Estate Find XXXVI.V

September 5, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

We have a late Find entry, which I’m rushing out to make it still within the confines of Friday (I have a half hour.)

After watching the hatching taking place many moons ago, I saw no signs of any Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis) at all, except for the adult that suddenly appeared on the liriope, and I suspected that one had come from elsewhere. Tonight I found this mama, obviously ready to drop an egg sac, and I’m going to keep checking on her to see if I can witness this (and by that, I mean photograph, natch.)

I have to note that this is full-frame, and hardly the limits of closeup ability for this lens (the Canon 18-135mm STM.) We need scale, however, and I gotcha.

Yes, she’s a right thick one, and it’s impressive seeing how much they can grow in a season, since she’s a measured 100mm in length (I went back out to check,) while the newborns might top 12mm. She spooked while i was doing this, and I had to convince her to get back into the open, since the foliage there was dense enough for her to disappear easily, and then I’d never see the egg sac being deposited.

During the same session, I also found this one.

This is the other common species around here, a Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina,) not exactly providing the natural background by perching on the rain barrel. Less than half the length of the Chinese, this is nevertheless an adult, though not obviously pregnant. Another view:

The urban camouflage is strictly within this species, which can also be green. The short wings denotes this as a female.

Now, I tried to coax this one into my hand for scale pics, but she was having none of that, perhaps aware that I’d been messing with the septic system earlier today (even though I did thoroughly wash my hands.) She quickly leapt away, at least making a more natural background by landing in the grass, and after assuring herself that she’d escaped, she wasted absolutely no time in ridding her feet of that icky human ichor.

You’d think that perhaps it might be healthier to use something other than her mouth, especially with the rain barrel right there, but what can I say?

Five minutes til midnight – gotta hit ‘Post’…

Estate Find XXXVI

September 5, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

I apologize, but there’s no Estate Find this week – I’ve spent the past two days doing almost nothing but dealing with contractors, after an extended weekend with guests over. While I did indeed go out a few times trying to find something, I was interrupted/cut short twice and found nothing new the other times.

It do be like this sometimes; despite your best efforts, you don’t produce anything of interest, and this can be made worse by insisting on something new. I’ve done extended outings like that, numerous times, and have also done sessions where almost none of the images that I did take were worth keeping. While it’s not a bad idea to have goals and to push yourself to produce something of interest, sometimes you simply have to let it go, since you can’t make the wildlife and conditions around you bend to your will.

Still, I won’t just leave it at that, so we’ll have a faintly fartsy pic from weeks ago, when The Girlfriend’s trumpet flowers (Brugmansia) were blooming.

Man, those are over two months old, dating from June 27^th! But the lighting gives a reasonably accurate impression I think, because these open fully and look best at night, attempting to attract some nocturnal pollinator that doesn’t actually live in this area, since these were imported (long ago) from South America and are actually extinct in the regions where they evolved – which isn’t to say that they aren’t thriving in areas where they were introduced. Still, whatever pollinator they evolved to attract ain’t coming…

We can go further back into the folder, too.

This dates back from May 2021, and wasn’t used then partially because I could never identify it. It’s perhaps even smaller than the impression given here, since it measured (if I remember accurately) somewhere between 15 and 20mm in length, and is likely a juvenile, perhaps only recently emerged from tadpoledom. As such, it probably doesn’t have its adult coloration in place, but it looks closest to a barking treefrog, especially those ringed spots. However, I never found any other evidence of the species in that region (this being where we used to live,) though they supposedly could be found in there. I’m just taking the opportunity to clean out a couple of older pics from the blog folder.

What the hell – let’s get rid of the oldest.

I don’t recall what the original purpose of this image was supposed to be, though the contemplative nature of it is obvious. It dates back from 2006, which predates the blog itself, and while it obviously got into this folder later than that, the program that I used for editing wrote the original ‘Date Taken’ as the ‘Date Modified,’ so I can offer nothing further. Those that maintain that I’m looking more and more like this as time goes by are ignoring that fact that the chimp has more hair on top (that’s considerably less grey) and does not have eyebrows sprouting wild and unruly hairs that resemble kudzu in more ways than one. The ears are a dead match though.

Anyway, better luck next week, and naturally I will present things here at other times as I find them, plus the occasional semi-philosophical post and some utter nonsense thrown in for seasoning. Don’t give up on me yet (he says to a nonexistent audience…)

Crikey stroppin’ beeah!

