The blue butterfly

I looked up the name of this butterfly, it's called a Red Spotted Purple.

They are everywhere this summer, landing on the walls and driveway, not very afraid of people.

I had to search for the butterfly name online, I found it at http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/intermediate.asp?curGroupID=2

It's really interesting, there are Swallowtails, Skippers, Metalmarks, Fritillaries, Eyespots, and all the colors (copper, blue, white). They also classify them as folded wings, spread wings, angle wings, and hairstreaks.

Blue Heron

These birds are more common now, we see them near the lakes in the area and flying overhead.

They fish in shallow water, have a 6 foot wingspan, and can fly right at the water level without getting wet or falling in the water.

They do not bring babies to your house, that's a stork.

Butterflies like poop!

I saw lots of raccoon and possum droppings on the road of Fleming Park this weekend. Each one was covered with butterflies.

I'm not sure why they like them so much, but they seem to swarm around them every time!

Bagworms!

We've hit that time of the summer where the bagworms come out.

They make a big bag out of silk webbing and grow up in there while eating the leaves off the tree.

My dad used to carefully cut them off the tree and burn them. When you get up close, you can see the worms squiggling around in their little web home.

The Locust Days of Summer

It's that time of year again. The buzzing of the locusts have been very prominent the last week.

I was telling a story to my wife and her parents This weekend. We were talking about the loud buzzing drone of the locust, and I remembered seeing them just emerging from their larval shells when I was young. We were at boy scout camp one summer, and we were finding locusts on trees while they were emerging from their beetlelike stage. The back of the shell opened up and they struggled out and then did this fascinating magic trick.

They transformed before our eyes.

The wings unfurled and the body changed shape and the locust changed color. I don't remember that the process took that long. Little boys are notoriously impatient, and I had no problem watching the entire process, so I'm guessing it only takes 3 minutes or so.

Then I went into the front yard less than an hour later and found one doing it's magic trick. I hadn't see it for years. So remember, sometimes just talking about something and makes it happen.

Old Faithful

This is the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone, erupting at night.

Above the geyser is the planet Jupiter, and to the left is the Milky Way.

I hope we see something this beautiful when we visit later this month!

The picture was shown on The Astronomy Picture of the Day at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/

The photographer is Wally Pacholka who has some other amazing photos at: http://www.astropics.com/latimes.htm

It's a Miracle!

This rock is part of the signboard for the Cathedral of the Plains in Victoria Kansas.

Looking closely at the base of the structure, I noticed this shape of the Virgin Mary kneeling in prayer.

It's a miracle.

Faces 1

Does anyone else see the face of our President in the reflection of the cloud in this picture?

Seeing Faces 2

Can you see the silouette in the shadow on Barb's arm?

Anyone know who that is?

The Great White Peacock

When I was in High School, Ted Nugent had a song out call The Great White Buffalo.

It was cool.

The Indians believed that a white buffalo was a sacred animal. Several have been born, and several are living right now. There is a lady in Flagstaff Arizona that is successfully breeding them. They are still very rare.

There is a difference between a white animal and an albino one. One in 17,000 people are albinos. That's really not that rare, but I have never seen one. That means there are about 4,300 in the U.S. and about 30 in the Kansas City area. Or around 92,000 of them worldwide.

An albino is a fish, bird, reptile, amphibian, or mammal with no pigment. That means the hair is white, the skin is very white, and the eyes look pink because you are seeing the blood flowing in the vessels in the back of the eyes. Some animals are just white, like a Polar Bear. They have dark brown, almost black eyes. So a Polar Bear is not an albino bear, just a white bear.

Peacocks are related to pheasants and normally bright blue and green. There are two breeds of peacocks, Indian and Green. The white peacock shown here is a white variety of the Indian breed. Apparently, the guy that has them has gotten them to breed true, but I don't know how many he has. This is not an albino, note that the eyes are not pink.

Also, a female is called a Peahen and the proper name for all of them is Peafowl, but don't expect people to be correct on that!

The fun thing about Peacocks (see, I'm doing it too) is the noise they make. Many people keep them around, like chickens or geese, and they make this sound that is like a baby crying or a cat being twisted by some cruel cat torturer. We used to have a lady across the street that had them. I liked finding the feathers. I wonder if they would get along with the cats?

Hey Hey it's the Monkeys!

When I was in Ecuador for the Army, I got to go to Ecuador.

