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I first heard its unique and loud call from inside the house and after the third sounding came to the bay window in the dining room to see what I could see, which was nothing because it clammed up for whatever reason. Then I saw the way the afternoon sunlight was hitting the few remaining suflowers and I decided to bust out the DSLR to more properly immortalize them…

And while I was moving around Coyote Corner doing just that the bird called again almost from directly over my head in the tree overhanging the sunflowers, and there it was (click it for the bigger picture):

Much larger than your average parakeet, it looked more cockatiel than conure, but I’ve never seen so colorful a cockatiel. And unlike the skittish flocks of yellow-chevroned parakeets that can often be found flitting noisily about the place, this bird had no problem being in such close proximity to me, leading me to think it either was or had been a pet. And when I mimicked its tweets we even got something of a dialogue going on, at least until it tired of the dead-end conversation and flew westward out of the tree directly into the setting sun where I lost sight of it, but later heard it tweeting from somewhere across the street.

So if anyone’s missing a unique looking and sounding bird or knows of someone who is, it was last seen and heard yesterday afternoon south of Sunset and east of Silver Lake Boulevard here in Silver Lake.

Literally moments after Susan had left this morning for her regular salon visit, a strange cat sound issues forth from the kitchen area and I arrive from the study to find a nice-sized alligator lizard on the floor bracketed on either side by Pepper and Ranger who are both looking down at it rather tentatively.

I immediately advise the cat and dog to vacate their locations and they do. Unfortunately so does the nice-sized lizard, straight into the space under the large free-standing pantry (that Susan built by herself several years before meeting me). I can’t say if Susan ever cleaned that void the lizard now occupied before I came on the scene in 2004, but I know for a fact that in the six years since then it has been left untouched as dustbunny incubator.

As is sometimes the case with me, simple plans have a way of getting complicated, and my simple plan to drag a rod across the space beneath the pantry and force the the lizard out from under the undoubtedly filthy place got really complicated when after doing so there was no lizard. In the reptile’s place came shoved out an amazing bundle of pet hair, an old barely chewed rawhide bone, and various bits of cat and dog kibble.

So my next step was to move the pantry out into the kitchen in hopes of revealing the lizard. But all that revealed was more pet hair, and by more I mean a metric shitload. On the OMFG scale of 1-10, 10 being Evacuate Immediately, this was an 8.

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Made with the Twitcast app on my iPhone propped against a beer can.

Arachnophobes beware! I finally timed it right and captured the largest of the many orb weavers in our backyard this morning building its new web. This timelapse at a frame a second, captures about an hour’s worth of webspinning.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for cereus cactus blooms, which open nocturnally this time of year for one night and one night only, closing up the next morning never to bloom again. As such, the local bees (and occasional carpenter bee) waste little time diving in to frolic in the flower’s funstuffs we until about  7 p.m. (the first four minutes). After that it’s just the progression of the petals opening wider.

I think the last cereus timelapse I posted here was of a bloom closing up at daybreak, so at least this time it’s different in that the above shows a bloom opening up at sundown.

As with any previous captures, this is a two-hour interval, in this case filmed August 23 from 6:03 to 8:03 p.m. at one frame per second via the timelapse function of a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot SD1100, supplemented by a tripod-fixed light source aimed on the blossom to provide illumination after dark.

Music via YouTube’s Audioswap feature:
Title: In And Out Of Days
Artist: C-Mon & Kypski
Album: Where The Wild Things Are

It’s roughly 80 seconds this phoebe (I think) spent at our bird bath, but through the magic of Quicktime I’ve put the way brief timelapse on an endless loop. Now all it needs is the appropriate musical accompaniment… “Rockin’ Robin” perhaps?

I missed capturing the latest cereus cactus flower’s nocturnal opening Tuesday night, but yesterday morning I set up my cam before the bloom  at 6:40 a.m. and timelapsed the following two sunrise hours of it slowly — almost imperceptibly — closing up shop.

There are certainly lulls in the activity, but it’s fascinating (to me, at least) not only how the bees frolickingly  interact with the blossom but also as the opening gets progressively smaller how they seem almost hyper-aware that their time with the flower is fleeting.

There’s a jumping spider who hangs out on the edge of the petals at one point, and keep an eye out near the middle for the big carpenter bee — especially nearer the end when it barrels its way inside through the almost-closed petals for one last round.

Whatever biological elements conspired to limit our property’s usual orb spider inundation this past year or two are not in effect this time around. These awesome arachnids have been out and about the yards early, albeit smaller in size than I typically see.

Until this morning, when I found this fine large specimen working on its web under the backyard bougainvillea (click it for the bigger picture):

For all you arachniphobes out there… sorry. It can’t all be hummingbird chicks and butterflies.

If it’s any consolation there is of course the drawback that I’m walking  face first into far more webs strung across walkways and such. But doing my exceptionally erratic version of the spiderwebfacefreakout dance is mostly a small price to pay to get to hang with such amazing creatures.

Mostly.

It’s that time of year and the neighbor’s fence-sitting cereus cactus is wonderfully at it again. I noticed the blooms-to-be about a week ago, but wasn’t expecting them to open up so quickly.

And when they do, the early-morning bees drop any interest in sunflowers and literally go swimming in them. So of course I stuck my iPhone’s cam all up in the bloom to catch the action. It’s pretty cool:

Sorry to cut off right at that particular moment. My iPhone shut down right then… either because it’s afraid of bees or I was holding it wrong. Or perhaps it was just trying to spare you from listening to me blather on.

After weeks of counting pollinators as part of my ongoing involvement with the Great Sunflower Project, I thrill with every bee I see. But I have to say, I’d been hoping for a little more variety beyond just honeybees.. Well, that variety arrived with my count including my first carpenter bee — and my timelapse captured its arrival to the flower beautifully (click it for the bigger picture).