Some recent Facebook posts, plus some other stuff ( Read more... )

'tis the season for critters here, it seems.  Besides the usual lizards and sphinx moths, Gandalf has also brought an enormous Jerusalem cricket into the house, twice so far.  I guess he just likes carrying it around and letting it go inside. Last week he also brought in a scrub jay, luckily uninjured.  I was able to catch it and let it go outside ( Read more... )

On Facebook today I kept seeing things about a "miracle" baby born without a nose.  I wouldn't really call that a 'miracle."  A horrible and sad birth defect, maybe.  On the other hand, maybe he'll never know the misery of clogged sinuses or a broken nose, and putting a fake nose on should be reletively easy ( Read more... )

I went for a walk in the park (I'm still making a valiant effort to keep up some sort of exercise, as painful and boring as it is).  At one point a coyote began following me on the trail.  I don't know if it was looking for handouts or simply was taking the path of least resistance rather than moving through the heavy brush.  Whatever the reason, ( Read more... )

The raccoon family returned tonight.  Unfortunately for them, they did it while I was still up.  This time they were in the side yard, going after the pomegranates I'd put out for the birds. So they got a repeat of being chased by the crazy woman, who this time threw rocks and a bucket at them, and when they went up a tree sprayed them with the ( Read more... )

This morning at 4 or 5 AM, three raccoons got into the back yard.  I'm pretty sure they were after the dried-up raisin-grapes on the grapevine.  I was woken up by them attempting to (unsuccessfully) climb past the baffles on the back patio posts.  When they couldn't get out that way they tried climbing over the cat fence, also unsuccessfully.  But ( Read more... )

Me and furtech were invited by calicougar to spend the day at her grandparent's house on Malibu beach.  Yes, a house on the beach at Malibu is just as nice as it sounds.  We timed our visit for low tide, and spent a couple hours roaming the beach and tide pools.  Always lots of neat critters there.  Tons of sea anemones, tiny hermit crabs in shells the size of a ( Read more... )

Well, so far I don't have 12 requests for the dirty and/or disturbing pictures from my saved archives, so I guess people are out of luck.  Not as much interest as I thought ( Read more... )

Promised photos of the very large shed snake skin. Somewhere along the paseo there's a big snake slithering around.


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On dogwalk last night Rondo found the whole shed skin of a snake. A really big snake. If I hold the skin in my hands and hold my arms over my head, the skin is still long enough to touch the floor. The only snakes I've seen behind the house are gopher snakes and a coachwhip, and this was long enough I'm guessing it was the coachwhip snake, esp. ( Read more... )