Herping with Dylan

I stumbled onto this guy while looking for other snake stuff on YouTube. He's not only adorable--he also knows his snakes! He's got a whole collection of herping videos, which you can find here. I particularly like this one, especially the tragic ending.

What the tick knows

This has been a bumper year for ticks. They are usually worst here in the spring and early summer. By August the population dwindles—thanks, I suppose, to drier weather and all the hungry young birds. But this year is an exception. The woods are literally crawling with dog ticks along with their accompanying “seed” ticks, which are far more annoying. These infant ticks are so tiny you can hardly see them until after they’ve gorged themselves on your blood. Sometimes you’ll look down to find a swarm of them crawling up your shoes. I’ve always been a tick magnet, ever since I was a kid, so I ought to be used to pulling the little bastards off by now, but they still disgust me.

I was extracting a stubborn little guy recently, and remembered a debate I once had with a friend. She absolutely refused to believe that the little brown ticks and the blobby gray ticks were the same bugs, pre-and post-prandium. This was before the days of instant bet settling with Google, so I never was able to convince her.

I was a little exasperated with her at the time, but her skepticism actually makes perfect sense—how could two such radically different things be the same creature? More to the point, why is it that I think they are the same creature? Why do I perceive a persistent identity between skinny tick and fat tick, given that they appear so radically different? I feel that my perception is simple, intuitive, ineluctable—but, of course, my friend felt the same way about her perception.

We confront this problem a thousand times a day, and we are oddly arbitrary about how we solve it. On the one hand, we’re very prone to assigning persistent identity to people. Most everyone (including me) would say I am the same being now that I was in the first grade. Likewise, I’d be the same person if I gained 400 pounds or became severely brain damaged. The person Maria Browning will even persist when I’m dead and buried—anyone who assumes my name and social security number will be said to have “stolen” my identity.

One the other hand, we’re much more fickle about the identity of things. Scarlett’s curtains and her dress are different entities, in spite of the fact that their substance is identical. Ears of corn and tortillas are different things. An acorn and an oak are different things, though everyone recognizes their connection. We can’t seem to decide whether their human counterparts—fetus and infant—are the same thing, which just shows how muddled our thinking is on the whole issue.

Philosophers have spent a lot of time puzzling over this one, and it causes us a lot of emotional agony. Even though we’re desperate to hang onto our individual identities—we order our entire existence around them--the inevitable changes in the organism assault our confidence in who and what we are.

Aging is the universal change that seems to throw everyone into a tizzy, as we each try to reconcile the transformation of decay with the static concept of “me.” Everyone deals with it differently. Some of us do battle with the flesh. Others try to tweak their behavior and ideas to fit the changing form without surrendering some fundamental sense of self. A few people just refuse to engage the issue and go on believing themselves to be children well into withered old age—which may keep them happy, but causes a lot of trouble for the people around them.

Which brings me back to the tick. The tick does not have this identity problem. Nothing in nature has this problem, except us. Not that identity is never an issue for the rest of the world. Deer have to know the difference between poisonous snakeroot and all the similar-looking greenery that is good to eat. The natural world is filled with deceivers and identity thieves, from the harmless scarlet snake who mimics the deadly coral snake, to the cowbird who sneaks her eggs into other birds’ nests.

But those practical, real-time identity problems are different from the one we inflict on ourselves when we recoil from the crumbling face in the mirror. The tick doesn’t mourn the loss of her figure, and she doesn’t have intimations of her own mortality as she happily sucks away someone else’s blood. She doesn't wish she could do anything over or be the girl she once was. She doesn't wonder whether she's "authentic" or leading a purpose driven life. She simply is what she is at every moment, and she changes without protest or resistance.



Photo of lone star tick from Wikimedia Commons.

Abracadabra

There was a light ground fog this morning, with mist on the lake. A faint breeze was moving the water just enough to force the mist to swirl up in gauzy columns. The light from the rising sun played off them as they moved over the surface. Some stood up, tall and independent; others stayed low and joined with their brothers to swirl together in a ghostly spiral dance.

