A Timely Appearance

 We live on a cul-de-sac just off the Catalina Highway. Our acre of fairly untouched desert is on land beginning to rise up towards the 8000 foot peak of Mt. Lemmon. This is in a good position from which to write a nature blog.  Just when I'm thinking it's about time to write a blog, I can count on something appropriate to pop up for me to write about.

For instance, once or twice a year mule deer (black-tailed deer) appear in our yard. They don't seem to appear at any particular time of the year (these times over the years: 22 May, 23 June, 22 August, 20 November, 23 November). There might be one deer, there might be several; they might stay one day, they might stay several (in which case they bed down at a distance from our house and pile up droppings), and the one rule is, they are all adult bucks, either in velvet or with enormous racks of antlers. We've never seen a doe. We don't know why they come, or where they come from. We assume they drop down from the higher elevations, but we really don't know.

At any rate one appeared the other day, looking healthy and well fed. As always it's a sudden surprise, and they always look as big as a horse. Of all the animals that occur in our yard, they are the largest and heaviest. 

And this one gave me to an opportunity here to speculate about them, and now my blog is written.

To round things off, we then a much smaller creature, one that we had never seen before, and which caused a bit more consternation.

Male Anna's Hummingbird Changes into Adult Plumage

 Autumn changing into winter is not my favorite time of year. You can scarcely complain about the weather here in southern Arizona now in November, day after sunny day, the temperature a mild 80, but things are closing down, you can feel it. This past summer, for instance, we often went out after dark on our back porch as the evening cooled off, enjoying the nectar-drinking bats swarming around us and draining the sugar water out of the half-dozen feeders we put out daily for the hummingbirds. But by now our bats have returned to Mexico for the winter, and the porch is empty. And anyway the air is getting too nippy for us to go out at night.

All through the year we had been watching another gradual change, the hummingbirds (we have five species) giving over the rather plain plumage they started life with to don (the males, anyway) the startlingly beautiful breeding plumage they will put on to win the females with. That change is at its peak now. Let me show you step by step what one species can do. Here is the male Anna's Hummingbird in sub-adult plumage.

 

This is a totally plain hummingbird with almost nothing to distinguish it. But notice the black spot on the side of the throat; there is also one on the other side. That is what it starts with.

Now note the spot again. When you look at the spots from an angle, they appear black, but when they are exactly opposite to the observer, they shine up bright red. That "black" spot is actually red, and you can see that some other spots are beginning to appear on the throat, and you can see that they're going to be red too. Some black spots are also appearing on the back of the head, and they also will prove to be red.

 The red on the throat is gradually expanding.

Suddenly the entire head and throat (except for a white area around the eye) is bright red (though from this angle the crown and throat appear black). Note how what started as a small spot on the side of the throat has thickened into a flange which is beginning to stand out from the throat.

 

Here is how it would appear from a slightly altered angle.

And here finally is the fully adult male Anna's Hummingbird.

The Rattle Trap

 

 I have recently done some blogs about packrats, saying that there is nothing ratty about them, but that  with their big eyes and their big ears they are really rather attractive. But then going on to say they are notorious for getting into the wiring of your car where they can cause very expensive damage. Since when they move into your house, usually it is your garage they move into, there is no tolerating them;  you must get rid of them.

We are getting quite efficient at this. The previous owner of our house, knowing I would have problems with them, left with me a Havahart live trap, which catches them easily, and leaves us with no blood on our conscience. We then carry them down to the bottom of our yard and release them, and that seems to be far enough that they won't immediately return. I bait the trap with a spoon-full of peanut butter and their nose is so sharp the smell on the trap never goes away for them, so I never have to bait the trap again after that first time.  I would check around the floor of the garage where they usually came in and look for fresh droppings or other signs they might leave behind, and if I found any trace, I would set out the trap.

Then I thought I would make things even more efficient if I simply set out the trap permanently, then all I would have to do would be to glance at the far side of the garage every day and see if the trap was sprung. The problem  with that is, the longer it stays out, the more unintended creatures end up getting caught in it.

Here, for instance, is what I expect to find when I inspect the trap.

 

Here is what I found instead the other day.

It might be a bit hard for you to make it out. It was hard for me to see what was in the trap, or rather, to believe what I saw. It proved to be a four-and-a-half foot long Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake (the rattle is easily visible in the lower right corner).

