Meteor Shower

I have seen shooting stars.

Not gigantic balls of gas and fire in a gunfight, no, but chunks of rock hurtling through the edges of outer space. I recently overheard that there was supposed to be a meteor shower happening in the late night of November 16, early morning of 17, so I decided that I would try to watch it. I had never seen actual meteors before; I only had an idea of what they are and look like because of media. So, yesterday I ate dinner at around 17:30 or so and promptly went to bed to be wakened at around 1:00 the next morning by an alarm; while I really wanted to see some meteors, I also really needed some sleep. I have noticed that resting is much easier and more comfortable immediately after eating a meal, which is why I did so. 

Before I went to bed, I was somewhat dismayed by my lack of binoculars... I had been wanting some near-sighted ones to use in watching insects from a distance that will not incite them to flee from me, and even a pair intended for relatively close distances would probably be useful for watching the night sky. But, surprise! Christmas came a bit early this year. Soon after I began lying in bed, my grandma came in with a suspicious box and revealed that she had already purchased a pair of binoculars for me to use, which was intended to be given to me in late December! 

Soon before 2:00, after eating breakfast and learning how these new binoculars work, I went to the grass of my backyard with a flashlight, the binoculars, and a sleepingbag, wearing a green bathrobething beneath a pair of sweats pants, a shirt, and a hoodie, and also shoes and socks. Lying on the sleepingbag (and moving to within the sleepingbag after a while when I wanted to be warmer), I stared at the sky for the next couple hours. In my backyard, my eastern view is blocked by my house, so I could not see Leo, the constellation from which the  meteors are supposed to originate; but there was also no moon in my sight, giving me a clear view. 

Before I saw any meteors, and sporadically between sightings, I used my binoculars to look at the stars; many are invisible without them. Many star formations, imagining images composed of them like constellations... In the southern area of my vision, behind Orion, there was a particular light that demanded my attention: it sometimes seemed to flicker between faintly different colors, and it was quite bright. If I focused on it with the binoculars in just the right way... it seemed like a comet!! A dark brown blob on the western end, shifting through orange into a light-blue tail on the eastern end! From my perspective, it was still extremely tiny, with the details only visible through the binoculars: if I were to compare it to a quarter (US currency) held ten centimetres from my left eyeball, it was about as long as George Washington's hair at its widest point, and about as wide as the height of any of the larger letters encircling him. There was also an odd streak of light-grey perpendicular to its length, centred on the 'comet.'

I thought it was a comet at first glance, and I am still excited about having seen it, but... it never moved. It remained in the exact same location relative to the other lights of the sky, moving only with the stars beside it. I could consistently find it again and again throughout the morning. It appears to have been some other heavenly body that happens to look like what I imagine a comet possibly being. Sometime much later, I focused on another object that looked quite similar, but thinner, and without the odd streak of grey. I wonder exactly what it might have been...

As my hands became colder, I hid them under the sleepingbag to just look at the whole sky in general. The first meteor I saw was somewhere on the northern side, going west. As with any meteor, it was a thin streak of white that did not last long, only just less than a second. This is one of very few times that I can say that I was truly excited, throughout the night! Bah, I need not your parties and football games and screaming and whatever it is people usually do for excitement; I get excited by finding and staring at things. Fascinating things. 

I did not count how many I saw in total, but I know that I saw more than ten! A couple were rather bright and relatively long lasting; some were instantaneous and faint. One in particular was really bright and dragged across the sky for at least two seconds! People who have seen meteors often throughout their lives would probably consider this a light shower, but as this was my first, it was very worthwhile!

Another thing worth mentioning is that, starting around the middle of my vision, I noticed a series of stars that almost seemed to form a spiral, like this. It was interesting to see how they might fit together like that. After closely examining a particular one of its lights, which was one of the brightest, if not the brightest, in the sky I could see, I am convinced that there were two sources of light in that same spot; could it have been a binary system? Fascinating observations! (Perhaps if I actually studied astronomy regularly, I would know more about what I was seeing).

