Cade's Horse

I don't remember this horse's name. This is from two years ago, so Cade is much bigger now.

We went down to the pasture and the horse, of course, wanted the grass that was on the other side of the fence, not what he could easily get to on his side of the fence.

Sometimes the grass is greener, and the grass on our side of the fence was tall and lush, so we tore some up and fed the horse across the fence.

Then Cade posed for this picture, which we call the money shot.

Funny Wrens

For some reason, our wrens really like to make their nests on top of spotlights.

This nest is in our front courtyard, and there is always a big one on the spotlight in the front of the barn.

You can tell that they like to use mud and moss to make the nests. When I leave the light on in the barn for too long, it starts to cook the nest, which is not good. So far, I've turned it off in time, but one of these days, the nest is going to catch on fire!

Tree Frogs

You think of frogs as something that lives in a pond, but sometimes they live in trees and on plants, or in this case, on the side of a house.

We used to have a friendly tree frog that lived on the side of the house. He would come out at night and work his way back and forth over the sliding glass door.

At night, with the inside light on, the insects would swarm across the outside of the glass. The frog figured out that all he needed for a quick meal was to go to the bug light bar and walk back and forth, filling up his little frog belly.

The tree frogs made a distintive noise. They were loud. I think they may have been able to change color, too. Sometimes they were brown and other times they were green, but sometimes they were gray.

We don't see the frogs as much anymore, but they are welcome to come back and clean the bugs off the window any time they want!

The lost Atomic Ball

Cuppy had a favorite toy, a green Atomic Ball.

It was old and nasty and cut up, but she loved to bat it around and chase it. Think of a kid with an old beat up teddy bear, and you've got an idea of what Cuppy thought of her Atomic Ball.

She would bat it under the couch or another piece of furniture and it would be too far under for her to get.

So she learned to talk.

Andrea noticed that she started coming over to me, and I figured out that she was looking for her ball and got a flashlight and a long stick and helped her get it. What Andrea noticed was that Cuppy was talking to me to get me to help her. She would answer back and meowed in strange and interesting ways, so I'm thinking she was trying to explain where the ball was and how urgent it was for me to get it.

After retrieving the ball from under the furniture, Cuppy played fetch with it for a while, like a little dog. Then she got tired of running around and sat with the ball between her legs, content.

We lost track of the ball a while back, and I'm still wondering what happened to it. No doubt we'll find it one day when we move furniture around or something. Too bad, I'd like to find it when Cuppy still remembers her little friend.

Bigfoot

You've probably heard the term Bigfoot, Yeti, or Sasquatch. You may not have heard of Momo (short for Missouri Monster) or Yowie (what Australian's call him) or Chiye-tanka (the Lakota version).

Is it an ape? A primitive man? An ape-man? Is it real or a hoax? Who knows? All that is known for sure is that people are scared of it.

One of those people was Kyle. When Kyle was little and got too hyper, his dad got tired and fed up with it. I remember how he tried to stop the madness one night with his twist on the Yeti tales.

He told Kyle that Sasquatch was in the woods behind the house and he got really angry and wanted to attack when he heard children making too much noise.

The next time Kyle made too much noise, Steve knocked on the wall next to his chair and make a growling noise. "What's that? It must be the Yeti!" I remember Kyle's eyes would go wide and he would sit very close to me, very quietly for a while. Then the fear would wear off, the sound would come back and the next round of fear had to be established.

It was pretty funny, and since Kyle was too smart to be fooled by this story for long, there was no lasting harm done. Or was there? Maybe Kyle still has nightmares about the Yeti dragging him off into the woods at night!

Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess Shale

I read a great book a few years ago called A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It had a section about the Burgess Shale.

Back in 1909, the Burgess Shale deposits were uncovered in the Canadian Rockies. Many interesting fossils were found and the discoveries were pretty much ignored for about 70 years.

Then some university scientists started looking over the fossils trying to classify them and made some fascinating finds.

There were hundreds of animals with no modern day descendents. These creatures all evolved around 540 million years ago, very suddenly, in an era now known as the Cambrian Explosion.

It was as if Mother Nature decided to make one of everything, no matter how improbable. There were animals with arms hanging off their nose to feed themselves, big spiny worms that looked like someone had strung together a bag of jacks, jack in the box worms, and spiny sponges. The world has seen nothing like this since, yet all this diversity happened so suddenly, that scientists are baffled that evolution could run at this speed.

