Nature in the Year of Fire and Plague

[Several years ago I stopped writing the blog I had titled "Sweating the Small Stuff." I am now re-opening that blog, but with a new chapter which I am calling "Nature in the Year of Fire and Plague."]

 

 

Nature in the Year of Fire and Plague

A few years ago I started writing a Nature blog, and kept it going for a few years. Then, as one does, I let it slip away. At that time we were living in Arkansas. I had been teaching English at Arkansas State University for some twenty years and was now retired. Indeed, by now I had been retired for twenty years. We liked it there, but it had occurred to me that we could now live anywhere we chose. Mountains? Deserts? Costa Rica? Anywhere that had the most wildlife, because that was both of our lifelong hobbies. We had come to Arkansas as bird watchers but slowly were being won away to the study of insects. Let me make a confession: If you go very far with birdwatching, then you have to get into photography. I got an SLR camera and a 400mm lens, but soon I came to realize that every bird in the world had already been photographed numerous times, and photographed with a skill I could never match, every vane in the feathers standing out.

Well, a friend got me into photographing butterflies, and there was my breakthrough. I got a macro lens, which allowed me to take pictures inches away. This was before everybody was doing this, and suddenly you could takes pictures of the jaws of tiger beetles, the fangs of jumping spiders,  and enlarge them so they filled the screen, denizens from Mars, and you could go on taking pictures for the rest of your life and go on finding new subjects. With a little care you could take pictures as fresh and new and publishable as the next person. Instead of my bulky SLR, Cheryl got something that  looked like a cigarette box and took it out of her pocket, and focused from an inch away. You could photograph the scales on the wings of a butterfly. After the butterflies there were dragonflies, grasshoppers, leaf hoppers; bumble bees, and on and on.

After several years of this, we began to see we had been accumulating a variety of insect images, mainly (because behavior was our  interest) filmed at the moment they were expressing the behavior that allowed them to survive, to find their food, to avoid being themselves food, to find their mates, and I saw that it might make a book. So we put together the best of our images (it came out to be almost exactly 50 % mine and 50 % Cheryl's) arranged the species so that they demonstrated their ploys: mimicry,  camouflage,  aposematic ("warning") coloring, and all the others, writing a little paragraph about each one because they are so fascinating, and we put together a little book (100 Insects of Arkansas and the Midsouth (etaliapress, 2018, Little Rock AR]) that became locally popular.

 Those of you who remember my blog will remember that though we lived in Arkansas and took most of our pictures there, Gawain (our son) and Heather had moved from the Bay Area to Tucson. We found that we were visiting them two or three times a year, and more and more blogs were based on what we saw in Tucson. Cheryl began searching in Zillow and saw a house which looked just like what we were after. She told Gawain and Heather, they checked it out and said it was perfect, and we had better come quick, someone else was bidding on it. We left Arkansas the next day.

The truth is, with our book done, we  had done our work in Arkansas. We didn't want to just repeat it. We wanted to start something new, and here is our first step: to reopen our blog, but this time in Arizona.

The trouble is,  a couple more years have now gone by, and I haven't been able to think of the first word yet. 

Normally what you would do is tell about your first discovery at the new place, and then the next, so that your adventures would  come to the reader at the same time they came to you. But the longer you go without sending a report, the farther behind you get. I feel like I keep dropping the new gem off the taffrail of a ship, and it is quickly drifting out of sight.

Well, so let me just start.

The other day, for instance,  I got up in the morning and looked out the window, and saw a bobcat standing outside our back gate

"Cheryl, there's a bobcat trying to get into the back gate."

"Two bobcats," she corrected."

By the time I got back with my camera, it was three, a momma on the ground, and her two kittens cavorting on the gate.

 

It's always a banner day when these graceful cats come by, but three at once goes beyond everything.

[There it is: I've started my blog].