Critters On My Frontier

Since moving to my small Frontier (acre in the suburban countryside), I have been able to host several critters.

There were already bluebird houses here.  Seven bluebirds auspiciously flew over the house when I first visited in the winter.  Sadly, there have been few bluebird since then.  Perhaps they are afraid of the outdoor cat, although I have never seen the outdoor cat hunt.  He much prefers to instead lounge all day, visit with his cat friends, and receive cat food.  

Anyway, some other birds moved in this spring, including a lovely swallow couple.  They are always nice to watch and can be very approachable when they are not nesting.  When they are nesting, they are territorial and engage in scary bluff attacks on the people who are trying to mow the lawn.

My second attempt to attract birds was purchasing a screech owl house. The house is cedar.  It faces East.  It is lined with cedar chips.  An owl has not yet moved there.  European Starlings nested in the house earlier this year.  I understand another owl nesting window of time is now here, so fingers crossed on attracting an owl.  Here is a

 selfie picture with the owl house.  I climbed the tree to install it.

Then, there are the cats.  I understand  that they are non-native bird eaters, but I am also a non-native bird eater, as are many of us.  Here is Dandelion inside and feral Bucher outside.  Bucher was a member of a feral cat colony, but he joined my cats and me and became very attached to us at the last place where we lived.  He stopped using the feral colony's resources in favor of sitting in my yard all day and night.  I was able to trap and move him here with permission and help from the feral cat colony's manager. Although he has some mannerisms of a pet, like his goofy pose shown below, he is very skittish and avoids direct contact.

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My latest venture is housing mason bees.  Several mason bees visited the flowers here in the spring and summer.  I read that hosting these native bees is now a "thing."  It is good to help our declining pollinators.  Next spring, I would like to plant a small pollinators garden for the pollinators.  A few companies also now sell mason bee houses, and the bees themselves!  I went with cute and inexpensive.  

I am not sure about this, though.  What if something goes wrong and instead of helping out the mason bees, I end up hurting them?   For example, I read not to use bamboo tubing because it will degrade.  Maybe the bees here are doing just fine without their new little house.  One thing that appealed to me about the mason bees is that they are solitary nesters.  Every female mason bee is queen of her own tube.  They are also said to be non-aggressive. The mason bees also need mud for their nests.  I don't mulch so they may be picking up mud from the flowerbed.

By the way, companies are also selling leafcutter bees, which can also be non-aggressive and are native, but bringing in leafcutter bees would be an ugly thing to do to the neighborhood.

I would like a bat house although I am uncertain how the neighbors would feel about a bat colony.  They were not too thrilled about the skunks that were living  under my enclosed  porch.

Free Nature Books for Kids

Kelloggs and Scholastic are teaming up to give away books for kids.  The promotion is done by signing up for their Kellogg's Family Share Program and entering codes from specially marked boxes of products.  Information is here: http://www.scholastic.com/kelloggs/
It says you can enter up to 30 codes.

It looks like at least three of the books from which people may select are nature books for young readers!  The first listed book appears to be a sensational one about deadly animals, but there is one on animal camouflage and what looks to be a nice story about a bat.

I ordered the one on animal camouflage to give to a charity that my mother works with that provides supplies for disadvantaged families.  Next on my wish list is the bat book.

Signing up for the promotions program was not all that bad.  My preference is for locally sourced foods, but there were some Kelloggs products with codes in the pantry.  I am 100 points away from being able to cash out to plant a tree through Treecycler.

Corporations working with charities is A-OK in my book.

Book Review and Little Outing

I finished neurologist Oliver Sacks' book, Hallucinations. See it here at Amazon.  It was an interesting and surprisingly quick read.  Sacks seems kind, very intelligent, and patient-centered. He also proves false the commonly held idea that having a hallucination means that a person is psychotic, although psychotic people do also hallucinate.  Apparently people hallucinate fairly readily under several circumstances that distort perception.  Dr. Sacks writes about people who hallucinate due to blindness, deafness, certain diseases, intoxication, migraines, grief, sensory deprivation, mortal danger, and isolation.

The chapter in which Sacks recalls hallucinations that he had after trying various mind altering substances was especially interesting.  I couldn't tell if Sacks was bragging about his adventures opening the doors of perception or if he was admitting a youthful addiction, or both.

The chapter on grief hallucinations was sad.  I have heard of people who had such experiences of seeing, hearing or smelling lost loved ones.  Some people thought they were grief induced mental tricks and others thought they were visitations from the spirit world.  What is kind of creepy to me, but not addressed in the book, is that some people have apparently experienced these grief hallucinations before they knew of their loss.