The Burgess Shale is still being explored today and still adding new types of animals to our lists each year.

Dragonriders of Pern

The Dragon.

Here's another fictional animal that has captured the imagination. While the dragon was a myth for many years, stretching back to before the times of knights, you have to wonder where the myth originated.

Men and dinosaurs were not alive at the same time, but there was a dinosaur that looked a lot like a dragon, the Pterodactyl (or "winged lizard"). Did ancient man see unearthed fossils of these animals? The myth of the dragon grew up independently in Chinese and Native American cultures as well as in Europe. How does that happen if the animal is purely fictional?

Another one of my favorite series of books was the Dragonriders of Pern. Pern was a planet colonized by man and then forgotten. Through a series of disasters, the people lost their ability to go out into space and much of their history and technology. They eventually even forgot that they did not come from Pern originally.

Before all technology was lost, they found the dragons and made friends with them. The dragons were intelligent and telepathic, and if a human was present when the dragon hatched, they would be telepathically linked throughout their lives. The men rode on the backs of their dragons, flying whereever they wanted. The dragons also had a trick where they could teleport themselves to anywhere they had been or seen before. If they could visualize it, they could go between to that place in the blink of an eye.

To bad it's all just fantasy. I used to want to fly around on the back of my own dragon.

Sandworms of Dune

I usually talk about real animals, and I don't think I've mentioned any fictional animals yet.

I mentioned the science fiction book Dune in my last story below, the one about dragonflies. This series had a planet with a strange and mysterious creature, the sandworm.

They were large enough to swallow a spacecraft or large aircraft whole.

The planet was all desert, and the worms lived under the sand and attacked anything that moved on the sand with a regular pattern.

The desert nomads in the story, the Fremen, learned how to ride the worms. They put a thumper into the sand, and its steady beat drew the worm in, while they stood nearby and jumped on the worm's back with the help of long barbed hooks. They could then ride the worm around the desert.

These Fremen were fierce warriors and each carried a knife made from the milky white tooth of a sandworm. They worshipped the worms as Shai Halud, which was a strange combination of a god and a devil.

I started reading the Dune series when I was around 11 or 12, I think. My dad read it, and I picked it up from him at some point. It was the first big thick book I ever read, and it is one of my favorites to this day.

Ornithopter or Dragonfly

Dragonflies eat mosquitos. That alone would be enough reason to like them.

They are colorful and fly in an interesting way and have those huge eyes, so the are really fun to see up close, if you can.

But there are some really cool facts about dragonflies that you may not know. They are the fastest insect, able to fly almost 40 miles per hour. The can fly in any direction, flying backwards almost as fast as they fly forwards. They have excellent eyesight, which is easy to believe when you have 30,000 lenses in your compound eyes. They are ancient. They were alive in the Palezoic era, 300 million years ago, and used to be enormous. Fossilized dragonflies sometimes have wingspans of almost 3'.

Around the same time that Columbus discovered America, Leonardo da Vinci had an idea for a flying machine based on the dragonfly. He called it the ornithopter. It was not built, we had to wait another 400 years for manned flight, but many say that the idea of a flying machine based on a dragonfly is possible.

One of my favorite science fiction books, Dune, used jet powered ornithopters as the way people flew, rather than airplanes as we know them.

So next time you go fishing or find yourself out near a pond, keep your eyes out for our ancient friend, the dragonfly.

Slimy Snails

We have snails.

Snails are cool. I'm not sure where there come from or where they hang out, but they don't seem to be in a big hurry or worried about anything when you see them.

Most land snails have the swirl on the right side of their body according to Wikipedia. I never noticed that before. It also says that their shells grow logorithmically, then when they stop growing the snails have reached the age where they mate.

The really cool thing are the eyes, which are on the end of stalks. Ever see them swivelling around, checking things out?

I wonder what we look like to them when we lean over, looming over them?

Spider Man

I'll bet most people don't realize that I have a Spider Man in my family.

The story of Spider Man is that the guy was just an ordinary guy until he was bit by a radioactive spider, which gave him many of the powers of a spider, like being able to pose really cool in your PJs.

This little spider guy may have an addition to his spidey group. His daddy was bit by a nasty spider, too. Let's see what kind of superpowers he gets from that!

Bringing back the benevolent Bee

Honey bees are cool.

They will go to any flower there is, they have no favorites. They are responsible for pollinating the majority of plants and crops in our country. That means that plants need bees to make seeds.

The bees are in trouble.

