Eight Random Facts

Ack! Amy Hooper of WildBird On The Fly has tagged us (and seven other bloggers) for the Eight Random Facts meme/pyramid scheme. Bloggers who accept the challenge must:

• write a post with eight random facts/habits about themselves and the rules of the meme
• at the end of that post, list eight other bloggers that they tag to write similar posts, likewise including the rules)
• leave comments on the "tagees" blogs to warn them about the meme.

Coming up with eight facts is a piece of cake, but finding eight other bloggers we read who have yet to be tagged is going to be HARD! Of course these things can never really be random, but here goes:

1. A Northern Bobwhite protested at our wedding - not the "if anyone can show just cause why these two should not be joined" part (which we omitted from our self-administered vows), but just the fact that there was a crowd of people in his territory.

2. Our honeymoon was an intimate, romantic, five-week tropical biology field course to Belize with fifteen other people.

3. Tom found the first Siberian Tit nest in the U.S. in 1996 on a float trip down the Canning River with Pete and Linda Dunne, Clay and Pat Sutton, and Bob Dittrick and Lisa Moorehead of Wilderness Birding Adventures.

4. One of Sheri's favorite books of all time is One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss, and she can recite it from memory on command.

5. Tom once had a pet otter named Gus (short for Augustus).

6. Sheri once headed up the North Texas Herpetological Society's Reptile Rescue program, intervening on behalf of such imperiled herps as a "7-foot python" that turned out to be a 5-foot Western Coachwhip and a real Ball Python abandoned in a condo.

7. Tom's high school garage band, The Guild, reunited for their 35th high school reunion and has played several gigs since, despite the fact that the members live in four states.

8. Sheri's first book, "published" at age 4, was a work of speculative natural history entitled Turtles of Tomorrow.

Now, we "tag" the following bloggers, hoping desperately that none of them get tagged by someone else before they moderate our blog comments:

1. Bill of the Birds
2. Scientist, Interrupted
3. Nuthatch
4. Don and Lillian Stokes
5. Birds Etcetera
6. NaturalVisions
7. Born Again Bird Watcher
   
8. Rhubarb
   

A Very Bisbee Fourth

Bisbee may be a small town, but it puts on one heck of a fireworks display for the Fourth. The Bisbee Fire Department is in charge of the event, and every year they choreograph a spectacular show with lots of old favorites and some new effects.

This year's show featured "chrysanthemums" that changed colors three times and shot single or double red "stars" out of their hearts; double rings of different colors both perpendicular to each other and in the same plane; half-and-half spheres with a globe of a third color inside; seemingly typical bursts whose trails expanded into thick, sinuous dreadlocks of shimmering champagne-colored sparks; and "serpentines" composed of a dozen or more red fireballs that zigzag off into the night like characters from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Way kewl!

And fireworks manufacturers are working with an increasingly sophisticated color palette these days. Turquoise, periwinkle, lemon, and marigold have joined the basic red, white, blue, green, and gold of my childhood memories. In between the patriotic red/white/blue shells came beauties that made it hard not to think of other seasons. A chrysanthemum terminating in multicolored pastel "stars" would have been perfect for Easter, a half green, half yellow globe looked like a celebration of spring (or an ad for Sprite), and of course there were plenty of red/green combos.

For southern Arizona, Independence Day often comes at the worst possible time to be shooting off sparks. Our summer "monsoon" begins sometime between late June and early July, so when the rains are late the Fourth falls during the hottest, driest week of the year (today's highs were 110° F in Tucson and 102 in Sierra Vista, though "only" 98 in Bisbee). But the firefighters have a virtually fireproof platform from which to launch the display, thanks to Bisbee's legacy as a mining town: the top of the Number 7 ore dump, conveniently located at the upper end of Vista Park. Nothing grows on the ore, so there's nothing up there to catch fire should a shell go astray (as some do every year). There are a few old wooden houses around the base of the ore pile, and I wouldn't be surprised if the occupants watch the show from their yards with a garden hose close at hand, charged and ready to go.