September 4, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Today, so my calendar informs me, is National Wildlife Day, which is actually different from World Wildlife Day, found on March 3^rd and yet somehow not on my calendar. In fact, this is only a National Wildlife Day, since it also falls in February – perhaps it depends on what nation we’re talking about (I seem to recall different hemispheres celebrating this on different days, early spring for either.) This one was created in honor of Steve Irwin, which means we celebrate it surrounded by a major camera and lighting team, animal wranglers, and controlled sets, running around pretending we’re in “the wild” while affecting a ridiculously stereotypical dialect and handling animals in a disrespectful and hazardous manner. Bonus points if you somehow manage not to be seen as an irretrievable assclown while doing so.

[As you might surmise, I’m not a fan of nature shows that aren’t the least bit natural, especially ones that foster (heh!) bad habits and entirely incorrect ideas about naturalism and zoology. The bare fact that most of them are like this doesn’t help at all, but for giggles, pay attention to the camera angles and ideal lighting to see how much staging is actually taking place. Now, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I will readily admit that I resort to natural-looking sets on occasion, and of course I’m often controlling the lighting, but I never represent these as ‘natural’ and the purpose is almost always illustration, not ‘documentary.’ To say nothing of the large percentage of subjects that are actually captured in completely uncontrolled conditions.]

All that aside, feel free to celebrate this as you see fit; mere observation works just fine, and will tell you a hell of a lot more than trying to have any kind of encounter. Go someplace where the chances of seeing something are greatly increased: even just the local park, but national parks, wildlife refuges, forests, lakeshores… any natural area is usually capable of displaying some kind of wildlife, especially if we loosen our concept of what ‘wildlife’ is. It’s easy to get into the mindset that this means lions and camels and narwhals, but really, just think about the more common species in your area that you’re never actually seen – even for me, this is a long list. Don’t target anything, don’t have goals, just keep your eyes and ears open.

I have a few pics to throw up, not actually from today – I may get out a little later on and see what I can see, though I have several other things that have to be taken care of. It’s not like this isn’t a regular practice anyway…

A few days back on the 1^st I found this particular subject, though this is purposefully shot wide to give context and perspective. Can you spot what I was seeing among these calla lilies (Zantedeschia aetheopica)? Granted, I suspected such a thing was there and was specifically looking for it.

We’ll go in a lot closer.

Naturally, it’s a juvenile green treefrog (Dryophytes conereus,) sequestered during the day before going out to hunt at night – there are almost as many of these around as there are the Carolina anoles, and that’s saying something. This was shot ambient light in open shade, and suffered a little for it, but I did do a quick scale shot too.

Eentsy little thing, but it had found a perfectly-sized spot within the leaves, perpetually shaded and so cooler during the day.

We had guests over for the holiday weekend (no, not this one, but Labor Day,) and went down to the waterfront to find that some species of fish was jumping from the water constantly and exuberantly, very similar to what we’d seen previously at North Topsail Beach and potentially the same species. I had not taken my camera on that outing, but I returned for sunrise the following day (this would be the 2^nd,) and managed to snag a few shots of them in midair.

I got several photos, but most of them at a moderate distance at odd angles, and I was only working with the 18-135mm, so a positive ID was never pinned down (especially when the closest shot, here, was only seeing their bellies.) Nonetheless, based on both appearance and behavior, I suspect these are mullet; the average length seemed to be on the order of 25-30cm. But some of them were dependable enough that I could actually compose a few frames.

The sunset was unimpressive, being far too clear and thus blinding almost from the moment of appearance, and none of the fish were cooperative enough to jump in front of it before the sun was too bright to make a decent pic. But this one works halfway decently, at least. If I were so inclined, I’d wax enthusiastically about the mood of rebellion and contrariness displayed by facing opposite the boats, but there’s such a thing as trying too hard…

And then, yesterday.

Right where the nutria (well, and everything else) regularly forage, we found this adult North American raccoon (Procyon lotor,) in mid-afternoon, of all times. I was able to slip out onto the deck for a clearer view but did not otherwise push it; not only can raccoons be remarkably defensive, seeing one during the day is one of those warning signs of distemper or rabies, though no other evidence of this was forthcoming – both illnesses often display symptoms of sluggishness or being in a daze, aimless wandering and long pauses in confusion. Far more likely was that I spook it off by trying to get closer, so I maintained a little distance while this one was quite busy with its harvesting of already-harvested corn.

