Sullen ravens

Our local ravens, Marco and Polo, have been looking sullen.

This winter and spring they breakfasted at 9:00AM daily with neighbor Richard.

While Richard ate his egg whites in the kitchen, Julia served the birds hard-boiled egg yolks on the back deck.

Richard was enthralled.

"They're intelligent, and they talk to each other".

Marco and Polo were like family.

They periodically checked in during the day and peered into the windows.

Then daylight savings kicked in and suddenly the ravens' breakfast was served an hour late.

The new schedule wasn't to their liking.

Marco and Polo were used to having breakfast only so many hours after sunrise.

They started peering into the window while Richard and Julia were still in bed, and when they got up, the birds watched them through the bathroom window.

Julia found it a little unnerving, but Richard was amused.

The birds remained impatient waiting for breakfast.

"Then I heard this tapping," said Richard, "but it took me a while to find out that they were pecking at the skylights".

It was starting to get like Hitchcock's "Birds", so Richard cut off the family breakfasts.

Cold turkey. It worked.

Marco and Polo gave up their attempts to break through the skylights, and spend a lot less time around the house.

"They still visit," says Richard,  "and they grumble on the phone pole. But they don't hang around like they used to".

Wildlife in the streets of Florence

Many things catch your eye in Italy, but my camera trapper's eye was pleased to encounter wild boar in the streets of Firenze, or as we know it, Florence.

This delicatessen owner proudly displayed taxidermic icons of his specialty -- pork in all of its processed products.

His domestic diorama of medieval piglets at the table proves the thesis of Luigi Barzini's masterpiece of character analysis . . . Italians thrive on spectacle and family.

"Tutti a tavola a mangiare".

Back on the Flume

With the exception of this mole the codger has little to show in the way of natural history.

The reason is that we were in Italy for three weeks, where camera trapping rarely crossed my mind.

But I am getting back into the daily routine of walking the flume and recording natural history.

Thus the partially eaten broad-handed mole.

I thought it was newsworthy, since mammalian predators, unlike raptors, often lose their appetite when they discover that their prey is an unpalatable shrew or mole.

The killer of this mole was hungry enough to make a meal of it. Usually I find the bitten but uneaten carcass. 

I found it the other day, put it in my shirt pocket, and deposited it discreetly in my office.

The redhead managed to find it of course, and I was compelled to photograph it sooner than I had planned.

The flume was practically dry when we left on May 1, which means that PG&E had cut off the water from Butte Creek and the Feather River for maintenance.

They dredged it, and when I got home I found it racing at a pace I have never seen before.

A few days later I watched a limp Bambi tumble surrealistically under the surface, a casualty of misadventure.

So I'm getting back in my groove, and next week you'll see some pictures of urban Italian wildlife.

Lucky shot in the dark

March 21, 2012, 11:35PM

Several camera trappers I know periodically post enviable otter photos on the forums.

They are risk takers. If they weren't, they wouldn't get otter pictures.

If you want to get aquatic mammal or waterfowl photos, you have to stake your camera in or near water, and if high water doesn't baptize your camera there's a good chance that men and boys with fishing rods will regard it as a gift from God.

Since this is the third time I've gotten otter photos, I am pleased.

And that drop of water on the lens over the otter's head? It doesn't bother me that much either.

The location is a seasonal creek that feeds the Mad River. 

A trunk of California bay lies across the mouth of that creek, and it looks like it was designed for a camera trap.

I smeared castoreum and muskrat musk in the moss, and the lures worked their magic.

The otter left one image on a rainy night 13 days later.

No doubt that single flash was enough to curtail its sniffing, and in my mind's eye I see it humping back to the dark water.

A few nights later the river rose and came close to claiming my camera.

Camtrappers lose their cameras to high water, but it doesn't seem to cure them.

Wetlands have a powerful pull.

When the grief wears off, they home-brew another camera, and before long they are staking it in water again.

Had Alfred Lord Tennyson been a camera trapper, he might have penned his famous lines differently: 'T is better to have lost your camera in a flood than never to have water-trapped at all.

I know better, but when it comes to water sets I can't help myself.

I re-set the camera on that log and took my chances once again.

The continuing quest

The biggest blue blossum (Ceanothus thyrsiflora) I've ever seen (uprooted by the storm)

The weather forecast was for sunshine on Thursday, so I drove to Arcata on Wednesday.

It drizzled on and off the next day.

Spring storms had uprooted a few trees, but spared the video camera in the fir tree.

When I reached it I saw worrisome droplets of water inside the Fresnel lens over PIR sensor, but my paranoid fears were for naught, the camera was still perched on the limb.

After unscrewing the lag bolt I took a close look at the tree vole nest, and realized something had destroyed it.    

The nest cavity had apparently been only an inch or two under the surface of the fir needles, but it was no longer a solid mass. The core of the nest had been torn apart. 