After what was probably over a couple hours (I did not have a clock, and I do not know how to interpret the stars for the time), I decided to go back inside, satisfied. But! the doors were locked, and I did not want to wake people in order to get in. So, I tested out my new binoculars on the raspberry plant in my backyard. I tried to hold the binoculars and flashlight at the same time, with the flashlight fitted under and between the two main lenses and held with my thumb. These binoculars are extremely effective! Looking through them at near enough objects - it can focus on things as close as 0.5 metres away - is like looking at them up close with a powerful magnifying glass, which means that it is even *more* effective than staring at something eyeball-to-compoundeye, as long as I can keep it steady. And it seems that the raspberry leaves have much crystalline frost on them! 

At some point, I sat on this electrical box thing in the corner and pointed the binoculars toward the ground near the raspberry bush. After staring at it for a while, I noticed something just beneath the ground through a crack: some sort of scaly-textured skin or something, immediately next to the box. Removing a bit of dirt revealed a small slug! I picked it up and put it on the box and watched with the binoculars as it slowly expanded from its huddled hiding position and slimed off of the box.

After that, I turned around and saw that the lights in the house were on, so I went back inside. After some knocking, my brother opened the door reluctantly and with strange looks (I think that he was not aware that I was stargazing). Apparently, the time was nearing 5:30; I had been out there in the middle of the night (morning) for over three hours. I then ate a muffin, had a shower (heh, my second one of the day!), and started writing this. And now I have seen meteors!

Writing Phases

It has been over a month since my last post!!

There are a few causes of this, I think. The first and most obvious one is, of course, procrastination. It just... happens.

A little over a month ago, my English class (I am still a high school student, you know) assigned me to choose from a list of classical literature, read whatever novel I chose, and write a bunch of papers for a project about it. Not quite knowing what I would be getting into, I chose - because I have been aware of it being interesting and somehow related to the Odyssey, which I have read - Ulysses, by James Joyce. Apparently, this book is extremely hard to read and comprehend, describing the actions and thought process - both with excruciating, bizarrely-written detail - of a couple of Irish men on exactly one day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin. Also, Joyce manipulates the English language in all sorts of crazy ways; there are relatively very few complete sentences. I enjoy this book very much and highly recommend it to eccentric people. Unfortunately, I was not even halfway finished with it when the date on which the project was due was drawing near, so I was required to read online summaries for knowledge on the rest of the book (and on what I had already read, heh). And... Anyway, my posting was mostly delayed by Ulysses. I still have yet to finish it, and I fully intend to!

I also think that I tend to have 'phases' for when I feel able to write things... I really dislike writing things, generally; part of the purpose of this blog is to help with that. The problem is not that I am a poor writer, for the things that I do write tend to be... well-written. Rather, I often find it extremely difficult since I am so much of a perfectionist when it comes to such things, particularly essays, and anything I write often takes hours; although, informal things like this are easier since I can implement things that I would be unallowed to implement in an essay, such as vocal nuances (hmm, well, heh, et cetera), parentheses, italics, ellipses, my verbal-tic-like usage of phrases of uncertainty (apparently, perhaps, I think, tend to, sometimes, et cetera), and other things. Occasional periods occur in which I actually feel good about writing something, after a rather long time without doing so; and for whatever purpose, I end up writing things, and I am okay with that. Obviously, one happened when I started this blog. Another happened mid-summer.

 After that, though, it is as if I had used up all of my writing-energy garnered from a while of no-writing, and require much rest to regain energy; like an extreme introvert who just went to a series of crazy parties and needs to be alone for a couple of weeks. For part of this rest period, trying to write things is excruciating and torturous, usually resulting in far too much procrastination. I had a horrendous experience in May this year when I happened to be in that avoidance phase, when I had a large and important writing project to do. The other main part, though, is more neutral: I have no desire to attempt writing things, but I would be willing to do so if I was required to (by assignment or by myself), although it would still be rather difficult. This neutral phase is what I am currently undergoing. The avoidance one probably happened earlier last month, and during a (thankfully) small part of the Ulysses project-writing.