First it was the vampire mite that attacked them in the late 90's. These little mites infested bee hives and killed 90% of the bees in just a few years.

Now it's something else and scientists have no idea what the problem is. The hives are just empty. No dead bees, no wrecked hive, just no more bees. Some believe it must be insecticides, others think it is a virus that messes up the bees direction. They get lost and can't find their way home.

Honey bees didn't start out here in America, they were brought over from Europe. There are other insects that also pollinate flowers, from bumblebees and carpenter bees to butterflies and other flies, many insects like to drink the nectar from flowers which pollinates the plants.

But it's hard not to love the pretty little honeybee and their fascinating hives full of honey.

When I was young, there were these roadside restaurants and stores, some called Nickerson Farms, and others called Stuckys. Some of them had bee hives. They put a little hole in the outer wall, and built this big glass or plastic chamber in the wall. You went into the store and walked up to the hive and you could see the bees making honey and tending their larvae behind the glass. There were pictures telling you about the bees and asking you if you could spot the queen.

I'd like to see something like that again.

Snake Eggs

I'll add the picture later...

I have a large compost heap. This year, I have 3 actually, but there is one that is moist and well aged, and a favorite place for snakes to lay their eggs.

I turned over the compost heap last weekend and found some snake eggs again. I did this a long time ago, breaking one of the eggs open with the tiller, so I know what they look like. I quickly reburied all the eggs but two. I'm thinking of letting them hatch to see what the babies look like. They'll probably need a supply of crickets once they hatch.

They're not all cuddly and cute like puppies, but who else can say they hatched their own snakes?

Missouri Eagle

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! No.... It's a plane! Well, not really....

It's... it's.... it's an ultralight!

He may not be superman, but this airborne Missouri native sure makes a patriotic scene, doesn't he? I wonder if he's wearing a cape?

Missouri Dinosaurs

Powell Gardens has a display of local dinosaurs this summer. Placed throughout the garden are very realistic statues of dinosaurs whose fossils have been found around here. At one time they would have roamed the landscape right in our neighborhood.

This one looks like T-Rex, but it was much smaller. We'll have to go out and visit again. It was very fun.

Butterfly Gardens

This is what you can see when you go to Powell Gardens this summer and hang out in the water garden.

Do you know what kind of butterfly this is? Can you see the long tongue of the butterfly getting a drink out of the flower?

Some butterflies go all the way to Mexico in the winter. Sometimes we see the caterpillars that will later turn into butterflies. They like all kinds of flowers, but the Monarch butterfly likes milkweed the best.

Children of the Corn

Here's my brother and his family loading up sweet corn out near Lexington. This is rich Missouri River bottom land and each year they plant the corn and sell it in town. It's hot sweaty work, but well worth it.

Cole wants a flat screen TV in his bedroom with his share of the profits!

Ottawa Longhorns

These two live just off of I-35 near the north Ottawa exit. The family that owns them has two little plastic cows on their mailbox that look just like them.

I saw them originally last week when I was driving home. Today we went back to get a picture of them.

This year, they were running the bulls at Pamplona Spain, like they do every year. People get in the streets and they release these big bulls with horns. The people run away from the bulls, and later the bulls are featured in a bullfight. Two people were seriously injured this year, and many more were hurt when a bull got confused and ran down an alley.

The Spanish bulls don't have horns this long. These guys could probably do a lot more damage that the Spanish bulls.

Crested Oropendolas

When I was in the Army, we went to Costa Rica to build a road with some bridges in it for some people in a remote village.

The road went through a very pretty area, near a giant banana grove, through thick jungle and past some very poor villages.

One guy marked where the road would go by tying colored ribbons on the trees, bushes or sticks. He was a real jerk. Lieutenant Ron Condon was his name. The guy was a real serious idiot. It was like he studied stupid at school, or something.

In the middle of this route where we were going to build the road was a village with an area they had cleared out of the jungle. This was their town square and soccer field. Near the field was a huge tree. This tree was shaped like a giant umbrella or light bulb. It had a trunk too wide for me to hug, it went straigt up with no limbs for about 80 feet, and then it had this huge canopy, probably 100' across. The best thing about this tree was that it was home to hundreds of birds. The birds weaved nests that hung from under limbs like teardrops made of sticks and twigs. The birds flew into and out of the nests and sang a musical tune that sounded like a flute. They were beautiful, and you could stand under the tree and watch for a long time without getting tired of it.

