Animals Everywhere

May begins with sun and wind. The trees are being tossed back and forth in a whispering flurry of green, and the ground is drying out. The hills are still moist from the recent rains, and as recently as Thursday, I watched runoff draining into Lake Ranch Reservoir.

The week was rather routine, with kids who occupied the middle ground on the behavioral spectrum, and the lower foothills of the socioeconomic one.

The most unusual find of the week was this dead bird:

I didn't recognize the species, which when one considers the size (somewhere between a dove and a crow) and beauty, is unusual. I quickly figured it out using a phone app (this one), which identified it as a Northern Flicker. It looked like it had been intentionally placed on top of a log, and later that day, one of my co-workers told me that he'd found it by a glass door near the middle of camp, picked it up, and relocated it to the log where I subsequently found it. It most likely flew into the glass and broke its neck. It's a shame.

Also this week, I caught a smallish Gopher snake, let the kids touch and/or hold it for a few moments, and then put it back. It had been resting underneath some unused panels from our solar pool heater, along with a toad, a vole, some Fence lizards, and a Ringneck snake or two.

I checked later to see if it was still there, and discovered that it had eaten the vole. It was sitting in the vole's nest with a huge lump in its belly.

Throughout the week, a lot of the other usual suspects made an appearance.

Yesterday, I did my first reptile party in a long time, for a Día Del Niño celebration at a park in San Jose. Last weekend, inspired by the thought of some reptile money coming in, I ordered three scorpions online. They arrived on Tuesday, and I took two of them to the event on Saturday. I left the Asian Forest scorpion home because it is more aggressive than the other two (not that I let kids touch scorpions, but I have an aversion to being stung as well). The two I did bring, an Emperor Scorpion and a Flat Rock scorpion, impressed the kids, as did the various other animals.

Here's the Emperor scorpion:

And here's the Flat Rock scorpion, chewing on my palm. This is the first time I've ever been bitten by a scorpion, so now I can say that I've been pinched (Emperor and Flat Rock), stung (California Forest scorpion), and bitten! It didn't really hurt, and it was actually kind of amusing. Since Flat Rock scorpions eat snails in the wild (or so I've read), I can only assume that soft human skin is snail-like enough to be worth sampling.

It's May now, and my goal to be more creative during the month of April was mostly a failure. I've once again started to try and teach myself guitar, but that's about it. This month, I think I'll set some sort of exercise goal. The only real exercise I've been getting lately is walking. I walked to the nearest record store today and spent around $50.00, which is one third of my monthly music budget (an arbitrary amount which I might increase slightly this month).