Beasts in our yards, beasts in our minds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, pests, animal behavior, sociology, attitudes, risks

It's funny. We have the words "vermin" and "pests" for animals we don't like, but no single-word terms for animals we like. We get by with "animal allies" and "domestic animals", plus "pets" for our most-loved. Most literature about animals either advises us how to get rid of the ones we don't want around, or idolizes certain "charismatic megafauna". There are clubs of bird watchers and butterfly collectors and wildlife photographers (even when the "wildlife" is found in your neighborhood). Could there be clubs for those who care about bats, or beetles, or (shudder) roaches?

The more citified we are, the more likely we are to fear or despise animals—other than the pets or "companion animals" we dote upon. Even some bird watchers call city pigeons "rats with feathers" and some of us go to great lengths to keep raccoons out of our garbage containers (Hint: If you have room for it, use a compost pile for everything that's even slightly decomposable).

Sometimes I've wondered, "What do animals think of us?" If you could converse with one, what would it have to say? Perhaps when a monkey sees a human, it thinks of her as a funny sort of hairless, tailless monkey. When a fish, even a shark, sees a human swimming, it probably thinks it is seeing a particularly clumsy seal. Perhaps the garter snake in the garden would advise you, "Don't spray the veggies. I don't like my insects covered in pesticides."

In her book Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature's Least Loved Animals, Jo Wimpenny asks us to look at animals differently, and in terms familiar to them. For example, when a moth follows you in through your front door, it isn't "invading". For most moths, everything inside your house is useless. It cares nothing for the furniture, the carpets, the lamps, the pictures on the wall (except as something to hide behind). If it is a female of one of the five or six species called "clothes moth", and she finds her way to a closet with some wool garments, if she thinks anything, it is, "Oh, goody! Oodles of stuff for my babies to eat," as she lays her eggs on your favorite sweater (Hint: woolens that you value are best kept in a cedar chest or cedar-lined closet, or even a chest freezer).

You might say, "You're just giving in to the beasts!" I am actually giving in to the math. There are about 11,000 species of moth so far known in the US, and more than 150,000 worldwide. Only about five have wool eating larvae. Most species outnumber humans thousands to one. There are probably several thousand moths the size of a thumbnail or smaller in my yard right now. In the evening, when they are airborne, getting into or out of the house must be done quickly, or at least one will get inside. If I can, I'll either catch it to release outside, or crush it. Probably half escape my attempts, but I can trust the house spiders to get most of them. And yes, we do have a cedar chest.

Ah, yes, the house spiders. Based on what I find in their webs, they mainly eat fruit flies and midges and the occasional housefly. Yesterday as I left the house, I felt a tiny thing land on my hand. I was thankful it was not a mosquito, but a newborn spider with a body no larger than a poppy seed. I blew it off into an Azalea bush, with a wish, "Catch lots of bugs for us." I knew it had several siblings still inside. I don't evict a spider until it is too big to stand on a nickel. Fortunately, my wife is not creeped out by having indoor spiders. That's good thing, because no house is free of them. Not one! They stay in odd corners, weaving tiny cobwebs, eating most of the tiny critters that get inside, and each other (population control!).

The book mentions that spiders are known to dream. I don't know how researchers figured that out! Can you imagine what they dream about?

The ones that were studied are jumping spiders (see this article in Harvard Gazette). While sleeping, they twitch their legs and their eyes move (I hadn't before known that spiders' eyes can move!). Just like REM in mammals and other animals.

Ms Wimpenny doesn't start with insects and spiders, though, she starts with fearsome critters, the ones that could eat us, or at least do a lot of harm: sharks and crocodiles. The movie Jaws set back both research and acceptance of sharks by decades. Earlier treatments (not mentioned in the book) by Jacques Cousteau that depicted sharks as mostly bloodthirsty set the stage for Jaws and the more recent Shark Week.

It's interesting that people fear sharks the most. I heard this joke when I was a graduate student:

Families are enjoying the beach at Cape Cod, when someone yells, "Shark!" Everyone runs out of the water, hops in the car, starts the engine to run the air conditioner, and has a smoke.