 

I have no idea what the snake was doing in the garage, or what prompted it to enter the trap. Perhaps it was attracted, not by peanut-butter, but by the lingering odor of a juicy packrat. Whatever the explanation, there it was. I told Cheryl and she came out and the two of us regarded it grimly, both of us thinking about the difficulty of shaking a packrat out from the complications of the tricky corners of the trap, especially getting the doors open without risking a bite from the rat. From a rattlesnake it would be more than a bite. We decided to leave the snake in overnight while we tried to think about it.

Here is what we came up with.

The trap is quite ingenious. Everything works by gravity, one thing falling making the next thing fall, and it is designed so that each step only works in one direction and so can't be undone. Here is the trap set with the overhead door open. The animal walks in and heads to the rusty-looking baited platform at the end, steps on it which pushes down the hair-trigger which allows the door to swing shut. As the door goes down (in an instant) the sort of mouse-trap like tang (?)  that hangs from the outer edge of the door opening slides down following it until it is caught on the flap in the middle of the door.

 Here is how it looks.

The door, which is hanging down by gravity, is not attached at the bottom, so the animal could easily just push its way out except that the tang fell down (by gravity) and locked itself into that flap.

Now, when we carried the rats we caught down to the bottom of the yard. it was very complicated trying to lift the tang up and hold open the door while we tried to shake the animal out, and that was just what we didn't want to do with a very poisonous and perhaps angry snake.

But suddenly we saw that the solution was right there.  We carried the trap by the handle very gingerly a distance from the house then set it on the ground and used a stick to turn it upsidedown. Cheryl jiggled the tang to stop it from hanging up, and from that side everything that had been down was now up and the tang released itself and the doors all fell open (by un-gravity?) and the snake, just as relieved as we were, went racing out of there, and we never saw it again.

Post Script

 In the blog I just sent I showed some pictures of a Tarantula Hawk carrying a  paralyzed Tarantula to a spot where it was going to put an egg on it then bury it in a pre-prepared hole. This battle between these mighty opposites, I am sure, has been going on for millions of years, the fiercest wasp, the largest spider. Cheryl and I were lucky to see this dramatic action that very few people have seen, and after I sent the blog I was afraid I had not done it justice, the pictures had not given it sufficient strength and, I think, beauty.

I think perhaps I just didn't make the pictures large enough. Let me try again.

Tarantula and its Nemesis

Not long after we moved into our house in the desert (this is two or three years ago now), we were sitting in our breakfast room looking out over our backyard when Cheryl saw a commotion about sixty feet away and said, "There's a tarantula and a wasp fighting."

We had been eating our lunch, but without saying another word we dropped our silverware, grabbed our cameras, and tore out of the house. This was entirely reasonable behavior for people like us who were heavily into nature photography. What Cheryl with her brief sentence had described was a Tarantula Hawk, a large and ferocious wasp with the most painful sting of any wasp in the country, which was in the act of attacking a tarantula. This creature hunts down tarantulas, stabs them into paralysis, then lays an egg on them so that the larval wasp can feast on its still living flesh. Photographing the battles between these formidable creatures is one of a nature photographer's holy grails and there it was right outside the door.

Well, yesterday history seemed to be repeating itself. I was looking out the same window at almost exactly the same place, and I could pick out the bright red wings of a Tarantula Hawk, and when I put my binoculars on it I could see that it was rolling over the limp body of a tarantula. It had already paralyzed  its prey and was carrying it back to its pre-dug hole (you can see the hole behind it that it is backing into) to bury it.

The first thing it did was crawl down inside its hole, and try to pull the spider under, but the spider wouldn't fit.

So it came back up and got another grip.

Now it's got a better grip and it is trying again to pull it down into the hole (on top of its head.).

And now it is gone.

The larval wasp will continue developing inside the tarantula's body while the wasp mother flies off to find another tarantula, to repeat the whole process.

What is happening around here

Well, what is the most fun right now continues to be our bats. We have four hummingbird feeders hanging along the front of our porch which we have freshly topped up with sugar water. About 7:00 in the evening it is completely dark, and we turn on the porch light, a weak light but strong enough to illuminate the activity. Suddenly the bats are coming in waves, and when we go outside these sturdy little creatures seem like they are barely missing our heads. We try to estimate how many we have, but they are coming so fast, appearing out of and disappearing into the darkness, it is impossible, but we think at times we have seen up to ten at once.