Lieutenant Condon tied a big ribbon around the tree. He wanted the bulldozers to knock it over. The bulldozers were due the next day when I found it. I untied the ribbon and walked over about 30' and tied it around a bush. There was no way I was going to let them knock this tree down. The next day the road went past the tree and didn't touch it.

I looked it up and found out that the bird is called the Crested Oropendolas. I wonder if their colony is still there?

Gardener Spider

When I was a little kid, we had some morning glories growing on the fence in our back yard. Morning Glories are these big viney plants that like to climb over things like fences and make a big bushy mass. The flowers are big and pretty. I seem to remember that the one we had put out light blue flowers.

There was a huge spider web in the morning glory, which was shown to us by my father. The spider was a Gardener Spider. This spider is big and black with yellow spots on it. It makes a web with a big white zig zag in the middle of it.

Dad wanted to show us that spiders eat insects, so he caught a grasshopper in the yard and brought it over to the web. He put the grasshopper in the web, and we all watched as the gardener spider ran over and wrapped up the grasshopper and bit it to stun it. Then it really wrapped the grasshopper up in the spider silk, and later, it went over and sucked all the blood out of the grasshopper.

It was cool. We treated the Gardener Spider like it was a pet, feeding it regularly and never getting sick of watching it catch the bugs. I still like spiders to this day, and the Gardener Spider is my favorite. If I find one, I always catch a grasshopper for it and give it a snack.

Evolutionary Theory

I love to listen to elks bugling. The males call to each other in the fall, when they are competing for a female elk, hoping to have an elk family with lots of little elk-ettes running around, asking for the keys to the ranger cabin.

I remember being near the Estes Park entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and listening to several bull elks bugling back and forth. That strange eerie sound has to be heard to be appreciated. It has these funny whistling trailers that sound otherworldly.

I heard an interesting story about genetics and evolution. They are using genetics studies to try to find out what animals are closely related, according to their genes. One scientist wanted to know what animal was closely related to the whale, and they found that the elk was one of the closest matches. Evolution says that animals started in the ocean and learned to come out of the sea and breath air through lungs, and eventually mammals came about. Whales and dolphins are mammals. They look like a fish, right? But they breath air and they are classified as mammals. So evolution says that some land animal, a mammal that walked, at some point went back into the water and eventually became a whale.

Then I remembered that whales sing. They makes these noises that you can hear underwater. In fact, one species of whale makes the loudest noise that any animal can make. They say you can hear these whalesongs from over 500 miles away.

If you've ever heard whale song and elk bugling, you will realize that they sound very similar. So there must be something to the fact that they are closely related.

Barred Owl

I was in my bedroom about 15 years ago. The window was open and I was drifting off to sleep. Suddenly, there was a crazy noise outside.

I was wide awake, listening to the commotion. Monkeys?! How can that be. "Ook ook ook, awk awk awk, ook ook ook!" over and over again. Someone must have released some monkeys from a zoo, or maybe it's someone's pet. Then the long stream of sounds ended in a hoooo hoooo hoooo.

I realized it must be an owl. Owls actually. There was more than one and they talked back and forth.

We love the owls. Sometime in the spring and in the fall, they are really active. You hear them talking back and forth. Nowadays, there are many more than there used to be, sometimes there is a regular chorus of owl voices at night.

I didn't know what kind of owl it was, so I looked in the Guide to North American Wildlife. There are these little pictures and a written description of the noise. I thought maybe we had a Screech Owl or a Great Horned Owl.

One day, I actually saw a Great Horned Owl, it was hunting in the field next to our house. It hit something on the ground, but I think it missed it, because it didn't fly off with a mouse or rabbit. It was almost 2' tall and one of the most beautiful animals I've ever seen.

But that's not what we have. I got a cd of bird sounds recently (and if I can figure out how to do it, I'll come back later and put a sound strip in here so you can listen to it too) and I found out that our friends are Barred Owls.

I've never seen them, but I like to picture them in their trees at night when I hear them. I hope they are eating plenty of mice and making lots of new little owls.

Hitting the 'Nip

Most people have heard of catnip and heard that cats are supposed to like it.

We grow catnip in the garden. It's a mint and I planted it several years ago and it just comes back without any help each year. It's getting big and bushy.

Andrea cut a bunch of it and put it on the patio. Instant cat party!

They roll around in it and then look sleepy and happy. Andrea read up on it and found out that it acts like a mild form of marijuana for the cats.

As you can see, they don't want to get very far away from their stash.