As long as we're on the subject of disgusting worm-related phenomenon, lately we've been dealing with an infestation of walnut caterpillars on our pecan trees. It's bad enough that they're not abiding by their names -- no one in their right mind would mistake a pecan for a walnut -- but they're also using our back yard as an outhouse. Just look at this photo:

That's horrible, isn't it. No, wait...I'm not talking about the condition of the deck, which is in obvious need of refinishing. I'm referring to those black specks, which are caterpillar frass, aka castings, aka poop. The caterpillars in our trees are producing generating prolific quantities of frass, to the point where we (and by "we" I obviously mean "Debbie") are having to sweep off the deck several times daily.

You're probably familiar with the book Everyone Poops, and that's obviously true even for insects in most stages of their life cycles. I accept this as a perfectly natural phenomenon, no different than the exhalation of CO₂ by mammals during breathing or the squishing of bodily fluids when one steps on a walnut caterpillar who has the poor judgment to temporarily cease pooping and venture down from the tree.

And it's not as though caterpillar excrement has no redeeming qualities. In fact, it (and all of its insect cousins' output) is high in nutrient value for your gardening enterprise. Unsurprisingly, you can buy bags of bug poo from Amazon. I don't want to know the details of how someone manages to fill a bag. (That link leads to a product that is described as containing exudate matter of black fly larvae. So, so dignified, especially if you hear it spoken with a British accent.)

Pestiferous as the prodigious poop production may be, it's more frustrating that we can't spot the exudate actors. The caterpillars are seemingly camouflage experts because we have yet to spot one in the trees.

As with most of these natural phenomena, this too shall pass. In the meantime, while How To Train Your Dragon may be more entertaining, I'd really like for someone to produce How To Housebreak Your Caterpillar. And I'd like to be able to go out on our deck without an umbrella.

Yes, poop deck is a real thing. Just not with caterpillars.

I decided to gently nudge its tail to see its reaction...and to my surprise, it stuck to my finger. I was so shocked that I flung it across the yard where it disappeared in the grass, thereby ensuring I would not be able to identify it.

They're not pretty critters.

They also don't behave in a civilized manner, at least from my perspective, as they prey on earthworms, and not in a delicate fashion: they essentially grab the worm via the sticky mucus that coats their body and begin to digest the living worm. In fairness, they also prey on slugs, so they have at least one redeeming quality. 

Land planarians are not native to the US, having arrived here in some fashion from Southeast Asia many years ago.

Here's a better look at the head, and some interesting (also gross) facts about its anatomy via this website:

We don't have a slug problem around here, and we do have a lot of beneficial earthworms, so destruction of the flatworms is a net benefit. However, they are apparently hard to kill. You can chop them up, but the pieces will each regenerate into a new worm. (Flatworms in general are like that, you know.) The recommended method of sending them across the Worm Rainbow Bridge is to spray them with orange oil; furniture polish will suffice.

We did find one source that recommended dropping them into hot water to instantly kill them. I tried that approach, and the flatworm contracted to a fraction of its original size. The photo below is a closeup on the head of the dead flatworm, which I think is lying on its back. I'm guessing that the white splotch further down is that dual-purpose orifice mentioned above.

Neither Debbie nor I have ever seen one of these creatures before -- and we're both quite interested in and observant of our natural surroundings -- and so we wondered why they were now appearing in semi-abundance. The recent heavy rainfall might have brought them out of hiding, but more likely they emerged from something we did ourselves.

Yesterday, we (and by "we" I mean Debbie) put down 400 pounds of "Texas Native Enriched Top Soil" in our courtyard which is mere feet away from where the flatworms appeared. We had purchased the topsoil earlier in the day from Home Depot. This is a suspicious "coincidence." The company that manufacturers (can you manufacture dirt?) is based in Cedar Park, TX, about an hour away, but there's no indication on the bag where the soil originates from. Anyway, be advised of the possibility that you might be getting more than just top soil. One of the previously linked websites suggests heat sterilizing any soil brought in from outside, but that is not exactly an elegant solution.

We disposed of four or five more flatworms, and no more appeared so we hope we nipped the invasion in the bud. And we now know more about flatworms than we ever hoped to.

This is a bag that the topsoil was packaged in.

Just playing around with some new software. Well, it's not actually new new; it's an upgrade from a version I bought in 2005, back when they were coding applications (the word "apps" had not yet been invented, even as it applied to chips and salsa at Chili's) with hammer and chisel. I had a powerful hankerin' to make a comic strip, and that's when I discovered that the program would no longer run on my computer, which itself was birthed during the Dark Ages when "IOS" was just the airport code for Ilhéus/Bahia-Jorge Amado Airport in Brazil.

