One Good Shot: Kibibi Is Pensive

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Flamingo Friday: Everybody Itches

I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating...

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Summer Is Icumin In, Loudly Sing Fishfly!

From what I hear, it’s fishfly season in Michigan, and I’m nostalgic, so I thought I’d share an image, and some reminiscences, with all of you.

If you don’t come from a Great Lakes state you may be unfamiliar with these charismatic, ephemeral insects (or you may foolishly insist on calling them “mayflies,” and I will ignore you). They are in fact in the order Ephemeroptera because their lives are so fleeting: although they can live for almost a year in their larval, freshwater stages, the adults only live a day or so (or less), not eating, not hiding from predators—not doing anything except mating and then going out in a blaze of glory (or a crunch if you happen to step on ‘em).

Some people complain about fishflies, partly because, in a good year, there can be hundreds of thousands of them emerging at once, covering streets and the sides of buildings. I think it’s an absurd thing to whine about, given that the unassuming little insects are entirely harmless: they don’t bite, they don’t sting, and they rarely even land on you (unless a friend of yours sticks one on you as a “joke”). They just cling to things in a mild-mannered way until they have sex or die (or both), and they’re, to me, a lovely signal of the season.

Additionally, a good year for fishflies usually means a good year for the health of the lake, so there’s another good reason to rejoice in the little guys.

In my years living in Boston and now DC, I’ve never encountered any fishflies, and I have to say, I still miss them, innocent and charming creatures that they are. There’s something magical about animals that appear all of a sudden and disappear almost as quickly—something as magical as the season itself, and the long, bright days that at first seem as if they’ll last forever and then suddenly slip away.

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Chameleon Action Shots

Well, you didn’t expect ‘em to be high-speed, did you?

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Wild Wildlife: Urban Predation Remembered

In June of 2009, when I was still living in Boston, I was walking to the Forest Hills T station when I saw a red-tailed hawk (one of several in the area) perched on a streetlight and devouring a newly-caught pigeon. It was a gruesome but impressive sight, and since I had my camera with me…

[sepia-toned to reduce the ickiness]

Much as I love pigeons, I can’t help but like the hawks too—just as I like any bird that has managed to adapt itself to the surroundings we’ve created out of its habitat. Mind you, the hawks spent a lot of time in the nearby Arnold Arboretum, perching majestically on the branches of tall trees, plunging like bolts of lightning into the brush after squirrels, and swooping through the reeds of the marsh, making the song sparrows and redwings pause in their territorial trilling. But they also spent a lot of time atop the weathervane on the T station, or hanging out on lampposts as if they were waiting for a bus, keeping a sharp eye on the flocks of pigeons that gathered to enjoy the delights of dropped commuter breakfasts and snacks.

I liked to see them there, even if it meant occasionally seeing them disembowel a pigeon. It reminded me that an urban landscape is still a landscape and that it’s navigated by more than just humans. It’s fun to feel you’re part of a larger ecological community—especially, I should stress, when you know that nothing else in it is capable of preying on you.

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"Misanthrope" Is My Middle Name

(Only I spell it with a V.)

[this is not the Scarab of Misfortune
for Stupid People,
but it should be]

I was in a bad mood this morning; it might have had something to do with having to partially disassemble a futon and move it into the bedroom before 9am, though I’m willing to consider other explanations as well. I took a walk in the zoo to cheer myself up, but I wasn’t able to leave the house until 10:30am or so, by which point the zoo was already chock-full of humanity—or humans at least.

Well, no one likes crowds. But I also don’t like people. Some people, sure, but I think you’ll agree with me that, as a species, we’re not so great. (History and politics bear me out on this quite well.) After I had dealt with not only the press of people but overhearing two different sets of visitors arguing, respectively, about whether the frogs in a pond and prairie dogs in their enclosure were "real" (did they miss the big “Zoo” sign out front??), I had had enough, so I gave up on trying to get near the exhibits and focused again on the greenery and the beasts I might find within it.

It worked out pretty well; I got more space, and no one hung around making asinine comments.

[Is that bug real??]