This was 50 years ago when almost everyone smoked, and the first "no smoking" restaurants were just getting started. Diseases caused by smoking kill half a million Americans yearly, and auto exhaust at that time probably killed half that many. The number of people killed by sharks in a typical year? Two.

The fact is, sharks are more social than we knew in the past. The author tells of social and even caring behaviors. Crucially, there are many species of shark, and they differ a lot. But even the "king of sharks", the great white shark, is a somewhat social species. They don't think of humans as prey. They probably don't think about us at all. Nudging and biting are how they gather information. The animal that does consider us prey is the crocodile. One Australian told the author that if someone jumps off a certain bridge and tries to swim just the 100 meters or so to shore, they won't make it. A saltwater crocodile will "take" them within a minute or less. But if you're in Australia and someone hollers, "Croc!", everyone cranes their neck for a look.

Bat-phobia is not as prevalent as shark-phobia, but is equally real. People think bats are creepy, even if they're too young to remember the spate of Dracula movies of the late Twentieth Century. We are generally slow-moving and bats probably think of us as furniture…furniture that is ill-equipped to catch food.

I spent half a summer doing geology in Nevada. There was a bright light on a tall pole, far from our bunkhouse. Moths and other insects swarmed around it. So did bats, catching them. Sometimes one of us would get a flat pebble and throw it up spinning into the light. A bat would dive-bomb it until it was about a foot or two away. Then its echolocation would be able to discriminate that the rock wasn't a moth, and the bat would swerve off. We were never able to induce a bat to capture a pebble.

Strangely, for a book intended to make us feel less fearful and more "friendly" towards animals, particularly the creepy or disgusting ones, the last chapter before an Epilogue tells of cute animals behaving badly. I won't go into it; much of it is gruesome or grotesque. Think abusive penguins and otters. Really abusive! The author's intent is to emphasize that animals don't live by our rules. I lived among rattlesnakes on that field trip mentioned above. I saw them every day. They were afraid of us humans. When I saw one it was usually retreating. Since it was summer, they never came inside; they like warmth. Had I been so foolish as to camp on the ground in cold weather, it's possible I might have awoken one morning with a snake curled up in my sleeping bag. I knew better!

Do you like the big cats? Many people do, but of course, at least in America, we enjoy them from the safety of a zoo enclosure. Where people and big cats live near one another, it's another story. Just in India, about 70 people are killed yearly by tigers. That's ten times as many as sharks kill, worldwide. This cartoon is based on one I saw sixty years ago (All these cartoons were produced using GPT Image 2 in the OpenArt site). 

There is an uphill battle to improve the public's perceptions of animals. AI will probably accentuate this, because LLM's like ChatGPT or Gemini have been trained on human text, much of which has outdated, inaccurate views of animals. Our literature is filled with over-cutified or overly villainous animals. Hardly any balanced depictions exist.

Other than humans, what is the most deadly animal? The mosquito. But out of thousands of species of mosquito, only a few carry diseases. Unfortunately, one of them is malaria, and others include West Nile encephalitis and chikungunya (bone-break fever). But not all mosquitoes need blood; many use plant sap. Of the bloodsuckers, few will utilize human blood. To get rid of malaria, however, getting rid of Anopheles mosquitoes isn't the right approach. Effective vaccines against the parasite the mosquitoes carry are just being released, after many years of research. I hope it will be cheap enough to allow near-eradication of the parasite. Meanwhile, mosquito nets are the fallback measure. Further, bats and many kinds of birds subsist on mosquitoes and other flying insects. Kill the insects and what will happen to them?

All of nature is sets of interlocking ecosystems. Cut one link, and it can shut down a whole chain, or hinder it for many years until it readjusts. We are seeing that all around us. I think the key to rewiring our attitude towards nature has two parts: (1) Recognize that we are part of nature, and (2) Discard the notion that any animals think like we do; they don't recognize boundaries that we hold inviolable.

Here's hoping that this book makes a difference!

Pestiferousness

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, sociology, pests

Smack in the middle of Pennsylvania, about a half-hour drive from Penn State University, we find Penn's Cave and Wildlife Park. Our whole church had an outing there some years ago, and on the fence of the wildlife park I saw this sign. It raises the point: when a bear and a human find themselves in close proximity, who is the trespasser?