 

 

 

 These are Mexican Long-tongued Bats visiting us at this time of year from farther south. They are not the bats that use echo-locating to catch insects in flight; these are nectar-drinking bats, designed for drinking from flowering cacti, but if hummingbird-lovers want to set out sweets for them that's okay with them too. It's true many people are exasperated when they get up in the morning and find all their hummingbird feeders have been robbed and are totally empty, but we try to re-educate those people to show them how much fun the robbers themselves can be. We and our guests often sit out on the porch on a cool evening to watch them for an hour or so. And fair play, they do feed from flowers too. Here's a picture of one showing its long tongue, and notice its fur is yellow from pollen, from the flowers it has rubbed up against.

The second event here for the last few weeks, more on the exasperating side, less on the entertaining, is that this is  a "Snout year." Snouts (see Cheryl's photo) are small rather drab butterflies whose only distinguishing features are long extended palps (like snouts) that still would scarcely make them noticeable if it wasn't for their propensity to explode their population, often into millions in a small area. That is exactly what is happening right now, which is making people who drive above twenty miles an hour on narrow rural roads feel like mass murderers, the movement of the car stirring up a tide-line of corpses. If you walk by a bush which for some reason is attractive to them you can slap it and they will fly up in clouds. At its peak one day we looked up into an open stretch  of sky and it was filled with butterflies from top to bottom, all traveling in one direction. I had often read about snout years; this is the first I have witnessed.

 

 

The third event, and you have to live right for this one, you can sit at your breakfast nook table looking through the window to the porch where a very handsome young bobcat is standing about six or seven feet away, paying no attention to you.

 

The Porch at night #3

Well. here we are, trying once more to write a blog about the bats, and instead writing  about every other thing on the porch. I was explaining all the tricks I needed to use to get even a not-very-good picture of a fast-moving bat in the dark. And in the meantime Cheryl walked up to the hummingbird feeder, held up her camera, went click quick, and look at these amazing pictures, the best I have ever seen of these creatures in the act of feeding.

 

 

 

 

 

I had wanted for a long time to write about pack rats, because they are so astonishing, and next the long-tongued bats, because they are so astonishing. Now I've finally done something on both of them. I almost feel like retiring, except I know I am sure to discover something else astonishing.

Our Porch at Night (part two)

In the previous blog (Our Porch at Night [part one]) I was talking about our bats, and how we entertained dinner guests and ourselves sitting in the window that gave onto our porch with the outside light on, watching the bats streaking by emptying our hummingbird feeders.  It looked like a close-in bombing raid, in a sinister way rather like the attack on Pearl Harbor, especially with the distant thunder rumbling. I had always wanted to get a good photo of these bats in flight, though it seemed impossible, but I made some progress this time, and I will make another try tonight.

But what I'm writing about here is that once we came outside in the dark to try to photo the bats, we were quite astonished at the variety of life we found on the porch. We took our big flashlight and flashed it against the back of the porch, in other words, the outer wall of our house, and the first thing we saw was a red-spotted toad, unexpected so far from any water. And right next to it, not unexpected, but certainly

 making us take notice, was a Bark Scorpion, the most venomous  of the scorpions. It's true I  kept one briefly as a pet, but that was contained within an aquarium, not wandering free to climb into our shoes before we put them on in the morning.

Next was a Mediterranean Gecko, not a surprise, as they must be in everybody's home in Tucson, but usually this introduced species is found inside the house. These exotic creatures are always welcome.

Most fun was to find the porch was teeming with Pocket Mice. These tiny creatures resemble miniature Kangaroo Rats. In fact I believe they also, at least occasionally. walk upright on their hind legs.

And finally, and most dramatic, an enormous jet-black tarantula.

During the day the porch is generally inhabited by more "normal" creatures, round-tailed ground squirrels, three or four species of lizards, two or three dozen species of birds, an unending line of harvester ants, an occasional rattlesnake, most of these attracted by the meal worms we throw out, and the hummingbird feeders we refill after the bats have emptied them.

And at the very moment I wrote these words about the daytime inhabitants of the porch, a brand new species appeared there for the first time. We saw what we thought was a large swallowtail butterfly out the window, and, looking to identify which swallowtail it was, we could see it was dark with almost no visible markings. We grabbed our cameras and rushed outside and saw it wasn't a butterfly at all, it was an enormous moth: a Black Witch. In our experience, these big day-flying moths appear out of nowhere, can be seen in the yard for a few days usually flying at tree-height, than go on their way, enwrapped in the mystery their name suggests.