The sun rose higher, the lake warmed up and the ghosts went away. It was just a trick of temperature, humidity and dust in the air—one routine act in the endless magic show the planet puts on. But I couldn’t look at it without seeing the spirits dancing. I would never want to.


Photo by Mila Zinkova from Wikimedia Commons.

Lizard weather

The fish were jumpin' this morning, just like the song says.** It's still hot here, humid and overcast--perfect fishing weather, but nobody was taking advantage of it. I had the lake shore all to myself and the fish were left to play unmolested. Most of the birds were sleeping late, so it was quiet except for the cicadas and the periodic splash from a leaping bass. It's a very cheerful sound, that splash.

The whole park was oddly depopulated for a Saturday morning. On a typical weekend there are anglers, hikers and maybe a gaggle of boy scouts entering the park as I leave it. Today I met only one very intense-looking runner, and a big guy with a lot of tattoos who was gathering firewood. I guess everybody's hiding from the heat.

The lizards love this weather, and they seem to be everywhere. A startled skink ran over my foot as I walked the trail. Skinks make me feel very nostalgic. I only have to look at one to be reminded of all the hot summer days I spent as a kid just hanging out in the woods. I loved to catch the little blue-tailed ones and play with them a while, then turn them loose in the grass. I'm sure I enjoyed that more than they did.

The walk back from the lake was pretty sweaty, and I rewarded myself by stopping for a few of the remaining blackberries, which have been very juicy and sweet this year. I scarfed a couple of cherries, too. Why should the skunks get them all?

**Click here for a nice little essay on why fish jump.

Photo of skink by Patrick Coin from Wikipedia.

Busy morning

It's hot and muggy here, so humid your skin feels damp the instant you step outside, even before you start to sweat. I am usually out on the trail just before sunrise, the coolest time of day, but when it's this humid even temps in the 70s feel pretty stifling. The animals don't seem to mind it. During last year's heat wave there were some eerily quiet mornings in the woods, but everybody was out and about today.

The good thing about the heat is that it makes me slow down and see more. I find myself stopping to look at fungi, bugs and other unglamorous things I'd be tempted to charge right past on a nice cool day. This morning I noticed a small fence lizard. I tried to watch him a while, but he didn't feature an audience. He started to scramble up a tree, somehow lost his footing, and then hid under the leaf litter. I thought about pursuing him, but decided against it.

That non-encounter happened shortly after another that was less disappointing. I was stumbling down a hill when a fat skunk trundled onto the path about 8 feet in front of me. I saw him just before he emerged from the brush along the trail. As he moved in my direction, I kept thinking about a story I heard from a friend recently, about a friend of hers who got a full-body spritz from a skunk that had wandered into her house. Weeks later she was still trying to de-skunkify herself. I stood absolutely still while my skunk got closer, oblivious to me as he snarfed up the black cherries that littered the ground. He was so close I was afraid he'd cut loose if I even moved to retreat. Luckily, the trail of cherries led him off the path and back into the trees before we collided. I was not tempted to follow.

Later I came across a group of four adult wild turkeys--not a chick in sight, which seems strange this time of year. They were scratching up the leaves to see what they could find. They had made a nice mess of the trail, throwing the damp leaves and dirt across it as they dug. They paid very little attention to me, only moving a few yards away as I passed through. Didn't make a sound. Very mellow turkeys.

There's a small lake midway along the trail I followed this morning. The sun was well up by the time I got there, but there was a family of barred owls still playing in the trees near the shore. I couldn't see all of them clearly, but I believe it was a mated pair and two chicks. There were a lot of baby begging calls and short hops from tree to tree by the young ones, who are probably not yet proficient flyers. I stayed there enjoying the lake for at least twenty minutes, and they never stopped squawking and flitting around. If they were supposed to be learning to hunt, it didn't seem to be going very well. Maybe it was just past their bedtime.




Photo of barred owl uploaded by Mwanner at Wikipedia