Hmm... Perhaps I shall call these phases Active, Avoidant, and Inactive (still subject to change, though). After an Active phase, the following one is not necessarily Avoidant or Inactive; it can be either, for both tend to switch sometimes between Active phases. It is necessary, though, that a very long period of Avoidant and/or Inactive phases has passed before another Active phase happens, and those are comparatively rare.

Things are a bit more complicated than that, but those are the main three phases I have considered. This blog is what caused me to think of 'writing phases' like this, as I have been wanting for another post to be written for quite a while but felt unable to make one, while worrying that there might be people who look forward to these.

None of that was primarily nature-related! Not all of my posts will be; I intend to sometimes describe other thoughts of mine, regardless of their relevance to wildlife. I was really eager to continue rambling about mantids and what happens when two of them are in the same cage in late September, but now I might not as easily recall exactly what I wanted to say. And also, numerous other potential post ideas have come up in my mind. I probably ought to continue about the mantids, though. I should do that... later. One post is enough to fill one day.

Irony

(Tsk, I was intending to write another post about mantids, but then this happened. Oh, well.)

Yesterday, on National Public Lands Day, I went to Dabbs Creek in southern Missouri to be a part of a GLADE-related work project involving picking up trash in the area and making a brush pile to prevent people from going into a sometimes-restricted area. The details of this work project, though they are important, are not the subject of this post whatsoever. Instead, I shall be talking about lunch.

For lunch at ~11:30, we had some great vegan chili (the GLADE director who caused this project is vegan, and I am vegetarian) with blueberry cornbread and chips. During this lunch, a yellow jacket wasp was flying around and eventually landed inside someone's bowl of chili. As the official Insect Whisperer™, I was tasked with peacefully removing the wasp from this person's chili. Thus, I poked  my naked fingers into the bowl and waited for the wasp to climb upon them. (Insect Whispering is really simple). It did. In doing so, my fingers picked up some traces of chili that kept the wasp occupied for a while. I stared (as usual) as the insect chewed on chili juices on my finger, no stinging necessary. I picked up a larger chunk of pseudo-meat and put it also on my finger, and the wasp was soon attracted to that. Soon, a fly came by and ate from the pseudo-meat on the opposite side from the wasp! It felt like one of those pictures with a black hand and a white hand shaking hands to symbolize peace and friendship between the human skin colors, except it was a pair of different insect species sharing a piece of food. So, yet again, I had a meal with insects. A very interesting lunch, this was. The wasp and fly flew away before the pseudo-meat was finished, though. When I intentionally put some chili juice on there later, the wasp returned and, while sometimes consuming, regurgitated some juices and rolled them into a couple of balls, one of which it left behind on my thumb, while the other was taken away.

When we were finished with the work project a couple hours later and had returned to the 'home base' where all the vehicles and equipment and stuff were, another yellow jacket came by and was flying around our heads while people were talking about things. Mostly, it was hovering around just my head (hoping for some more chili?) and occasionally landing on me. At some point, I felt something crawling and tickling on the right side of my neck; reflexively, I nodded my head to the right. Soon after I did so, I felt a sudden, sharp sense of irony, and the wasp flew off. Apparently, by nodding my head, the folds on my neck skin against my shoulder started to squish the wasp that had landed there, which drove the wasp to sting me in self-defense.

It has been a long time since I was last (and first) stung. Sometime when I was 3-4 years old, I was at some sort of family picnic or party or something at a park, with park tables/benches. As I was walking between two of these tables, a large black bee was flying towards me from the other side. We collided, and the bee stung me on my right cheek. IT HURT. WAAAAH. Afterwards, I was treated and, after a few days, became a healthy little boy again who would soon go on to be fascinated by invertebrates like the one that stabbed and envenomed him.