Our Porch at Night (part one)

 At this time of year Mexican Long-tongued Bats come up from Mexico into southern Arizona where they feed on nectar from flowers and on sugar water from hummingbird feeders. Bird lovers often get annoyed to find all their hummingbird feeders drained dry every night, but if you have an outside light on so that you can see them it is worth it just to to see the waves of bats sweeping through your yard. I decided I would attempt to get some pictures of them. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. You see, they move very fast, and they don't have wings shaped to make an air foil which would give them lift, so they are unable to hover in front of a flower or hummingbird feeder; they have to keep traveling forward or they will simply fall out of the sky. So when they get in front of a hummingbird feeder, they can only pause for a second to get a quick slurp. That means, first of all, you only get that one second to click the shutter. And next, it is  dark night, very difficult visibility to aim the camera and focus it, in that one second.

We have a porch along the side of our house overlooking the backyard, and that porch has a number of hummingbird feeders on it, so that is the area the bats are attracted to. I thought the solution would be to use our light- and movement-sensitive game camera, which would be automatically tripped by the bats. We tied the camera to a post pointed to a feeder, and went to bed assured that by the next morning we would have dozens of images.

Well, the bats were so fast they came and went before the camera had a chance to see them and so no  pictures were taken.

All right: I decided I would have to sit out there, and trip the camera myself. But it turned out the porch light produced so little light I couldn't see to aim or focus the camera any better than the automatic camera could. So I thought I would make one more try before giving up. First of all, the next morning,  I put the camera on a tripod so I could point the camera at a feeder and focus it by daylight, and then I left it out there pre-aimed and pre-focused. That night (which was last night) once the bats started circling the porch at high speed I sat next to the camera and every time a bat made its one-second pause in front of the feeder I clicked the shutter, and I could see when the flash revealed the bat's brown color and I would know I had timed it right.

The first picture shows a bat from behind, the underside of its head reaching down to drink some sugar-water. The second picture shows a bat from the side.

So this showed the bats, which was our intention, but in the act of going out on the porch in the darkness, something evidently we had not done before, we learned that the porch at night is teeming with totally unexpected life. In part two part of this blog I will show the life we discovered.

Pack Rat (part two)

 

 

 

Here is a typical pack rat nest such as I described in my last blog, the mess of fallen and rotting cacti that in some cases can preserve its original material from nearly forty-thousand years ago. Because of the cooler and hotter periods such an ancient nest went through in all that time, scientists think it will give us useful clues for how the vegetation will change during the warmer periods we expect in the future.

 

 

 The pack rat compulsively cares for the nest, constantly trimming off pieces of cholla and leaving them lying around, a sure sign that the nest is active. 

Well, I started getting these little calling cards in the garage. Instead of fresh green bits of cholla, these were old dry ones, the best he could find in the garage, but I knew exactly what it meant. It meant a pack rat was living out of sight in the garage. And my car was only a few steps away. I opened the hood and here's what I found in the engine compartment. I've seen too many pictures of cars left parked and undriven for a couple of months with engines that were totally covered with bits of cacti, engines that had virtually become nests.

 That's when I brought out the HAVAHART trap, spent about an hour trying to figure how it worked,  and after a few trials and errors, caught the angelic looking creature you saw in the first picture in this blog on pack rats. It would need to be taken at least a mile away or it would return. We drove for at least a mile, and began looking for a spot to release it. 

It's not as easy as it sounds; a mile from our house is another house, and a mile from that house is still another house. As good neighbors, we wouldn't want to leave it by somebody else's garage, especially knowing if we got caught they would come after us with a posse. We finally parked by a place that was at least a few feet more than a mile beyond the closest house, and I tried to look like I was examining a tire while car after car drove suspiciously by. Finally there was a gap, I pitched the rat out and we raced for home.

We're still waiting for it to return. 

Pack Rat

 Over the past couple of years, with these posts, I have been introducing you to the animals that share their land with us here. Naturally I started with the largest, the most dramatic, the most beautiful, the bobcats, the coyotes, the Javelinas, the black-tailed deer, the Cooper's hawks, the Harris's hawks, the western diamond-backed rattlesnakes, the gila monsters, the Mexican long-tongued bats, the desert blond tarantulas, the solifuge, the Costa's hummingbirds, the Anna's hummingbirds, the broad-billed hummingbirds. After a list like that it might seem like I am now down to  the dregs, but in fact maybe I am down to the most extraordinary of them all. I am talking about the pack rat (Neotoma albigula).

