Git Along, Tiny Dogies

We're going into farming. We bought everything we need for a protein farm and I don't mean beans, baby. Animal husbandry. Yippee-Ki-Yay. Ordinarily I'm leery of these sorts of projects and balk at the learning curve, but this one seems like a slam-dunk. We're raising fruit flies.

It doesn't take long to whomp up a complete fruit fly out of practically nothing. The mommy fruit fly lays eggs and poops on them, which really revs up the larvae. There are stages. At one point the larval fruit flies are said to encapsulate in the puparium, and nobody wants to see that.

Fruit fly courtship is nice though. The male vibrates his wings and then licks the female's genitalia, and although I wouldn't make a point of watching, I wouldn't necessarily look away either. The female fruit fly is said to be receptive to the male within ten hours of emerging as an adult. Well, no shit. What with one thing and a mother, you basically get a whole new set of fruit flies every few minutes in warm weather.

I have read up a little. The literature insists there is such a thing as "virgin" and "naïve" fruit flies, the naïve ones being virgins that have not even observed copulation, and there are distinct behaviors associated with each. For instance, sexually experienced males spend less time courting and more time mounting, and naïve males are more likely to try to court sexually immature females, when they could just, like, wait an hour. The whole fruit fly life cycle peters out after about fifteen days, after all, assuming it is not cut short by a hummingbird.

But that's the plan. We're raising meat for the hummingbirds. Hummingbirds need solid protein and usually find it in the form of insects or spiders. A hummingbird can edit the spider right out of her web in nothing flat. And that's the sort of thing she'll need to feed her own babies. They aren't all about sucking flowers. She doesn't just funnel nectar into the wee ones.

So, in theory, we will put a banana peel in our fruit fly corral and be in business right soon.

There's a reason people know things like whether a given individual fruit fly has watched fruit fly porn. Fruit flies are one of the most-studied critters on the planet. They're easy. You can study generations of them in practically no time and they are easily herded, using simple tools like tweezers and undergraduate students.

I'm not too worried about achieving mature, well-marbled fruit flies in our corral, from whence both hummers and bushtits should be able to belly-up for take-out. It is true that in season we have literal tons of rotting fruit on the ground in this neighborhood, figs to plums to berries to apples to, in fact, bananas, in quantities that will seem unfathomable come the big earthquake. So we won't run out of fruit flies. The reason to keep them in a corral is the same as for any bird feeder. It's not so much that our birds need our help. It's that we want to watch.

Fruit flies are so good at replicating themselves that for centuries it was believed they spontaneously generated. The ancients believed they just appeared out of nothing, materialized right out of the aether. Which is nuts.

They're thinking of blog posts.

Let Nothing Ye Dismay Too Much

I was ready to celebrate Christmas, or as it is known in our family, Tuesday. Tuesday with twinkly lights and music. There's always something to celebrate in this big beautiful world, and the things worthy of celebration are more likely to appear to you if you're not all fried with obligation: the shopping, the postal schedule, the traffic. We keep things pretty calm around here. Life comes with enough challenges without picking up burrs of distress.

Dave and I don't even exchange presents. We get each other what we most desire: nothing.

You don't need much when you have goldfinch butts right out your window. Our Lesser Goldfinches like to grab water out of the central reservoir of the nectar feeder. They show us their cute little fuzzy white butts. It's not a butt butt, of course; no cleavage. But it's still interesting. As is the hummingbird that hovers at them hard, giving them what-for. He could totally boop them right in their fuzzy finch fannies, he wants them to know, but he has discretion. And also there are twenty more finches in the tree, and the hummingbird has no friends to speak of. But--he wants them to know--he could totally boop.

There's stuff worth celebrating online too. Lookit, there's a dancing parrot! Oh look, someone made cream puffins! Cream puffs with little puffin heads on top!

Oh look, someone started a thread about transgendered people using the wrong bathrooms! There are several commenters, and they're all in agreement. Penis: male. Vagina: female. You use the bathroom that corresponds with the gear you were born with. That's it. Simple, end of story.

My goodness, we're on the eve of rendering the entire planet uninhabitable, we're on the verge of extinction, we're creating refugees faster than we can wall them out, and the possibility that someone we don't understand is going to want to pee at the same time we do is what's keeping us up at night?

I stood at the edge of the pit just to observe, but there comes a time you just want to pop in a word in case someone is reachable--someone who hasn't sunk into the mire all the way. Sometimes it works.

Okay, it never works.

I suggested that although this is a simple matter for most of us, it isn't for everybody. I suggested it pays to listen to someone who does not have your own experience. I suggested that person might be someone's child, or even one's own.

