Confessions of a naturalist: experiences with wild animals.

In college days, almost 30 years ago, we had honors research. Mine was a bone cave excavation with flourine dating of bones and one of my buddies did a bat migration and ecology study on the social bat. (Myotis sodalis). The bat project involved collecting torpid bats off a caves roof and banding them for later collection and migration studies . Since there were many colleges involved in various studies (mostly rabies transmission) we had the benefit of having lots of other data from a huge pool.
Bat banding involved living in a cave for weekends and measuring bat properties , then in the spring , summer and into the next year, wed go back and recollect and note the bands . we had other data from schools up and down the Appalachians from Maine to Georgia. There was some interesting data he gathered and some important conclusions like,
1 bats dont want anything to do with people in caves

2 This particular species of Bats doesnt move around much

Thats about it, lots of statistics and maps but not much of importance, unless youre a real chiroptarologist.
I remem ber picking the bats from the cave walls like little peaches. i always wondered whether the study procedures had any effects on the population, Id since come away with the opinion that animal ecology was the study of the obvious.

I would have like to have done that kind of work as a young man. Doesn’t every boy want to live in a cave? Here’s a beautiful pencil drawing of Myotis sodalis in flight. http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/mammalkey/Components/Line%20Drawings/Myotis%20sodalis.gif

Does this bring back memories? A banded M. sodalis in hand is worth… http://www.batmanagement.com/Projects/Canoe%20Creek%20Map/ibats/ibat213.1.JPG

When I was younger, my brother and I explored a small cave. The main room was frequented by many people, who left a lot of graffiti, but there was `a narrow passage in the back wall through which few people passed. We squeezed through it, wading in deep muck, then worked our way through a maze until we got to a tiny room in the back. It had a small blue pool of water, but the air was so bad we couldn’t stay there long. When we got back to the main room, it was getting dark outside, and the bats were leaving the cave. Our lights formed a barrier that they wouldn’t pass, so we turned the lights off. Immediately, we could sense them flying past us, gusts of air and wing tips brushing against our bodies.

In the same zoo that had the vampires, we had a display of fruit bats or flying foxes, large bats that resemble small foxes or dogs. We put a large branch in the display for them to hang on. The would make short flights around the display, and to land would simply fly right above the branch, hook their feet on it, and swing down while folding their wings. They are very graceful and impressive animals.
http://www.mered.org.uk/saraweb/animals/flying%20fox.jpg

I cant believe Im recall this , but the drawing you posted of the myotis, was , in fact, a Myotis sodalis lucifigus, since it was in possession of the keel bone in the tail . This is a little subspecies identifier that said the drawing was probably of a bat population in Kentucky or West Virginia.

Ive always wondered how the bigger bats hung themselves "up" for the day. Ive watched the small ones , they sort of oppose themselves upside down and get their foothold. Then they hang there a few seconds with their wings open and gradually fold them. I got a kick out of how they sort of noodged each other around so that within a short period of time, theyd have a huge clot of furry bodies all clustered together. They often do walk around the cave floor like mice so you have to be careful where you step.when they are flying around or disturbed.

Tarantuala are common in Texas. I had a female living in my backyard in Dallas for several years. Female tarantulas live up to 30 years and build burrows, whereas males are much less domestic and roam around, presumedly looking for females, and have relatively short lives of just a few years.

I watched my female dig her burrow over a long period of time. She would disappear inside of it for a couple of minutes and reappear at the surface where she would hesitate until the coast was clear. She would emerge with a pinch of dirt, a small pebble, or occassionally an old snail shell and deposit these on a small shard pile that slowly accumulated over the years outside her burrow.

Every time I mowed the grass, I made sure to avoid her burrow, but I'm sure it must have terrified her. I suppose I felt an affinity with her, because I'm a clay artist and part of my work involves throwing vessels. I've eked out a living in this manner for almost twenty years. This spider, with no sense of time, patiently dug out her own vessel in this hard, clayey soil using nothing but her tiny claws on her feet, and then lived in it.

One day I saw a tarantula hawk flying around in my yard. They're hard to miss once you learn to identify them, being very large, black wasps with red wings. I forgot about the wasp, and didn't check on the tarantula for a month or so, but I never saw her again, and her burrow soon filled in.

