The Urban Pantheist

Here we are, the vice and pres of the local chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers, sitting at our table in front of the baby reindeer. A Wild Affair is a restaurant tasting event that is held at Stone Zoo every June. I liked the buffalo chicken mac and cheese the best, but the chicken pot pie cup was pretty delish. We were there to tell the guests about Bowling for Rhinos, happening only 11 months from now.

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Still cute.


Belly still speckled.


Our street and sidewalks (where we have sidewalks--they end at our house, so we have about five feet of sidewalk and then it mysteriously stops) have been repaved. The town removed a strip of every lawn in the process, replacing it with new soil. Since then it hasn't rained much, so most yards still have a strip of bare loose dirt. This turned out to be a perfect substrate for catching these deer tracks, as the animal went up to investigate one of the neighbors' ornamental shrubs.

I think I've featured this stony cervid family in a previous snapshot. Sorry to get all techy, but this (along with the zookeeper/Mandrill and croc pics) was taken with the tiny powershot A540--the modern equivalent of a 110 camera (see icon). It looks so much better to me than the iPod snaps, it look like this is going to be the camera I carry around with, at least until bug season rolls around. How good a bug close-up could I manage with this little thing?




About this good, I reckon. There is a macro setting but it's hard to know if you've got it right until you check it later. It's better than I expected.

Anyway, this is an early instar nymph of the smokybrown cockroach Periplaneta fuliginosa. I've probably been seeing and dismissing adults and later instar nymphs for years, since they look a lot like American cockroaches. The smokybrown adults are uniformly dark mahogany brown, while the Americans have lighter brown markings on their pronota. The early instar nymphs are distinctive, however. There are two light colored bands on the insect's body, and the last few segments of the antennae are likewise light colored.

Smokybrown cockroaches are not common indoor pests, they require temperature and humidity levels that are much higher than most households. They are found in and around houses in Florida and Texas, as well as in tropical greenhouses and similar buildings.

I think this is the best shot I got of Stone Zoo's new gibbon baby and its mom, but that won't stop me from posting a whole bunch of other ones too!

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I think of reindeer as being kind of mild-mannered, somewhat less interesting animals sometimes. Not today. Oh hey, look, I'm caught up with my posts!

Maggie is almost completely healed up, so we went to Lost Pond Reservation today. This is a group of dead and dry Indian pipe flowers that grew in Summer.

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When Yellowstone was created as a park it was before Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho were states. Being a big area full of edible animals and interesting mineral resources that were suddenly all protected by the U.S. government, it needed protection. That job went to the army, who did the job in tents until they got tired of camping in fifty below, so they put some buildings up.

Then the Parks Service was created, and protecting the park became the job of Park Rangers, so the army cleared out to kill Spaniards or something. The buildings became a little tourist village called Mammoth Hot Springs. This village has watered lawns and a lack of predators, which suits the local elk population just fine. They have given up migrating, and they hang out surrounded by tourists (being yelled at by Park Rangers) an awful lot of the day.

( Plus there's the hot springs which are mind blowing. )

As I was coming home for lunch to walk the dogs I saw a deer in Boston. I was on the Jamaicaway, and the deer was in Olmsted Park by Leverett pond.  It was an adult with no antlers, and it was running in an apparent panic.

This is a first for me; I get to add white-tailed deer to my catalog of Boston wildlife.  I knew that they were often seen at the Boston Nature Center, but this is my first time seeing one in Boston.  This is a touch closer to The City, about three miles from Kenmore Square.  (In the past I've joked about the encroachment of deer into cities by saying that I don't expect to see deer in Kenmore Square, but in some outer city parks.  Kenmore Square, in case you don't know, is famous as the location of the Citgo sign you can see on televised Red Sox games.)  I'm sure this deer was outside of its normal range and I won't be shocked if I see its carcass in the middle of the J-way on the way back to work.  But I consider today a landmark of a kind--my first Boston deer.

(You may remember my first urban deer from my trip to the Pacific Northwest.)