 1.5 hours for birds to get carried from wherever they land to where Mark and I were hanging out bored to tears. It was 7 p.m. when a guy finally walked in with a container that looked like what we were waiting for.
Because Mark was suddenly acting oddly nervous, I bravely peeled back the green mesh that the seller had put in front of the windows and doors. Inside, I saw something brown and yellowish lying on its side. I cringed as I told Mark and the clerk behind the counter that I thought the birdie was dead. As the clerk was responding with, “Well, you’ll have to take that up with…” this thumping noise came from the cage and I heard flapping inside the cage. I peered back inside and saw the bird in the back. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the blob in the front turned out to be a very ripe banana the seller had shipped with the birdie.
Mark smiled as he carried the carrier to the car.
He placed the carrier in the back of the car and we enjoyed about five minutes of quiet before the bird began throwing itself against the side of the cage, flapping, making squawky noises, and slowly making the entire car smell like banana. I was a bit of a wreck by the time I got home. Mark, on the other hand, was beaming and said he couldn’t wait to play with his new pal.
It was 9 p.m. by the time we took the bird to her new home in a spare bedroom. We held the carrier up to a real bird cage, thinking the birdie would be happy to get out of a small container it’d been in since 11 that morning.
The little birdie suddenly stopped flapping around. After several minutes and a complete standoff on the part of the bird, Mark reached inside the carrier and gently grabbed her. She squawked and attempted to gnaw on Mark to show her displeasure.
Amazingly though, in a matter of minutes, the bird settled in to her new home. She hopped from one perch to the other, found the water bottle, and found the free standing dish of water and took a brief bath. She also ate some of the 25 pounds of food Mark had purchased. The next day, she ate fresh fruit, including blueberries, pear pieces and apple bits. She also snarfed the dried mealworms we’d gotten to attract bluebirds.
Over the course of the next week, the bird’s name morphed from little birdie to Little Buddy. Mark spends time with her each day, sitting next to her as he reads a book. She hops right over to the side of the cage to see him and, after a while, sometimes chirps and makes other higher pitched calls.
Two nights ago, we opened her cage door for the first time and I snapped a couple of photos.
After hopping in and out of the entrance to the cage, she finally built up the nerve to fly around a bit and ended up on top of the cage.
Farewell to the Special Fuzzy Friend That Picked Me
Back 13 years ago, my criteria for picking out a pal for our male dog, Dusty, was pretty simple–I wanted a female, bijon friese-lhasa apso mix, and she had to lick me to indicate she licked me. This is the puppy that picked me.
Little Dipper and our first puppy, Dusty, got along from the get-go.
And Little Dipper was also my pal. She figured out right away that if she wiggled just so, I’d take her for a walk. It worked every day, including Tuesday, the day she died.
Last night, a stroke led to her quick departure. The hole she left in my heart is huge. I will miss my walking pal, my traveling pal, my McDonald’s pal, and the little puppy that first licked my face to tell me she was the one for me. May she run across the heavens and may belly rubs be waiting for her afterwards.
The Importance of Friends When the Chips are Down
The fact is, I almost didn’t go on the trip I’d planned with my Snowy Hoot-ers pals a few months ago, because the day we were to leave was two days after my dad’s funeral. But Brenda and Sylvia encouraged me to drag my grieving self along and it turns out they–along with a few margaritas and some quality time on a river–was just what I needed.
Things didn’t start out so well, because we didn’t even get out of Brenda’s neighborhood before we saw a dog that had run away from its owner. The three of us like dogs as much as owls and rivers, so we stopped so Brenda could take the dog back to its home.
Three hours later, after settting up camp, I realized I had not only come without a fishing pole, I had brought a kayak without a paddle. No worries, they said. Brenda had brought an extra pole for me, and we simply made arrangements the next day with a livery for a ride to the put-in spot on the river and to borrow a paddle.
With details for Saturday figured out, we headed to downtown Beulah, MI to my all-time favorite restaurant, the Roadhouse Mexican Restaurant and Cantina. They serve some great food and their margaritas are ones I dream about.
Our plan to get ahead of the Boy Scout worked until we found a good fishing hole. A good fishing hole meant stopping to try to catch fish.
