This is what our new roof looks like from above.

We used to have wood shingles and the cats just loved to climb on them. Of course, cats love old wood to sharpen their claws on, so they loved to rip away at the old wood shingles.

I don't know how they feel about asphalt shingles.

Hedge Apple Mutant

Here's an interesting genetic mutation found in the yard. A three way siamese twin hedge apple. I'm going to dress up as this for Halloween.

Autumn Showcase

This display is outside of the Parks and Recreation office near the dam of Lake Jacomo. I love the color and the swaying fountain grass.

Lake Jacomo Picnic

This is what a picnic on a bright warm October day at Lake Jacomo looks like.

About 1 minute after the picture was taken, the dog chased the geese into the lake, and would have gone in after them, if we had let her.

Little Square Bales

I love the (now) old-fashioned little square hay bales. They used to be the only kind you saw, but now, there are those huge round bales that are the standard. You have to have some people still baling the hay with the old style, because you can't decorate for Halloween or have a hay rack ride on a big round bale.

The Passing Storm

I love the contrast of fall colors to the sky after an autumn thunderstorm passes through.

Back to Nature

Sometimes the slow return to nature is a very pretty thing.

This is from the long empty house next door.

Juniper Berries

I don't remember ever seeing so many of those pretty blue/violet berries on juniper bushes before. Some signals in the environment told the bushes to reproduce like mad.

Half Autumn

Here is the intersection just down the street. If you stand on the road that the car is turning onto, just past the right side of the frame, and shoot back toward the direction where this picture was taken from, you get the pond that I put on the cover of the blog. Each time the season changes, I put a different picture on the blog.

The house on the corner was for sale for 2 or 3 years. When someone finally did buy it, they immediately hired a tree crew to come in. Not only is this house memorable because it's right where I turn every morning when I leave work, but it also has these two huge sugar maples that usually turn bright orange each year. These trees are the prettiest trees in the area. The family across the street with the pond planted some kind of oak that turns deep red, so those trees are competing.

This year, only half of the trees are changing. The rest still look pretty green and summery. I hope we don't have our first freeze before they get a chance to change and make this a really colorful fall.

Ghost Mike

The camera was open for something like 12 seconds for this picture. I set the camera on a tripod, set the timer for 10 seconds, and ran in front of the camera to pose. I meant to hold perfectly still to put myself in the picture, but I only waited part of the time and then moved around to the back of the camera. That's why you can see through my shoulder. It's a 10 second shot of me and a 2 second shot of the door behind me, which is bright enough to overpower me.

Or I'm a ghost. It is getting close to Halloween.

Autumn Entryway

We like to put out some mums and pumpkins in the fall. It's nice to have some Halloweeny colors around the front of the house.

I took this picture on the night setting of my camera. It was very dark, so I did not see these details and colors when I took the picture. I put it on a tripod and it stayed open for 12 seconds. This means that everything had to stay perfectly still while the lens was open. The cat must have been very relaxed.

Schweizer's Orchard

We always go to an apple orchard each fall. When we were growing up in Lee's Summit, there was the Stephenson's Apple Orchard right here close. When I was around 6 or so, I got to drive a car for the first time in the orchard (I'm pretty sure it was just the steering part of the driving).

They sold the orchard off to developers and put something that is, I'm sure, more useful than a silly orchard. Like another faceless strip mall.

For the last couple of years we've been driving up to Weston Missouri, going to Vaughn Orchard. Last year was a horrible year for apples because there was a really late freeze and there was almost no apples.

This year we went to St. Joseph to Schweizer's Orchard, which Andrea found online, I think. This place was beautiful, with tons of pumpkins and mums for sale, and a really nice store. Besides apples and peaches, they had pumpkins (some really big ones) and lots of other vegetables.

Andrea says if we win the lottery that we will buy an apple orchard. It's a good plan.

Orb Weaver Summer

I like spiders. This is almost certainly linked to my early childhood experience of being shown first hand how they eat. My father used to put captured grasshoppers and other bugs in the web of a gardener spider in our yard. We got to watch the capture, the bite to stun the prey, the wrapping up of the prize, and the slow feeding on the hapless victim.

Spiders are our friends. We spray tons of insecticide, buy fly paper and bug zappers, hire exterminators, and use copious amounts of insect repellent. Here's a creature that will gladly dispose of all the nuisance insects for free.

Watching web construction is another fascinating pasttime. The patient task of spiralling around and around in ever tightening circles to complete the pattern is something to watch.