Anyway, back to yesterday's sting: For the first few seconds, we were not certain of whether it was a sting or just a bite, but it was soon apparent as the sharp feeling persisted. According to the other people with a better vantage point than mine, there was a tiny red mark surrounded by white swelling in a general area of redness, if I recall correctly. In that spot, and within a very small radius from it, there was a sharp, but tolerably intense pain left by the venom. To treat it, I was given a small plastic tube filled with a viscous green liquid and with some sort of cotton swab stuck in the hole in one end of it, which I would hold on the stung spot so the liquid would lessen the pain quicker. Since I never got any throat or tongue swelling, it seems that I am not allergic at all. Within an hour, I had almost completely recovered from the pain, although there is still a slight mark and occasional itchiness like a mosquito bite.

I learned a few important things from this:
-What a yellow jacket sting feels like. (One is not that bad, apparently, but it certainly does hurt).
-I am not currently allergic to yellow jacket wasp stings.
-If ever I feel something crawling on my neck like that, I must fight the urge to use my neck and shoulder like a vise and instead use my hands, gently, or wait until it leaves.

In other news, I brought home a souvenir: a stick to which a rather large silken cocoon is attached! It is approximately 9 cm long (parallel to stick) and extends to 4 cm wide (perpendicular to stick). A small hole pointing downwards grants me a glimpse into its empty innards, so bringing it home should not be harmful.

Carolina Mantids: The Male

If you have not done so already, please read about the Female before reading this one.

Between 1-2 weeks ago, another mantis visited my porch. I first saw this one sitting on the screen on the far right side of the porch, but outside of it. For a couple days it was still on the outside, but eventually it wandered into the porch and became my second mantis! I have a pair of  mantids now! Apparently, this happens to be a male of the same species as the first one, Stagmomantis carolina.

He is definitely not accustomed to being handled like the female now is. In this species, the male's wings are longer and more effective for flying than the female, so he puts them to use rather often when I pick him up. Of course, it takes much longer to get him on my hand than the female.Since I do not have any sole pictures of him at this time, I shall be describing what he looks like... for now.

Now that we have both sexes, I will be talking about the sexual dimorphism! Keep in mind that none of this is technically the definitive method of identifying their sexes; that would involve counting abdominal segments. Compared to the female, whose picture is available in her post, the male is notably smaller in all dimensions. While this particular female seems to be mostly black, with white spots, most of the male is grey (with some black spots), his legs are bright green, and the topside of his abdomen (usually hidden by wings) is blood-red! They both seem to have splotches of white (female) or black (male) on the tops of their wings. As I mentioned before, the male's wings are longer; the female's wings are stunted and hardly allow any flight at all!

Of course, the most notable differences must be in the abdomens, where reproduction happens. I already linked to a picture of a Carolina mantis' ovipositor in the Female post, but I have not seen a similar photo of the exterior bit of a male's aedeagus, which I have not had a good enough look at yet to give an apt description. It seems to me that the female's abdomen is much fatter or flatter than the males; flatter when hungry and/or free of sperm and eggs, or fatter when full of food and/or preparing to lay an ootheca. That is, the female's is able to expand like a balloon to hold oothecae. A male's abdomen, however, seems to be more straight and thin, as wide as his thorax.

So, we now have an adult male and an adult female of the same species in an enclosed space. What happens next is rather exciting...

Carolina Mantids: The Female

For a while now, I have seen that some insect people on the Internet like to raise large insects like praying mantids and cockroaches as pets. There are even entire guides for how to raise them, like this one for mantids, detailing things like their life style and how to hatch them, feed them, breed them, among other things. I have no intention of actually doing that, purchasing some exotic species and raising them in a box in my room or something, but it is somewhat interesting to me. Due to the nature of my back porch, it could be said that I have kept spiders as pets unintentionally for many months now, since I leave them in their webs in the corners to feed on stray small insects (most anything else I try to take out of the porch) and check on them frequently.