Sacks briefly wrote about the Third Man Factor.  I finished another book specifically about it this summer. Amazon info.  That is when a presence, usually helpful, appears to a person who is isolated and/or in deep trouble.  The Third Man is especially associated with mountain climbers, those working in the Arctic, astronauts, and people sailing alone on the ocean.

Sacks tells all kinds of stories. Some are sad and some are humorous or inspiring. I liked the sweet one about the woman who had a comforting visit from her cat that died the previous day.

You may know of the author as the doctor from "Awakenings."




Also, I visited my favorite agritourism destination over the weekend.  It is White Oak Lavender Farm in Harrisonburg, VA.  It is a beautiful place and the lavender is so relaxing.  My favorite part is their friendly farm animals.  Here are some pictures I made there.

I like this one because it looks like the one hen is saying, "That's some awesome highlighting on your feathers there, girlfriend!"

The Post of Human Origins

PBS aired two episodes of the amazing First Peoples program last night.  These were episodes about the first peoples of America and Africa.  How very interesting!  I was hoping for some good archaic humans information, and PBS did not disappoint. There were also theories of modern human migration that turned on their heads the old ones that I had been taught.

One very interesting theme of both episodes was that the first peoples who settled America and Africa did not come out of solely one gene pool, such as in a Garden of Eden theory.  They told how remains have been found of people in the Americas who were dated as being here before the previously supposed first people who crossed the famous Bering Straight Land Bridge and who  hunted the great mammoths. This means there must have been at least one different route of human migration into the Americas other than the Land Bridge that we all learned about in elementary school? Interestingly, one of these ancients has been linked genetically to modern Native Americans. That is fascinating.

When we got to the Africa episode, they told of archaic humans!  These were the humans who lived before and with us, the modern humans.  There was a very cool story about an African-American family with an enslaved ancestor who may have been carrying DNA from an archaic human group in Africa.  The family learned this after doing some commercial DNA ancestry testing.

I am also interested in archaic humans due to DNA ancestry testing.  After many years of speculation of Asian or Native American genes in my mother's family, I forked over some money to  a company to test my genetic makeup and report for certain what is there.  Well, the results came back very heavily Southwest Virginia mountaineer by way of England, Ireland, Normandy and Germany.  That is what I had expected.  There was a tiny amount of Subsaharian Africian DNA, which also did not surprise me.  What did surprise me was a little Finnish ancestry.  Where did that come from?  Vikings?  And, the supposed Asian or Native American DNA?  Only teeny amounts showed up, like .001 percent.

The big surprise is that the company said I carry 3.2 percent Neanderthal genome DNA. Apparently this is high normal for a modern human of European ancestry.  Now I am a big Neanderthal fan and sometimes like to type like a Neanderthal, ugh. :)

Mom, whose maternal halogroup we now know, and I visited the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum this spring. We saw casts of Lucy and the hobbit and facial reconstruction of archaic humans.  When there was an opportunity for a photo shoot that merged my features with the Neanderthal reconstruction, I did it, with this result.  I think you could only be a male Neanderthal.

Thanks, Smithsonian!

Spider web Photos

Here are some spider webs early this morning, all wet from last night's rain.  Those dewy spider webs reminded me of autumn, but today was hot and humid and certainly did not feel like autumn.

I also like how the morning light was captured in the first two photographs.

A side note:

I love to drink bottled teas with natural ingredients and am currently having McCutcheon's Real Brewed Peach Iced Tea.  It is from Frederick, Maryland.

Blog is back with a post that is no bull!

I have decided to resurrect the nature blog. There are certainly many fascinating things happening in nature and science these days!  This post will not be about American chestnuts as promised in the last entry, however.  Perhaps later we will have a chestnut post. Get it, a chestnut post?! 
Let's move on.

Some of the biggest nature news lately is the upcoming papal encyclical on climate change.  This made me ask, what is an encyclical and how is it different from the papal bulls that we heard about in history class.

Well, I looked it up and an encyclical is a circulating letter written by the pope to bishops, archbishops, etc. Pope Francis said that this letter will be to all good people of the world though in addition to the clergy.  Sometimes an encyclical is written to end a theological debate.

When talking about older documents, a bull is a somewhat nonspecific term for a document from the pope. These were first written on round metal plates that reminded people of boiling bubbles.  Later, they had affixed lead seals.  Modern papal bulls may or may not have the metal seals. Modern papal bulls are the most formal documents currently issued by the Vatican.

It will be interesting to hear what Pope Francis says tomorrow.  He often seems to model and teach Christlike behavior.  

In other news, I am reading two science/ nature books this summer and hope to report here on them.  One is on sharks!

PS- I don't know how to make that white background above go away.  Sorry.