There's a vaguely interesting story behind the comic. As Debbie and I walked across the Bay West bridge, the Egyptian gander (first introduced in these pages here) flew in front of us and landed beside its mate and gosling. Much conversational honking ensued between the couple, with the youngster looking like it wanted to be anywhere but there.

Pretty sure I've correctly translated the Masri - which we all know is the conversational language of Egyptian geese - dialogue into English.

It's only fair to warn you that you'll probably be seeing more of these lame attempts at cartooning in the future. I have to justify the $14.99 upgrade fee somehow.

Sure, birds and [some] reptiles are cute and cuddly, and [most] insects are not, but that doesn't mean that they're not attractive, even when they're a bit scary.

Take the pipevine swallowtail caterpillar, for example. As shown below, it looks like something out of a Tim Burton movie, with those nasty-looking black "horns" and the contrasting orange dots. This one was inching aimlessly around on our driveway, and I had to google it to identify it. But when I discovered its identity, and followed the logical trail to its metamorphosis, I found that it eventually becomes something out of an 1950s Walt Disney animated movie. Drag the yellow bar left to reveal the beauty of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly. Butterfly photo borrowed from this website; uncredited photographer.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a pipevine swallowtail (aka blue swallowtail) IRL, and I don't know much about them. But according to this excellent article, the larvae are distasteful if not downright poisonous to the predators that would feed on them, because they "sequester" acids from the plants they feed on. So their menacing exterior is a warning about their deadly interior.

Speaking of butterflies, here's a photo I originally posted to my Instagram account. The butterfly is a Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia). I did a teensy bit of Photoshopping to make the colors of the butterfly stand out.

Our lawn isn't really black. As far as you know.

Dragonflies (which are neither dragons nor flies, but then the same sort of misnomer applies to butterflies) are nature's Top Guns. I didn't make that up; someone else did. I just stole borrowed it. Anyway, they look like they're assembled for aggressive action...except maybe for this one:

Anyone know how to reset a dislocated dragonfly shoulder?

I've never seen one with the wings folded forward like this. It was in our back yard, perched on the end of a crape myrtle branch (which I don't think is going to win any awards for blooms this year). It was rather windy, and perhaps the dragonfly was just trying to steady itself in the breeze. I hope it didn't throw anything out of joint.

Let's talk about something else.

Flowers are great, aren't they, especially when they pop up in unexpected places or assume unexpected shapes.

Last week, Debbie and I went on a long walk up (literally; the road rises 100' every mile, on average) the main road through our part of town. The traffic isn't usually heavy because it's essentially a residential street, but on this particular morning, there was a steady stream of cars and trucks going both directions (it's a wide, divided thoroughfare with an equally wide landscaped median so there's little danger to pedestrians). We were puzzled, and wondered if we'd somehow missed an evacuation order related to a gas leak or zombie outbreak. 

After about a mile of walking, we spotted the morning glory shown below just a few yards off the road. It was just the single flower amongst the thick undergrowth of a couple of trees. It was begging to be a photographic subject, so I obliged it. I share all of this only to say that while we stood on the curb, pointing to and discussing the flower, the traffic coming our way slowed to a crawl as curious drivers tried to see what had captured our attention. People will rubberneck at anything.

Sometimes, less is more.

Oh, in care you're curious about the unusual volume of traffic, it turns out there was a major traffic accident on Highway 71, a mile or two west of where we were. A section of the highway was closed down for a couple of hours, and the street we were on was the only detour route available to traffic going to or coming from Austin.

There's no particular story behind the next photo; I just like it. It's an emerging agapanthus bloom on a plant in our courtyard. It's taking FOR. EVER. for this this one to fully open. I guess it's confused by our hot-then cold-then hot again weather, and is waiting for things to stabilize. I've got news for you, buddy...this is Texas and it ain't happening.

Is this the flowering equivalent to sticking your hand out a window to see if it's raining?

Here's another photo that I find most pleasing. It's the foliage of a Persian Shield (Strobilanthes) that Debbie has planted in a pot on our front porch.

This is our tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson (RIP)

I was going to post a photo of the bloom on our aloe vera plant, but it's even slower to actually open up than the agapanthus, so I'll just wait until it does.

Thanks for sticking around for this little nature walk. I'll bet we do another one at some point in the future.

