Catch and Release

Catch and release: it’s really easy when you are talking about a turtle.  1. Approach turtle.  2. Pick up turtle.  3. Set down turtle.

I was walking home from the train after church and I saw it crossing the road…and there were two cars about a block away and heading toward it!  So I picked it up, put it on the sidewalk (on the side it was heading towards) and put it down.

About halfway home from the turtle, I had the thought that I should have brought it home with me, then made posters proclaiming “FOUND: TURTLE” with a photo and posted them in the neighborhood.  But I didn’t.  I wonder if it was looking for some mud to bury itself in for the winter?

Population growth

Thanks to a great birdfeeder my parents gave us and my father in law helped us put up, we’ve been feeding the birds in our neighborhood for nearly five years.  When we first started feeding the birds,  I can’t remember seeing more than one adult male cardinal at a time.  We’ve had juvenile males hanging around, however.

This fall, I have seen FOUR adult male cardinals at once! Here’s one of them:

Giving

Every year, we get asked what we want for Christmas.  I don’t mean this in the general sense, I mean my mom calls or e-mails and asks if my husband and I have our lists yet and to please send them as soon as we can.

This is difficult.  We both maintain wish lists on Amazon.com, and keep them fairly up-to-date.  But to come up with things we need is a challenge, and things we want, well, we don’t want much and when we do want something we usually buy it for ourselves.

So this year, we decided to make a list of charities.  A list, so there would be some choice, or maybe our parents could give a little to each one.  Here they are:

• Heifer Project International – Donations buy farm animals which go to needy people who can then sell the eggs or milk and breed the animal(s) to expand production.
• Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres – Doctors help people who are victims of natural disasters, wars, or poverty.
• The Nature Conservancy – Donations are used to conserve nature, either by directly buying up land or by partnering with others to buy or protect land.
• Camfed USA – This group is educating girls in rural Africa and empowering them to become leaders for change in their communities.

I hope you will agree that at least one of these charities is worth supporting.  I have given to each, and I would love it if you would also.  Please do not give me any gifts this year.

If you are curious about how these organizations (and many others) spend their money, you can check out Charity Navigator.  This website gives a breakdown for charities on how much they spend on accomplishing their mission, fundraising, and administrative expenses.  You can see how much the CEO is paid and how big a chunk of the overall pie that is.  I recommend checking this site before donating to any organization that is asking you for money.

Is there an entomologist in the house?

I ought to just take these photos to the biology teachers at school.  I know one of them is having his classes make insect collections.

This big insect was found dead, on the back deck:

It was white on the underside, and at least 4 cm long.  Is it a cicada?  Most of the cicadas I have seen in my life are the shed skins of cicadas, which are an amber-brown color.

Then last week there was this tiny insect in my office:

This one was at most, one centimeter long, counting the wings.  It walked slowly up my wall, so I had time to pull out my tripod and take the photo on maximum zoom.  Unfortunately, it is still fuzzy—I don’t have one of those non-jiggly remote-shutter thingies I used to have for my old SLR camera, and of course I jiggled the camera while pushing the button.  It was unavoidable.  Is it a baby praying mantis?  It looks a lot like a teeny praying mantis to me.

Is there an entomologist in the house?

Gingivitis

Buzz has gingivitis!  I took him to the vet for his 3-year rabies shot and a general check-up, and he has bright red gums next to his teeth.  I never look in his mouth (he really doesn’t like me doing that) so I hadn’t noticed at all!

The vet prescribed a liquid antibiotic, which we have to squirt into his mouth twice a day, a two-person job that will become more interesting once I am back at work starting Monday.  More interesting because I usually leave the house in the morning before my husband is out of bed.  Since the first week is all in-service, I don’t need to be as early as I like to be once classes begin, so I will leave a little later and we’ll get the morning dose down Buzz somehow.  I hope he doesn’t start to hide every morning when he sees us coming!  It is very hard to get him out from under the bed, for example.

I really don’t want to start brushing Buzz’s teeth.

Ah, summer days, tra-la

All those weekends I stressed over papers I had to grade or lessons I had to prepare; all those evenings when I fell onto the sofa, exhausted; this is when I have that time back.

So, I pull weeds, wash dishes (Greg does more of that during the school year), cook more often, and make to-do lists.  And watch the Tour de France, and watch wildlife.

Wildlife?  Well, suburban wildlife.  Yesterday we found a praying mantis and a small brown snake while pulling out some poison ivy from the front garden.  There are lots of birds at the birdfeeder, in addition to the white squirrel.  I’ve only been seeing one white squirrel at a time lately…so I don’t know what is going on in that community.  Did the one I saw in early spring going at it with a gray squirrel have her babies?  Did two of them die?  Has a squirrel gotten territorial and chased the others away?  There’s a little bird that lands on the wooden dowel of the bird feeder and keeps slipping upside down.  That happened to the woodpecker too, until it figured out how to balance on the top of it, sideways.  There are cardinals and chickadees and titmice and lbj’s (little brown jobs).  And wood doves, which are basically backyard pigeons, as opposed to street pigeons.

So far this summer I haven’t seen (or heard) the foxes that we’ve sometimes had in the backyard, and I also haven’t seen the hawk I saw last year.  But we haven’t had any problems with rabbits, despite some of my friends complaining bitterly that they are overrun with rabbits this year.  However, I found a really huge Japanese beetle in my roses on Saturday.  Ugh!

Here are some (out-of-focus) pictures: