The Urban Pantheist

I'll let you in on a little secret that I won't tell them over at tumblr. I'm going to slow release a whole mess of photos of organisms from this day to try to catch up on my 280 days of urbpandemonium project. The following post is mostly people and places kind of pictures, and lots of them.

Nickerson Beach is on a peninsula neighborhood known as Squantum in the city of Quincy. It sticks up into Boston Harbor and is very close to a couple of the harbor islands.
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I went to dump the dehumidifier water in the compost (it's a thing we do) but when I opened it I found this perfect garter snake shed!

Sunday morning there were clouds of flying insects emanating like smoke from the ground! ( Read more... )

Here comes Cosmo!


He and I enjoy our time together. We both like to rassle.


And then Maggie found something fun in the yard!

Wilson Mountain Reservation is a protected patch of woods on a stony hill in Dedham. The main entrance has a parking area which is almost always packed with cars full of dog owners taking their pets for a quick ramble up the path, often off-leash. My good friend dedhamoutdoors knows her town well, and took me to the back side of the Reservation, where we didn't see another human or canine soul. Perhaps the persistent light rain helped.

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Ah weekends in the (almost) summer. A piña colada slurpee enjoyed at the backyard picnic table. By practicing Assal Horizontology for most of the day I found some creatures:

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Andy consults the map to get us from Portland to Astoria.
( let's see Portland and Astoria! )

A common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) found at the edge of my driveway. The garter snake is North America's most common and abundant reptile. It is a small (rarely growing to 3 feet long) predator of earthworms, slugs, salamanders and other small animals. It prey to many other creatures including skunks, larger birds, and as I suspect in this case, house cats. I suspect a cat because this snake's carcass is entirely here, none of it is eaten, but it's head has been crushed by a bite. Most predators kill as a matter of feeding themselves, while domestic cats are sated of this need and kill because the instinct moves them to; they leave the dead behind as grisly offerings on pillows, doorsteps, and driveways.


Each scale on a garter snake is keeled, bearing its own central ridge, giving the skin an overall rough appearance. The garter snake is named for the band of fabric that holds up stockings, though many mishear the name as "garden snake."

( Somewhat gory )

Garter snakes have appeared in photos on this blog before, from Drumlin Farm, Franklin Park Zoo (as a wild, non-collection animal), and at Cutler Park.

Wow, what an unexpectedly wonderful day for urban nature!  As most of you know, I work at a zoo in a major northeastern city.  I was in an area that used to be a waterfowl exhibit that's now closed, treating the water features for mosquitoes (biological controls, insect growth regulator, and pheromone traps).  Almost immediately I encountered the garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) pictured two posts ago.  It slithered over a stick, so I was able to pick it up without it biting me, or worse, musking on me.  It struck as fiercely at me as a timber rattlesnake, despite being a pencil-sized predator of slugs.

I delved further into this jungle of concrete and weeds, and found a mallard family with four nearly grown chicks.  They were clearly shocked to see a human in their sanctuary.  It was surely safer for them in an unused part of a zoo, a hundred feet from thousands of people and cars, then it was in any of the nearby city parks.  I found one of my pheromone traps, blown by the wind into the artificial pond, and fished it out.  A plastic container the size of a large mayonnaise jar, it had an amazing array of life within it.  Four water boatmen had swam into it, hunting smaller insects.  I could make out the tiny swimming forms of water mites, and even copepods carrying double saddlebags full of eggs.  I dumped out the creatures into the pond and brought the empty trap back to storage.

On the way I walked through a landscape decorated with huge white spheroids, ranging from the size of softballs to those the size of deflated soccer balls.  These are giant puffballs, Calvatia gigantea.  If they were allowed to grow to maturity their insides would turn into billions of spores, which would puff out of tears in the mushroom's leathery hide when struck by raindrops.  I harvested two of them, for research purposes for the mushroom classes I'm teaching at Drumlin Farm in the fall.  Some of my research will include slicing up one of the mushrooms, frying it and eating it.  I must ask, lizblackdog and gwenhyffar, how do you cook and season these beasts?

Finally, as I went back to my storage area, I moved some equipment and turned up a yellow, white, and black striped caterpillar.  Such a striking and beautiful thing, but it was on a piece of metal.  "You belong here, little one," I said, as I lifted it up and placed it on a milkweed plant growing out of a crack in the asphalt.