And that gave the Boy Scout plenty of time to catch up and pass us . . . sometimes. Other times, the Boy Scout demonstrated at our good fishing holes that the upper Platte does indeed have a 50% tip-over rate. We’d guess that at least half of the Scouts ended up in the river.
Meanwhile, we paddled on.
Since Snowy Hoot-ers are into birds, I had to stop to photograph the flock of cedar waxwings that seemed at times to be following us down the river. We also saw kingfishers and a great blue heron.
Afterwards, we returned to my favorite restaurant to suffer through more great food and margaritas.
Sylvia misunderstood the idea of playing chicken.
After extracting Sylvia from the road, we wrapped up the day with a roaring fire.
Indeed, a camping trip with my pals was the best thing I could have done. It was the kind of fun my Dad had throughout his life with his friends and family. It also turns out that where I went camping, paddling and fishing was where my Dad used to go to a hunting camp to spend quality time in the woods with his gun.
Oh, and watch out Boy Scouts–the Snowy Hoot-ers have more trips planned for the future.
Our Latest Fuzzy Addition; Deer Swimming
Since everyone should probably get at least one hamster in their life, and because I’d never had one of my own, I set about to get a hamster of my very own . . . to add to the ten or so that Mark already had in the house. Her name is Daisy and she was all by herself in a cage at the pet store, winked at me, and well, that was it.
Daisy took to her cage fairly well and really took to pepitas and pumpkin seeds.
The 2012 Mini Fishing Tournament – and the Winner Is…?
This posting is about a fishing tournament that included me, Mark and his Georgia nephew, Terry. The great thing is that they didn’t know they had entered my tournament and that I got to make up the rules as we went along.
To make sure the tournament started out sort of fairly, we hired fishing guide Doug Samsal on Monday to take us musky fishing on Lake St. Clair. He had a nifty bass boat that zipped across the water to what he says are hot musky spots . . . some days.
It was a lovely, sunny day and compared to my office cubicle, I got a whole lot of sun and a whole lot more exercise flinging a giant lure in search of musky. My lure looked something like this.
And it’s a good thing I did, because by the end of day one, I had nabbed four smallies to Mark’s one and Terry’s one.
On day two of the tournament, we returned to Lake St. Clair and fished out of Terry’s Boston Whaler. Near the dock, I took a moment to take in the local wildlife, which included a pied-billed grebe.
As we headed out to Lake St. Clair, we stumbled upon these tough looking characters.
10 Things I’m Grateful for
Okay, it’s not Thanksgiving–wherein I’m always grateful for family and food–and it’s not Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day–wherein I’m grateful for the members of the US military past and present–and it’s not July 4–wherein I’m grateful for our Forefathers, independence, the right to vote and bear arms and all of our other liberties. But a couple of things happened lately that made me realize that I’d taken a few other things for granted lately, too.
1. Parents. With my Dad in and out of the hospital lately, I have become even more grateful for having parents. Two of them, in fact. My mom is 76. My Dad will turn 76 in two weeks. Poor buggers have been parenting me for almost 50 years and it’s still a work in progress. Just today, Mom witnessed me say hello to two passing dogs instead of the two people walking the dogs. She apologized to the dog owners and said I’d been raised better than that.
2. A job. My program recently advertised an entry level position to manage grants and in response, we had 216 applicants. I don’t know how many people applied for the job I got with the state in 1986 but I know the job market wasn’t nearly as tough as it is now. I can also share, though, that about 150 of the people that applied for this entry level job recently didn’t follow directions and were handily eliminated from consideration.
3. Annual leave and sick leave. I got to use my sick leave to see my Dad in the hospital. I get to use my annual leave to go fishing the next three days.
4. Air conditioning in my car. It wasn’t until my fairly new, young secretary said that she was thrilled to borrow her father’s car on Friday that I realized I hadn’t appreciated having air conditioning in my car lately. My first car didn’t have air conditioning, or my second, I recall, so I well remember being in her shoes. Well, not literally. She has bigger feet than me.
5. Air conditioning in my home. Imagine having 11 hamsters, two dogs, a cat and a ferret without air conditioning. I couldn’t either.
6. Nice thunderstorms. Lucky for us, the recent storms trimmed our trees a bit but didn’t down power lines. So thankfully, the electricity kept on going. Which kept the air conditioning going. Which made all the pets happy.
7. Cooler weather. Every furry creature that’s come to our deck to get sunflower seeds the last couple of weeks has been sprawling itself out on the deck to try to cool off.
Even a duck came to our deck to cool off in the water. We’re all happy with cooler weather.
8. Vinyl siding. I’m grateful for the siding I have, but note in the photo below the tiny bits of blue foam. Apparently, there’s a place on the underside of my house that the red “‘spaz” squirrels discovered is in need of being covered in vinyl or aluminum.
9. Having a good sense of humor and being able to stretch the truth a wee bit. The former is needed just about every day; the latter will come in handy if the next three days of fishing are bad.
10. Toads. I had to have 10 things to be grateful for and I saw this little fella last night. I fed him a bug before we parted ways.
Book Wrap-Up and a Visit from the Gawky Family
April was dedicated to the sport of promoting my book via a virtual tour that lasted from April 8 – 28, and I have to say I learned a lot from my adventure, including:
- Doing a book tour is a lot of work because most hosts “offer” the chance to do an interview and/or the opportunity to post something of the author’s choice. During my tour, most hosts wanted one or the other, which meant I was writing marketing material every night in April and ignoring just about everything else, including my poor, sad husband.
- Most book tour hosts are willing to do a book review as part of a tour, but the thing is, they’re all honest people and are just as happy to give 3 stars for your book as a 4 or 5.
- If you’re going to write a second book, it’s good to keep track of the book tour hosts that gave you high reviews and those that did not. I mean, why invite the people who didn’t rate you well to participate in your next tour?
- Not every tour host will “get” your book. Two people thought my book was a children’s book and only one of the two of them backed out as a result.
- One person backed out before the tour began for reasons that weren’t real clear to me, and it was the very last day of the tour. I was grateful to be able to call upon Joy V. Smith, who was one of the first (and best) reviewers of my book, to fill that last spot.
- One tour host got in a car accident. On the day my book was to have been featured, I told her nothing was more important than getting better.
- Another tour host put down the wrong date on her calendar and her apology included information about her rare blood disease that is distracting her. I also told her nothing was more important than getting better.
- My tour included several give-aways, the success of which was highly dependent on the number of people that frequent the host’s site. One site got 7 participants, another got over 100. It’s good to keep track of which sites get the most traffic.
- Author interviews on sites with lots of traffic can generate just as much interest as a give-away on a site that doesn’t get a lot of traffic.
- I got the most participants (over 400) in a give-away via GoodReads.
- I had some nifty jewelry to give away and some people had more to say about the jewelry than my book.
- The book tour was probably mostly a great way to get my name ‘out there.”
- Tweeting became a nightly event in April, mostly to boast about the good reviews I received. I did not Tweet about the marginal reviews.
- Facebook postings jived with my Tweets which was about the only automated thing that occurred in April.
- Twitter parties should not be done on a Sunday morning because most people are either hungover or at church. I would have been better off being hungover or at church.
- As far as book sales go, I did best after a free give-away on Amazon Kindle.
And so with my book tour behind me, I have a couple more free sites to advertise on and then it’s time to wrap up my next book, a humorous story about raising a whole bunch of animals I knew nothing about. It’s much more marketable and gosh, as a result of a wee bit of work in April, I now have a list of several hundred Tweety-people, some blog followers, some book reviewers and some book host tours that I can call upon again.
Between now and when my next book is finished, I’ll be back posting about people and critters. For instance, during my book tour, Mr. and Mrs. Gawky set up a nest across from our house this year and Mrs. laid 8 eggs just like last year. And like last year, there was one egg that hatched later than all the rest.
The very next day, I stopped by and saw the last hatchling.
A week or so later, the entire Gawky family stopped just offshore of our property to say hi. Some of the babies had their back legs resting on their backs and I was a wee worried they didn’t all work properly.
How My Stepkids are Like Ducks
I’ve now managed to attract people to my blog who like hearing about my wildlife adventures, while others followers are interested in the topic covered in my book, which is stepkids. How to please both audiences, I wondered?
