Melodious Drummer

I was sitting in the outdoor tub, enveloped by the quiet night, waiting to listen to the next interesting sound that sauntered my way. Dusk was descending. I was not able to see much detail anymore, but still able to hear numerous aural particulars. I was drifting along with the flow of mundane events.

A sound came to me: the drumming of a woodpecker. But this one was no pedestrian drummer. He was a virtuoso. A woodpecker’s usual drumming sound is loud and repetitive—emanating from a hollow tree branch that he has claimed as his very own. It rings out through the forest, as if the bird has proudly discovered a wonderful new drum to beat on; sending his exuberant message to all, but especially to any receptive female woodpeckers who may be within hearing distance.

Woodpeckers come in several flavors around here: downy, hairy, red-bellied, and pileated—from small to large. In addition to being garish drummers, they are also garish in their appearance. They flaunt their contrasting black and white apparel, like a teenage boy dressed up for the prom. Their woodpecker tuxedo is often set off with a brilliant red patch on either their head or shoulders.

A woodpecker’s bill is long and chisel-shaped; it is backed by strong neck muscles, that allow them to bash into tree bark, seeking hidden bugs beneath. To keep them from becoming addled by brain damage as they bang away, their brain is encased in a fluid shock absorber.

Their vocal calls are of three types: expressing alarm, attracting a mate, or declaring territory. Their drumming calls are primarily for similar communication—either to attract a mate or to proclaim their domain. When they excavate for bugs, they slowly, much more quietly and erratically bang away on a tree branch; but when mate-seeking drumming, their rate is far more rapid—sounding like a toy machine gun.

It’s not easy to discern which species is drumming, when I listen to them—but the big pileated woodpecker sounds big, while the little downy raps much more demurely. Although I couldn’t see the drummer on this night, I was guessing that he was a medium sized hairy woodpecker.

The usual woodpecker drumming sound is a loud rapping of 10-15 beats, way off in the woods, where the bird has found himself an echoey, hollow branch. That beat will get repeated, with the same resonant tapping, every minute or so. You can admire him as you listen, proudly announcing that he’s found himself a great percussion instrument to rap on and show off his skills.

The drumming of this guy, however, was not always repeated the same way. Although his rapping rate was quite constant, he’d bash away just once or twice, and then he’d fall silent for a bit. When he started up again, the tone of his drumming would quite different… not at all repetitive. He’d tap for a few times on what sounded like a hard spot on the limb. Then he’d switch to a dry-sounding spot, sort of like a dead wood area. Then he’d drum with a hollow, resonant sound that rang out, almost bell-like. I listened to him moving back and forth between these three locations, as if he was seeking the best sound to woo the ladies with.

I pictured in my mind a jazz drummer or an orchestral percussionist—tapping on one surface after another, making fascinating, melodic sounds, seeking just the right tonal quality. It was as if this bird was experimenting—exploring for the location that pleased him (or her) the most. I enjoyed his musical concert. I liked the variation in sounds, although I suspected that the hollow-limb sound traveled farther in the woods, and thus was more likely to reach a listening lady woodpecker. I wondered if she was enjoying the concert as much as I was, picking up on the different intonations. Maybe she was just a tone-deaf lady woodpecker, but still receptive enough to respond to his artistic drumming.

Garden Spider

Can you note the eight eyes? Click to enlarge.

Nipping Nuisances—Part 2

Repellent sprays do little to discourage these biting flies. Dark clothing attracts them, as well as the smell of the carbon dioxide you exhale. (I wonder if it’s the CO₂ or the halitosis?) Movement attracts them. I’ve not yet tried to wear white clothes, stand utterly still, and hold my breath as a defense. Somehow that seems like offering them a very inviting target.

I read on the internet that my best defense is to jump around and madly swipe at them with something. That’s much more my natural inclination—in fact, I can’t seem to stop myself from going into a manic state of ducking and leaping, when I hear one of these buggers buzzing around my head. When I do, I at least have a fair chance of driving one of them away and a tiny chance of triumphantly whacking one out of midair. That’s an occasion for a celebration! Stop whatever I’m doing and go inside and open up a beer!

