[sic]

Susan noticed it sometime over the weekend, but I discovered the fungus among us in my morning spritzing of the side yard this morning. Having popped up between a couple walkway bricks it’s almost half the size of one… sucker’s huge (click to quadrify):

Back in early April I turned my backyard spotlight on the bud that had sprouted from a one of three dismembered cactus pads that I’d found last summer and thunked into some soil.

Immediately after that first post there was some drama I never reported about. See, I moved the pot atop a fence post so that it could get more exposure to the sun and not long after that — maybe a few days or a week — damn if the pot hadn’t been knocked over into the neighboring yard, either by cat or squirrel or wind.

Peering over the fence down into the out-of-reach abyss where the pot was still intact but the cactii were strewn about it, my first thought was that unless I wanted to trespass into that backyard (which I didn’t) I’d just have to reconcile that my cactus dreams weren’t meant to be. I was appropriately bummed.

Then the next day, I got out of my wahmbulance and MacGuyver’d myself a trespass-free solution. Using the long arm of an old tree-branch trimmer I tied the pooper scooper to it and also knotted a long piece of twine from the handle of the scooper with hopes of being able to extend it to the ground on the other side of the fence and retrieve the pot and pads by pulling the twine and opening/closing its poop-scooping jaws.

Well it worked for all three cactus parts, but the pot proved to be too large and heavy for the scooper to handle (I’d later retrieve it when I opted to trespass into that yard after the incident with our cat Jiggy and the baby opossum that turned out to be a baby skunk).

Though I wasn’t sure if the fall and the prolonged exposure hadn’t damaged the pads, I still went ahead and re-plunked them into a larger pot of soil, placing it on the ground and surrounding it with some heavy-duty garden wire.

And dang if all three hearty pads didn’t rebound magnificently. As you can see below in the upper left, the first bud has turned into a prickly juvenile pad of its own, and the other two smaller pads are now hosting growing buds, too:

Amazing!

It wasn’t more than a few days ago that Susan spied our first teeny tiny tomato on the vines she’s been nurturing since March and there was much rejoicing.

Then today Susan found the first born ‘mater had an unwelcome guest that had moved in (click to triplify):

Drats, but such is life in the backyard. I hope that first fruit helps nourish  this caterpilar through its metamorphosis to whatever it’s to become. And in the meantime Susan’s gonna step up repellent procedures to prevent further invasions.

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.

The loquat tree in the neighboring yard has branches that grow over the fence into ours.

Before we banned our gardening crew from the backyard because they proved lax in closing the gates, they used to strip the branches bare of the over-abundance of fruit. Now there’s enough for me… and the squirrels and birds and opossums.

Loquats generally don’t get a lot of respect, but they have a tangy apricot quality that I enjoy.

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)

Not really a rose, but this tiny flower was certainly shaped like one and caught my eye as I was raking the backyard enough to stop what I was doing and go get my cam (along with the dime about six inches in the background that I used for scale). I was going to pick a dozen for Susan, but they were too cute to disturb.

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.

If you’re an angeleno, odds are at some point during your time here you’ve experienced the falling of a palm frond from its tree.

I’d hazard you haven’t ever had the pleasure of being 40 feet away from 17 30 — count ‘em: 17 30! — of them full-sized suckers falling at once. I have. It happened this afternoon during my second mandatory Structural Integrity Test of the hammock:

In the midst of the rigorous examination, from out of nowhere comes this woooooshing sound and I crane my neck far left just in time to see what looks to be the entire top of our 60-foot palmtree crashing down on the poor loquat tree next to it. Fortunately it wasn’t the entire palm tree top, just a helluva load of dead fronds. And I mean helluva (click to triplify):

If that image doesn’t adequately indicate the mass of frondage that broke free and fell, here’s one of the stack following my clean-up efforts (click to triplify):

In the wake of it really not being that windy I’m not at all sure what triggered the fall, much less the series of detachment events and/or physics that allowed 17 30 individual fronds to basically abandon their vantage point all at once. All I know is I hope I’m not 40 feet away the next time it happens.