Found this excellent article the other day, and decided to post it in honor of my awesome dogs, and the whole dog nation...
Until recently, dog domestication was thought to have started with the emergence of agriculture. The birth of agriculture created a new niche for dogs – one suitable for scavengers on a source of dependable, stationary food – human refuse. Wild canines that were bold enough to capitalise on this new niche – to interact with the humans there – became “proto-dogs”. These proto-dogs were domesticated over time as humans capitalised on their presence for other purposes – protection, hunting, and even as another source of protein.
I was interested in this because I occasionally find owl pellets on the lane when I'm out with my dogs. Of course, it's possible that some of them may have been from hawks.
I know that we have barred owls in the holler. Because I know they are around, I chose barred owls as one of the species I observe for the Nature's Notebook project of the National Phenology Network. Here's a brief recording I got of one on May 7, 2012. The first call is near the beginning of the video, but the second one is toward the end, so hang in there:
In terms of pellets, I think I have seen evidence of more than one species, probably the barred owl and the great horned owl. I believe that I have heard calls of both species as well.
One time I saw an owl in my headlights as I returned home after dark. It flew ahead of me for several seconds before continuing on into the darkness of the woods. But most often I either hear them or see pellets. My dogs usually go out to bark at owls if they hear one.
You can compare owl calls at learner.org or at All About Birds on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. If you visit the Cornell site soon, you can download owl calls for Halloween uses for free if you sign up to receive emails from them. I just did this and got the 4.1 MB zip file with nine different owl sounds. The offer appeared as a pop-up on the main page and the browse-the-owls page...in fact it looks like it pops up on all the pages unless you tell it to go away.
I got a couple of good owl photos when I visited the Knoxville Zoo. This one is a barn owl -- I remember seeing and hearing these when I was a kid in Kansas:
[Photo credit: Cathie Bird]
By the way, Walden's Puddle is an organization in Tennessee that provides care and treatment to sick, injured
and orphaned native Tennessee wildlife. They are the only professionally-staffed wildlife rehabilitation and
education facility in Middle Tennessee. They don't charge for their services nor do they receive federal or state funding for their work. Check out their website for instructions on what to do and how to contact them if you have find a wild creature in Tennessee that may need help. Right now their Facebook page has lots of owl photos scattered about.
Lots of birds are on the move during the fall season. Migration presents a number of hazards for birds. For example, I found this article (via The American Bird Conservancy) today about a recent rescue at sea:
Lieutenant Chris Patrick with the Eurasian scops owl, which was found cowering under the ship's crane and later released to continue its migration. Photograph: Nicky Wilson/MoD/PA
A tiny owl was discovered sheltering on board the Royal Navy's
helicopter carrier HMS Illustrious. The Eurasian scops owl was found
cowering under the ship's crane on the flight deck while the
Portsmouth-based warship was off the coast of Yemen during a training exercise.
Leading
Airman Mikaele Mua picked up the exhausted bird and passed it on to be
looked after by the ship's meteorology forecaster, Lieutenant Chris
Patrick, who calls himself an avid twitcher and who belongs to the
navy's birdwatching society.
Patrick, 44, from Weymouth, Dorset, said birds of the species would be migrating south towards sub-Saharan Africa around this time of year.
He
said: "It was clear the poor little thing had literally run out of
steam. It must have seen the ship and took refuge. It looked as though
it was simply waiting to die."
Here in the holler I'm starting to see and hear more of the year round birds as they look for nuts that are ripe or fallen. I saw eight blue jays yesterday, and I can hear chickadees. Coming back from our holler walk on Saturday I think I saw some turkeys fly up as the dogs headed up toward the house. The lane has plenty of beech nuts and acorns on it -- not to mention walnuts.
The first moose I ever saw up close was in Ashley National Forest in the early seventies. Bill and I were camped there for a rafting trip on the Green River below the Flaming Gorge dam and a visit to some of Bill's old haunts around Manila, Utah.
Bill was off getting more gear out of the car, and I had just started cooking supper when I heard something -- a pretty large something, by the sound of it -- just beyond the edge of our campsite, maybe 20 feet away. When I looked up, all I could see was a long, dark brown back. It kind of looked like a horse until it raised its head. Then I recognized it as a moose. It was one of those good news-bad news moments: I was ecstatic to see a moose, but a little concerned about being that close.
In 1978, a few moose were transplanted on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, just across the mountains from where Bill and I lived. I didn't live there long enough to see them migrate over to the east side, but my brother Bob has posted several photos of them in that same yard lately. According to a story in May in the Denver Post, that small group has now multiplied and migrated to other parts of Colorado. It's another moose population that is doing well, at the moment, rather than declining.
Moose are such awesome animals. Wise up, man of Earth, before we trash one more acre, one more stream, one more species.
I saw one of these photos on the news this morning...there are a couple more at the link below the photo, including one the crested black macaque took of the owner of the camera...too good not to share!
When I photograph something, I'm very aware of relating with it. But how does that interaction show itself? The image certainly implies interactions: a focus of attention directed to a subject...a waxing or waning desire to photograph it...a reckoning with the technology of the camera...a decision about how to frame the subject of my gaze. Much of all that seems to be done with some conscious awareness and intention. But the complexity, the breadth, the depth of that interaction is only hinted at in the image itself.
When I bring the images up in a viewer -- many hundreds and even thousands over time -- am I surprised by them? For the most part, no. At first glance, what I see is generally what I expected. On occasion, even at first glance, I am surprised by something, but, more often, it's only as I sit with the images and let them penetrate layers of assumption and expectation, that something new, something unexpected emerges.
I had not really thought a lot about this process until a few days ago when I uploaded this image of some eastern tent caterpillars that had recently emerged from their "tent" on a sweetgum tree:
What surprised me was the red tint on this image. I had not noticed anything like this as I took the photo -- neither sweetgum bark nor tent "cats" are reddish. However, I knew immediately how the red wash had become part of the image: I took this photo early in the morning, looking toward the sun that was just barely up over the ridges...and I was wearing a coral-red t-shirt.
In the instance of this particular image, my participation was reflected in a way that spoke more directly to a co-creative process with an "other" -- the sun, the tree, the caterpillars, the camera, my shirt.
For me, eye-to-eye macro-encounters -- especially with species other than humans -- introduce another question: who (really) is doing the gazing? Such are the contemplations of life in Frogpond Holler yet to be born into words...
The findings, reported in the Dec. 21 Current Biology, are the first documented evidence of boy and girl primates in the wild playing differently with their toys. Though these patterns’ origins will surely be argued, they add to the constellation of behaviors shared by humans with our closest living relative.
“We find that juveniles tend to carry sticks in a manner suggestive of rudimentary doll play and, as in children and captive monkeys, this behavior is more common in females than in males,” wrote anthropologists Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College.