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Flamingo Friday: A New Angle

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Wild Wildlife: They’re Everywhere! They’re Everywhere!

Summer is here—in fact has been here, in DC, for some time now—and the world is full of birds and bees and other insects. The zoo is full of them, too, so that everywhere I walk, I see catbirds fighting for territory, grackle fledglings puffing themselves up to gigantic proportions as they beg for food, and crows being harried by various smaller birds. If I stay in one place for a while and lean in towards a flower or plant or tree (much to the alarm of the other zoo visitors), I’ll see streams of ants and beetles, buzzing congregations of bees, and flurries of butterflies. Some days it’s more fun to focus my attention and camera on these than on the official zoo residents—partly because it’s often more of a challenge to get good photos of them, partly because I enjoy the smug feeling of having spotted organisms that almost no one else in the zoo ever notices.

I would like to take the time to really observe these various species’ behavior, and maybe I’ll have some opportunities to do so this summer (unless it’s prohibitively hot, in which case I’ll take the time to lie very still in an air-conditioned room while moaning plaintively). So far, though, I can only report on the aesthetic interest and appeal of the wildlife I saw.

For example: notice anything different about this daisy?

That’s right—it’s a doubled daisy, two flowers fused into one! I wonder if it attracts more pollinators than its fellows—and, if so, I wonder if the doubling trait is hereditary and could be selected for…

Or how about this lovely guy that I noticed on my way home as it wandered the leaves of a honey locust?

It’s probably some sort of horrible evil pest, but it’s just so cute—! (That’s right; just call me the queen of zoological objectivity.)

There’s something thrilling about being vividly reminded that every inch of the natural world is now teeming—seething—with life, and that the animals all around me are a far more diverse and plentiful group than I soemtimes realize. So, along with more entries on lemurs and lions and flamingos, expect more frequent updates on the other inhabitants of the zoo and neighborhood.

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Glamour Shot

Judging by the incipient mane on this model-to-be, I think this is one of the three male lion cubs practicing his pose.

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Not-Yet-Greater Rheas

This May the greater rheas at the zoo became the proud parents of four rhea-lettes, which are, not surprisingly, adorable and fuzzy, and amazingly tiny compared to the adults.

In case you’re wondering just how much smaller the little rheas are than their mother, here’s an illustration:

I’m not sure if four chicks is an especially big batch of hatchlings or not, but there was only one young rhea last year. This could mean that last year was a fluke, or this year was a fluke—or both years were flukes and usually there are no chicks. That’s the problem with trying to make generalizations from small sample sizes…

And speaking of small, look how cute—!

It’s amazing how cute creatures that still look a lot like dinosaurs—that still, depending on how you look at it, are dinosaurs—can be. Perhaps it’s the lack of teeth? Or maybe the overall fuzziness? The vegetarianism? The wide-set eyes? I leave it to your judgment.

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Flamingo Friday: The Yearling

No, I’m not referring to the (still-not-quite-a-year-hatched) flamingelehs, or to a novel about a deer—I’m talking about this blog, which is now one year old!

To recognize that anniversary, I thought I’d serve up some statistics alongside my flamingo photos.

I started the blog just a couple of months after moving to DC; Annie convinced me to do it, probably hoping that if I had a broader audience with which to share my nature photos and anecdotes I wouldn’t bug her with them as much (ha!). Since its inception, the blog has had over 6,000 visits (and over 12,000 pageviews) from almost 2,400 people from 95 different countries (most from the U.S., the UK, Canada, South Africa, India, and France).

In that time, I’ve posted 261 entries, including 55 Flamingo Friday posts. Just for the record: flamingos are not my favorite animal, but I do like them, and they’re very photogenic.

Some of the all-time most popular posts on the blog include:
Is That a Fire Hose in Your Pocket, or Are You Just a Barnacle?
The Frogs Die in Earnest
I’ve Got a Mantis Shrimp and I’m not Afraid to Use It
Desire Under the Aviary

Some of the much-less-visited but equally deserving posts (hint, hint) include:
The Proposal
Hey, BIRD!!!
The Frog Game
Flamingo Friday: A Strainer Among Us

That’s it. That’s all the statistics I’m willing to force on you (although I have more of them, terrifyingly enough). So I’ll just end by saying, Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll continue to do so.

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The Default Sex

The problem with scientists is that they—like most people—tend to be products of their time. This is why females, from the perspective of development biology, have been referred to as the “default sex” even up through my time in college (1998-2002, if you’re wondering). Apart from the social/cultural assumptions involved—which I’ll get back to, don’t worry—the reasoning behind this is in itself flawed, but it’s based on the fact that, in humans, even if your sex chromosomes are XY rather than XX (that is, “male” rather than “female”), if you don’t have “male” gonads and/or the hormones secreted by them, your secondary sex characteristics (genitalia, aspects of physical appearance) will generally develop as female. Of course, you still won’t have female primary sex characteristics (ovaries); also, the development of any primary sex characteristics, male or female, is an “active” process that requires various signaling cascades and genes being turned on and so forth: there’s no automatic female- or male-hood.

So to call any sex the “default” is the result of conflation as well as sexism. (See, I told you I’d get back to the assumptions. Because you just know that, if male secondary characteristics developed in the absence of “female” hormones, males wouldn’t have been called the “default.” You certainly don’t see any Judeo-Christian religious leaders referring to Adam as the “default” parent-of-the-race, now do you?)

On the positive side, the terminology is changing, and one of the most common (and I think best) undergrad textbooks reflects this not just in its section on sexual development but in an appendix piece on the inherent and long-standing chauvinism of this concept. —Which is great, but is all mere preface to the real subject of my post, which is the existence of a different “default sex” in our cultural mentality.

You see, the problem with people is that they—like most scientists—tend to be products of their time. This is why they usually refer to every single animal they see as “he,” unless—and sometimes even though—the animal in question is nursing or giving birth.

You may remember that I’ve complained about this before. Unfortunately, even my vast and compelling powers of persuasion have not been enough to cause a social revolution in language use—and so, since the behavior continues, I continue to complain about it.

Why do so at this moment, you may ask? A couple of reasons: one is that, this past weekend at the zoo, I heard even more visitors than usual blithely mis-pronoun-ing a host of animals; the other is that I’ve been rereading Seeing Voices, a book by Oliver Sacks about Sign language and language acquisition in deaf and hearing people. Sacks doesn’t address the misuse of male pronouns (in fact, even he—a hero!—consistently refers to a hypothetical child as “he”)—but he does, very briefly, touch on the idea of language being the means of not just conveying but shaping our reality. So when we indelibly gender the world, unnecessarily and inaccurately—when every animal, every unidentified “I” in a story, every author without a first name, is assumed to be male—we are structuring for ourselves a reality that is pervaded by maleness, in which all visible actors are male.

[Is this elephant male? It is holding
something pink...hmm...]

What then have we told ourselves, taught ourselves, about who among us is capable, or even present? What does a little girl visiting the zoo learn when her parents tell her that every animal she sees is a he? What does a little boy learn?

The process through which embryos develop involves tremendous, almost magical, changes—proliferation and reorganization and specification—in order to create tissues and organs and structures from a simple spherical collection of cells, a ball of potential. It’s a process that’s at once remarkably resilient and incredibly fragile. The signals an embryo receives—the cues, the interactions, the feedback, the impulses—determine how, and how well, it forms. In other words, the environment in which it develops has enduring consequences. I wonder, after all the textbooks change, how much longer it will take our language to rid itself of a default sex.

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One Good Shot: Trunk Salute

After wading in and out of his pool, this young elephant felt the need to raise his trunk--in a greeting? A high-one (as opposed to a high-five)? A way to clear water out of his nostrils? (I hate when that happens when I'm swimming...) --Who knows? It seemed exuberant and fun, and, as with many elephant gestures, it made me wish I had a trunk.

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Flamingo Friday: The Three Phases of Flamingo Napping in Public

You may feel the same way about trying to sleep in front of an audience; perhaps you go through stages of

Alertness:

Suspicion tinged with sleepiness:

Saying "To hell with it":

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