Tarantula hawk attacking a tarantula.
http://vidal.med.puc.cl/insectos/PepsLimbata.jpg

I just recently bought a potters wheel at an auction. Its a motorized one withh the stool attached and is on a huge frame with a 2 hp motor. The belt on the drive wheel is busted so Im going to have to figger out some kind of wide belt contraption. The wheel is operated by stepping on this foot bar which makes an idler wheel taught which makes the wheel go round. Any ideas about what would make a wide belt with no bumpy seems. I tried a tire tube but this quickly stretched out and then got caught in the idler. I think I need a leather machinery belt.
I paid 50 bucks for the whole thing , I figured I did OK. Ive thrown pots before but many of mine wind up looking like George Ohrs work , except mine is by accident.

That was astute of you, farmerman, to get that pencil drawing down to the subspecies. Probably only a handful of people could do that.

I alway though it was weird that such mobile creatures as birds and bats would have subspecies, but then I realized that even birds and bats live in their confined territories isolated from the other parts of the range of their species.

astute hell, you stay in a cave for days banding bats, it stays with you for a lifetime.

I saw your tarantula stuff. I worked in Africa in the past and , in surveys, besides hhaving to worry about the Coup du Jour, there were spiders. Some of the tarantuals were big and FAST. I always see these tarantuals in movies just creeping along a bedsheet. Not so over there, The tarantuals could be as big as a buick and were fast and MEAN. If you tried to swipe one away from a table or sitting area, theyd raise up on their hind legs like "Watch it buddy, see these Fangs?" The locals would swat em with sticks and often the damn spider would come back at you like a pissed off black snake.

Interesting stuff..keep up the great stories, its fabulous.
I always thought bat study was something I could do easily, and itd be fun but, yeah...living in a cave for days with the little critters well, I dont know.
A friend of mine growing up had a female tarantula and he got bit once, I guess once is all it takes. I thought of one as a pet but, when I went to the pet store in the area that was known for a variety of species...well, mr 6 ft tall was not all too happy I wanted to see one. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me how his most tame bit him once, brought him to his kness and basically turned him off to the cuties after that....I decided that it probably wasnt a good idea.

I worked in a zoo for three summers, and have ton of stories. Enjoying yours so far.

Tarantulas are incredibly fast, yes. One of my duties was the petting zoo, or bringing smaller animals out for the public to examine close-up while talking about the animal. For some reason (this makes no sense) a couple of us were sent to the local Renaissance Festival with some animals, including a tarantula. I usually did this stuff within a room set aside for the purpose, and this time we were out in the open air. I was holding the tarantula like I always did -- just on my flat hand, this particular one was usually pretty placid -- and a mom and toddler came over and were looking at it. We always got nervous about small unpredictable children, and I was just attempting to move out of range (but was being crowded from the other side) and had already gotten through most of a "look don't touch" lecture to the mom (we let people gently touch, but not toddlers), when the toddler reached out and POKED the tarantula's abdomen, hard. The tarantula sprinted up my arm and onto my head in a millisecond, which was unpleasant, but also meant it could easily become tangled in my hair. Also risky in terms of I couldn't SEE (the other zoo person was elsewhere) and so it was tricky to extract it, and I didn't want a large tarantula running amok outside among the Renaissance Faire revelers.

Eventually got it down, somehow, plopped it in it's box, slammed on the lid, and took a break. Didn't get bitten through all of it, which was a credit to the tarantula (though the bite of this kind -- I have a muhc worse memory than farmerman, can't recall details beyond "tarantula" -- is akin to a bee sting, not bad.)

I have a hypothesis about snake speed. I feel that the speed that a snake can attain is inversely proportional to the period and frequency of the "sine wave" the snakes body describes as it moves along..

I have always been a snake nut. As a kid Id go out and try to scrounge up snakes for "bring em to class or the playgrounds" on "pet days"
I found that black snakes were particularly aggressive but would make great swirly sine waves with their bodies that they would appear to be movin g at great speed but really didnt go far. If they wanted to really get away they would almost look like a black spear just shooting through the grass and into some cover.
Anybody know anything about snake mobility and velocities?

Any industrial supplier should be able to come up with a flat belt, and maybe link it up for you, too. There's still lots of Southbend lathes running around and they use the same setup

Sozobe: I've never held a tarantula, and you're brave to do so. I love spiders now, but it took me a while to get to this point.

Another trick that tarantulas have when upset is to kick the hairs on their abdomen into the air and into the eyes of the predator. That's very irritating, I understand.

The brown recluse spider or violin or brown spider (Loxosceles reclusus) is very common in Texas. They're stalkers and take their prey on the run.