We retreated to the truck, uploaded 12 video clips to my laptop, and found only 2 contained footage of the vole.

The other clips contained other arboreal visitors.

What follows is not exactly action-packed, and the jury is still out as to the identity of the nest wrecker.

But if you want to see the voles and the suspects, have a look.

Black bear

This image of a young black bear is from the Chimineas Ranch, taken at set 551.2 last November.

Craig checked the camera in mid-March. The cams are often inaccessible in the winter, so its a long haul. But we've gotten over 4 months of battery life using 2 external D cells.

Twelve days after the camera was set the bear climbed the outcrop to reach the bait and eyed the camera.

Craig still has a few cameras to check in the back country at Chimineas, and  soon I'll also be checking the cameras in Humbolt County, as well.

"The dog is not for sale"

Oliver Gordon Young, April, 2012

Background: My friend Reno Taini and I recently had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Oliver Gordon Young. We had both read "Tracks of an Intruder" his 1967 book about hunting with the Montagnards of northern Thailand. Reno and I may fancy ourselves as "old Asia hands" , but Gordon is the real thing. He was born in 1927 into a Baptist Missionary family in a remote village in Yunnan, China, had Lahu wet nurses, and spoke their Tibeto-Burman language long before acquiring proficiency in English. Like most missionary families, his had a deep understanding of local languages, customs, and beliefs.   I'll write more about his life and times, but here I want to share his story about match-making for Teddy, his Lahu hunting dog.

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"Did you ever encounter indigenous breeds of dogs in the remote hills of northern Thailand", I asked.

Gordon answered without hesitation.

“Yes, there was a breed in the Lahu villages that looked like a small Alsatian – brown and off-white coat with pointy ears, but smaller and more delicately built, and the tail carriage was upright – not like an Alsatian”. 

“I had one named Teddy, given to me as a puppy, and he came from an excellent hunting dog line”.

“They’re known to chase game silently, and Teddy barked only when he cornered wild pigs and deer”.

Teddy watches a tame leopard cub at play with another dog 
(Photo by Gordon Young).

“Teddy’s favorite pastime was fighting stray semi-feral curs quite numerous in those days.

"I remember the time, just outside the compound’s gate, he had pinned a cur to the ground, and seemed to want to hear 'uncle' just one more time.

"I ordered him to ‘go home’, but he just looked at me sheepishly, wagged his tail that he’d heard me, and the theatrics continued.

"I ordered him again and he finally quit, but not before cocking his leg and peeing in the vanquished cur’s face.

"My wife was with me in the Jeep. We couldn’t believe that purposeful gesture.

"Teddy demonstrates the fearlessness of his kind for leopards. Other dogs would panic from just the smell of a leopard, dog's dread and most mortal killer in this area of the world"
(Photo by Gordon Young).

"I was smitten with Teddy’s breed, and considered it probably the best type kept by the Lahu people as hunting dogs. 

"I also wanted to find Teddy a mate, and maybe even start a recognized hunting dog breed.

"While conducting an ethnographic survey in the late 1950s I thought at last I had found the perfect match in a Shehleh Lahu village near Doi Mak Angklang in Chiang Mai Province.

"The dog was sleeping soundly in the shade of the headman’ s bamboo and thatch-grass house, and she was exactly what I was looking for.

"The chieftain said she was a good hunter, and she always obeyed when he told her to back off a cornered boar.

"The last Shehleh chief of the village many 
years after the bargaining. He is holding his 
musical gourd pipe" (Photo by Gordon Young)

“The more he talked about that dog the more interested I became.

“The chief had two good-looking daughters, rather buxom girls between 14 and 16 years, which is marrying age for mountain people, and as was the custom they served us a meal, hill grown red rice with a mustard green curry and a fresh-killed chicken.

“We were sitting round the hearth in his hut, and I offered him 100 bhat for the dog.

"It was a reasonable offer in those days, but he replied “Hpuh chi haw a-hpeh meh”, which means ‘The dog is not for sale’".

"Well, every man has his price, so I offered him 200 bhat, and again he answered, ‘The dog is not for sale’.

”My assistant, Chanu, whispered to me 'Wait till we finish the meal, and then offer him 300 baht'”.

"when we finished eating I made my final offer, and once again the chief repeated ‘The dog is not for sale’.

"I couldn’t believe my ears.

“I just offered you the bride-price! 300 bhat! Does it have to be in silver?

“I could have one of your daughters for that price. Do you mean that dog is worth more than your daughter?

"The chief replied, 'You can have both of my daughters for 300 bhat each, but I will never sell the dog. Hpuh chi haw a-hpeh meh!'"

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References
Young, Gordon. 1962. The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand. Siam Society, Bangkok
Young, Gordon. 1967. Tracks of an intruder. Winchester Press, New York

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Gordon and his daughter Debbie Chase for hunting down the family photos for this post.