A distant cousin to the horsefly and deerfly is the blackfly—native to lands north of here. They are really nasty! I once drove into a parking lot in a remote provincial park in Canada in the month of May, stepped out of the car, and was immediately attacked by a killer squadron of blackflies. Their fierce attack distracted me enough that on one of my wild swings at them, I slammed the car door closed—locking the keys inside. Their attack only increased, now that they had me on the ropes. Painful bites ensued and blood began to stream down my neck.

I was miles from any locksmith. Desperation came over me. Quickly sizing up my predicament (much faster than otherwise, thanks to the attackers), I grabbed a rock and smashed a small side window—gaining reentry and escaping blackfly hell. I fled down the road, leaving the hungry beasts in my wake.

Returning home to Virginia a day later, I was devastated to learn that replacing that wee side window would come at an unbelievable cost of $600! I was devastated to find out that replacing the whole bloody windshield would have cost less. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a hugely expensive lesson delivered by such a small pest.

Tomato Hornworm

Note the red horn on it butt end. The tiny circles on its side are spiracles, through which the worm literally breathes, bringing air directly to its body. Left click to enlarge.

Parasitized Tomato Hornworm

The white cocoons are eggs of a parasite wasp, slowly killing the worm. This one was found next to the healthy one above.

Nipping Nuisances—Part 1

I have learned to be tolerant of and even respect a critter here and there, who I once considered to be nothing but a pest around the homestead. So I don’t indiscriminately retaliate with the lethal weapons against them as I once did. For example, I previously used chemical sprays to kill off many garden looters, but now have learned to repel most of them with a natural product. We have also learned to live with some critters we once would have willingly sent to their deaths, when we have come to learn that they are causing no significant harm. The key has been to learn enough about their habits to keep their populations in check.

That said, I still have a few pests that I do not hesitate to kill. (OK, I still have some work to do on my nonviolence practice.) Mosquitoes, ticks, and horseflies top my extermination list. When one comes buzzing around me or is crawling up my leg, I’m gonna assume that it is trying to claim some of my blood (and possibly inject a nasty bacterium in me), and have no guilty feelings about dispatching it.

Horseflies (and their close cousins, deerflies) deliver a painful bite. As with mosquitoes, only the female horsefly bites, because she needs some mammalian blood to nurture her eggs. (That’s yet another reason to stop her: no blood, no biting babies.) The horsefly has razor-like mandibles with which she slices into your flesh, injecting a little anti-coagulant, to keep the blood flowing, so she can take a quick sip and flee, before getting swatted.

Sometimes a group of horseflies or deerflies will swoop around my head—flying at warp speed. I can hear them, and occasionally spot one out of the corner of my eye, but they move so fast that they can’t be tracked by us sluggish humans. It can feel like I’ve been transported into some bizarre Star Wars scenario, with tiny alien space ships zinging about me in a coordinated attack.

The horsefly knows she’s nearly uncatchable, because she moves fast, so she maddeningly buzzes within inches of your head, causing you to spin about, in a fruitless attempt to shoot her down. After she forces you into a frantic state of mind where you can’t tell where she is, she silently slips up from behind and gently lands on your shoulder or neck. An instant later you feel the painful zap. She has drawn blood—even through your clothing. Like tiny stealth drones, you’ve been nailed before you can put up a defense.

Horseflies are up to an inch long (that’s a big blood sucker!). Deerflies, which may reach half an inch, are less intimidating to see, but are sneakier. There are over a hundred sub species of these nasty little beasts—some with fascinating names such as breeze flies, clegs, gadflies, zimbs, and bulldog flies. (That last one seems like an endearing name.) Barnyard animals can sometimes become weak from loss of blood, if repeatedly bit by a swarm of these nuisances. My dog goes berserk when a horsefly comes within 20 feet of him.

More on biting flies next time…

Lovely Mushrooms on Dead Tree Stump

Superstar—Part 2

Picking back up on the post of a few days ago...

If a star is much larger than our sun (at least twice the size), it will terminate itself with an even larger spectacular ending. It goes on beyond a red giant to become a supergiant, after which it explodes into a supernova. The core can then collapse into an unimaginably dense ball the size of a small city, called a neutron star.

Let’s go up to the next size star—at least four times our sun—the biggest stars until recently that were thought to exist. When these guys go supernova and then collapse, what’s left is called a black hole… the most dense object we know of in the universe.