I apprenticed for a professional potter once, and her studio was an old corrogated metal shack. We had to run a 100 yard extention cord for electricity and a long hose for water. When I first arrived, the place was a huge mess. Hundreds of flattened boxes that the clay came in were strewn on the floor, and plastic bags of wet clay scraps were piled to the ceiling in one corner near her wheel.

We decided to clean the studio, a process that took a week. Many spiders found the perfect habitat underneath the flattened boxes, most of them either small harmless wolf spiders or brown recluse spiders. The potter had an affection for the spiders, but agreed that we should kill the brown spiders since they're dangerous.

You'd have to pick up a box, identify the spider, and kill it with a rolled up newspaper if it were a brown spider. They're easy to identify because of a violin of the cephalothorax, while the wolf spider had a stripe, but they're so fast that I occassionally killed a wolf spider by mistake. I caught hell whenever that happened.

Thanks for you encouragement, Quinn. I don't get much feedback on this thread or my other thread on " more weird animals." The first "weird animals" started by Portal Star continues to get many hits. I put some incredible animals photos there and it's still popular, but it's very slow loading. Then, for some reason, I couldn't post the images directly anymore, so on "more weird animals" I just posted websites. Last night, though, I successfully posted an image, so I hope it lasts.

A weird family member, that is a weird spouse of a troubled, shall we say, family member, of whom I remember little except that she existed, brought to my aunt's house one day on a visit, a tarantula in a jar, showing it to us in the kitchen.

That and the James Bond tarantula just about did it for me. On top of the fact that my feet swelled up as a child from spider bites. I even have spider dreams (some kind of rete revisitation) that wake me up once every six months or so.

My awake self is somewhat interested in them though, and am listening on this thread.

Continuing this theme of nature rambles, today I took a small hhike to the Glenns of the Susquehanna. Thhe purpose (so its a totally valid and , hence, deductible experience), was to gather some photos of the trilliums in bloom. I wanted to have some wildflowers on a page of our company's brochure of services about mine reclamation. Trilliums have a nice symmetry and they bloom in an otherwise dead , leaf strewn forest floor in rather rocky and wet areas.The theme of "we can turn your mine pit into a n asset just like these trilliums bloom in craggy areas and add to its beauty" was much on my days plan.
while hiking the glenns , I came across a large pothole of a stream. the pothole was carved by centuries of falling water that cascaded down the cliff faces that formed the glenns, The water in the pothole was clear and deep . I was waiting for the light to allow some better reflections of the newly budding trees aand the trilliums along the edge o the water, when a dinosaur head poked up on the water surface. A large snapping tutle had apparently claimed this pothole as his(hers). I just stood and watched for awhile as he looked about. he caught me staring at him and , we began a stare-off.
He was apparently a better trained and highly experienced starer, what with all the cold blood and all. im, by nature, kind of hyper , so I shortly broke off the grinning contest and , as I moved closer he dove to the bottom and kicked up a trail of leafy silt that marked his trail underwater like an old carp. he was a large turtle and , while I couldnt detect any signs of intelligence in his stare. i did
feel that we recognized each others position on the food chain. I, having earlier eaten a substantial mr Wizard breakfast of juice,eggs , cereal, toast and grits, was perfectly comfortable and didnt see him as a potential meal.Of course, he couldnt know that and just did what he could to keep from being eaten
A very primitive looking animal , is a snapping turtle.... I just then realized that I sort of have an aversion to such primitive appearing species. I get uncomfortable about the paleozoic frame and the
ridges on his scoot. I dont know why this is, as a kid I was always catching snakes including the poisonous ones (for which I got sent home with ceremony and telephone communications between the school principaln and my father for bringing an example of to school in the fifthe grade)I still like snakes, theyre cool and intelligent looking , not this dull "nobody home" stare I see from the residents of the paleozoic.
I dislike snapping turtles and mud turtles, box turtles and painted turtles dont have this primitive look that I find uncomfortable. i dont like hellbenders , but Ill pick up newts and forest salamanders . With a snapping turtle, i see cycads and steaming bug infested swamps of the mississippean. Maybe its just a genetic memory thing.

Sozobe: Referring back to you experience with the tarantula that found refuge on your head, I think that animals, like reptiles and arthropods, think of humans in two ways: either as potential predators or inanimate objects like a tree or a rock. I think the closest we can get to a snake or a spider is to have them think we're trees or rocks. So when the tarantula was on your hand, you were a tree, and when the predatory child poked it, the spider ran up your trunk and onto your crown. I suppose the ticklish part is approaching the tarantula in the first place and making sure it thinks you're a tree.