I hope your weather has been as nice as ours over the past few days. Cool mornings and warm afternoons mean that we get to spend a lot of time outdoors, and there's been a lot of interesting flora and fauna to observe (and photograph). With your permission, here's what we've observed.

Hello, fellow Gazetteers. I trust that your household pets are thus far avoiding becoming science projects.

I was going to do a long post about how I'm pretty sure I had COVID-19 in the first week of February, as I suffered many of the symptoms that the CDC are now putting forth, but tested negative for both strains of the flu, but I figured that would be boring and possibly inaccurate. But I see that I've done it anyway. Sorry.

But I'm pretty sure I had it. See also: ihadititis

So, I'm in the midst of a couple of fancy DIY projects, where being in the midst of is a euphemism for I'm try to figure out what I've done wrong and how to fix it. (Alert Gazette readers will be surprised not in the least at this situation.)

First is a bicycle-related challenge. A couple of weeks ago, Debbie and I were riding our recumbent tandem through the lovely, wildflower-filled landscape of Horseshoe Bay when to our mortified surprise, we lost most of our braking power on the steepest section of downhill on the route. This is NEVER A GOOD THING, but especially where a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill is at play. Fortunately, we were able to scrape off enough speed through a combination of what little braking power the bike still had plus my emulation of that well-known prehistoric vehicular stopping technique you're no doubt familiar with [insert "braking bad" joke here] to make the corner and eventually return home safely, albeit with elevated heart rates.

After we got home, I determined that we were the victim of a combination of cable stretch (To learn more than you ever wanted about this phenomenon, click here. Or just trust me when I say it's a real thing.) and pad wear on the bike's disk brakes. I normally don't work on life-and-death componentry like handgun safeties, hospital ventilators, and bicycle brakes, but our local bike shop (which isn't all that local, being 30 miles away but I like their work) is temporarily shut down because of you-know-what. If we want to ride safely in the foreseeable future, I'll have to fix this myself. 

I ordered a fourth-hand tool -- it's formally called a cable stretcher but that sounds boring -- and tightened the cables. That fixed the back brake, but the front one is still not grabbing like it should, and I think the solution is to replace the pads. According to the "experts" on YouTube, this is a piece of cake that any third grader could do with one hand full of gummy worms, but, wouldn't you know it, we've run completely out of third graders. So, it's up to me (and YouTube). I ordered a set of pads today, and by this time next week, I'll either report that our brakes are working well, or I've had to order new ultra-grip shoe soles.

The next project has no mortal implications, unless you consider television viewing a necessity for life like air, water, and Chex Mix. I'm attempting to repair a 4K LED TV.

It's a 50" Vizio flat screen that we inherited from Debbie's dad. It's been in the credenza in our bedroom where it primarily broadcasts the morning and evening news. It's not as though we're running low on TVs here at Casa Fire Ant; we've had as many as eight (including the back patio and garage). But Debbie did some research and found that Vizio televisions are actually pretty easy to service. There are four main circuit boards with inscrutable scary names that control the main functions of the device: the Power Supply, the Main Board, the LED Driver, and the T-CON board. Each of these are readily available for purchase via multiple online sources, and they're not all that expensive (certainly collectively much less than the $900 original purchase price for the TV).

Of course, there's a catch. There always is. In this case, you have to diagnose the problem to know how to fix it. Unfortunately (for me), this requires a bit of expertise and -- let's just say it -- luck, because some symptoms could arise from problems with more than one of the aforementioned circuit boards. So, we took a chance and picked the most likely board: the power supply, because the set wasn't turning on. Debbie put in an order for one and when it arrived yesterday, I endeavored to install it.

It's a fairly straightforward procedure, theoretically, in the sense that a brain transplant is a simple matter of cutting open the skull, removing the brain, and dropping a new one in.

The skull opening was the hard part. There are precisely 27 screws of varying sizes attaching the back of the TV to the frame. I managed to remove 26 of them without drama, and then I stripped the head of the 27th. Now, I have special tools for extracting screws with stripped heads -- you're not surprised, are you? -- but they're designed for much larger fasteners than the 1/16" wide screw head I was dealing with. I won't bore you with the details, but it took significantly more time (and tools, and vocabulary) to remove that last screw than the preceding twenty-six. But I was finally able to expose the mysterious inner workings.

The yellow borders show the circuit boards that can be replaced. Theoretically. And, no, I can't tell you what any of them do. Sufficiently advanced technology ≈ magic and all that.

Doesn't every well-appointed electronics repair center have stylish throw pillows?