I couldn’t be certain while looking through the viewfinder, but I fired off the frames when it seemed likely anyway, and did indeed get the catchlights in the raccoon’s eyes, which is almost a necessity for this species; otherwise the entire mask is simply a band of black most times. It didn’t want to sit up and give me a better pose, but you take what you can get (when you don’t have an entire crew and animal wranglers setting up your shots, I mean.)

So, go see what you can find – still plenty of time left in the day, and I’ll provide a written excuse for you to celebrate this tomorrow if you need it.

Jiskaske nou rankontre ankò, August!

August 31, 2025August 31, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Squeaking in under the wire with this one, getting out two specially-produced abstract images to see August on its way (since I found absolutely nothing during my normal perambulations.) Will this make them better, or worse than normal? Who’s judging? Who’s reading?

Anyway, what I produced after a little playing around a short while ago:

A handful of people might recognize this, since it contains just enough context, and a few more may be able to make a decent guess based on the progression of the numbers visible on the dial, especially the red dot by the ‘100.’ The dot denotes the highest setting that flash synchronization could be achieved, a trait of older cameras. This is the top panel of a Minox subminiature camera, often called a spy camera though it’s a lot more likely that actual spies used cameras that didn’t look like cameras, so this is more of a spy wannabe camera. I’m slowly collecting some of these, simply because I like them.

And another, more recognizable but likely more fartistic too.

The sharp-eyed or those familiar with macro work will spot the traits here, knowing this was fairly high magnification and so the smaller white shell is really small. These were all from Cayuga Lake in central New York, several years back – such shells would shift around the lake bottom depending on vagaries of winds and currents, and while I was there a small cove was littered with a thick carpet of these, but clear of them when I returned a few years later. Species? Not even gonna try.

So we’ll send August on its way and soon see what September has to offer, shall we? I mean, I don’t think we have much choice…

Estate Find XXXV

August 29, 2025August 29, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

It was looking like I was going to have to punt the Find again, with nothing much to show for this week, but I went out late Thursday night and found something better than what I had lined up. It’s not fascinating or exciting, but it’s the kind of thing that makes a nature photographer (zoologist/biologist/naturalist/creepy hermit) go, “Aha! Now I know what to be looking for.”

Be warned, however, some of these images are graphic.

Gruesome thing to find in the headlamp, no? Especially deep (well, not that deep) in the woods at night. Yet it’s only resin, an indication that the damage to the bark of this bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) was recent. And, fairly, extensive, since it reached roughly a meter off the ground.

I was out there alone, so I had to put my own hand into the shot, and couldn’t pose next to it for relative scale. What this indicates though is how big the critter that did it would have to be, which makes this likely from either a nutria, beaver, or bear. Chiplike teeth marks on other trunks nearby (there were several showing this damage) largely ruled out bear, and with seeing the nutria so recently (actually, daily now) and not far from this – fifty meters or less – one would be inclined to favor those as the culprit. There were two bits that were contra-indicators, though. The first was, this is quite close to the beaver lodge and alongside the creek that they favor, and second, I heard the distinct ka-thunk! of one diving only a few minutes before this, right near the lodge – nutria will splash, but they don’t slap the water with a flat tail to make that sound.

I’d been out a few times before and hadn’t seen nor heard any signs of the beavers at all, even when I felt that if they’d had young, those would have been out of the lodge by now. And there were signs that they’d had young, since I found scraps of cow lilies on the crossover paths from our pond to the creek, and the only reason for them to be carrying food back at this time of year would be to feed young. Since it had been so quiet with no further signs, however (even the cow lilies have bounced back almost entirely,) I had callously discarded them as a potential photo subject in favor of other things, though I’d wondered if they had moved on or even run afoul of some predator. These pics makes it clear that there is still notable activity, so I have to go back to plans of staking them out, or at least checking a lot more often.

Funny, too, I might have missed this entirely by day, since I would have been relying on the indirect light filtering through the dense canopy, which would not have illuminated this as distinctly as the headlamp aiming right where I was facing. But yeah, I need to be getting my butt up before sunrise and checking out the area more often to see what I can see – I’m not a morning person, as you might have guessed from all of the night pics, so switching over takes a little effort, which I’ll be happy to expend if enough people encourage me. Not that I’m hinting or anything.

For giggles, though, I’ll include what was slotted to be the Estate Find, should I not have found anything else last night. Otherwise it would just go in a separate post anyway.

