[sic]

Did I see what I think I saw earlier today?

I know that a small squadron of crows set to making quite a racket directly overhead in the backyard this afternoon. When Susan and I came out of the house to investigate I counted five of them circling our smaller palm tree and immediately I figured they were giving some raptor grief that had landed up there in the fronds.

Little did I know…

Upon circling to the backside of the tree I found myself looking up about 25 feet from a magnificent red-tailed hawk looking straight down at me while trying its best to ignore the divebombings of the crows and maintain control of its prey, a medium-sized something that it clutched in one talon while holding the frond with the other.

Only when I said something over the crows like “Whoa will you look at that!” and pointed up, did the hawk get startled, unable to deal with the attentions of the crows above and me below. Upon lifting off it was also unable to maintain a grip on its meal — but the meal wasn’t dead and like a shot took off flying in a south-by-southwest direction toward the downtown skyline over the trees and outta there!

With some fluffy down feathers drifting down upon us we watched as the hawk flew north to land a palm tree closer to Sunset Boulevard with the crows in pursuit and not letting up in the slightest.

But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure the hawk’s catch wasn’t a crow. As it all happened so fast, I didn’t get a really good look at it so maybe it was and maybe the hawk had invaded a nearby crow’s nest. But the down feathers that fell to earth were light gray and the momentary glimpse I got of the escapee bolting away was that it was a pigeon or maybe a mourning dove.

What’s the big deal about that? Probably nothing much, but to my layman’s eye it’s fascinating to consider that I witnessed crows defending against an enemy — even if the battle they wage is not for one of their own.

Before getting going to work this morning, Ranger came to me at the desk as I was moppily Velcro’ing my bike shoes, occupied by the sad news of the day.

“Dood,” she said with a ball in her mouth so it made her sound kinda retarded. “Lesgahp lay feshin gahbah kyard.”

“What?”

She dropped the tennis ball to the hardwood where it thumped twice and was still.

“I said: Let’s go play fetch in the backyard, duh!” She picked up the ball again in her mouth and snorted.

“Oh. Maybe when I get home tonight.”

“Cuh mon! Jussa fyoom intz. Ill may kyafeel burr.”

“Make me what?”

She spat the ball out again and it rolled to the ottoman.

“Feel better! Gah!”

Who was I to argue:

(click to triplify)

Atop the stretch of uphill in Griffith Park that cyclists generally refer to as the “roller coaster” (where Griffith Park Drive meets Mt. Hollywood Drive), my friend Stephen and I caught our breath around 8 p.m. and observed this first of two coyotes pass by us. Generally I’d delete a photo of this nonquality but I liked how it pretty much captured the elusive mystery of the wild canines against the flowing streetscape.

If I were king of L.A. I’d decree coyotes to be the city’s official animal.

FYI: Yeah, that’s right. After bike commuting to work across L.A. and back, just for fun I went for a bike ride.

Brief backstory: I have an Alphasmart 3000, a somewhat goofy PlaySkool-looking AA battery-operated, bare bones portable word-processor that I bought prior to our Africa honeymoon trip in 2005 because I wanted something rugged and durable and cheap ($200) that, given our locations in the Rwandan countyside, the Serengeti (pictured at right tapping away on it into the dark of the night within our tented camp) and other various outposts with uncertain access to electric power, wasn’t in need of recharging. The device performed flawlessly throughout the more than two weeks abroad. I wrote this journal of that trip on it.

I barely used the thing since. In fact, the only time was in the summer of the following year when I brought it with us on our 4,500-mile roadtrip through California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. I’d also brought our old Apple laptop with us as well and so I hadn’t much use for the Alphasmart.

Which brings us to today when I turned it on for the first time in practically two years and found the 1,421 forgotten words I’d written still stored in its memory, recounting a bit about our travels across the famed Beartooth Highway on to and through Yellowstone.

About 356 words from the end there’s a break where I’ve apparently stopped writing about Yellowstone and several days later picked the thing up to type a few emotional words after we discovered the four abandoned pups on the side of the highway in Monument Valley — and that ends abruptly, too.

For wont of a real blog post today, after the jump it’s all copied and pasted (with a couple links to pics) in full unedited glory.

(more…)

It started when I was playing fetch with Ranger in the backyard and her attention was diverted to something happening beyond the north fence. Upon investigation I found our cat Jiggy on the other side and he was trying to “play” with what I first thought was a baby opossum. I shoo’d Jiggy away from the little critter and enlisted Susan’s help to keep the cat at bay while I raced around in full trespass mode onto our neighbors property with some intention of coming to the baby’s aid.

When I got there, Jiggy took off, and the critter was gone perhaps through a tight gap I found in the fence and so Susan commenced searching our brick and river rock pile for clues. Sure enough through an opening (indicated by the arrow above) she spied something moving and when I made my way back around to it she had broken out the bazillion candlepower Q-Beam and not long after aiming it into the hole did she clear the area with, “That’s a skunk!”

Sure enough when I dared to verify her findings I found the littler fella had the telltale stripe down the center of its muzzle and a bushy little head of white fur, and we realized where there’s a baby skunk and a den there’s a momma who might not take so kindly to us encroaching. So Susan and I retreated with me then getting busy setting up the SkunkCam in hopes of motion-capturing them should they chose to step out for a little nocturnal foraging tonight.