Going down from our sun in star size, we find red dwarf stars. These are anywhere from about half the size of our sun, to less than a tenth. Being so small, they don’t have that much gravity to squeeze them, so they burn very slowly. Whereas a star like our sun will last for 5-10 billion years, a red dwarf will keep going for many billions of years… maybe even a trillion.

That, until a few years ago, was the full range of star sizes thought possible. But now comes along the superstars found by Gal-Yam and his cohorts. These stars may be 100-200 times the size of our sun! Any star this big was thought either to be impossible to form or, if it could exist, was too big to explode. They, like old soldiers, were believed to just fade away. Astronomers now have to rethink the stellar process, however.

These newly-discovered superstars end in more than just a supernova; so maybe we have to come up with a new moniker and maybe call them super supernova? And we have to expand our understanding of star formation and death. One of the more fascinating results of the regular old supernova is that they have previously been thought to be the only way heavy elements were formed in the early universe. Just after the Big Bang, something like 99.99% of the material in the baby universe was hydrogen—no oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, or any of the other many elements that compose our Earth and us human-like critters. (By the way, the other 0.01%? Mostly a wee bit of helium.) Only in the wake of the massive early supernova explosions were the heavier elements formed; only after these early stars burned and blew up, could planets, people, and fireflies be formed.

But now we find that there’s a new chapter to the story. We have gone beyond mere supernovae to super supernovae. Our limited human knowledge once again expands. No one yet knows quite what these superstars mean. Maybe we have yet to discover super superstars, with their super super supernovae? This is getting a little clumsy. Will we have to come up with even more superlative names? Megastars? Meganovae? Mega megastars?

The universe still refuses to accede to our limited definitions and comprehension. It remains bigger than we can wrap our heads around. We’re just beginning to pry open its secrets. (Actually, they are not secrets at all, but knowledge just waiting for us to wake up to.) I wish I could live another couple of hundred years, if only to learn a few more of these mysteries.

They Fledged!

The next day we were thrilled to watch the wren babies in the photo below fledge. Turns out there were four of them. (One must have been hiding in the photo I took.) There was lots of fluttering around the yard, as the fledglings awkwardly tried out their wings for the first time, aiming for a branch and missing, or managing to grab on, but swinging upside down, struggling to right itself. Mom and dad nervously flew about, chirping out to their babies and encouraging them to quickly learn how to fly, before some critter came along and gobbled them up. They carried worms and bugs to their babies, urging them on. Within an hour all babies and the parents had dispersed. Another brood on its way!

Carolina Wren Babies

This is a late brood... early September. Left click to enlarge.

Superstar—Part 1

Back in 1971 Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice—two very talented Brits—conceived of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” and ushered in a new kind of entertainment, as well as provoked a lot of people to rethink the story of Jesus. I recently watched the 1973 movie once again—an inspired production filmed in the beautiful Israeli desert. I love the music!

What Sir Andrew and Sir Tim couldn’t anticipate was that decades after their opera, another type of superstar would be discovered—this time not by a couple of talented Brits, but by a skilled Israeli astronomer. Avishay Gal-Yam has an article in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American magazine, titled “Super Supernovae,” that describes how he and associates came upon these superstars. (Maybe super superstars?)

Prior to this discovery, the accepted wisdom in the astronomical world was that the largest a star could get was maybe as much as 100 times the size of our sun. There are many kinds of stars in our majestic universe—with a wide range of size, temperature, color, brightness, age, and number (single, double, or even triple stars). Each kind has its own type of life history. Every star winks into existence when a cloud of interstellar gas (almost completely hydrogen) collapses on itself and ignites under tremendous gravitational pressure, kicking off a nuclear fusion process. The star emits its shine for millions or billions of years, as the hydrogen fuel becomes slowly fused into helium.

When the hydrogen begins to run out is when stars get interesting. Their next act is a dying one—sometimes far more dramatic than what Shakespeare conjured up in “Romeo and Juliet.” The nature of that swan song depends mostly on the size of the star. Every star begins to collapse into itself, when its fuel diminishes. Some (like our sun) will then swell into red giants, and what’s left after that will then shrink back to a white dwarf. If the dwarf has a partner (part of a double star system) that’s still burning, the dwarf may steal some of its partner’s fuel and later explode into a nova. They are called that because, to the ancients (who were very familiar with the night sky), the explosion suddenly became very visible to the naked eye and seemed to them to be a new star appearing in the heavens.

More superstars next time…