I’m still checking out the sun when I think of it, and this past Wednesday, some significant activity had sprung up when all had been quiet before. According to two apps on my smutphone, though, this hasn’t so far resulted in any increase in potential auroral activity, not that I would likely see anything at this latitude, anyway. Compare this to August 4^th, however:

Barely anything registering there at all, though one day in between there was so little I could pick out only two faint specks.

So, this post could have been worse – at least the bark pics were actually on Walkabout Estates Plus, and not 151 million kilometers above it…

Banana (spider) for scale

August 29, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

While I was out last night photographing the Estate Find, I grabbed two other images of opportunity and I’ll throw them up now.

I’ve mentioned the explosion of golden silk orbweavers (Trichonephila clavipes) on the property, but they’re getting big now, and I needed an illustration of this. It worked out fairly well, all things considered, and you can see why they’re also referred to as ‘banana spiders.’

Yes, that’s my own hand in the pic, just a little behind the spider so only slightly misleading as to scale. I’d wanted to get this for a while now, and this particular specimen was low enough and within reach, while also being huge. What also worked out well is that there was a large gap through the orb web to the right, likely courtesy of some bird, that I could reach through to put my hand back there. That helped, since the web is nearly a meter across the orb portion, much more if you count all of the anchoring strands. Still, it was close, and the spider jerked in alarm at one point, ensuring that I did too; the arachnophobia that I grew up with is greatly reduced but still not entirely gone, especially when we’re talking this big. This is a female, and if the girth is any indication (not that I’m saying anything,) she’s likely to produce an egg sac soon.

Now, see the brown and white vertical oblong shape, out of focus to the top left? That’s a male in the web (yes, that small,) somehow not cognizant of the fact that he’s way too late to this party. I had to check something on my return, too, since I’d read that there is another spider that often shares the web to steal food, a ‘kleptoparasite,’ but this is not one of them. I’ll have to keep my eyes open since they’re actually pretty cool looking.

For comparison, one of the many newborn Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) that litter the property, taken only minutes afterward.

Yes, not only could the spider take the lizard easily, it might not amount to much more than a snack. Yet the T. clavipes are plainly after insects, albeit large ones, stringing their webs between trees and often sitting quite high in the air. The anoles are unlikely to ever come within range.

Now comes the uneducated speculation, since I started wondering what might prey on the spiders and realized a couple of things. Both the brilliant coloration, which isn’t going to blend in with anything (especially out in the open as they so often are,) and the color of the silk itself would seem to indicate that they evolved to be seen, and the coloration may also be an indication of aposematism, the ‘keepaway’ warning to other species. Typically, this is coupled with some means of discouraging predators, often through being unpalatable, but also through active means; the predator makes the attempt, finds out that this is a bad idea, and remembers the species thereafter because they’re so distinctly-colored. Yes, this means that not only does at least one member of the aposematic species often have to be sacrificed to protect others, but that the predators have to learn this behavior for themselves (since I’ve found no mention of anything inherently/genetically knowing that keepaway colors are bad.) It seems remarkably inefficient, but still better than nothing.

All that said, there’s no mention anyplace that I’ve found that golden silk orbweavers have these colors for such a purpose, and a lot of birds eat spiders – seems like these would be easy pickings. I need to look further into this…

Still here, really

August 26, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

These long empty stretches keep happening, and probably will, since there are plenty of other things going on here that need my attention, so the posts get neglected. Plus, those same things keep me from finding new images or topics. So, we’ll have just a couple of sideline pics gathered here and there just to prove I’m not dead. But also consider, I could be resorting to AI to generate posts to keep on a better schedule (that’s AI, not Al, me,) but none of us want that, do we? Actually, has anyone but advertisers or cheapskate corporations asked for anything like that?

Continuing to our questionable and hardly exciting content.

While I was examining the almond tree for lizards, this dragonfly was insistent on hanging around, probably trying to get attention, and like a little bitch I complied. This is probably an eastern amberwing (Perithemis tenera) because of the uniformly tinted wings – most others close to this appearance only have a portion of the wings with color. More, I just liked the pose, as trite as it is.