I was swiftly reminded that this whole issue had already been decided by God. And that I should "stop placating that which is abnormal," and that "the country needs to go back to basics."

And that I was a "typical puppet lefty, calls people hateful & running away cause they can't think for themselves."

I reviewed. I had said something about advocating for my friends, people I actually knew. I had said something about listening. I had not said anything about hate.

Got to give the hateful fuck points for mind-reading, though.

And this coup de gross: "If you're not helping your friends get mental help then I hope you celebrate when they get their ass kicked or kill themselves because you're the one helping that to happen."

I'm the one helping that to happen.

This is just the sort of thing that brings on despondency in a person, every bit as debilitating as the Christmas despondency we've sworn off of. It's not that I can't win the argument. It's that these awful, dreadful people are out there at all, let alone in droves. It's all too much: the ignorance, the racism, the xenophobia. It's almost more than I can bear, sometimes. I ceded the last word and stepped away from the pit for my own peace of mind, but it was long in coming. Dreadful, godly people were squatting in my mental real estate.

We decided to get a tree. Decorate it, for the babies that will be here for the holidays. Turn this thing around.

Guess what? There is a Christmas tree shortage in the biggest Christmas-tree-producing state of all. One week before Christmas, all the lots were swept out, except one. We pulled in. The trees were presided over by the most unpleasant human being I have met in the real world in a decade. He was a horror. Nasty. The kind of man who gets described as body parts. We waited, and waited, to pay by far the most money for the crappiest tree we'd ever had while he conducted loud and seedy business on his phone, and finally he deigned to run our credit card while sneering and grumbling as dramatically as possible. Under my breath, I called him "Mr. Personality." He turned on me so fast and with such anger that I recoiled in fear like a woman used to being abused. It was the most thoroughly unpleasant transaction, I think, I have ever made in my life.

I drove away and pondered the loss of my equanimity. I rarely take things personally. I am seldom so affected by an unpleasant encounter; as a postal carrier, I looked at those as a challenge to win people over. But on this day my soul had already been steeped in a stew of small and hateful minds. I was already tender. You could drop a fork right through me.

I pulled out of it. The solution is surprisingly simple. If you want peace, you must find it within yourself. You must share it with the world. You must be the light you want to see in others. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Also? All the dreadful people need to be swapped out for goldfinches. Soon is good.

There Goes The Neighborhood!

Resin in beak!

Well, the nuthatches are definitely a going concern. Things look a lot different than when the chickadees, Marge and Studley Windowson, were in the birdhouse. They just poked grass and stuff in there and neatened it all up and planted petunias in the front and kept the lawn trimmed, but these guys are a flat mess. I had no idea.

When it looked like the nuthatches were going to take over the lease, I read up on them to see if anything would be much different, other than that they'd be producing tiny invisible nuthatches instead of tiny invisible chickadees. One of the things I read that seemed a little exotic was that they might be inclined to daub pine resin around their nest-box hole. They might bring the resin in their beaks, or they might even use a tool, a piece of bark or a mortar trowel or something, to smear it around. The male is in charge of goobering up the outside of the hole and the female works on the inside. "It is thought," the literature says dubiously, "that this is meant to deter predators." In other words, no one's really sure why they do it. Presumably the nuthatches themselves avoid the sticky resin by shooting straight through the hole on the wing.

Toes rearranged for hanging upside-down

Of course, Marge and Studley could and did fly straight through the hole too, so it wouldn't deter chickadees. So the nuthatches have to be on their aggressive, territorial toes. And they are.  I thought the Windowsons were plenty protective of their house. Anyone flying anywhere near it got a good scolding, and no mistake. Nobody likes to be dee-dee-deed at by a feathered golf ball. But the nuthatches are way more ferocious. They're complete assholes about their territory, in fact. They no sooner spot a strange bird in the vicinity than they're diving right at it. They will even chase off hummingbirds, and hummingbirds don't take guff off of nobody. They'll spindle you as soon as look at you. They will poke you a new cloaca. But doggoned if they don't hit the road when the nuthatches come bombing in.

Business end of a male nuthatch

While I was reading up on nuthatches, I still wasn't sure we'd scored any. They were interested, but not committed. And supposedly it was quite rare for them to use a house instead of a tree cavity. But there is at least one advantage. If the hole in the tree is big enough for a nest but the entrance hole is too sprawly for proper security, they'll haul in mud and enshrinken it. So our birdhouse had exactly the right size hole (nuthatch diameter + a quarter inch) and they didn't have to do any masonry. That's a savings right there.