It was really cool. I want to go back some day because it was beautiful and the people were wonderful. Quito, the capital, was cool and sunny. It was cool because it was in the mountains, and it was sunny because it was on the equator.

Our job was to survey a road in the jungle, and we slept in a base camp built on a soccer field south of a town called Archidona. Our commanding officer for some of the time was a Captain Jarvis, this guy that was a goofy National Guard officer.

We drove out to the jungle in a Army Chevy Pickup truck that was fitted with a canvas cover over the back and benches down either side, so you could put about 8 people comfortably in the back. By Army regulations, you weren't supposed to pick up civilians in Army vehicles. You weren't supposed to give rides. But we were almost the only thing going out to the end of the road, and there were plenty of people that were on foot that would wave hopefully, looking for a ride. So we gave them rides. I should say that the Captain gave them rides, since he was driving. I thought this was a really bad idea at the time, not the least of which was because I rode in the back and a lot of unwashed and very ripe smelling people would absolutely cram into the back of the truck. The Ecuadorians (and many were native Quechua people) had no concept of personal space like we do. So they jumped in and practically sat in my lap. I remember Smith and Woodruff didn't like it at all and made hilarious comments about it. This was because we assumed that they didn't speak any English, and they were being a little mean about that. I think they were right though. I never ran into anyone in that part of the country that spoke English, and many didn't even speak Spanish, they spoke Chechua.

One day this very happy man got on the truck and sat knee to knee across from me. I noticed he was happy and somewhat antsy, and at first I just thought he was happy to get a ride.

Then I noticed that his hair had eyes.

I did a double-take. Surprised at hell and not sure what I was looking at. The man had a tiny monkey on his head. This little monkey had a head about the size of a walnut with this little tiny almost human face on it, complete with bright, alert, intelligent brown eyes. The monkey would lie down on his stomach on the guy's head and he spread his arms out and gripped the man's hair to hold on. His back legs were on the back of the man's neck and the long tail was wrapped around the man's neck like a furry necklace. That monkey wasn't going anywhere as we bucked and bumped down the road.

The man obviously loved the little monkey like a child. He would reach up and pull the monkey of his head to hold against his chest to pet, but the monkey would work his way back up to the top of the head after a few pets.

I still remember the man well after all these years. We rode in silence for about 10 minutes, then the truck stopped and he disappeared down a path in the jungle. I never saw him again.

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.

Jack in the Box

I visited Chicago in October of 2003 and stayed with Jerry.

I was out on the patio with Jack and caught a small grasshopper.

I popped the grasshopper in my mouth and watched Jack's eyes bug out. Then I opened my mouth and stuck my tongue out and the grasshopper was on it like a little diving board. It jumped off and I caught it in the air in my hand again. That part was like a little magic trick.

I'm not sure why I did it, it was just a wild impulse. But it worked out pretty well.

Big Snake

OK, here's another in a long series of snake stories.

I got this email from Dale, claiming that this snake was found in Medicine Lodge. It's supposed to be 9 feet long, according to the email. I found the story on snopes at http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/txsnake.asp. Other emails first said it was found in Texas, then later in Missouri.

But is it truly a 9 foot long snake?

My North American Wildlife Guide says that it's a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake and that they can get 3 to 7 feet long. There is an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake that gets 8 feet long, but it doesn't have stripes around the tail like this one.

I think this one is right around 7 feet long. I guess the man is about 5 feet tall. The angle that he is holding out the snake makes it look longer. I think it's almost a foot off the ground at the tail and 2 feet off the ground at the head. That would make it around 7 feet long. It's still a huge snake, but not quite 9 feet long.

So I don't think the photo is altered, but it is a bit of an illusion. The thing I find interesting about the picture is what a bloody broken mess the back of the neck right below the head is. Obviously, this snake did not get a friendly reception.

Fearless

I got this picture of Matt today, holding a boa constrictor at a reptile park they visited yesterday.

This reminds me of his father. Growing up, Warren was always the one totally unafraid of animals. He would turn over rocks, looking for whatever was underneath, and was the first one of our group of kids that I remember that would pick up snakes. We caught frogs with our hands, and crawdads (crayfish) with bits of bacon on a string.

Warren was also good at catching grasshoppers with his bare hands, and I remember one time he was sitting in the grass, and snatched at something hopping around in the grass. He slowly opened his hand to find that he had a huge spider!

