Category Archives: Nature

Thoughts on thinking, or, what have we done to ourselves by over-emphasizing abstract thought?

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I was already mulling this topic when, this morning, a video of a deer popped up on my twitter feed.

The video shows a buck maneuver his rack so he can get under a gate.

Here’s four screen grabs so you can see how he did it.

approaches gate
lowers head to get left-side antlers under
twists head to get right-side antlers under
done

It’s striking, isn’t it?

But to my eye, this maneuver also demonstrates something profound about reality and about how we think.

It embodies a type of thinking.

Literally.

We think with our bodies.

Notice how we respond to this video of the deer by saying “clever deer” or “smart animal.” That’s a tell. We recognize that what we’re seeing is a kind of thought, a kind of intelligence.

The deer has “figured something out.” It’s “solved a problem.”

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Time to post about bugs

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Western Short-Horned Walkingstick (Parabacillus hesperus). Southern Calfornia.

On the screen: a Western Short-Horned Walkingstick (Parabacillus hesperus). Southern Calfornia.

Hi all,

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past several months about “bugs.”

Two reasons my brain got churning on this.

First: an essay about bugs in the book Animal Presences by the late Jungian psychologist James Hillman.

Dreams about creepy crawly things are pretty universal. I’ve long been puzzled by mine; lumping them all into the category of “another dream about something that’s bugging me” seems a bit too facile and non-granular to be particularly insightful. Lots of things bug me. So what?

So I’ve been mulling a lot on the question: what is it about bugs that bugs me so much?

That bug people so much?

Second: the news stories hitting the Interwebs lately about how scientists are getting pretty worried about bugs.

We may be witnessing a global insect extinction event.

Here’s an example, published on January 15 in The Guardian.

Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished.

If true, that is some pretty bad news.

I’m doing some serious writing on this topic, but in the meantime I’m planning a series of (somewhat) lighter blog posts about some of the “bugs” I’ve seen and photographed in recent years.

Inaugural entry: a Western Short-Horned Walkingstick (Parabacillus hesperus).

Here’s a bit of background about the species.

Walkingsticks in general are pretty mind-blowing little critters. They have their own Order (Phasmatodea); there are at least 3000 different species; they are found on every continent except Antarctica.

What is cool about them is how they’ve taken the art of camouflage to such an extraordinary level. Body shape level: they’re shaped to look like twigs.

They hide by blending into the background. By almost becoming the background.

There’s no point in reproducing the Wiki I just linked, treasure trove of Walkingstick factoids, so let me just add a couple of my own thoughts so you can see where I’m going with this whole “bug” thing.

Insects have been around for a very long time–nearly half a billion years. Walkingsticks date to at least the Mesozoic (252-66m years ago).

Humans have been here an eye blink compared to insects.

Now I am by no means a people-hater. Nor do I even begin to pretend that I have any answers about how we’re supposed to share this planet with the critters that were here first, given how biologically successful we are (or have been so far). It’s complicated. (Understatement, of course. Even when we try to do something right, like rake up plastic garbage floating in the ocean, we end up causing extraordinary harm, possibly. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh.)

But I can suggest a humble starting point:

Pause for a minute. Sit with the feelings that lurk below our feelings about animals–including the ones, like Walkingsticks, that are utterly alien to us, that tend to trigger (hahahahaha) spontaneous feelings of revulsion.

Hillman loved to look at the etymology of words when he was sitting with dream images.

So how fitting that the insect subject of my inaugural post on bugs, the Walkingstick, bears the name of the tool we humans use to help steady us and strengthen us when we embark on our journeys.

We need walking sticks to help us make our way — particularly over rough terrain. And it seems very much like we’re about to enter a bit of rough terrain …

Maybe our grandfather, the insect Walkingstick, visits us for a reason …

Longhorn beetle

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Only I’m not sure which one. Anybody know?

long horned beetle

Definitely Cerambycidae, based on the body shape, showiness, length of the antennae, etc., but this particular one’s not in my copy of Petersen’s field guide to NA insects, and I can’t find a pic of it on the ‘net, either . . .

long horned beetle2

Pileated Woodpecker in my backyard

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pileated-woodpecker4Okay, excuse me while I flip out — but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen one of these guys — then this afternoon, didn’t I walk out my back door and see a Pileated Woodpecker working the bark of a tree, right here in the ‘burbs!

If you’ve never seen one — you know right away it’s a Pileated because they’re BIG. Crow size.  Of course, if you can get a close enough look you will also see the “woody woodpecker” red crest like shows up in this pic.

pileated-woodpecker3

I wish my pics had come out clearer. I actually got quite close, but he was on the shady side of the tree so the clarity isn’t the best . . .

For most of the time I watched him, he was working one particular crack in the tree. This pic shows how they use their tails to brace themselves.  He’s twisted his head around to try to work something out from under the bark. Late lunch :-)

Here’s one more that I didn’t crop as much so you can see more what he looked like when I first noticed him.

pileated-woodpecker2Pileated Woodpeckers need a habitat with mature forest and lots of deadwood. Must be there’s enough of the stuff he likes in Brighton . . . I sure hope so, would love to see this fellow again sometime!

Eye-spotted Ladybug

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I haven’t found one of these since I was a kid . . .

Isn’t it gorgeous?

Eye-spotted Ladybug

Most of the ladybugs we see anymore are non-native species that were imported by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in the 70s to control agricultural pests.

Sounded like a good idea at the time, but they’ve driven out many of our native species.

The law of unintended consequences.

And look what else I found: Cornell University is asking kids to find and photograph native ladybugs and submit the photos with a little supporting data (date and time seen, location, habitat).

To be able to help the nine spotted ladybug and other ladybug species scientists need to have detailed information on which species are still out there and how many individuals are around. Entomologists at Cornell can identify the different species but there are too few of us to sample in enough places to find the really rare ones. We need you to be our legs, hands and eyes. If you could look for ladybugs and send us pictures of them on Email we can start to gather the information we need. We are very interested in the rare species but any pictures will help us. This is the ultimate summer science project for kids and adults! You can learn, have fun and help save these important species.

The website tells about how a couple of kids found a nine-spotted ladybug in Virginia in 2006 — the first sighting of this species in the Eastern U.S. in 14 years. Isn’t that cool?

And what a great environmental science-based summer activity!