While doing the evening rounds, I discovered that the Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina) on the largest Japanese maple tree, one that I’d been spotting from time to time, had recently molted into its final instar, adult form, as evidenced by the wings (even though they look inadequate.) Carolina mantids are much smaller than their Chinese counterparts, so this one was a third the mass or less than the mantis featured in the previous post. It was also much more reluctant to walk on my hand for scale, so this was the only place that I got it to hold still enough. The dark spot on the wing is not a natural marking, but more likely evidence of an injury that occurred before the molt – it has a near-matching one directly opposite, only more noticeable.

This little lady has been guarding the living room window against encroaching insects for a couple of weeks now, and judging from the size, not doing as well as its relatives down along the pond, it must be admitted. This is, again, a golden silk orbweaver (Trichonephila clavipes,) catching the morning sun. What I like about this is the eye-bending nature of it, since the shadow is against the glass which sits between us and the spider with its the web. The web is bright enough to cut through the shadow, though, so it makes it appear as if the shadow is somehow behind it. I have seen these webs with very uniform spacing among the circling strands, some of them almost appearing like train tracks, but this one here isn’t evidence of meticulous care, is it? This is probably grounds for Weaving Under the Influence…

And finally,

The Japanese maple nearest Walkabout Studios routinely features four juvenile Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) each night, though two nights ago when this was taken, it had bumped to five. These two aren’t doing anything nasty, they just happened to take up sleeping positions like this – normally they all find their own leaves with at least a moderate amount of personal space. Earlier that same day, I think, I’d witnessed one just a hair larger/older than these suddenly jump across to a butterfly bush and begin displaying its dewlap, flushing another unseen one from the area, so even this young, they can start getting territorial (and I’m really sorry I didn’t catch it on video, but I didn’t even have the camera in hand.) So does that mean these are opposite sexes, or perhaps siblings and thus not territorial? I can’t even speculate – I’ve said before, I just takes the picchers, someone else has to explain the behavior.

By the way, this particular night I didn’t take the time to get an anole count, even though it looked promising. However, the previous night I’d managed to bump it all the way up to 39! That’s quite a few bebby lizards – there’s got to be be some way to monetize them…

This could be easier

August 26, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

For the past several weeks, I’ve been getting messages in the WordPress dashboard about my site’s PHP version being beyond security updates, and that I should switch to a newer one. No sweat; the host has this easily accessible and lists numerous versions I can switch to. Only, the moment I do, any of them, the blog site goes down.

This is generally an indication that something on the site, usually a plugin, is incompatible with the version of PHP that I switched to. Okay, a little sweat now; this requires either a) checking the plugin/site compatibility with another plugin specific to that purpose, or b) disabling plugins until the site loads properly again, or c) both. Right in the warning that WordPress provides is a link to a compatibility checker, one that I already have installed.

Only thing is, this one is not anywhere near current, only checking up to three versions past the latest version of PHP. Guys, why are you recommending this damn thing? Nonetheless, I tried it out, identified two likely culprits, and disabled them. No go – the site still doesn’t load.

Ah, but you can get error logs with some editing of the wp-config file, which is easily done in a text editor! So, download the current version, edit that, re-upload it, and voila! All the errors displayed. Unfortunately, they display right inline with the site content itself, making it look shitty, but they can be copied from there. Those identified a couple of other plugins which might be the culprits, so I disabled them too. Still not loading properly.

Throughout all of this, I’m switching back and forth between versions, reloading pages, and then reversing what I’ve done. Did I mention backups? Yes, the entire WP database has been backed up right before I start, and the wp-config file as well.

Mind you, I’ve been updating the plugins and the main WordPress files routinely, so everything is ‘current’ as far as it can be. Now, this doesn’t apply to plugins that are no longer being supported or updated, which you would think the compatibility checker would flag. But just in case, I disabled all of the older ones that got flagged or indicated, one way or another. Still no go. Then I added a new plugin that would tell me when all of the other plugins were last updated, found all of the old ones, and deleted them. And the site still won’t load once PHP has been updated.

[Small sidetrack here: While I’m quite fond of open-source software because it’s almost always written better than what the large companies offer as well as the creators often being responsive to improvement suggestions, the major downside is, there is no motivation to maintain it – quite often, such projects are simply abandoned after a while. If you’re lucky, someone else has stepped in and created a new and improved version when this happens, but not always, and even then, you have to install the new version and get used to all of its quirks. This describes damn near all of the extras that can be added to WordPress, as well as numerous Linux/Ubuntu offerings and the firmware versions available for 3D printers. Still, it remains better than subscription bullshit.]