So the professional show is pretty safe for spectators and neighbors, but the same can't be said of the amateurs. Personal fireworks are illegal in Arizona, but that doesn't stop people from crossing the border into New Mexico to buy their own dangerous toys. One early July day shortly after we moved into our house, I heard a crackling sound and looked out the window to see six-foot flames crisping our newly planted desert willow tree. Some wayward bottle rocket had set a wildfire in our very own yard!

You might wonder, as I have, how all the noise and light of a fireworks display affects the local wildlife. I suspect that they take it in stride. After all, nature regularly puts on far scarier shows. Though our electronic rain gauge registered a inch of rain while we were away last week in Colorado, the "monsoon" hasn't officially started. Nevertheless, this evening the sky south and east of our neighborhood flashed with its own awesome fireworks.
--SW

Approval for Disapproving Rabbits

Our blogger buddy BirdChick's disapproving rabbits were touted in the "Weird Web" section of the latest Earthlink eLink newsletter! Maybe a few nonbirders that come for the bunnies will stay for the birdies.

Here, in honor of this new level of acclaim, is a disapproving lagomorph we encountered at a private home in southwestern Colombia, where we were teaching the field portion of a hummingbird banding workshop.

Cool! (and wet)

I know this is going to be hard to believe, but yesterday's official high temperature here in Bisbee, Arizona was 69 degrees F. That's 21 degrees cooler than Minneapolis and just four degrees higher than Seattle and Anchorage. And it's wet, too! In 24 hours over an inch of rain fell at our house, mostly slow and gentle like winter rains but garnished with pea-sized hail from one intense afternoon storm. June is usually our hottest, driest month, with little hope of moisture until the last week or so, if then. Yesterday's precipitation was almost double the June average.

The rains started in the middle of the night. It was lovely listening to the the rumble of thunder and the murmur of raindrops on the roof, until the sploit sploit sploit of water hitting the bedroom carpet sent me lunging for a wastebasket to catch the drips. Tom's replaced I don't know how many shingles ripped away by the howling winds of spring and early summer, but guess it's time to splurge on the services of a roofing expert.

Needless to say, there are some happy critters in our neighborhood today. We've been hearing a lot from the Crissal Thrashers who make their home in our neighbors' dense conifer trees and a male Lucy's Warbler who's having trouble dealing with all the recently fledged House Finches invading his domain. The first Cloudless Sulphurs of the season, a male courting a female as she dodged among the branches of our plum tree, made an early appearance. Normally these beauties are harbingers of the rainy season as it moves north. Their early arrival, along with the appearance of a Plain-capped Starthroat at Agua Caliente Park in Tucson and a Berylline Hummingbird at Ramsey Canyon Inn, are encouraging signs for the season to come.

Bisbee will be back up in the high 80's by Thursday, but in another couple of weeks we should see signs of the typical "monsoon" weather pattern that gives us storms like yesterday's almost every afternoon. We hope, anyway.

Kids say the darndest things

There were quite a few young 'uns at yesterday's hummingbird banding session, especially for a Friday. Two boys, the younger barely chest-high to the table and the older not much bigger, were peppering scribe Phyllis and me with questions. As I pulled a female Black-chinned out of a bag, I told them in a kind but firm way that we needed to concentrate on this bird now so that we would get her on her way back to her nest, and so we couldn't answer any questions for a little while. There was a moment of thoughtful silence from that corner of the table, followed by that classic query of the extremely young, "Why?" Phyllis and I kept right on working. A couple more "whys" from both boys, also ignored. Then, just to show that these were not just random "whys," the older one asked, "Why can't you answer any questions?" It was beginning to sound like a Bush administration press conference. --SW

All too familiar

Someone at The Onion, that hip, edgy, and often outrageous send-up of newspaper journalism, is a casual birder or knows a birder pretty well. Those are the only two possible explanations for this:

The Sibley Guide To Birds Has Clearly Misidentified The Dark-Eyed Junco

The urge to open our Sibzilla to page 488 is almost irresistible...

--SW