My New Screen Saver

I get off on plutons.

So, this is my latest screen saver -- El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

I took it a couple days ago with a Lumix FZ200.

The images from the hand-held camera were a wee blurry, but this one was taken on a tripod with delayed exposure.

Can you see the 3 climbers?











If John Muir saw Yosemite today he would be horrified, but for the rest of us, it is certainly still worth seeing.

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Memories of Ted Reed

Buckminster invites the author to a sparring match (ca 1979)

There is a reason you haven't heard from me lately. 

I was busy writing my personal memories of the late Theodore H. Reed, who died last year at the age of 90. 

Ted Reed was Director of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park from 1955 to 1982, and he hired me in 1974 to work at the zoo's Conservation and Research Center.

Several colleagues joined me recently at the National Zoo to memorialize Dr. Reed and celebrate the National Zoo's 125th anniversary. 

Here's one of my anecdotes from the late 1970s.  

"In due course, the Zoo and its conservation center became destinations worth seeing, and Ted hosted visiting VIPs with a personal touch. 

One of those VIPs was the Director of the Zurich Zoo, Heini Hediger, who was well known as the father of Zoo Biology.

In those days, a curator who hadn't read Hediger's books, Man and Animal in the Zoo, and The Psychology of Animals in Zoos and Circuses hadn't done his or her homework. 

Ted had me open gates, and do "the show and tell".  

At Greenhill Barn we had a herd of young Eld's deer that had been hand-reared for studies of reproduction, and being a keen student of ungulate behavior, I demonstrated the universal signal used by deer to terminate unwanted social interaction, such as invitations to spar with the antlers. 

The basic rule is this: Don't make eye contact. Turn away and just graze or pretend to graze. 

We observed this cut-off signal many times in different species of deer.

Even a person can give the signal by turning away and plucking grass with the hand. 

On this occasion my imitation worked like a charm.

Buckminster was game for a sparring match, and followed me around poking me in the butt.

I just kept plucking grass, and soon he lost interest and started grazing.  

Ted called the next day, and asked me to get photos of the sequence with Buckminster.


Hediger had been impressed and wanted the photos for his lectures. 

"Dr. Reed, it doesn’t always work. I’m not sure he’ll do it again.” 

Ted's response? “Just get it. He did it yesterday, he’ll do it again.”  

It took a while to get those pictures, but Ted's prediction was right. 


Buckminster finally tired of horning me in the butt and started to graze.  

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Red Tree Voles up close

Michael Durham, who happens to be one gifted wildlife photographer -- recently clicked some crystal clear images of red tree voles.

Read about his project here, and feast your eyes on these special rodents of our great Douglas fire forests.

It's also good to know these little canopy crawlers are subjects of ongoing scientific research.

Catnipping Bobcat

Getting cabin fever.

We've gotten but half the average rainfall we should have at this time of year.

 But I'm not complaining

To keep the show going I'm posting this brief video of a bobcat getting it on with a little castoreum and synthetic catnip oil.

Fred Learns the String Test

I'll never know for sure where Fuzzy came from, but suspect that Fred absconded with it from a neighbor's front yard.

We had great fun with Fuzzy, as you'll see in the video, and the game was a good way to dust the truck.  

But Fuzzy's departure was as sudden and mysterious as its appearance, and that was end of the string tests.

A White Winter Weasel

The short-tailed weasel or ermine, Dec 19, 2013, 1840 h

I just scratched the white winter weasel from my camera trapping bucket list. 

At least the white short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea). 

The white long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) remains to be camera-bagged.

White weasels of course are just brown weasels camouflaged in white winter coats. 

You find them where you can rely on long snowy winters, which is north of the 40th parallel.  On the mild west coast, the white-weasel-line jogs north into British Columbia.   

I bagged my white weasel near Yuba Pass on a steep north slope, in a jumble of broken granite shaded by red fir.

Some time in the past a large mass of granite cleaved and released a large flake of stone that slid several feet and settled against its mother.

The result was a narrow slot, a shelter, the kind of place small boys and codgers in their second childhood love to explore.

I was ready to camtrap "the granite flake" two summers ago, but a yellow jacket nest changed my mind. 

It was only the size of a grapefruit, but big enough to scare me off.  

The nest was gone last fall, so I set the camera on October 8th using civetone and castoreum as elevated scent lures.  

   

View from north opening.

View from south.

Bill and I checked it last Wednesday. The Lithium AA batteries lasted 94 days, and in addition to the white weasel -- here's what we got: 

Montane vole (Microtus montanus): 6 visits/8 photos

Bushy-tailed wood rat (Neotoma cinerea): 8 visits/13 photos. Last visit:Oct 18. Here it gathers lichen as nest material and/or food.

Brush mouse (Peromyscus boylii): 58 visits/146 photos. Many photos recorded one or more of these characters gathering papier mache from the wasp nest.

Trowbridge shrew (Sorex trowbridgii): 1 visit/1 photo (Nov 14)

Long-eared chipmunk (Tamias quadrimaculatus): 11 visits/14 photos (Last visit: Nov 21)

Chickaree (Tamiasciurus douglasii): 11 visits/14 photos 

You all know, of course, that we're in a bad bad drought.

There was little snow on route 49 until we reached 6000 ft. Normally it would be down to 4000 ft.

Below the current snow line those white winter weasels are an advertisement to predators, mainly carnivores and birds of prey.

Not to worry my friends, the furry and feathered agents of natural selection have already started to fix the problem.

[thanks to "Bill W, MJC" for the good company and watchful eyes]

References

King, C. 1990. The natural history of weasels and stoats. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

Hall, E.R. 1951. American weasels. University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History 4:1-466.

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Camtrapping the Western Ghats

Karanth and team radio-collar a leopard
in Ngarahole National Park in the 1980s

Here are some terrific camera trap photos of carnivores from the Western Ghats, the major mountain range of southwest India.

They are a testament to the dedication and leadership of Ullas Karanth and his able colleagues at WCS-India. 

Ullas (lower right) has devoted his career to the conservation of tigers and the landscapes they depend upon.

The tell-tale equipment seen in the photos is a reminder of the first generation of commercial trail cameras. 

The Trailmaster active infra-red motion detectors seen in the background rely on a beam of IR light between a transmitter and receiver. 

The detector can be adjusted to detect different species based on the duration of beam interruption. 

The Olympus point and shoot cameras were quick acting 35 mm models that captured the action quite well.