In my backyard, we have a raspberry bush growing on one side which brings a plethora of fruit and arthropods every year. I like to look at it sometimes in order to find and observe insects. A little over a month ago or so, I found a particular mantis on this raspberry bush. If I am recalling correctly, I think I saw a very similar, but significantly smaller, mantis a few months earlier on the raspberry, so I wonder if they might be the same one... I decided to bring it up to my back porch and leave it there, as it could feed on the flies. It has remained there since, and I check on it regularly! I am fairly certain that she is a female Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina), and I have seen her increase in size throughout the month. This is what she looks like, standing on the screen covering the windows of the back porch:


When I first brought her to the porch, I held her on my hand for a very, very long while. ...Which is not really holding, since it just consists of the insect standing and walking around on my hands/arms, occasionally flying away so I had to catch her again. Whenever I tried to pick her up, including when originally taking her from the raspberries, I would surround her with my hands to encourage her to climb on them, and she would try to get away from them. This is most interesting: she would seem to ram head-first into my hands with her forelegs tucked in, as if to feel around for a possible opening somewhere. I have never seen or heard anything about that peculiar behavior before. At first, it was quite a while until she actually allowed herself to crawl on the hands. I get the feeling that she actually became accustomed to being held by me; she typically does not try to fly away any more, or run off, although she still does the ramming thing when I pick her up, but not as much.

When I first brought her to the porch, after I had put her down on the wall, I also tried hand-feeding flies to her, just to see if it would work. This is rather difficult and probably amusing to watch, since it is not easy to get a live fly to stay on the tip of your finger for very long (she would probably not be able or willing to catch it if it were held unmoving between my fingertips). After a couple tries it worked, and she caught a fly that was on the tip of my fingernail!

A couple weeks ago, I saw her standing on a chain that was holding up a flower pot... right above an ootheca that I had not seen before. It seems that she had mated before I found her! That, or I just had not noticed that particular ootheca before. There is another ootheca near the door inside the back porch that has been there for a few months now, though I do not know where its parents have been. Maybe next spring I will see some baby mantids crawling all over the place and eating everything!

So, yes. This mantis still lives with me. Sometimes she goes missing and I almost worry that she might have found the door or something, but she always shows up again with a day or two or three. She probably just happens to be in the places I do not bother to look in.

Insect Whispering

Now, I suppose I follow the post describing my back porch with another one that involves it!

During the summer, I usually like to lie in bed for a while in the morning, even if I have already awakened mentally, just so I can think about things and/or daydream, unless something is scheduled that requires me to get up early. This usually means that I get out of bed between 9:30 - 13:00 (it varies). Sometimes my grandma wakes me up - not necessarily getting me out of bed - to inform me that she is going somewhere to do something in the morning, so I will not be surprised to find her gone.

One day in mid July of this summer, my grandma did wake me at 8:00 or so to tell me that she was going somewhere to get stuff. Instead of staying in bed, though, I got up as she left. Since I was home alone in the morning, I decided to try not putting on my clothes for a while, instead just staying in my underpants. (No, I had not tried that before then). When I started to make breakfast by getting a box of cereal from a cupboard, I noticed that there was a katydid on the wall in the kitchen. I think a human kitchen is not a very good place for a katydid - or any other insect - to stay, so I decided to liberate it back outside. I had to chase it around for a little while before I caught it my hands.

When I walked to the back porch - which is connected to the kitchen - and opened my hands so that it could fly away, though, it did not; it just stayed clinging to my finger. Even though I nudged it around, it just kept crawling on the fingers I nudged it with. So, I stood there for quite a while, holding and staring at a katydid while wearing nothing but my underwear, hoping that the neighbor behind our house would not walk onto his back porch. The weather was rather pleasant; comfortable weather for wearing only undergarments.

Only by staring at insects for a very long time will a person realise how clean and well-groomed they are. I have known about this long before I held this katydid, but that thought always comes up when I look at them stationary. One will often see them chewing on their legs and antennae, and wiping their eyes and wings, to rid themselves of dirt and grime and stuff so that they can continue to move with ease. Many insects are cleaner than those nasty humans! Including cockroaches! Handling a cockroach will get it dirty, not you, unless perhaps it had not yet cleaned itself after walking through some grime or something. Probably.