 He's really quite handsome, nice rounded ears, shiny black eye, furry tail, no narrow ratty face. And if you see him move, he has a wonderful agility and can go anywhere, climb anything. But notice that this photo is taken while he is imprisoned, which he richly deserves. You see, he can't resist setting up his lodging in your garage, and once he is in your garage he can't resist moving into the engine  compartment of your car. What he does then is get into the spaghetti of crucial wires behind the dashboard and cut and trim and rearrange them to make a comfortable nest, in the act costing you several thousand dollars to get them back the way they are supposed to be. Just say the word pack rat to anyone in Tucson and you immediately get stories of the horrors they have caused, and the revenges that are planned.

When we were moving in, and the previous owner was moving out, he gave me some tips about the pack rats. First of all he told me he was leaving me a HAVAHART trap, which he had used to catch the pack rats. Originally he would take them a mile away and release them. But almost immediately, its place in the garage would be taken by a new one. So finally he wised up and brushed some blue paint onto the back of the next one, and sure enough they were all returning to the garage almost before he could get back himself. It turns out pack rats have a fanatic loyalty to their home, and a sure sense of geography, so he learned to take them much farther away.

Garages usually have enough junk piled in them to give the pack rat lots of room to hide under, but out in the desert where they make their natural homes you see an area four or five feet wide made up of dozens of pads of cacti gathered together with tunnels running under them. The owner of the nest keeps it up, refurbishing it when it needs more bits of cacti (usually cholla) , and if something happens to the owner, another pack rat comes in and takes over. And it is here that you learn what an amazing creature this is. Scientists have carefully examined the disintegrating material at the lowest level of the nest and have found, in some cases, traces of pollen of plants that no longer grow where the nest is, plants that grew there when the climate was very different, material that can be traced back as much as forty-thousand years, which is how long that particular nest has been continuously occupied!

(End of part one of "Pack Rats")

 

Harris's Hawk

When we first moved here (a couple of years ago, now), Cooper's Hawks were very common. Scarcely a day would go by that we didn't see one. We frequently saw them catch their prey, mantle it for  few moments, then carry it to a broad horizontal branch in the middle of the back yard and pluck most of its feathers before eating it. They caught mainly Gambel's Quail, less often White-winged Doves (perhaps because those were faster flyers), and an occasional Cooper's would specialize in the Round-tailed
Ground Squirrels, which are very common here. The hawks paid almost no attention to us, so we got to watch them from close up for a good insight into their lives.

Sometimes we would see a dark hawk sitting near the top of a tree. This was the Harris's Hawk. It's quite a handsome bird, black and chocolate brown, with a black band on the tip of the tail, and white all the way around the base of the tail. There's a house across the street from us, and from our angle we could see into its backyard which had some big mesquite trees in it, and a pair of Harris's that may have been nesting in them. The birds never seemed to do anything, so we decided that it was a pretty mild bird compared to the Cooper's. Here's where we were wrong. We had a pair of half-tame Roadrunners  in a tree in our front yard with a nest-full of babies almost ready to fledge. The Harris's had a clear but distant view of the Roadrunners constantly flying in to feed them, and one day ripped through the nest and stole them all.

We suddenly had a good deal more respect for them as predators

 

Recently a Harris's visited us, landing in some trees in our backyard close to our house, and we had our closest view ever. Cheryl got this really nice picture. Look at those long legs and oversized talons, look at that meat-cleaver beak. This bird is built on the plan of a small eagle.

This is when I began patching together a theory. For months now we had scarcely seen a Cooper's Hawk. The horizontal branch on the "plucking" tree no longer seemed to be in use. When a panic suddenly cleared birds out of the bird feeders, if we looked at the top of a tall pine tree on the edge of our lot it was always the Harris's sitting there. I wondered if the Harris's had chased the Cooper's out of our yard. In a  fight, if these fierce birds ever fight with each other, I don't think the Cooper's would stand a chance.

The Harris's doesn't live as openly in front of us as the Cooper's, so we don't know as much about them. For instance with the exception of them robbing the Roadrunner's nest, we have never seen them with prey so we don't know what it is most likely to be. In one source, we read that they prey on small mammals, but have never witnessed that ourselves. We know that Cooper's favor quail, a sumptuous meal worth chasing down, but we have also seen a Cooper's catch a half-grown quail out of the line following its parents.

There is another development. Lately we have seen two Harris's together in our backyard. Are they thinking of nesting here now?

This is probably stretching my theory that the Harris's has driven the Cooper's  out of our yard, but if Harris's indeed prefer mammals, and Cooper's quail, it could be the Harrris's are in a sense preserving quail in our yard, and this year we have noticed that we seem to have more quail than ever, with the young that follow behind them preserving their numbers exceptionally well.

We will watch how this develops.