While doing this, I got a message at the top of the page while checking out the custom sidebar entries, the space over there to the left that has all of the extra doodads that I’ve added to make the site less boring – I mean, c’mon, what would it be like with only the posts? This message suggested making a change to a menu that was ostensibly linked within (basic html,) except it wasn’t, and I couldn’t locate that menu. Eventually, I think I found what it was referring to and disabled that function. Nada.

So at this point, the sidebar has been decimated, without allowing the upgrade to actually take place, which means I’m worse off than I started. And now I think I’m done. This kind of shit always takes so fucking long and rarely results in any improvement. While PHP might not be the most secure version that it could be, there is nothing on the site that actually needs security anyway: no payment portals, no personal information, no access to anything – just posts (and, in the main site, photos,) all of which are readily accessible anyway because that’s what the fucking site was designed for.

I was thinking this was related to a holiday, but if it is, I’m not going to observe it anyway. I’ll try to throw up another post shortly, though – I’d already written most of it before I decided to tackle this dumbass project, so it’ll offset this a little.

Estate Finds XXXIV

August 22, 2025August 22, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Nothing too exciting this week, so I’m making up for it by providing several different things – quantity instead of quality, the bywords of the US.

Let’s start with one that I discovered while mowing, and thus had to resort to the smutphone to capture, which once again convinced me how much they suck.

The mantids have not been highly visible on the property, and so finding this one was a little surprising, since it’s an adult Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis,) though with the wings it could have arrived from anywhere. Still, the largest mantid found so far wasn’t even half this size, though likely the other common species around here instead, the Carolina mantis.

Despite the smutphone camera repeatedly locking focus directly on the mantis, which was dead-center in the focusing ring, damn near every time the shutter was tripped the fucking thing adjusted focus to the background. I would have charitably put this down to attempting this one-handed, had I not handed the phone over the The Girlfriend, who had the spare hand to tap the screen to tell the goddamn phone, “Focus here,” and still had it jump to the background immediately before tripping the shutter. Out of eight or nine frames, only these two locked in properly – and then, the color register and quality was still sub-par. Now, I’m sure that some people with their hyper-expensive smutphones can achieve better, and hooray for them. I’m not spending that much for a phone that goes obsolete within 18 months, especially something that fragile; I’ve spent a small fraction of the high-end phone costs on my current cameras, which do it right and will trash any phone photo handily. This is called, “cost effectiveness.”

In the background of this sits the almond tree, by the way, which has been very happy with the move and recently surpassed me in height – I just don’t have enough comparison photos to show this off well.

A few different, new-to-me wildflowers have appeared on the property, or to be more accurate, they’ve bloomed and made me aware of their presence. Presented in order of their difficulty to identify.

i found this one in fairly short order within the North Carolina Wildflower Database that I use: this is a groundnut (Apios americana,) which also goes by the common names of potato bean, Indian potato, Virginia potato, wild bean, and wild sweet potato, all of which are misleading since it is a member of the pea family. Plants appear to be even worse than insects about having regional, colloquial names, to say nothing of the people that would confidently misidentify them. You get a hint of the esoteric bloom structure here, which I will have to revisit in better detail.

I made a small mistake on this one, in that I didn’t tackle these images until after nightfall, not realizing that this was one of those plants that close up at night. This is a sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia,) also going by five other common names, and I was also examining this plant to see if it featured any sleeping anoles, which is now a semi-regular exercise. So I actually examined those leaves closely to see if there were any tail-tips sticking out, thinking that an anole might have achieved its position before the leaves fully closed (which I don’t imagine do so firmly enough to actually trap a lizard.) We’ll return to this topic in a moment.

I found nothing even approaching this in the online database, even accounting for their execrable take on what color something is, so I had to go back out with the smutphone and resort to PlantNet, which quickly identified it as a swamp loosestrife (Decodon verticillatus,) though for some reason the name was hyphenated in the app; it’s also called a waterwillow, which is decidedly more pleasant. The moths were partaking of these blossoms while I was out there at night.

Speaking of willows…

As linked earlier, I’ve begun going out at night to do a count of the newborn Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) that I find sleeping on various plants, since it now seems to be a serious buttload of them. For a couple of nights, my count stood at 23, but last night it jumped to 28. I’m sure there are more, but that’s how many I could confidently spot. Moreover, this was the first found on my new weeping willow (Salix babylonica) tree, last year’s birthday present, more or less; I was promised the tree when we found one in good shape, which was achieved several weeks ago, and it has also been quite happy with the new location. I made the mistake of not measuring it when we first got it, but it’s over three meters tall now.