And then we saw it: pine resin coming in! The male was hanging outside the box by one toenail and smooshing resin on the outside of the hole, just like he'd read his own Wikipedia entry. This seemed serious. It's sticky stuff and not something you'd necessarily want on your own personal beak if you were planning to eat, unless you were driven. He'd schmear it around and then go to a nearby twig to try to scrape off the excess.

I was thrilled. Then, over the course of a few weeks, they brought in more and more resin, and the sun melted it so it ran all over the outside of the box, and every time one of them exited they dragged nesting material out, and it dangled from their toes like stuck toilet paper. Pieces of fluff and fur and bark strips are hanging out of the hole, dripping with resin. It looks like hell. The chickadees did everything but neatly line up plastic flamingoes and solar lights on the walkway. These guys were of a completely different school. They've got a broken-down washing machine on the front porch and a dead car in the yard and plastic toys and beer cans. They's slovenly.

There's so much resin on the place that I fear for the hatchlings. I never did witness the chickadee puppies' maiden flights, but if these little guys don't get a really good jump, they're going to end up glued to the side of the house. Nuthatches On A Stick.  It will look like carnival food for hawks. I can't bear to watch.

The Tweedle Of Doom

I am working in my garden when all of a sudden I hear the distinctive, furious tweedling of a pissed-off hummingbird. Or, as I like to call it, a hummingbird.

They're all pissed off. They start out life with just a couple of cells like everyone else, but by the time they've hit the eighteenth cell division or so--at which point we have achieved about two-thirds of a hummingbird--our hero has discovered he's jammed into a pellet the size of a Tic-Tac and there's not going to be a lot to him. He's pissed.

I kind of know how he feels. I remember a soaring, optimistic time when I actually seemed to be growing. The annual pencil marks on the door jamb were getting farther apart for a while, and then the increments began to ratchet down, until finally the last mark just got darker and darker. I had beached myself somewhere just south of 5'4", and I said "oh well" and "that's that" because I am a pragmatic person, but the hummer takes it personally.

He has about two weeks in the egg to think about it, and he thinks if he ever gets out of here, there'll be hell to pay. By the time he has hammered his way out of the egg, he is a model of obstrepery. He takes a good look around, which takes hardly any time at all, and assesses the situation. The situation is that he has hatched with all of the attitude but none of the feathers of an adult hummingbird, and, in his last act of discretion and diplomacy, he bides his time. And then it's all Goodbye, Mama, and Who The Hell Are You People?

He isn't interested in making friends. And he'll be go-to-hell if any of those other pointy-headed bastards are going to dip their diddlers in his flower patch.  Mine, mine, mine. That's the hummingbird motto. And then he cuts loose with the Tweedle Of Doom followed by a sound like the sharpening of the bill against a steel: tweedle tweedle tweedle, snick...snick snick.

He needs the nectar from the flowers, or from the feeder he has yet to thank me for, in order to power his remarkable wings. What he's really after is spider meat. If he's got enough fuel for the wings, he can delete a spider from her web before she has a chance to mount an objection. He'll get what nectar he needs and park himself on a nearby branch to conduct personal hygiene and stand guard. Anyone approaches his stash and he's all over his ass, and off they go like the Blue Angels in an air show. If they had any concept of sharing, they wouldn't need so much damn fuel. Tweedle tweedle tweedle, snick...snick snick.

I wouldn't take him on. I know he's an Anna's Hummingbird, but I'm keeping it to myself. He isn't claiming allegiance to anyone.

Mysterious Ways

Thank you for visiting mylittlescienceblogspot.blogspot.com. It is my hope that by introducing research from my own backyard, I can help demustify the world of science, making it accessible to the general population; and in so doing, to banish, once and for all, scientific illiteracy, and replace it with a mild form of dyslexia.

Faithful readers may recall how I solved the puzzle of the missing possums around here (the raccoons ate them). You're welcome. It's just a simple matter of applying sound scientific principles to the evidence at hand (possums all gone; raccoons very, very fat). I am pleased to now bring you the results of my latest study.

As you may be aware, our local hummingbirds have all but disappeared. There are a few relics around, but the buzzing hordes of last year have gone away. Also gone are the jewel-like little dragonflies, sparkling in iridescent shades of blue and green. In place of both are alarmingly large and, frankly, unattractive dragonflies with feathered heads and military-style wing bars. They are zooming around here like black helicopters. Obviously, the dragonflies ate the hummingbirds.

In addition, it has been noted that the penstemons in the garden did not make it through the winter. These were the hummingbirds' favorite flowers, and they are no longer of any use, so, lo, they perished from the earth.

This is the simplest and most elegant solution that takes into account all the facts. That's what makes it science-y. As a science-ist, I must remind you that it is not true that things do not change, or even evolve. They do evolve, if in so doing they are able to become more of service to humans, who, all the data indicate, are the Crown of Creation. Hummingbirds, for instance, have been zipping around here for years like little chicken nuggets, but they're too hard to catch and fry up. They had to go. What we really needed was some sort of drone aircraft that could drop fury on our mortal enemies, and in another few years, our new dragonflies are going to be right there where we need them. I quote no less a science-ist than St. Paul: "And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men...and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle...and their power was to hurt men five months." Locusts? Dragonflies. Five months? Nine years and counting in Afghanistan. Same general idea, and translations are always a little dicey. What doesn't change is the fact that all of these things came into being in a blast of glory about six thousand years ago. There's already been a book written about that, so I won't go into it here.

Every scientific hypothesis takes the form of the statement "if this is true, then that will happen"--in other words, it is essentially a prophesy, and I'm all about the prophesies. The book previously referred to is full of them, which is why it is regarded as the premier science textbook for the ages. For instance, I give you: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings." And: "...chariots shall be as a whirlwind...Woe unto us! for we are spoiled." All of which, I submit, has come to pass. Ipso factoido, nanner-nanner, and boo-yah. I'm just saithin'.

So check back next post when I explain that climate change is a hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by people who don't want us to have any fun with our chariots. I'll get into the details later, but for now, ask yourselves: is it a coincidence that all the global-warming talk started at the same time the Baby Boom generation hit menopause? I think not.

Weeds vs. Weed

I'm an avid gardener, but I'm not indulgent. I like to introduce my plants to adversity early on so they learn to cope. This is a tough old world, I tell them. Mommy may not always be here to protect you. Sometimes the rain won't fall, sometimes the sun won't shine, sometimes a fleet of cutworms will hack you off at the ankles. Sometimes, I warn darkly, Mommy will be too busy having a few beers and throwing darts over by the tool shed to tend to your every need.

Still, there are always a few specimens I try to keep an eye on: new citizens without the rootage to withstand drought, potted plants that always whine for water or fertilizer. So when I go away for a few weeks, I try to enlist a little help and I try to keep it simple. Just make sure the flowerboxes get water, I explain. You might want to check on this little guy over here, I point out. He's a recent transplant. But generally I expect to entertain a few losses.

I needn't have fretted. In the two weeks since we'd been gone, the topiary frog looked ready to leap. The corn's ears met the elephant's eye. The cherry tomatoes lit out for the territories, and the heirlooms sent a posse out after them. The strawberries were studying a plat for a new development and negotiating with the diascia for open space. Peppers popped. Zauschneria split up into gangs and roughed up the other ground covers.

The squash, showing deference to the seniority of the tomatoes on the east side, galloped to the west and made for a patch of marigolds. The toad lilies were hoppy. Buzz was building for the Shakespeare Festival on the north side, with the nicotiana and datura duking it out for the part of Oberon, King of the Fairies. The little eyringium, which had knocked the Puck audition out of the park, observed impassively. Encouraged, the new pomegranate got together with a few reticent players in the aster family and set up a chapter of Toastmasters International, gaining confidence with every performance.

The phlox stood up and cheered as the helianthums busted out into a chorus of Didn't It Rain, Oh My Lord, Didn't It Rain. The caryopteris shot up two feet to see what the commotion was. The gloriosa daisy shot up three, to see over the caryopteris. The scrub jays, who had started a book group, were unperturbed. As is the case in most book groups, nothing much got read; they were basically in it for the blueberry nosh.

The hummingbirds did one round each on the fuchsias and then had to go lie down for a while; I don't know where the sofa, barely visible under the blue hosta, came from. The star jasmine not only made it to the bottom rung of the new trellis, but went condo on a nearby rogue asparagus plant. The lemon cucumber exhausted its vertical possibilities and shot out over the zinnias. The hibiscus is treating it as a hostage situation.

The only plant that looks to be a little worse for wear is a handsome but dissolute penstemon, which had always been known to drink too much, given the opportunity, and was found staggering over the ground. It will probably recover, given the chance to dry out, and now that I'm back in charge, that's a chance it's likely to get.

As for the weeds, half appeared to have been dispatched and the rest terrified. A particularly tenacious colony of oxalis between the stepping-stones had been completely rooted out, possibly with a spoon and tweezers, and all the thistle seeds have blown away, bearing tales of a holocaust.

So this is what a garden looks like when it gets every little thing it wants. All it ever needed was to be left for a few weeks in the custody of a nice woman with a lot of time on her hands. And a pretty good stash of pot.