One point made in Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire is that humans are the ultimate trespassers. When the bear is "in the woods", supposedly a "natural" setting, of course the person is in the bear's territory. When the bear is enjoying your swimming pool, though, take a moment to consider: if "your" yard and house were "developed" just a couple of years ago, that bear's favorite scratching tree might have been removed to make room to install the swimming pool. A quarter acre or more of forest may have been removed to plant grass for the yard. What else used to live there with the bear?

Pests is not about insects or disease or anything most of us first think of when we hear the word "pest". It is about vertebrates that are called "pests" by some significant number of humans, somewhere. The word "pest" comes from Latin pestis, meaning Plague or pestilence, plus several other meanings including "curse". In the opening chapter the author curses, frequently and eloquently, about a squirrel that destroys her tomatoes, every year without fail. She even tried chicken wire, but the squirrel could reach through, and cherry tomatoes fit through. Chicken wire works for us; we fence far enough from the plants that squirrel limbs aren't long enough to reach.

So, the bailiwick of the book is mammals, from mice to elephants; birds such as pigeons; and reptiles such as snakes. In particular, Burmese pythons in Florida have cross bred with native boas/pythons to produce offspring that are much larger; big enough to tackle humans. Most of us find ourselves pestered by more prosaic critters: mice, voles, squirrels, or rabbits, perhaps rats.

The single biggest problem is the huge range of attitudes about any animal that might be called a pest. For example, we know deer live near our neighborhood, in a few loosely-connected patches of forest totaling 30 acres, and there are forested areas of similar size scattered all through the surrounding several square miles. When we have apples drop in the fall, we'll sometimes see where a deer or two bedded down to munch fallen apples in a protected corner near the tree. We haven't caught any in the act (yet). My wife doesn't like deer that get into the yard, while I am more neutral. A few neighbors try to feed the deer, while others would rather shoot them, except there is no hunting allowed in residential areas even in deer season. 

Similar ranges of attitude exist in my neighborhood for the local squirrels, foxes, raccoons, and hawks. I've seen a Cooper's Hawk land on a squirrel not ten feet from me and flap away with it to feed her nestlings (Cooper's Hawks are mainly bird hawks, but they're not too particular). My wife wishes the hawk would go after the rest of the squirrels in our yard.

Slide halfway around the planet to Kenya. A hungry elephant can consume all of a poor farmer's crop overnight. While it is barely possible to build a fence that elephants can't destroy, it would cost more than what an entire Kenyan town could afford. The author reports that combinations of electrified wires and bees, along with other measures, discourages most elephants. In Kenya, "coexistence" isn't a cool slogan on a bumper sticker, spelled out in bowdlerized religious symbols, it is a necessary wildlife management skill.

Stories abound, but the author's focus is on attitudes. Those who can afford it like to live in more "natural" settings, but then far too many of us get perturbed when "nature" pays a visit. Leave a door ajar, and a sparrow might get inside (dodging a Cooper's Hawk perhaps): you could spend a couple of hours trying to get the terrified bird back outside. Meanwhile, it will have poo'd and peed in a few places; birds don't wait to find a toilet to "drop it". Is that bird a pest? Attitude…

The author points a finger at the Western/Christian cultural undercurrent of "dominion", based on Genesis 1:28. Less than half of English translations of The Bible use "dominion" to translate the Hebrew word, while a larger number use "rule", which is more accurate. A few use "take charge". By domesticating many animals and penning out the rest, the human race has definitely set itself up to "rule" nature. "Pests" are those animals that remind us our rule isn't perfect; we aren't totally sovereign. A little humility is a useful antidote to our hubris.

A big issue is ignorance. There was a joke when I was a child about a city kid on a field trip seeing a pile of discarded milk bottles, who said, "A cow's nest!" That's only slightly exaggerated. Every day children eat eggs but have never seen a chicken, let alone reached under a hen (risking a peck) to feel the warm eggs. Perhaps suburban houses and yards should come with a "Former Owners' Manual", describing the lives of the rabbits, squirrels, voles, mice, raccoons, foxes, perhaps even deer or coyotes (or even pumas) that were displaced to clear the land and build the house. The Manual should include strategies for coping with former residents and their descendants that may still make use of the place. Lacking that, reading this book is a good way to begin to learn.

