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Vickie came by this little guy in the garden today. We admired him for a bit, and then let him go. He took off like a bolt of lightening.
A very pretty animal it is for sure.
 Aspidoscelis tigris stejnegeri. Coastal Whiptail Lizard
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Aspidoscelis tigris stejnegeri. Coastal Whiptail Lizard
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Aspidoscelis tigris stejnegeri. Coastal Whiptail Lizard
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Aspidoscelis tigris stejnegeri. Coastal Whiptail Lizard
‘The Scorpion’
~Hilaire Belloc~
The Scorpion is as black as soot,
He dearly loves to bite;
He is a most unpleasant brute
To find in bed at night.
I found this fellow running across my desk in the house today.
Luckily I had my mug to trap him, so I could take him outside.
 Scorpion Paruroctonus silvestrii
…. These are the common little scorpions here in California.
They are not terribly poisonous… I’ve been stung by one once….
It feels like a nail has been driven into your skin. It really hurts….
The local site of my strike suffered a necrosis…
in ten days I had a small half pea-sized chunk of skin and meat slough off, leaving a half-healed crater in my finger. But it grew back in OK.
I got stung while digging a hole and not wearing gloves..
always wear your protective gear… if I’d had strong gloves on, I’d not have been stung….
just like when the tarantula or the Black Widow bit me… gloves would have been nice then too! LOL
 - Scorpion
Click to embiggen,
you can see the hairs on this dude.
 A Scorpion, Paruroctonus silvestrii
I let him go in the front yard… which is just a weed-whacked wilderness really.
We have deer and quail wandering daily in the front yard….
We see tarantulas and scorpions and rattlesnakes here often enough….
there’s no need to run this guy a mile away to ‘release’ him….
but when I got close to take his picture… he got shy and curled up, all scared
when I backed the camera off he’d jump up and start to run away.
 A Scorpion Yeah, he’s a pretty nice looking little animal.
He reminds me of a lobster
Our lobsters here in California don’t have big claws….
These guys hold their prey with their claws.. and their stinging tail comes up and over their head… they will push the spike into their prey… it pushes in and holds there… you can see they will often make several little pushes to fully embed the stinger.
When I got stung, it happened very quickly….
I think in my case it just wanted to give me a ‘short, sharp shock’ so I’d know I was crushing it while digging bare-handed in the soil. In the case of a bug that it captures, it has the ability to hold and restrain the prey animal while it very deliberately injects its poison to maximum effect.
We have Turkey Vultures in this area. They are pretty amazing animals….. they can eat dead animals felled by disease, and their systems can clean the disease out…. they are called the ‘trashmen of the wilderness’… they are a necessary component to our local eco-system.
They are also terribly pest-ridden creatures…. infested with little crawlies… and stinking really bad… really, really, really bad.
But I like them a lot…. they taste a bit like a cross between a Peregrine Falcon and a Spotted Owl! (Joke).
They are an amazing little creature to watch… they will sit high on a treetop or cliff waiting for the sun to cause the thermal updrafts that they ride so effortlessly…. a simple jump into the breeze… a short downhill glide to build air-current causing lift (the curves of the wings causes a vacuum that actually lifts the animal up), and the animal can turn into the updrafts… letting the upwelling column of air lift the bird up gradually… they must spin in circles inside this column of air….. each circle will bring them a bit higher than they were before…. all of this is done with just small ‘tweaks’ to the feathers… the birds can control some of the flight feathers giving small adjustments to balance and steering.
Amazing creatures really….
Incidentally… they have to take several running steps to build momentum for lift if starting off on the level ground. A Turkey vulture in a five foot pen cannot fly out due to this take-off restriction. I’d say a Turkey Vulture takes thirty feet horizontal-run to get six feet off the ground.
 Turkey Vulture on a tree I saw this Vulture in a tree over the creek…..
 Turkey Vultures on a tree Moments later a cousin (they nest in family groups) came to mess with him…..
They squawked for a few moments, then left off together to do some Vulture stuff I’d not understand.
 guinea hen on a bumper
This is our neighbor’s Guinea Hen. It likes the sheltered area that this bumper gives… solar radiation is concentrated here by all the black paint…. it is sheltered from the breeze…. a good spot for a bird.
Guinea Hens are very interesting birds…. I think they are a bit smarter than your average fowl.
This one likes cars and often runs alongside our car when we go to visit the neighbor’s.
It runs alongside Vickie’s car… sometimes in front of her bumper…. its head almost level with the bottom of her window….