[When I was growing up in central New York, we planted a weeping willow in a damp portion of the yard soon after moving in, so 1973 or ’74. As they do, this grew quickly and soon dominated that portion of the yard, and by the mid-eighties it was large enough to climb; I had a hammock strung across two boughs about five meters up, where I would lie and read on summer days, and in the fall, as the wind got gusty but not yet cold, it was enormously satisfying to be riding in the swaying canopy of the tree. The last time that I drove past the old house, it was still there, but as of March of this year, it is now missing in Google Earth images, which saddens me, but half a century still isn’t bad for a willow. Since we already had bald cypress on the property here, one of my pipe dreams, I figured we needed a new willow, though how much climbing I might be doing remains to be seen…]

Actually, there were two anoles on the tree – despite that dangling foot giving the appearance of having caught this one trying to scramble away, it had only opened its eyes for the photo as I leaned in close with the headlamp. They do occasionally adopt some of the more awkward poses to sleep in, including hanging fully vertical, head down.

As I was making these rounds, I caught movement within the thick foliage that marks the hollow in the yard that we call The Puddle; in winter, it’s a complete, if small, pond, but the spring sees it become overgrown with only a few centimeters of water in the wet seasons. This means that the frogs adore it, and it isn’t hard to find treefrogs and narrowmouth toads hanging out. A tiny green treefrog (Dryophytes cinereus) appeared to be struggling, unable to free itself from the stem of a leaf, and I reached in to detach the leaf and see if I could help. My mistake: it was not actually trapped, but had seized a small ‘inchworm’ larva that refused to relinquish its hold on the leaf, and so a tug-of-war was going on, even within my hand as I snapped photos.

Notice the little fingers gripping the stem and larva – I really should have had video.

Eventually, between not having success with the larva and not being wild about doing this in my hand with the camera flash going off, the frog disgorged the larva and hopped away. I felt bad that it was deprived of its meal, but I’d been trying to help it, honest.

Okay, fine, I’ll go out and distribute a load of mealworms in the vicinity. Happy now?

Thinking like that

August 21, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Because I’m a supporter of George Hrab’s Geologic podcast, I receive his weekly newsletter, and the one from July 5^th [yes, this sat in editing limbo for a bit] contained an article on superstition that he’d written for the James Randi Educational Foundation back in 2008. I’d done a post myself on superstition two years after that, without having seen his, so I dug it out to compare it as I read his own. Mine was much shorter and more ‘clinical’ (you know, like how that sketchy tattoo parlor is ‘clinical’) while his delved more into the social and empirical implications – I’d link to it here but I don’t believe it exists online anymore. Anyway, what I’m going to cover now is an extension of his own thoughts, so credit to George Hrab for most of this.

Basic premise of my post: superstition seems (to me) to stem from three things primarily, which are searching for meaning and cause, finding patterns, and confirmation bias. As for the first, while we endeavor to find the cause of any particular event or phenomenon, we too often view this through the filter of our human social instincts where we reward good behavior and punish bad, to keep the tribe strong, but then mistake events that occur to also follow this reward and punishment system, even when there’s no reason to believe this. When something bad happens to us, we’re too inclined to think that we deserved it somehow. The second part, pattern recognition, is simply our ability to seek patterns from what we experience, which was likely a decent survival trait and certainly assisted in our quest for knowledge – yet we can find patterns too often when no such pattern actually exists. And that brings us to confirmation bias, the practice of noticing the events or circumstances that support our beliefs and ignoring or downplaying those that fail to. Together, this gives us the ability to wonder about things like droughts, then consider that they might be related to when the peppers were harvested, and then start to believe that harvesting peppers leads to a drought (reinforced by not harvesting the peppers and finding that it rained soon afterward – even when it was bound to rain at some point anyway.) In short, various human traits combine to support superstition. Something that I failed to note in that post: assisting with this is the tendency to seek agency, to believe that events or occurrences are the product of intention rather than simply happenstance, which does a lot for supporting gods and all that. This last one isn’t always an aspect of superstition, but it appears a lot all the same.