I’ll update with the results tomorrow.

UPDATE (04.20): Not much luck last night. The center of the three-image sequence (click to enlarge thumbnails) below, with its blurry flash of white in the den entrance is the only thing captured on the cam last night.

I haven’t had much oppotunity to dig in the back yard and find much in the way of new old stuff to post about, so any unearthing being done must be credited to Ranger whose excavations around the place are many. Next to one particularly deep hole close to the hammock I found this 1.5 inch-long jaw fragment (click to triplify):

I’m clueless as to what critter this belonged to, but given it’s size I’d hazard whatever it was it wasn’t very old, and with the severely deteriorated condition the bone and teeth I’m pretty confident in saying it had been in the ground for a long, long time.

It’s after midnight. Restless. Maybe it’s the biz trip I leave for early Wednesday morning to Charlotte for four days. Maybe it’s some residual over-thinking about a couple aspects of my behavior on what was an otherwise awesome bike ride upupup essentially to Descanso Gardens then back down to Eagle Rock around to Highland Park with a stop at King Taco and then home. Maybe it’s just because the cats were restless and agitated tonight after I went to bed. Maybe it’s the cup of TiGeorge’s espresso grind Haitian coffee that I had at 8 p.m.

Whatever, I can’t sleep. So with that, and with counting sheep out of the question, instead I’ll share something new I learned today and it doesn’t have to do with how defensive and vocal I can be on a bike or how troubled Bink the cat was, or how things will go in North Carolina next week, or how strong the coffee is.

I discovered that blue jays have a carnivorous side. First hand. Out in the backyard this morning. The jay up in the tree caught my eye because we don’t get many jays around here. Not sure why that is. Mockingbirds, yes. Jays, nope. But then I saw the jay was eating a lizard it had caught — really going at it — and I was amazed enough to gawk at it and call Susan over to show her before I ran in to grab my camera.

Of course the bird had relocated with its breakfast to a much more higher up and much less visible location by the time I got back  outside, but I still managed to relocate it and get off a couple snaps of it with the lizard remains, neither of which are very clear in the darkness of the tree and the morning’s diffused light, but nevertheless offer up muddled proof of the predatory and meat-eating aspect of the jay’s  ominvorous nature (click thumbnails for full size):

I was 12 when I killed a jay once. Accidentally. In Hollywood. With my eyes closed. And a slingshot.

Sweet dreams.

The 78th Annual Blessing of the Animals is taking place at Olvera Street this Saturday beginning at noon, with the procession commencing at 2 p.m.

Susan and I have made this a spring tradition since 2004, bringing our Russian tortoise Buster who serves as house ambassador for our four cats and two dogs.

I snapped this photo of a true dee-oh-double-guh blessee from the event in 2005.

I was saddened to learn earlier this week that Susan’s uncle Jim had to put his dog Sid down after an episode in which Sid bit Susan’s grandma. I had the pleasure of meeting Sid twice, first in 2004 during the Thanksgiving I spent with Susan when her grandma lived in Redding and then a couple summers ago for Independence Day in Troy, Montana, where her grandma had moved in 2005, a few dozen stones’ throws off the Kootenai River.

I’m not sure of the particulars, but I do know that Sid was the best a grand and good and rambunctious and loving and loyal dog could be. I’d hazard Jim loved him just about more than anything or anyone else. and the feeling was mutual. I’d also wager the bite was accidental and the decision afterward was a really difficult one to make — but the right one.

I knew I had some shots taken on July 4th, 2006, of Sid with Jim doing a biscuit trick in the front yard of the Troy house and in looking for them I came across one I’d forgotten about. I think Sid’s adoring and obedient expression — especially with a biscuit on his head! — just about says it all about how wonderful he was and about the wonderful partnership they shared, and it’s how I’ll remember that big old wonderful bear of a dog:

(click to triplify)

Ranger, being the good first-alert dog that she is brought me out of me sleep with two insistent barks, but when all remained quiet after that, I drifted back off until another got my feet onto the hardwood to find her on the club chair in the library looking out the west window, tail wagging back and forth like a windshield wiper. I stepped beside her and scanned out and around the dark street. Nothing.

Then I looked and saw the furry, hunched over form on the porch railing and an audible “Wow!” escaped me for their sat the mightiest raccoon of them all. I grabbed my camera and moved to the foyer trying to pull some kind of image of the thing in the dark and through the window glass (above’s was the best of that bunch).

When it was finally alerted to my presence I moved to the front door and it clambered slowly down the rail to the porch floor where I allowed it to move across the threshold before yanking open the door, where it then did the coolest thing. Instead of running away down the steps, it climbed back up to the top of the railing and came back across threshold to the pergola above the porch where it shimmied up and out of sight onto the roof of the house.

So of course sporting nothing more than a pair of boxers, my camera and some questionable judgment, I exited the house, climbed up on the porch bench (making sure to turn on the flash), poked my head up through the top of the pergola and found him hangin’ out casual some more on the roof where I managed to snap these other three shots (the far left one being an obvious fave and most indicative of his massive scale; all click to quadruplify):

Eventually it trudged up to the top of the roof and I have no idea where it went. I swear this big fella would have fit snuggly in a large laundry basket. What a treat to behold and to get images of, even if it did abbreviate my shut-eye time.

Our first and only other raccoon encounter is posted here.