My dad has posted his skunk story now.
Category Archives: Nature
And — Skunk Tracks!
The snow is wet, and my skunk ducked under the deck on his way across my property which muddied his feet a bit — perfect for leaving several sets of pretty clear tracks.
Along with the size of the tracks (1.5-2 inch long prints) one way to tell a skunk track is that the claws on the front feet are markedly longer. (They use them to dig for food–that’s how they tear up peoples’ lawns if they have grubs.) Skunks are also “pacers;” that refers to their gait and the way they place their feet. Pacers leave two rows of tracks, and each row has alternating front and back foot prints.
Usually you can see five toes on both the front and back feet of skunk tracks, but in some cases you can’t. In the tracks in this photo, only four toes show on the back foot print.
Here’s a great online resource for identifying animal tracks, and here’s another.
Skunk!
I happened to look up from my desk a few minutes ago and saw a skunk heading across the street into my lawn!
I grabbed my camera and dashed out the front door. It had snowed last night, so I was able to tell from his tracks where he had headed — up my driveway. I caught up with him next to my garage — I yelped at him, and he whirled around and lifted his tail :-)
I repeated that several times, grabbing shots. Unfortunately, none was a killer pic, but here’s the best of the lot.
Isn’t he cute????
Somewhat less “romantic,” per se
I’ll let blogger Pharyngula explain this himself:
All across the world, people are wondering what the etiquette is if they should find themselves in a romantic situation with an amorous cephalopod, and it is my duty to provide the answers.
The protagonist of my new novel in progress has a degree in biology. And to think I was wondering if my setup would lend itself to comedy . . .
Teleportation oh my
At SignandSight.com, an interview with Anton Zeilinger, Viennese physician, who has teleported light particles and, occasionally, larger atoms.
He says that in a thousand years or so we might be able to teleport larger objects, like coffee cups or, presumably, Rolling Stones tickets. We’re a long way from teleporting a human being, however, for several reasons. One is that a human represents such a vast amount of information. Says Zeilinger:
The atoms in a human being are the equivalent to the information mass of about a thousand billion billion billion bits. Even with today’s top technology, this means it would take about 30 billion years to transfer this mass of data.
Makes you feel kind of special, doesn’t it?
A Valentine’s Day metaphor
We go together like aphids and organic lettuce . . .
[tags] Valentine’s Day [/tags]
Yellow Stuff
Rochestarians are understandably uneasy. What’s happened to winter? Our average annual snowfall is 92.3 inches. So far this season, we’re up to ten: two inches of snow in January, three inches in December, and five in November.
My daughter is particularly bummed — she wants snow, and is fervently hoping the Groundhog sees his shadow on Thursday.
I’m with her on this one, albeit for different reasons. Drop the other shoe, Mother Nature, and get it over with!
[tags] annual snowfall, Rochester weather [/tags]
It’s an hawk, it’s an owl . . .
No, it’s a Northern Hawk Owl, and Junk Store Cowgirl trucked her family out today to look at it.
This species of owl, she writes, isn’t supposed to be found this far south, so it’s generating a bit of excitement in the local birding community. It’s also stirring up sentiments of a different kind:
In a bid to keep the owl around, some birders have been releasing pet store mice into the fields near where the owl’s been spotted. So I knew we were in the right area when I spotted a sign saying, “Do not release live mice on my land.”
LOL
Here is a site with some info on this owl. It’s a pretty distinctive-looking bird. I can see why people are excited.
How to build an Igloo
I guess this would work! It’s in the January 2006 issue of the Western and Central New York Outdoors newsletter.
I’m having visions of myself surrounded by crumbling snow blocks. But if you give it a try, do stop back and let me know how it goes!
(There’s also an article on trails in Penfield.)
[tags] how to build an igloo [/tags]
Mind meld
A few days ago, I read about some research that suggests that men’s behavior can be affected by hormonal changes in a woman’s body.
So, okay. Appropriating another person’s bio-active chemicals has an effect on one’s own biochemistry.
But get a load of this: apparently, you don’t even need to get close up and personal to fall under someone’s spell.
In a contribution to a round-up of “dangerous ideas” at The Edge, Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist and director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at UCLA, describes a phenomenon called “mirror neurons.”
Mirror neurons are cells located in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain relevant to the planning, selection and execution of actions . . . [They] fire when we observe somebody else performing the same action. The behavior of these cells seems to suggest that the observer is looking at her/his own actions reflected by a mirror, while watching somebody else’s actions. My group has also shown in several studies that human mirror neuron areas are critical to imitation. There is also evidence that the activation of this neural system is fairly automatic, thus suggesting that it may by-pass conscious mediation.
I interpret this as follows. You see someone do something, like throw a frisbee. Within your own brain, a bunch of neurons fire — no surprise there. The surprise is that the “read out” of those neurons is not “other guy throwing frisbee” — it’s I am throwing a frisbee.
Iacoboni believes this phenomenon has unhappy implications for people who imbibe violence through the media.
I’ll leave that last bit to him. What I’m wondering is what role mirror neurons play in bonding. I’m thinking, for instance, of the ritual dances of bonded pairs of birds, and human dancing, and military exercises based on people synchronizing their actions.
And to step off even further into the wild blue yonder: does this suggest that multiple brains can link up and synchronize into what is, for all intents and purposes, a larger “brain” — like parallel processing CPUs?
Have you ever seen a flock of hundreds of blackbirds pivot simultaneously mid-flight? They look like they are a single organism, like they are operating under the control of a single brain.
Maybe they are.
And (wilder! bluer!) is it also possible Iacobani has discovered the biological basis for the “one mind” long postulated by mystics?
(More on Iacobani’s work and its implications for empathy here and here.)