Hrab goes into the advances of science and human achievement when superstition was ignored in favor of actual testing and experiments and consideration of other causes or answers, and this is the part that I’m highlighting now. It’s easy to believe that ancient cultures, when viewing the rare occurrences of eclipses, assigned them portentous or supernatural causes, and there are some limited accounts of this, though written records of older cultures are too sparse to give an accurate idea of how widespread such beliefs might have been. And while total solar eclipses tend to be few and far between, not usually able to be witnessed multiple times in anyone’s life span, partial solar and lunar eclipses are another matter. Someone, sometime, recognized that these occurred only at the times of new or full moons and began piecing together the patterns, ignoring whatever cultural beliefs existed about the special or supernatural causes and starting to find that they were only due to orbital mechanics. The Antikythera mechanism indicates that this occurred, at least in Greece, 2,200 or more years ago, since the patterns and timing were understood well enough to build a geared device that would predict future eclipses, as well as other celestial events.

Medicine is another excellent example. The various illnesses that befell humankind were given untold thousands of explanations and supposed treatments, some vaguely on the right track, some so far afield that we consider our ancestors to have been irretrievably stupid, but gradually, people began to notice the patterns, and to recognize the indicators and counter-indicators. Germ theory, easily the greatest advancement of medicine in our history, promoted the idea of organisms far too small to see as the primary culprit in numerous diseases, and while we can understand how difficult it was to get this idea across to enough people, the concept was obviously quite sound.

We might see such occurrences as evidence of past ignorance, a time when the populace was much more superstitious than today, but we need to recognize that a lot of such advancements occurred quite recently, and it wasn’t very long ago at all that exorcisms were practiced for erratic behavior; indeed, they still are.

The point here, however, is that a very large percentage of the advancements that we’ve made, as a culture, as a species, originated from people that didn’t accept the pat answer, that didn’t believe in the idea that ‘if enough others believe it, it must be true,’ that dared to question not just common knowledge, not just authority, but even their own senses. The ones that said, “Shouldn’t we expect B to happen if A is really true?” The ones that required a demonstrable and measurable body of evidence before they accepted an answer. They had to deny that tendency towards superstition, the ‘gut feelings’ and the internal prods towards accepting certain answers (or even just relying on other people as a guide,) to actually make progress.

It’s also easy to take the wrong message from this. The key isn’t, “Buck the trends and rebel against common knowledge,” which can be done for literally anything (as countless people do,) but instead, “Build the supporting data and the probabilities until the conclusion is valid.” And there’s even a caveat to that, because that pattern-seeking aspect, as well as the ego in believing we’re right, can cause us to ignore all of the evidence that fails to support this, which is confirmation bias, a huge favorite of those that embrace psychic powers and alternative medicine. Doubt is a key ingredient, especially self-doubt, the recognition of how many ways we can be wrong.

And there’s another aspect that doesn’t receive as much attention yet has held true throughout the majority of advancements, and that is, if we need to propose significant complication or properties that we have not actually measured or observed, it’s probably wrong – at the very least, such complications should be well-supported by evidence and data. Oh, the stars can predict what our personalities will be? How do they possibly do that? What physical law applies here, and in what manner? The number 666 is connected to satan? In what way, and why? Isn’t this a distinct giveaway that satan should have abandoned by now? Even small corporations will ditch their negative branding…

This is why critical thinking is such an important aspect of education, too often neglected in favor of simply teaching facts. The idea isn’t to memorize what we’ve found before, but to know how to find (and test, and confirm or deny) new results, new ideas, new discoveries. The scientific method, overall, places a lot of emphasis on this, though it’s not as widely adopted as it should be, but it should never be up to just college graduates; we should all be practicing this as much as possible. Remember that, at one time, there were no colleges, no such thing as ‘higher education.’ It took specific people to encourage and emphasize this departure from our internal biases to even promote the idea of an advanced and comprehensive education.

Those are the people that we need to recognize and emulate – or more specifically (since hero worship is missing the point,) the mindset and habits that they possessed. As interesting as it might be to believe in ghosts, as satisfying as it might be to think that shaking water gives it special properties, as self-affirming as it is to hear that Capricorns are supposed to like music and we really do, 99.999% of the time, the actual advancements and improvements in our culture and health and technology came from relying on more than feelings and gut instincts and “there’s something more mystical at work here, I know it.” We can’t look at any point in human history and say something like, “Boy, it’s a good thing we could tell how honest someone was by how far apart their eyes were – that certainly saved a lot of lives!” Let’s give credit and respect where it’s actually due, and not fall prey to the simpler human traits.

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