Scientist have noted that, "pound for pound" spider silk is stronger than steel. Many have sought to copy the procedure that the spider uses to make webbing. National Geographic had an excellent article on spiders some time back, complete with an awesome illustration of the web silk glands. These glands are in a cluster and the spider can make a variety of silk, from fine to thick, non-sticky to sticky. I knew there was variety because when they wrap prey it comes out in a net rather than a single strand. They make parachutes, fine jump lines, and egg casings all from the same material.

This summer has been thick with what we always called orb weaver spiders. In researching for this blog, I found the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araneidae which seems to indicate that Orb Weaver is a family of spiders, all the ones with elaborate webs. There is a picture of the species Eriophora transmarina on this page, which is similar in shape to the spider I've always thought of as the Orb Weaver, but it's lighter in color and lacks the two white spots of my local friends. The coolest thing about this spider is that it manages to place webs in really improbably places, like out in the open between trees, where you realize that the web spans 20 or 30 feet across.

The attached picture is too blurry to be satisfactory, but I took dozens of photos on two different occasions of the spider and not one came out in focus. I'll have to work on that. I'd like to identify the species, now that I see that there are hundreds of spiders in the family.

I listen to a podcast called "NPR: Driveway Moments Podcast". The 9/5/08 episode was about Charlotte's Web. I vaguely remember details from the book, having read it when I was very young. Everyone who has read it remembers the broad outline, the spider saves the pig by weaving words in the web over it's sty. E.B. White read the audiobook version of the book and had to redo the part where Charlotte dies several times because it made him cry each time he read it. The producer said it took him 17 takes to read that part. He remarked afterwards "It's ridiculous. A grown man, reading a book that he wrote, and being unable to read it aloud because of tears." They say that children take the death of Charlotte better than children for some reason.

Wouldn't it be a nicer world if we felt just a little more that way about the death of any of our animal friends?

First Maple of Fall

This tree is down the street and is always one of the prettiest fall colored trees in the area. It has a sister a bit to the left of it, which usually changes at the same time.

For some reason, this is the first and only tree to turn this year. It stands by itself with all the trees around it staying green. The house was purchased recently, after being on the market for a few years, and the new owner hired a large crew to come in an remove several trees and trim back the rest. I'm not sure if the recent trimming had anything to do with shocking the maple into changing early.

This house is right across the street from the pond that I always use as the title shot on the blog. I stop next to the house, just to the right of the tree in the picture and shoot across the pond at various times in the season.

Hint of Fall at Sailboat Cove

This is what the Sailboat Cove looks like in early October with the trees just starting to change. I wonder if they are still going to take the sailboats out on the lake, and when they are going to haul them all out of the lake and store them for the winter?

Butterflies and Black Eyed Susans

I noticed a lot of these yellow butterflies in the last few weeks. They are the same color as the black eyed susans they like to hang out on.

Coincidence? I think not.

Adolescent Turkeys

We have several growing flocks of adolescent turkeys this year.

While the neighbors up and down the street have been feeding the turkeys with cracked corn, there has been very little hunting or predator pressure on turkeys. This has caused a turkey population explosion, and no one is complaining.

There are two things I've noticed about turkeys.

1. They never get hit by cars. You'll see possums, turtles, raccoons, and snakes flattened on the road (think Far Side with the Vultures with the spatulas). My theory is that turkeys are both smarter and more versatile than other animals. You see them walking and strutting around so much that you almost forget that they can fly. They are also more alert and wary than most animals, so I think that they watch carefully, don't cross the street unless it's clear, and move fast if they get into trouble.

2. You almost never see really small turkeys. They are about half grown before you see them strutting around in the yard in the open without hiding. I think their mothers are overcautious when the turkeys are tiny and defenseless.

So here's evidence that the turkey does eventually emerge from their protective custody and get a turkey life out there.

Wedding Bouquet

What do you do with your wedding bouquet?

We saved ours until it was completely falling apart, and now it resides outside next to our potted vinca.

I just can't bear to throw it away.

I saw a really cool display of a wedding bouquet that was more than 2 years old. It was in a glass vase on a shelf with a mini spotlight shining on it.

I might do something wicccan like putting it into a nice woodland setting. We'll see.

Primeval for Oreos

What do Oreo Cookies have to do with a blog called Animal Tales?

It's because I'm an animal when it comes to cookies.

OK, it's a pretty weak premise, but it's my blog and I get to write whatever I want in it, don't I?

Some people (other than me) may have noticed that Oreo likes to mix it up a bit. They like to make different cookie shapes from time to time, special edition production runs. Sometimes they vary the flavor, too.

Wikipedia actually has a whole section on varieties of Oreos. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo#Variations_and_adaptations] I thought I had seen them shaped like different things, but that is probably Ritz Crackers I'm thinking of.