The biggest board shown in the photo is the power supply and it actually was very easy to replace. I did that and [carefully...very carefully] reattached the back cover of the TV. Did I mention there are 27 screws, one of which has been brutalized? I plugged the power cord into the wall, waited for it to reboot (what? you didn't know your TV could reboot?) and -- voila! -- 

Nothing.

My reaction was mild. This was no surprise; this was par for the course; this is my lot in life. I did eventually remove the back cover again (oh...here's a shock...I managed to strip another screw head in the process, so at least the first disfigured member has a friend now) just to make sure I didn't miss a connection. I didn't. That would have been too easy.

At this point, I would normally give up, realizing I'm out of my depth, which is measured in millimeters at best. But after pricing the additional boards, I realized that there was still a chance of repairing it for a fraction of what a new one would cost, so I ordered the three remaining components. I'll let you know how that works out, as if we don't already know *wink, wink, sigh*.

In closing, I you're sure to appreciate the sheer artistry of the following image, which is a frame from a 28-minute video I made of the inside of my pocket during our walk this morning. I'm saving the actual video for the 96th days of lock down, when it's sure to compete favorably with anything on TV...especially if your TV is a busted 50" Vizio.

All reptiles go through a similar process as they grow. Snakes shed their entire skins at one time. Turtles and alligators shed their plates and scales, respectively, one at a time. Lizards molt their skin a section or piece at a time.

They're a little lethargic when they're molting and I was able to get within a few inches of this one before it tired of my company and jumped off the deck into the liriope below. I thought no more about it (other than regretting that I didn't have a camera with me) and went inside for breakfast.

Later, about midway through breakfast, something on the deck caught my eye. I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like a lizard was eating something. This time, I did have my phone handy.

It was hard to make out exactly what was going on from a distance.

I got a little closer, and the situation was clarified. Two anoles -- one brown and one green -- were fighting, and one had gained a definite advantage.

The green anole had the brown one gripped by the throat.

Green or Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and brown or Bahaman anoles (Anolis sagrei) are separate species. The former is native to the US; the latter is not, but has gained a fairly wide foothold in the States over the years. And, apparently, they don't get along well with each other. But, it's not really a racial thing...male anoles are quite territorial and they will aggressively defend their domain against every perceived interloper. In this case, El Verde apparently got the jump on El Café.

I got closer...

The green one looked familiar.

Since anoles can change color, one might wonder if these are both of the same species. The greenies can turn a shade of brown, but the brown ones never turn green...only different shades of brown. I also suspect (it's just a guess, however) that during stressful times like this, their "natural" colors persist. Whether that's true or not, if you look closely at the back of the neck of the brown one, you'll see the dorsal flap which is an indication that this is indeed a different species from the green one.

From this vantage point, I could see that El Café was still breathing, albeit very slowly. El Verde acknowledged my presence by dragging his adversary a few inches, but he was loathe to release him.

El Verde was molting...note the loose skin patches on his head.

The green anole was the same one I saw earlier on the deck railing. His territoriality trumped his lethargy as he assertively defended his borders (one wonders how they might be laid out).

Now, I have no great issues with the life-and-death realities of nature, but I kinda like the idea of having two competing species hanging around the premises. Since the brown one was still alive, I took matters into my own index finger and gently flicked the tail of El Verde. He relaxed his Jaws of Death, and to my surprise, both lizards sprang away, in opposite directions of course. El Café showed no apparent residual deleterious effects, living, I suppose, to fight another day.

I imagine them smack-talking to each other across the deck, perhaps in voices reminiscent of Inigo Montoya: until we meet again, mi amigo, enjoy your life, as it will be shorter than you wish.

I theorized that some of our omnivorous varmints -- possums, skunks, raccoons...possibly even armadillos, although they were at the bottom of my list of suspects -- were dining on the fruit. We were anxious to identify the gluttons, so we scattered some more fruit between the fence and the creek and I placed a game camera in hopes of solving the mystery. And that's exactly what happened around 3:00 a.m. this morning.

Slide the vertical yellow bar to the left in the following photo to reveal the identify of the loquat-gobbling visitor:

While armadillos were at the bottom of my list of suspects, deer didn't even make the list. But the photographic evidence is clear: at least one of them is hooked on loquats.

I also edited one of the videos from the gamecam into an animated gif (see below), and if you look closely, you can tell that it's a buck by the just-beginning-to-bud antlers.

The deer didn't consume all the loquats, and I'm not sure why. About 45 minutes after the deer appeared and then left, a possum entered the scene but didn't seem to express any interest in the fruit. Shortly after that, a strong storm rolled through, and that might have limited the appearance of additional diners. Regardless, we now know that whitetail deer are not only vegetarians, but also fruitatarians (that's a technical scientific term).

