neonleonb

I visited my sister and her husband in Irvine this past weekend. Of course, I only took pictures on the day we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, but I still got some good pictures.


Ruth


Todd

Of course, when I was most excited, I forgot entirely to take pictures. At the park, they did a little presentation where they brought out some animals to interact with select members of the crowd, and some dude got to have a hyrax jump around on his shoulders! I was intensely jealous. For those of you who don't know, a hyrax is an adorable little rodent-like rock-jumping critter. I saw some in Israel last summer, and I took as many pictures of them as I did the whole rest of the trip. For instance:


(from Israel)

I also got this video of a young hyrax making a clumsy mistake. Damn, they're cute.


(from Israel)

I was in Tennessee with my family (save for my sister) for two weeks. I didn't take as many pictures as I probably should have, but I'll share what I've got.

I went on a few hikes with these folks


including around a green Tennessee valley
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And, while in Chattanooga, I went flying. But that's another set of pictures.

So, allow me to introduce you to Berkeley's South Side. It's where the undergrads live, along with the park-dwelling hobos and "Money for beer"-sign-carrying panhandlers. It also has this awesome vacant lot.



In this lot, there are rats.

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I hear that crows are some of the most intelligent birds. What I've noticed lately is that they're also some of the most belligerent. Several times in the past few weeks, I've seen crows in what seems like combat. They'll aggressively fight for altitude, then one will dive at the other, which will turn upside-down, so they meet claw-to-claw for an instant before they fall apart. The incident ends when one crow flies away or roosts somewhere. The giant, lovely eucalyptus tree out my back window has been a focus of such activity at least once.

Someone suggested to me that this isn't combat, but instead is mating behavior. Finally today I saw evidence that they're wrong, when a crow chased away a seagull. Unless that crow was pretty broad-minded (and the seagull wasn't), I'm pretty sure that wasn't mating behavior.

And now, a picture of angry crows ten time zones away (where the dominant crow species is the "hooded crow").

The weather has been gorgeous in Berkeley, so I thought I'd go outside to work. Predictably, I didn't get too much work done, but I saw a number of interesting things at the Marina.

For starters, at the Berkeley Marina, the main entertainment is flight. The wind wasn't good at first for kites, and I saw many people fail at getting their kites to fly. But I looked up at just the right moment, and I saw a spider drift by. I ran after it--it was clearly "ballooning" on strands of its own silk! I'd heard of such things, but never seen them. It didn't seem to be using just one strand of silk--it looked more like some sort of structure, but it was hard to make out any details. I didn't see any others, but that alone was amazing enough. I was particularly amused that the nearly-brainless spider was succeeding where all the humans couldn't get their kites to stay up.

The low winds were good for more than just spiders, though. I saw a remote-controlled helicopter! It didn't do the fancy tricks you'd expect from, say, Pieter Abbeel's AI-controlled helicopter, but it was cool to see anyway. I also saw a remote-controlled glider, but it wasn't able to soar until the wind picked up and the kites started flying. (The wind came from the east! At the Marina! If you're a Berkeley resident, you know how weird that is--usually in the afternoon at the Marina there's a strong sea breeze.)

In addition to the spider, I saw a little more good wildlife. By being very still, I was able to get some nice close-up pictures, so here's a little sequence:

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Rock hyrax look cute when sitting around, but they jump over the rocks quite nimbly. I took some videos. I apologize that they're kind of grainy and the light is bad, and the cameraman sucks, but I did what I could.

First, see a young rock hyrax jumping around. Those little buggers can really get around.


Second, and I can't believe I caught this on tape, the hyrax proves not to be as sure-footed as he seems. I didn't even notice this happen when I was filming--only looking back through the video did I see it, and then I laughed out loud.

Megan and I went on an all-day bicycle-based exploration of San Francisco.

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As I was jogging this morning, I saw a small dog without a leash running around up ahead. I figured its owner was around, but I didn't see them. As I got close to the dog, it suddenly ran off into the street, its owner yelling after it to stay. Of course, it was at that moment that a minivan came driving down the street. The dog ran right in front of the van, and then ran away from the van--in the same direction the van was going.

The image that I have in my head is this: The owner was yelling, then van's driver was stopping, but not perhaps as fast as they should have been, and the dog was fleeing from the van. The dog was right in front of the van's front left wheel, scampering away, and it got maybe 2 inches from being run over--I think it was crouching a bit to avoid the wheel as it ran away. But in the end, the van stopped and the dog barely escaped with its life. It would have been truly crushed had it been caught by the wheel.

But it all ended up okay, and maybe the owner will learn to either (a) train the dog or (b) keep it on a leash. Some people might blame the driver (they should have been going as slowly as molasses in a residential neighborhood!), but they were reasonably slow, and drivers aren't responsible for psychically intuiting what might run into the street in front of them. I grew up on busy streets, and you simply stay off the road, and keep your pets off the road.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the ICSI picnic. After having eaten lots of food (they didn't tell me there would be ribs, so I ate other food--then couldn't resist the ribs),
I was about to play some frisbee (not ultimate--way too full for that). All of a sudden, I saw movement in the grass. It was a little mammal peeking out of a hole in the ground! So I sat and watched it for about twenty minutes, because I am fascinated by rodents in the wild. Someday Kate and I may take a rodent tour of the world, and this was a completely unexpected chance to see one.

I sat so I could look into the hole. About 4 times per minute or so, a small quantity of dirt would appear in the hole and be pushed to the top. The rodent definitely preferred to leave it as close to his burrow as possible, but he had to push it away in order to keep it from falling in. So every so often, he would come up and push the accumulated dirt farther away. Whenever he exposed himself in this dirt-moving process, he used quick, jerky motions and stayed above-ground for only seconds.

Having looked it up on the Internet, it's clear that this creature was a California vole. He was about the length of my hand (when stretched out pushing dirt, anyway). He had big front paws with long nails for digging, and for pushing dirt out of the hole. He had sleek brown fur and small round ears that lay flat against his head. I wished I'd had a camera, but I didn't. I found a few pictures showing voles, but none of them captured its one ugly feature: Although the vole was mostly as cute as a mouse, it had an ugly mouth for burrowing. Its lips were such that they would never cover its teeth and gums. I suppose that's so that it can get its teeth right up against something to gnaw on in a tunnel, but it wasn't pretty.

Here are pictures, hotlinked mercilessly from voles.com: