Flickers

A pair of flickers has been hanging around the house the last few days. A flash of yellow underwings grabbed my attention this afternoon. What have we, yellow-shafted or gilded? Definite yellowish head, red malar stripe. Gilded! Maybe they have plans for our Saguaro. I snapped this picture from a distance and will work on getting better if they stay awhile. We usually suffer through a lot of rapping on the metal roof in the spring. Scares the heck out of the dogs and gets pretty annoying for us, too.

Packrat Wars Continued

It was a bit chill early on so we waited until the sun came up before taking our morning walk. It was perfect weather with just a hint of the clouds that eventually built into a gray day. But we enjoyed the glorious sunshine and on returning home a strange thing on the pavement caught my eye. It looked like a little turd (or big, depending on the animal) except for the ridges. At closer inspection it was clearly a grub of some sort, and having never seen one of these before I was determined to ID it. 

Here is the little bugger below. It's about an inch long and half an inch wide, a soft fleshy thing, covered with black spikes, two little pinchers at one end and two plate-like things at the other.

So long story short, after a couple hours searching the internet for grubs I turned up an exact look-alike creature called Cuterebra. A bot fly. My first thought was the burros or the horses, but no, this one is associated with our old nemesis Neotoma, the wood rat, aka packrat.

 Now to go over the life cycle of the bot fly...

An adult fly lays eggs near the burrow of a wood rat or whatever rodent (a related species is associated with rabbits). The eggs attach to a passing animal (somehow they respond to body heat), hatch into the first larval stage and make entry into the animal through the mouth (when the animal licks its fur), or the nose or a wound, whereupon a migration within the body occurs, usually to just under the skin but sometimes a larvae loses its way and infects the throat, eyes or brain. (It's bad news when that happens and I won't go there now.) Then the larvae starts growing, forming a nodule under the skin with a visible pore or breathing hole. Pictures of these parasites in rodents are striking because they are so freaking big. Once maturity is reached the bugger breaks out of the skin like in a horror flick, falls to the ground and pupates in the soil where it eventually emerges as a mature adult fly ready to breed. The critter I found appears to be the break-out stage. Not sure how it got into the driveway on a chilly morning, but I thought it was a dead thing until it started squirming under the heat of the microscope light. Gross and awesome at the same time.

So, moving on from the fascinating horror of the bot fly life cycle, these critters are known to accidentally infect dogs, cats and people, giving me another thing to worry about and leaving us with yet another reason to hang steady in the never ending war with our damnably destructive packrats.

Big Ol' Owl

I was coiling clay like crazy for a few days making this big owl for the yard. There's a spot at the top of the pole that held our old power line -- might be the perfect place to put this thing to scare the packrats! The war with them is ongoing. Of course this will have to survive a glaze application and firing before it can be put into service protecting us.

While walking last week we stumbled upon a vein of chocolate jasper that I've been hoping to find for the last five years. It was pretty well mined out years ago but we were able to collect a little material and I hope to cut a few stones from it. There are reds and chocolates, and I think the lighter stuff is pastelite.

Here is a pendent with a pretty piece of Kingman turquoise I recently made. I'm working on combining different metals which can be tricky. This is textured copper and brass with a patina of liver of sulfur that adds a bit of character.

Sculpting with clay

It is difficult these days to switch creative juices between media but I forced myself to pull out the clay this week and made this small sculpture of a big girl. Isn't she beautiful?

Here is a pendant I worked so hard on only to have the stone break while putting it in the setting. Ugh. I love this pink quartz. We found it in Alaska and have only enough material to make three good sized stones, so I glued this one together and it will be a personal piece with a story.

Glyphs and Etsy

It's been a busy few weeks. We found some new petroglyphs while out four wheeling one day. Being limited to foot travel sure didn't stop those early people. If you come across a rock outcropping in this desert it's worth taking a look for something.

The road  

The area

Trees!

A few shots of the glyphs. Really neat. Best to enlarge these if you want to see anything.

Back to the truck for a much needed drink.

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Finally finished building my Etsy shop and went online today. Heck of a lot more to it than I expected. Now we'll see if it was time and effort wasted.   Mineralization