Some more on tarantulas

 

First of all, with my ignorance, I gave you some bad information. I said I thought this was a female. In fact, this is a male, which is shown by the black color of the inner sides of the legs. So this one is the one who, when it is mature, will go off looking for a female, which it will mate with, then die. So I would rather have had a long-lived female. But the good side is that this male is only half-grown. We recently found a wandering male run-over dead on the road, and it was twice the size of my pet.

This species, which looks so formidable, doesn't bite. You can put it on your arm and it will just walk harmlessly along it (admittedly it feels a bit weird). On the other hand, if you attack it roughly it will rapidly use its hind legs to scrape hair off its abdomen. The fine hairs (called urticating hairs) will break up into a cloud of floating bits of hair that are very irritating if they get into your eyes or nose.

When we first moved to Tucson a couple of years ago, I began photographing every spider we found in the house, and I would try to identify them later. One day I found three or four small spiders in the bathroom, all with the same marking, an abdomen split in two, black on the back half, pale on the front half. I photographed them but never found out what they were. One day I was reading something about tarantulas, and there they were, baby tarantulas, and I was sorry I had not taken clearer pictures of them, and especially sorry I did not try to raise one of them.

The mother tarantula lays its eggs inside her burrow, and keeps them there for a while. Then when she thinks the time is ripe, she opens the burrow, and the young stride out one by one and march off across the desert, evidently a wonderful scene if you have the luck to witness it. I have no idea how these got into our house and ended up in our bathroom. If I had photographed them more carefully you would see the black half of the abdomen was made up of the already fully formed urticating hairs they would use for defense

A Fuzzy New Pet

 We've been warned repeatably that our three-year-long drought is going to continue bone-dry right on through our totally failing monsoon season, and our temperature would be up in the three-digits every day. Well, it's 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon and it is 73 degrees, and this is the first time in the past three days that it has finally stopped raining. We can't go to our beautiful park for our pre-breakfast walk because water is crossing the roads and there's no way to get through. If this was the turn the weather was going to take you think we would be thrilled and relieved. The truth is we are getting fed up with the soggy gloom.

I would probably be sitting in the house getting bored if it wasn't that I had a new pet.

Now I know it seems like I only write about poisonous snakes and scorpions and never write about fuzzy and furry creatures. But I'm not always like that. We found this new, very fuzzy and furry creature, or rather, our cat found it for us, walking down the hall, and we grabbed it for our own.

This is the Desert Blond Tarantula, a symbol of the Arizona desert. Full grown, the species has a four-inch leg span. When you see them wandering the roads at night it is generally an adult male searching for a female, and mating will be his last act. He literally gives it his all. I have occasionally brought one home but they don't eat and they just die. The females live for a much longer time, but they are harder to find. You don't find them wandering. They stay home in their burrow and wait for the male to come by.

Well, I really don't know how you sex them, but I believe this a female, and better still, I think it is only half grown, So I might be able to keep this one as long as I want. (I have looked it up, and the oldest one on record lived 49 years. Maybe I better think through this; I might have to remember this one in my will.

I have kept a solefugid (another exotic arachnid) for a pet, and they are fairly easy, because they will eat meal worms. The one I had lived for about a year, which may be their life span. I have kept a few scorpions for pets, but often had trouble getting them to eat, and I have had to let them go. That's what I did with my bark scorpion. and I still miss it. Anyway, getting this one to eat was the first concern.

Heather, my daughter-in-law, went to the pet store and got me a packet of baby crickets. We poured them all into the aquarium. Now, there is another slight problem with tarantulas, and that is, they come out at night in the darkness, which can make them problematic to observe. I had about two inches of gravel in the bottom of the tank, and I had put in a square piece of bark, knowing the tarantula would want something to hide under during the day, and it has now dug out a hole beneath the piece of bark. That's where it was hiding out when we poured in the crickets. The next morning I looked in and there were only two or three crickets left. Now, did they bury themselves in the gravel? Did the tarantula eat them all in one wild gorge? If it ate them all, it was in the dark so we did not see it.

That was not very satisfying. So we went back to the pet store and bought some big half-grown crickets. The next morning I looked in, and noticed that the spider was still out from his hideaway (is it taming down?), and though we did not see it make a kill, there were scattered parts of slaughtered crickets strewn about, and there it was holding one while s/he devoured it.

 

So I would not have to turn it loose out of guilt that I was starving it. And anyway, I have just now read that their metabolism is so low that they can go months, if not years, without eating a bite.

This blog is dedicated to my good friend Carter Patteson.