Another time, when I was probably 6 or 7, we were walking through some grass and one of those huge grasshoppers crawled up my pants. I had on some jeans with long legs and I remember that they were pretty new and stiff. This huge grasshopper was clawing its way up my leg and I was terrified. I had no idea that it was a grasshopper, just something creepy inside my pant leg. So while I'm screaming and doing the jiggy dance, Warren calmly pinched whatever it was through the leg on my jeans, and reached up from the bottom until he could grab it and pull it out. I was relieved by having it removed, but also to learn it was just a grasshopper.

Warren loved animals so much that he secretly bought mice at the little pet store in the TG&Y store in our neighborhood. He brought them home and put them in a box in our basement, because we didn't ask if we could have mice. We guessed we weren't supposed to have something like this. Dad found out when they got away and we had to hunt them down in the basement. We kept them for a while. They had many litters and soon we had a huge crate full of mice.

Warren eventually became a veterinarian, which surprised nobody.

Florida Retiree

Many older people that retire move to Florida.

We went to Florida to a little town called Seagrove last winter. There were retirees everywhere. Andrea was treating them like they were this rare animal, on the verge of extinction, and that were were lucky to see them.

The whole time we were there, we took pictures like this one, making fun of the fact that we "spotted the elusive Florida retiree." We pretended like they were shy and easily spooked.

Some times it's funny to make fun of people, if it's all in good humor.

River Snake

When I went to Ecuador, we were supposed to march through the jungle every day, looking for a route for a new road through the thick trees.

Each day we came back covered in mud and needed to clean off somehow. There were showers in the base camp, but the line was long and the showers were dirty, nasty, and crowded.

We preferred the local stream. It was a beautiful stream coming out of the mountains with clear fresh water. We drove over a little bridge and then followed the stream for a while before stopping. The rocks were huge. We stripped down to our shorts and waded out into the stream where we cleaned our uniforms in the stream and washed the mud off our arms and legs.

It was a great daily ritual. It was hot in the jungle right on the equator and the mountain stream was cool and refreshing. After carrying around all that mud all day, it was so nice to get clean.

One day, after we finished cleaning up and left the stream, we drove over the bridge and looked back down into the stream. There was a snake about 12' or 15' long, probably about 3" across, swimming on top of the stream, going against the current faster than I could run.

We found another place to bathe after that.

Snake Hunter

The story below about the raining snakes has another part.

We were told to be careful about the snakes in the Costa Rican jungle, because many were poisonous. One snake, called the bushmaster was not only poisonous, but dangerous in another way too. They said that if one struck you, it would hit so hard that it would probably break the bone.

We carried machetes (big long knives) and mostly kept an eye out for snakes and tried to avoid them. I didn't see them very often, actually.

Lieutenant Wilson was the snake hunter of the group. He was in my tent with the rest of us. He was in charge of the bulldozers, so he would hang out around the rain of snakes. He liked to catch the snakes in the jungle when he found them. He got very good at it. Every day he would bring home snakes he had found that day. He would open their mouths and reach in with a knife. If there were big fangs folded up onto the roof of the mouth, the snake was poisonous.

I don't remember seeing any of them that weren't poisonous.

Guardian Groundhog

I think I have a guardian groundhog.

I was riding my motorcycle today, stuck behind a Raytown Schools van going very slow. I made my move, pulling out to pass, and the fun of being unstuck made me open it up until I was going too fast. The next thing I know, there is a groundhog on the side of the road, looking like he was getting ready to cross. I slowed way down, and a police car popped over the hill. If not for my guardian groundhog, I probably would have gotten a ticket. Thanks Chuckie!

Actually, it could have been a beaver. I was going too fast to check out his tail.

It's raining snakes!

I went to Costa Rica when I was in the Army. We were building roads and bridges, digging water wells and doing medical and veterinary clinics.

We were here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=10.060811,-82.762756&spn=0.91406,1.235962&t=h&z=9&om=0&msa=0&msid=103772662287472566049.000001134af10e490ffb2

If you zoom in, you'll see the banana plantation we were next too. It's huge. It was really neat.

We had bulldozers knocking down trees to make our road through the jungle. Another guy in my tent was in charge of the bulldozers and told me this story:

The way a bulldozer knocks down a 60' to 80' tall tree is they cut around the base of the tree on three sides, back up, raise the blade and slam into the tree to tip it over. The first time the bulldozers slammed into the trees, there was a nasty surprise. The bulldozer hit the tree, and the operator reached down to put the bulldozer in reverse. About that time, dozens of snakes that had been in the tree came raining down on the bulldozer. The operator was in an open cage and some were right next to him, others were on the hot engine hood, slithering like mad!