On occasion I do nature programs with kids, and sometimes we encounter snakes. The problem is to get the kids to stop acting like predators so the snake will calm down. The kids move quickly and like to grab, so I tell them to be like a tree, move slowly and deliberately and don't grab, support the snake like a branch.

Farmerman: I read about the wheel you bought. It sounds like a homemade motorized kickwheel. You'll probably have to improvise something for a belt. If it's a commercial model, you can call the company.

Interesting comment comparing a snake's movement to a sine wave. The long slender snakes, like the black racer, have a flattened wave and move the fastest. Heavy-bodied snakes like rattlesnakes and cottonmouths move with a much deeper wave, but maybe it's just because they have so much more bulk to move. I once encountered a very hot, and pissed diamondback that got into the classic raised S-shaped posture and frantically rattling. I moved back a ways until it felt less threatened, and it shot off with a speed I didn't think was possible for those snakes. It still moved with a very deep wave, and I'm sure it took a huge effort, but it got 30 feet off in no time and raised its body again.

I think the top speed of snakes is about 3 miles per hour, much slower than they appear to move.

ossobuco: I don't think you're alone in your fear of spiders. They're so alien and scary-looking, but for the same reason they attract us. I was afraid of spiders when I was younger, but once I learned a little about them and could identify some, I got more interested until the point now where I really like them. A lot of people like the jumping spiders because they have a face and they react to you so much. They hate the feel the human skin, maybe it's the heat, but if they're on your hand they'll immediately jump off attached by a safety line. They move down, but if they don't encounter the ground or something, they'll climb back up completely forgetting why they left in the first place. When they reach your hand, they drop down again and repeat the process over and over again like a living yo-yo. Kids like watching that.

Jumping spider:


Farrmerman: That's what I like about hiking; you never know what you're going to encounter. Snapping turtles are pugnacious-looking, and it suits their nature. I saw one in Florida last winter that was up on land digging a nest by a trail. I checked on it several times, making sure to keep out of sight, but finally after hours of futile work, the turtle abandoned its feeble attempt. It had only managed to dig a few inches after hours of labor.

My brother and I were in the Fakahatchee Strand just west of the Big Cypress Swamp in SW Florida once. We were two miles from our truck and found a dead snapping turtle that had been trying to lay eggs. Apparantly a raccoon had eaten through the body cavity to get at the eggs, and this killed the turtle. My brother loves turtles, and waxes poetic about snapping turtles, so he wanted the skeleton. He cut a branch, put the turtle on the end of it, and carried this stinking 20 pound mess two miles back to the car.

His wife is very territorial about her house, like a lot of women are, but I guess she's used to my brother's enthusiasm about natural history by now. He has a nice collection of bones and skulls. Once he brought home the head of a fox he cut off from a road kill and boiled it in one of his wife's good pots to remove the meat and skin. I don't think she was too happy about that. But then you gotta do what you gotta do. Women have a hard time understanding that. On the other hand, men need the influence of women, otherwise we revert back to nature very quickly.

we used to bring bats back from cave trips (dead ones we found in the cave floor) Then wed put them in a box with carrabid beetles which cleaned the bones well and then wed articulate theh bat and use it for a study skeleton.

we had a "stank" lab whhere the department ecologists and anatomists had carabid beetles and flies for defleshing . We didnt boil anything cause it messes up the grizzle.

Defleshing.

Love the dinosaur story.

Just read someplace that the fossil evidence of T. Rexes is more consistent with a scavenger than a killer; more vulture than eagle. There are the giant olfactory bulbs (bulbs?), which indicates a dependence on smell, and there are those useless forelegs which has always been at odds with the predator image. They also figured out that the huge tail was probably a balance for the front part munching on things on the ground -- that the overall orientation was parallel to the ground (head through tail, with legs perpendicular) rather than rearing up a la Jurassic Park. And of course those teeth are great for tearing up carrion.

Confirm/ deny, farmerman? Made sense to me.

I agree, the real predators were much leaner and didnt have tails thaht needed to act as counterweights. They were better balanced . The real solutions of these kinds of questions have been proposed by mechanical engineers and not paleontologists. There were a bunch of mechanical engineers that took Mark Horners suggestion that T Rex was built too damn klutzy to be a good predator .

cool thread.....