They make a screeching sound that a lot of people find annoying. As far as I know, people don’t raise them for meat or eggs….. they mainly have a reputation of being an ‘easy-to-have bird’… they don’t really need to be caged… anyone we’ve known that had Guineas just let them roam free. They tend to find the place they want to live, and hang out there, eating the bugs all around… they are also very vocal, and when someone comes onto the area, they will sound an alarm…. it’s hard to sneak up onto a house with Guineas, Dogs, or Geese. These birds used to live at another place up the hill… but they wandered and became friends with ‘Little Man’ the pony and lived with him in his pony run. Since they had no fear of cars, and would try to chase people away… one got run over by a car and died. Now there is just this one Guinea left.. and Little Man.
We leave water out for the local wildlife… even though the deer love many of our cactus plants… I like having them around. Our best cactus is behind a seven foot tall fence….
The local does (a female deer) have their babies here… it is a safer place than further from the house. Local predators do not come to our house that much because it riles the dogs…. the dogs bark like crazy at the deer, but don’t worry them too much. The dogs are preferable to coyotes….
Our dogs are chihuahuas… so mostly all they do is make a ruckus. They get scared by anything larger than them… so they fright up when they see a rabbit. But they do keep predators away…. believe me, foxes, coyotes and lions don’t worry about a chihuahua… but they know there is usually a human nearby… so this is a relatively safe place for deer. Sometimes we get to see the babies nursing…. so sweet.
Here’s a photo of the little fawn near our house. I took this photo from our open front door.
 a deer fawn
We came upon a salamander in the woods.
We took a picture, and set him back into the forest duff.
This was underneath some massive giant Coastal Oak trees.
It’s amazing that these little guys can survive in such a dry climate.
We have a few cats that live outside year-round. They sleep under the porch and in some of the sheds and trees we have on the property. They serve the vital function of helping keep the numbers of rodents down. some of our neighbors are overrun by packrats and mice…. we don’t have any such trouble… generally…
That’s because outdoors cats eat rodents outdoors.
We’ve also got two kittens we bottle-fed as their mother had been killed. They barely had their eyes open when we found them…. the rest of the litter had died, and these two were cold to the touch, unresponsive and immobile…. but we warmed them up, and got them hydrated again using an eyedropper and kitten milk replacer….Chica the chihuahua served as a surrogate mother to them.. and they still run to her to say hello. They have some dog social habits… we raised them as indoor kitties but let them in and out the doggie door as they pleased, and when we walk the property… we often have the two dogs and the two kittens all accompanying us. It is cute seeing the kittens playing in the field with the chihuahuas.
All was fine until they started to hunt…. and I don’t want to discourage them from this activity as their predatory instincts… while deleterious to the local small animal population does reduce the numbers of gophers eating our cactus, mice getting into sheds (and house), and rabbits causing HUGE damage to our terraces with their large tunnels.
But we have to draw the line at them bringing rodents into the house to play with and eat. For months we’ve found bloody evidence of their nocturnal forays…. we’re happy and proud that they are great hunters… but please, don’t bring rats into the house! They tend to bring them in alive and play with them before killing and eating them…. and some of their prey have escaped… and I’ve had to catch them….. usually I can be found with a drinking mug in hand… when a cat brings a rabbit, rat or mouse into the house and drops it near our feet… I quickly spring into action… I down the last of my liquids quickly, and set the mug over the erstwhile prey… and take it outside to be released….
We’ve now taken to closing the doggie door at night, the cats can go out, but they can’t come back in…. so for a couple of weeks, we’ve been able to keep the carpet clean(er) than before. And I don’t have to gulp liquids down so I can use my drinking vessel as an emergency capture device.
Here’s the last two critters the kittens brought into the house… one is a large shrew.. the other is a small cottontail bunny such as are so common here, and a major food source for local predators.
I took both critters outside and released them. It’s a strange thing to release critters when I’m wanting the cats to eat them anyway… but I can’t bear to give a little critter back to a cat, that seems a bit unfair even if I took it from the cat in the first place… and I don’t want to kill them myself….
A joke: Why don’t bunnies make any noise when they mate?
Answer: They have cottonballs!
 bunny in mug
Winter-time toad
We’re dry and hot in the summer….
We have a lot of toads that come out in the wetness of winter…
This was one of them…..
We don’t see too many toads in the summertime.
Domestic tranquility
Chica raised this little kitten named Tony. They are still very close.
We went to Grover Beach. There were some gulls that obviously get fed often from the cars in this parking lot by a fast-food joint.
Gulls are pretty common… and not especially pretty nor pleasing to hear. But they are masterpieces of evolutionary design. Efficiency….
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