And so it was that I sat down and compared my stepkids to ducks, making it such that this posting has something for everyone. Here are just a few reasons why my stepkids are like ducks:
1. Like ducks, all my stepkids like to swim. Stepkid number one swam circles around her competitors last summer during her first triathlon. Stepkid number three, the boy, swam at Haslett High School for a year or two, proving good in some events, but not so as a diver duck. Stepkid number four was on the swim team and water polo team at Haslett High School. Stepkid number two can hold her own in the water as well.
2. Like ducks, all my stepkids like dabbling in the water. All four stepkids got to try scuba diving at a pool in Lansing and took to it like fish. Or ducks, for that matter. All four also took to snorkeling pretty well, after one or two near drownings.
3. Like ducks, all my stepkids like hanging out with their pals.
4. Like ducks, all my stepkids occasionally hang out with kids that aren’t like them.
6. Like ducks, all my stepkids had to be watched pretty closely sometimes when they were little.
7. Like ducks, my stepkids sometimes got into trouble anyway.
8. Like ducks, my stepkids (who are all over 21 now) always seem to have a member of the opposite sex nearby.
9. Like ducks, my stepkids got big and flew away. And when they come home, they always seem hungry.
10. Like ducks, my stepkids will make their own nests one day . . .
. . . and have their own ducklings.
Like ducks, my stepkids will likely want to bring their youngsters over for a visit one day, and when they do, Mark and I will welcome them with open wings. And after a nice wee visit, Mark and I will do like older ducks do and make sure the little ducklings go home with their mother.
Snowy Hoot-ers
Anyone who’s published an e-book lately knows that just about every waking hour that you’re not working your regular job, you’re marketing. My book From Zero to Four Kids in Thirty Seconds was published as an e-book in late December and all I’ve done is Tweeted, gotten LinkedIn, blogged, written articles for interviews or other blogs until finally, last Friday, I found myself sitting at my computer writing “blah, blah, blah.” I decided it was time to get away with my two fun traveling pals, fellow biologists and adventurers, Brenda and Sylvia. On Saturday we set out to see a snowy owl.
You see, snowy owls don’t normally hang out in Michigan, but this year they’d been spotted in various places in Michigan because their population outgrew their food source in the arctic and some had to wander south to find food. The two places the owls had been spotted that were closest to the Lansing area were the Tawas Point State Park and the Muskegon Wastewater Treatment Plant. Treatment plants are smelly affairs, so I called the State Park in Tawas on Friday only to learn that the 5 owls that had once been seen there had moved on. Our destination became the Muskegon WWTP.
Lansing didn’t have any snow on the ground but as we got to the outskirts of Muskegon, we found an inch of snow blanketing the area. The wind was blowing mightily as well, and since one of the members of our party arrived to go look for owls without wearing any socks, we stopped at a local dollar store. We didn’t ask why one would show up without socks in the winter time, but while buying socks we discovered several tiny bags of yogurt covered pretzels, sesame sticks and almonds, and loaded up with enough snacks to keep us through a winter storm.
We arrived on the grounds of the Muskegon treatment plant and took in the fresh air.

Three well prepared wastewater treatment plant visitors, Brenda, Sylvia, and me. Photo by Brenda Sayles.
The wastewater treatment area is laid out like a series of football fields divided by earthen berms. In each earthen berm is a concrete chute or notch that allows water to flow from one treatment cell to the other. When we stood back and took in the giant area, we realized that from the view of a snowy owl, it might just look something like the arctic tundra. We also realized that it might be difficult finding a mostly white owl in the mostly white area. Luckily, we saw an old guy in a Buick driving around, flagged him down, and, after a wee bit of flirting, got directions to the cell where he’d seen an owl.
At a better angle, and using my 400mm lens, I was able to get a better shot of what is an adult male snowy owl, sitting on a concrete chute between two treatment cells.
I felt particularly lucky to have seen this snowy owl, because I’m not likely to get up to the tundra any time soon, and I realized that in the real tundra, a snowy might be really hard to see.
Still, I was hoping for a better picture than one taken from far away, so I sat down in my ghillie suit, thinking I could creep up on the owl and take photos. But I think I just looked like a giant bush on the otherwise white tundra. The owl was not impressed.