Common Nature

Lizards have been somewhat fewer in the apartment complex than last year, and the other night I learned a possible reason: a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) couple have set up housekeeping on the back lawn next door! (No pictorial tax as yet: their nest, less than five feet from the curb, overlooks a back alley heavily travelled by garbage, service, and delivery vehicles as well as human cyclists and pedestrians—meaning that they’re probably experiencing botherance enough without amateur paparazzi. (1)

Burrowing Owls are regarded as local mascots and rigorously protected here; standard procedure upon discovering an inhabited burrow is to erect a little designated perch for the owls and cordon it off, crime-scene style, halting any human construction until the young have left the nest.

(1) Rule of thumb is that if the owls are reacting to your presence, you’re too close; the risk of attracting gawkers is one reason that doxxing Burrowing Owls nesting on private property is frowned upon around here. Schools, museums, and other such facilities, however, will encourage on-site nesting, observable by remote cam.

I’m finding varying accounts of how capable they are of digging their own burrows, but certainly the owls prefer the convenience of found housing when they can get it, not only taking over burrows constructed by other animals but occupying such human artifacts as PVC pipes; it’s quite possible to build artificial burrows to attract them.

I sure do!

I’m something of an astronomy nerd; you have to understand that the great solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 was something I’d been counting down to my whole life. In my native Dayton, Ohio, I’d gotten to witness the strange begrimed 40-watt sunlight (1) and dappled crescent shadows of the partial solar eclipses of 10 May 1994 and 21 August 2017, after having gotten a fleeting confirmatory glance through SolarShields under welder’s goggles: the exercise was a bit like hunting basilisks or Medusa.

Another point is that I’m acutely homesick for the seasonal markers of the place where I spent 90+% of my life: the violets and wild chives and flowering crabapples, and the two equinoctial yellows of Moraine honeylocusts: neon chartreuse foliage in the spring, and in the fall flaming saffron—turning to orange piles of cornflake crunch beneath the feet. Even the lawn weeds here are unfamiliar.

Until a couple years in advance—by which time it was too late—I had not anticipated that, by the time the total solar eclipse at long last came to Dayton, I would be gone; behold the southern Gulf Coast of Florida’s experience of the Grand Portentuous Celestial Event.

( Continue. )

Taken on 17 April 2017 at 17:00 US Eastern Daylight Savings Time in Dayton, Ohio, US:





This is a snapshot, taken some years earlier, from the place I left in May of 2023. Cherry blossoms are relatively uncommon in Dayton, but flowering crabapples, in red, mauve, pink, and white, are a signature of spring—and this specimen, fallen face down onto the concrete sidewalk, is a perfectly serviceable representation of the sad beauty of transience. The flower is long since gone, of course; so is the tree that bore it, sawn down in the gentrification project when the property changed hands at just about the beginning of COVID quarantine; so is the irascible albino squirrel who claimed it as territory (you don’t seriously think that little expletive deleted deigned to hold still for a photo.) And now, in the Rust Belt desertion and inexorable southward demographic gravitational suck, I’m gone from the premises too.

(I never bothered to photograph much of the surroundings of my native and near-lifelong Dayton: first because I didn’t own a camera until 2010, and didn’t figure out how to host the images until the mid-to-late teens, and didn’t own a home computer of any sort until 2020, and above all because I never anticipated leaving until it was too late.)