The operator jumped from the cab and ran away screaming.

They eventually worked out a procedure. They put a piece of plywood over the cab and put two guys with long forked sticks and machetes next to the bulldozer. When the bulldozer hit the tree, the operator just shut down the bulldozer and curled up in a ball and waited. The two guys with sticks ran in and flicked all the snakes out of the way.

You don't want to be sitting in the middle of a rainstorm of snakes.

Songs of Insects

I got this book Songs of Insects for Uncle Kyle for his birthday. I heard about it on the radio, these guys tromped around in the woods and meadows for 6 years with recorders and microphones, recording the sounds of crickets and katydids and cicadas (we call them locusts). The book has a CD with all their songs on it, and I got one for myself and loaded it onto my ipod. It sounds really cool. You can see more on their website: http://www.musicofnature.com/songsofinsects/index.html

One of the authors had hearing loss in certain frequencies. This means he can't hear some types of sounds. This usually happens when you get older, so kids - don't blow your ears out with loud music, you'll wish you hadn't later. I noticed that there were 2 tracks on the CD that I could not hear at all. Makes you wonder how much you are missing.

There was another book on Amazon.com by the same guys, Songs of Birds. I got it and was playing it this morning. It helps you identify all the birds by their songs. I had it on my computer and was listening in the family room. Two of the cats came in, first Speedy, then Eddy. They thought there were birds in the room! It was so funny. They came over to the computer and kept rubbing against it and staring at the speakers, trying to figure out if there were birds in there. I guess they really like the birdies!

Dos Hombres

These two wranglers look like they are just spoiling for something fun to do. This is last Easter when Cole & Tyce got together at the Ranch. Red dirt, rocks, kitties, cows, bikes, basketballs, and fishing. It doesn't get much better than that.

When "the big boys" were about these guys size, we used to ride on the top of hay bales stacked in the back of the pickup truck, going out to feed the cows. Jerry was riding on the edge of the stack when the truck hit a bump. The bales he was on all fell off the side of the truck and took him down with them. He wasn't hurt at all, surprisingly. You don't get to fall over 10' off a moving truck and get to walk away dusting yourself off very often.

When we got home, Warren wrote a story for his Kindergarten class called "The Adventures of Miss Kitty". There was a momma cat in the barn back then, and we were very surprised to see it way down the road around where Jerry fell off the truck. I don't remember how the story went, but it had something to do with the cat travelling a long way. That was a long time ago when we were the size of these guys!

Home on the Range

Jodi & Lisa are showing off the country lifestyle!

There's nothing like a pretty lady and a pretty puppy in a pickup, is there?

Feeding the Cows

Tyce is quite the cowboy. Here he is last Easter while we were feeding the cows. The truck is lined up to drive down the line and deliver the feed pellets into the bins. First you have to call them in and you also need to count them.

I wonder if Tyce is going to drive the truck, too? Cowboy up!

Dogs with Toys

My cousin got a black lab puppy and named her Lisa. Actually, someone else in the family named her Lisa, I think after Clint Black's wife.

Lisa, like most labs, is a happy and friendly dog. Somewhere along the line, Lisa picked up a teddy bear. She loves the teddy bear, and is often carrying it around the yard. This is a great picture, because it has her using her teddy bear as a pillow.

Pleasant dreams, Lisa!

Blind Baby Possum

Sometimes we see little animals that are pretty sad and pathetic.

This little possum was wandering around aimlessly in the day. We figured out that he wasn't able to see. He couldn't tell what time of the day it was. He was out during the day when possums almost always come out at night. He wandered around looking confused. He didn't see people or cats walking near him. He didn't seem to know where he was.

We think he navigated by smell. He kept coming by and wandering around for a few days, so we went over and put some cat food in his path. Then he would smell the food (or trip over it) and eat like crazy! He was so hungry.

He may have gotten over whatever was making him blind. I think I saw him much later and he could see just fine.

The Easter Bunny

You'll never see the Easter Bunny, he's just too crafty. He's able to hide those eggs right under your nose, practically.

However, sometimes grown-ups like to dress up like the Easter Bunny, to keep the kids happy. Thanks, Uncle Steve!

Kiss my Burl

Nick loves trees. This one, down on the ranch, had some huge growth on it.

So the only choice was to pose for this picture.