[sic]

It was Monday when my friend and networker extraordinaire Joel emailed me out of the blue asking if I could come give a talk to his Cub Scouts troop Thursday night about endangered animals. I barely hesitated to say sure, and only after I signed on did I wonder what the heck I was going to say.

I mean, it’s not like I had a ready-made presentation stowed on some hard drive somewhere that I could call up and dust off. And as the workweek would have it, I had little time to build one until yesterday afternoon when we finally shipped the latest issue of my magazine and I had an hour to decompress — and did so finding information on condors, and tortoises and Channel Island foxes, and the like, pulling it together in a hastily crafted powerpoint slideshow just in time to leave and bike up Overland (along the way rediscovering the steep hill north of Palms Boulevard that I’d long forgotten about) to Santa Monica Boulevard to Wilshire and the Electric Fountain at that decidedly nonbike- and nonhuman-friendly intersection where I stopped to relax and unsweat since I was a few minutes ahead of schedule.

Looking down into the pool of the fountain I entertained the notion of going in for a splash but put such silliness aside when I spied several ladybugs flailing around on its surface, the water of which was moving in a slow counter-clockwise flow.

A few minutes later I’d pulled 12 from the water and transfered them to the leaves of the jasmine growing around the perimeter, where they could dry off and fly off… hopefully not back in to the water.

The subsequent talk to the cub scouts held adjacent to El Rodeo Elementary School was deemed a success.

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.

Here I go again celebrating the littler things such as this moth willing to let my camera get surprisingly close to it while sunning itself on the leaf of an avocado seedling.

The troubling wiltedness of the young magnolia tree in the parkway in front of our house hasn’t kept it from producing a crop of blossoms, the first of which I found popped open this morning (click to triplify):

(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.

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.

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.