Of 2012 and bugs

kw: archaeology, pests, photographs

I am host this weekend to an itinerant archaeologist, who is attending a conference that kicks off the University of Pennsylvania's new exhibit, Lords of Time, about the Maya and the 2012 prophecies. He is the author of a book debunking the notion that the world will end in December this year.

Meanwhile, I have an apocalypse of my own to avert. I have been battling privet rust mites for a few years. I have about 300 feet of privet hedge. For three years I have sprayed in late May, and sometimes also in June, with horticultural oil. That is apparently too late.

This morning I took leaves from several places on the hedge and resorted to my trusty microscope. Here is one image of the result (magnification, about 50x in this image, more than 100x in the image you'll see if you click). Basically, the entire hedge is infested again, probably because I didn't treat it all, from end to end, in the past, only where the leaf curling and silvering were visible. This leaf and the others I looked at show no symptoms, yet!

I have a couple of jars of oil so I know what I'll be doing this morning, right after I get the archaeologist to his train.

Two mice and counting

kw: local events, animals, pests

A week ago I caught a mouse in a glue trap, in the family room. It is a common place for them to hide once they get in through the garage. In the past, at most one mouse gets in each year. Sometimes, instead, one will stay in the garage and build a nest there, which we find quite a bit later.

This evening, there was a ruckus in the kitchen, and we saw our cat had trapped another mouse. It got loose long enough to run down the basement stairs, where it hid among some shoes and sandals piled on the lower landing. I went down and encouraged the cat, but it was clear she didn't know quite what to do. A cat that gets raised by a good mouser for a mother learns to dispatch them with a bite through the neck.

After watching the hide-and-seek for a little while, I noted where the mouse was, under the toe of a sandal. I punched down on the sandal, stunning the mouse, which I popped into a plastic bag and then into the freezer. Come trash day, mouse, bag and all, will be moved to the trash and disposed of.

It is a bit of a shame to kill a one-ounce mouse, but I've tried letting them alone in the past, many years ago, and they gradually take over. They are like Tribbles, only slower. They really do need to be exterminated once they get inside. A pity.

More oil on the hedge

kw: gardening, hedges, pests

As I reported last May, I sprayed our hedge with horticultural oil spray to control privet rust mites. The trouble with them is, by the time you discover they are there, they've already done most of the damage they are going to do this season. So here it is, June, and I ought to have re-sprayed a month ago. The spraying last year reduced the problem a lot, but not completely. I spent a couple hours Sunday afternoon spraying, in hopes it would do some good this year.

I noticed on the back of some affected leaves, larger critters, barely big enough to see without magnification, and faster moving. Further digging at horticultural web sites got me an identification: privet thrips. Fortunately, they are also susceptible to oil spraying, but a heavier dose is recommended. As it happens, I did use a heavier dose this time.

We decided to put this on our calendar for next year, in early May: spray again and see what arises in June.

Oil down that hedge

kw: gardening, hedges, pests

This little mite, seen here in an image from Branching Out at Cornell, bedevils privet, camellia and similar plants. It takes a strong magnifier or microscope just to see them; they are less than a quarter of a millimeter long (about 1/100 inch). Eryophyid mites are unusual in having only four legs. They crawl very slowly and some call them "worm mites", but they are smaller than even the tiny C. Elegans nematode.

I have about 400 feet of privet hedge, and though I sprayed with oil last fall, I see signs of privet rust mite damage. So I bought two quarts of horticultural oil today, and I plan to spray both sides of all the hedge plants tomorrow. Fortunately, this oil is not toxic, just a bit messy. It smothers the little critters.

Last fall, shortly after spraying, I cut back the hedge on one side where it fronts a sidewalk, that it was overlapping rather seriously. The open side is beginning to fill in with new growth, so this is the perfect time to spray through the hedge to the back side of the leaves on the other side.