I remember the Halloween Oreos, and the White Fudge covered Oreos, and I've also had the Golden Oreos, with the vanilla cookie & white cream (highly recommended). My wife thinks you should only eat Double Stuf Oreos, but I like the normal ones if they are dipped in milk.

However, the point of my story is the incredible limited edition Banana Split Creme Oreos. These are really good. I can't imagine what would happen if an open bag of these was put in a room full of chimpanzees. It's be the primate equivalent of a birthday party for a 3 year old and all his friends.

In doing a search for this story, I also see rumors about a Strawberry Milkshake Oreo that was only released in Canada. This may be a myth, as Wikipedia seems to know nothing about it. It might be similar to a sighting of a Yeti.

Double Rainbow

I was in the car with my brother's family last month, driving back from my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary in Wichita. Some storms had just blown through and were retreating to the east while the sun was setting to the west behind us. Driving up I-35, we had a perfect view of a large, bright double rainbow.

The clouds were moving around, so at times it was just a single rainbow, and sometimes clouds blocked parts of the arc, but there were times when the primary or secondary rainbow were visible all the way from one side to the other.

This was one of the biggest rainbows I've ever seen, the sun was right on the horizon. The sun makes rainbows circular, but they get cut off by the horizon. The rainbow is also always directly opposite the direction of the sun.

Why is there a rainbow? The sun is going into rain drops and bouncing off the back of the drop and acting as a prism. A prism splits white light into all the different colors they contain. This does not explain to me why the rainbow is in an arc. A double rainbow is when light bounces off the inside back side of the raindrop, then reflects off the inside front side of the drop before reflecting one more time.

The colors in the rainbow always go in the same order. You remember it by the word ROYGBIV (it's supposed to sound like a guy's name Roy G. Biv). That's Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo and Violet. Check it out next time you see a rainbow.

But don't waste your time looking for the pot of gold. By definition, you'll never reach the end of the rainbow.

Buffalo Tongue

I go to the Fleming Park Hooved Animal Enclosure from time to time. It's a good place to go and get up close to Buffalos and Elk. I like to stick the carrots through the chain link fence and watch them magically disappear.

This is a slightly blurry, and therefore surreal picture of a buffalo tongue, right before I pop a carrot in there. It's sort of like a 1500 pound reverse pez dispenser. Look at that big wet nose, too.

My brother, a vet, told me that they do not have upper and lower teeth (just one or the other, probably just lowers), so they can't actually bite you. You can stick your finger in the mouth and let them try to swallow it. It sounds like fun, doesn't it?

I haven't tried it yet.

Early Fall

This tree is showing signs of changing, at least a month before it normally would. The picture was taken 8/22/08, still in summer.

I noticed some sumac changing bright red before this [see Fall in July post from September 6, 2008], but that could have been caused by some herbicide or something. This tree changing, plus a few other random changes makes a trend.

This summer was one of the lushest or wettest I can remember. It wasn't like the flood summers of 1993 or 1995, when the Missouri and Mississippi were flooding over dikes and the pond filled up overnight (only to empty within 2 weeks) [see Full Pond post May 19, 2008]. It never rained to the point of flooding here (Iowa had historic floods in late June early July), but it never really stopped raining. If we had something like weather control, where we could make it rain when we wanted, you would set the rain to come down in about an inch or so a week, and it did that most of the summer. While the grass never got out of control, because the yard was never so soggy that a lawn tractor left ruts, it also never dried out enough for anything to go dormant in the middle of the summer.

One of my theories about why the fall colors came so early is that the plants never got a dormancy rest and were able to produce enough sap & nutrients all summer to fill up the root system for the winter. Mission accomplished, close up shop and shut down early?

My other theory is that the last couple of years early fall frosts and late spring frosts have reset the plant's crops and maybe they are being paranoid. I know that the leaves signal to the plant when to flower, maybe there is something signalling when turn colors. I noticed that some of the trees have just one limb that changes.

One story I heard about spring was that if it was too dry the trees would be too stressed and the colors would not be very brilliant. Usually, everyone hopes that there will not be an early frost right when the colors are bright and autumny, because they turn dull, die, and drop off right after that. I also noticed that this year, with a warm, wet fall, and early changing trees, that the colors are not as brilliant as usual. Everything has this dull brown tint coming over it rather than bright oranges and scarlets that the maples and fire bushes normally have. The vines that usually turn the deepest shades of red and tend to cover the trunks of large trees are very prominent right now.

I don't know what's causing it, but it is a very odd fall.