By the way, the seeds in loquats contain a cyanide compound, similar to that in apricot pits. I wonder if whatever is chowing down on them experiences any ill aftereffects as a result.

We could see a mass of twigs and small limbs waaaay up in the tree, and we guessed that it was a nest, but because of its placement and the other foliage, there's no clear line of sight to it. However, we often saw one or two hawks fly to and from the tree...but, again, no line of sight to confirm they were visiting the nest-like mass.

So, yesterday morning I charged up a couple of batteries for my drone and launched it from our driveway, thinking that perhaps I'd have better luck spying on the nest from above. It was rather breezy and I had some trouble maneuvering the drone, but I soon discovered that there was no clear path to the nest from that side of the tree, so I landed the drone, intending to try again today when it might be more calm. 

Even though I had no luck spotting the nest, both hawks flew out of the tree and around the drone a couple of times. I was curious to see if one of them might attack the little aircraft, but they didn't seem overly aggressive. (I was to later discover that there was a greater threat than protective hawks.)

Fortunately, the wind died down later in the afternoon, so I again launched the drone and flew it to the other side of the tree, opposite from our house. From there, I took it up to an altitude of about 50-60', pointed the camera downward and -- voila! -- an amazing scene appeared:

Here's better view:

The drone hovered about 6-10' above the nest and I recorded video for a couple of minutes. I was happy to see that the hawk never seemed to acknowledge its presence, much less appear agitated.

I mentioned above that some non-hawk-related drama occurred. I piloted the drone back to the driveway where I intended to land it. It was hovering calmly at about 6' when I tried to activate the auto-land control on my phone, but instead of settling gently into my outstretched hand, it shot straight up into the branches of another oak tree shading the drive and became hopelessly entangled, twenty-five feet above my head. Well, great. I felt like Linus, staring mournfully at his mangled kite in the grip of that predatory tree.

The drone's green and gray color scheme was a perfect camouflage, and it would have been difficult to even determine its location but for the glowing lights from the trapped-but-still-activated craft. 

By the way, normally there are two green lights and two red ones. Four glowing crimson lights indicate a malfunction. Gee...ya think?

My MacGyver instincts kicked in. One approach would be to cut down the century oak, but that was possibly a bit extreme. I needed something with a thirty foot reach to dislodge the drone.

Fortunately, another dominant instinct is hoarding, and I still have a decades-old windsurfing mast which is fifteen feet in length. I had attached a small plastic rake on the end and I was using the contraption to clean leaves off the roof and gutters. That extended the length to seventeen feet.

I got a stepladder out of the garage and the second highest rung added five feet to the reach. If you're doing the math, we're now at 22 feet. I needed only eight more feet and I cleared that distance with my own wingspan, holding the mast+rake assembly at arm's length.

With Debbie steadying the ladder, I was able to dislodge the drone, which came crashing down in a decidedly ungraceful fashion. It hit the pavers pretty hard, sending the battery flying in one direction while the drone bounced the other way. Not good. (In hindsight...how hard would it have been to spread a blanket or two under the tree to cushion the inevitable fall? I guess that's [one reason] why I was never cast in the role of the actual MacGyver.)

Upon closer inspection, I was relieved to see that the damage was actually fairly minimal. One of the rotor assemblies was a bit cockeyed (see photo below), but when I popped a battery back in and tested the drone, it lifted off and hovered in place quite steadily. Apparently the operating system is sophisticated enough to allow for variation in the rotor's position.

I was able to bend the rotor assembly back into place and I suspect there will be no issues with flight, although I won't know for sure until I can put the drone through its paces in the great outdoors. (Update: I did just that a couple of hours ago, and while the drone still flies well, it doesn't reliably respond to instructions. There's either some circuitry damage, or it no longer trusts my piloting expertise.)

I have no idea what caused the mishap. After discussing it with my pal Tommy, another drone pilot, we theorize that the automatic Return To Home (RTH) feature kicked in just as I tried to initiate the landing. The RTH is designed to bring the drone back to safety when the battery reaches a critically low condition, ensuring that it doesn't land abruptly (aka "crashing") in an untenable position...like, say, in a tree. The situation oozes with irony.

Back to the birds. I don't want to intrude on their personal space, but at the same time, I really want to monitor the nesting situation, especially if/when the eggs hatch. So, I plan to check on things every few days. If you're interested in the progress, I'll be posting updates on the Gazette as they occur. And I hope none of them involve any rescue or recovery attempts!