I went back inside with the katydid and to the front door, in hopes of releasing it in the front yard. I suppose I could have just picked it up by the thorax and placed it somewhere, but I really dislike being so forceful. It stayed on my fingers. So, I decided to eat breakfast with the insect, pouring cereal with one hand while holding a katydid in the other. It finally flew away and landed on the wall again! I caught it so I could eat breakfast with a katydid in my hand, but it flew away again and landed on a window or something. I decided to leave it there until I finished eating. Maybe this katydid dislikes Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal?

I went to the back porch again with the unusually compliant katydid afterwards, although I went all the way down into the backyard this time, to a raspberry bush in there (which I should post about sometime!). ...Yes, I was still walking through grass in my pants. It took a few minutes, but it eventually jumped away onto the raspberry plant. I then scolded our dog for chasing and barking at the robins that landed on our fence and nested underneath our porch.

Some people have proposed before that I am an 'insect whisperer' or something, after seeing my interactions with them... Things like this make me seriously consider that I am an insect whisperer or something, which is probably absurd, but curious...

My Back Porch

The house I live in has two floors. Due to hills, the main floor that one enters through from the front door is at ground level from the front, but the back of it is much higher than the backyard; the bottom floor is underground beneath the front door, but it opens with a door into the backyard at ground level. So, at the back of the main floor, we have a wooden porch that floats above the ground (...attached by wooden pillars) that seems to fit the Wikipedia definition of Verandah in its first paragraph, although I have never referred to it as a 'verandah' before. Unlike the photos on Wikipedia, it is high above the ground, attached to it by the house and a staircase, and the large window spaces are covered with mesh screen. The screen is there mainly to prevent wild animals, including insects, from wandering in, and also so our dog does not squeeze between the wooden bars of the wooden railing and plummet to her serious injury, I think.

In the door that connects the interior of this porch to the staircase immediately outside, there once was a doggy-door, so the crazy miniature schnauzer of the house could come and go between the kitchen (just next to the porch, inside) and the backyard while keeping the aforementioned door closed so as not to allow wandering animals to wander in. However, sometime within this past year it was decided that this door and the mesh screen covering it was too broken and mangled from being ravaged by a certain tiny terrier terror (...hyperbole), so it was replaced by a new door that was, and is, very similar except for a distinct lack of doggy-door. This means that in order to allow this dog the freedom of going between the inside of the house to the backyard at will, this door must be left open all day.

The hole left by this continually open door may not be very large compared to the whole porch, but it apparently is quite large enough to allow many wandering insects to wander in daily, only to get trapped in the porch since they tend to prefer flying foolishly towards the sun beyond the mesh screen instead of searching for a door. So, every day now I go onto the back porch to observe and liberate the trapped insects. I like this because occasionally a particularly interesting insect comes in that would be rather difficult to find otherwise! The majority of what I find are flies and wasps, though, and there are surely way too many of the really tiny leafhoppers and other such insects for me to find and return outside. There are also some spiders that have taken up residence in the porch; I have decided to leave them there. I sometimes save a few of the flies, but I typically just leave them as food for the spiders and whatever predatory insects happen to be in the neighborhood. Since wasps are also rather common in the porch, I usually bring with me a pair of gloves, so that I can handle and take them outside without fear of sting. Of course, even without gloves, they probably are not very likely to sting unless I really put pressure on them, and only the females can sting (though I cannot tell the sexes apart at a glance). Hopefully I shall eventually become confident enough to handle them bare-handed more often, but at the moment I still worry a bit. Anyone can get their face really close to a wasp without much risk of sting, though.

I expect that there will be future posts involving this porch that will rely on the readers knowing what this porch is and why there are insects trapped in there, so I thought it wise to describe it early in the life of this blog.