Category Archives: Animals

A few new pictures

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Despite the lack of posting, we have been here all along, and here are some photos I took to prove it.

We have been having a lot of cloudy days lately. The sun broke through just enough to make this fain rainbow. Leah says she can’t really see much there.

Mollie likes to lie on her back in different places around the house. Here she is in front of the stove.

She folds her front paws like she’s praying.

She also likes to climb up onto the window stool. Here she is in the kitchen window. Our collection of fossilized wood is crowding her.

Zeke also lies on his back occasionally.

This is the result of Zeke and Sam playing while on the leash.

Zeke looks like he’s asking Sam, “Did we do that?” Makes a nice blue and orange barber pole stripe.

We were sitting on our sofa a while back and heard a strange sound. It was Mollie snoring. I hope you can hear it.

Great horn, dog

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I saw this prize at the edge of the road when I was walking the dogs Thursday morning and couldn’t figure out what it was for a while.

Eventually it dawned on me that it was a goat horn. It was confirmed when I saw the partial goat leg nearby.

Sam was fascinated. He picked it up and walked the rest of the way down to our turnaround, and then most of the way back up. He eventually dropped it and Zeke picked it for a while. Then he dropped it and Sam picked it up again. I let him keep it until we reached the house, then I made him drop it (good dog, Sam!).

I was going to leave it in the driveway, thinking maybe it would eventually turn into a good chew toy, but the dogs were obsessed with it and tried to get to it every time we went outside. I had to put it in the trash.

Goats are not native to this area, but there are two that have been roaming for a while. A neighbor got them to try to keep the kudzu at bay at his house. He tied them with a rope and, of course, they chewed through their ropes and escaped. People on the Facebook group around here post occasionally about seeing them. The last I heard they were living on Rocky Mountain, which divides Big Texas Valley from Little Texas Valley, and upon the peak of which is an artificial lake impounded as part of a pump-storage electrical power generating plant. It’s probably a good place for them.

That leaves only the question of where the deceased goat whose partial remains we found came from. And what happened to the rest of the body?

Here’s a quick note on horns that everyone probably already knows. Horns, found on members of the bovids, have a keratin sheath and remain on the animal for life unless forcefully removed. They are (generally) not branched, except for the pronghorn.  Both male and female bovids grow horns. Antlers, found on members of the deer family (cervids), have a bony structure and are grown and shed every year. They are also typically branched. It seems that reindeer are the only species in which females as well as males have antlers.

Some sun, lots of rain

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We’ve had a fairly long period of wet weather, interrupted occasionally by a sunny day. I don’t really mind a rainy day. There’s something nice about being warm and dry while it’s cold and wet outside.

One day this week it was foggy — cloudy to those down at the bottom of the mountain — and it had been raining, so I took the dogs on a short walk up to the top of the mountain where power lines cross the ridge. The towers looked like half-hidden alien structures. And there was a crackle in the air. Turn your volume up for this video.

The buzzing sound is caused by what is essentially leaking electrical power. It’s audible only during wet conditions, at least if the power company is doing its job on the transmission lines. It’s called a corona discharge.

I had walked the dogs up a few days earlier when the view was more open. There were still a few clouds scudding about down in the valley.

What might look like a particularly bright cloud near the center of the image is actually a lake.

The maples have turned. It was hard to get a nice, bright image, but here’s one where I tried.

With all the rain, the wet-weather streams are running all over the mountain. I can hear the rushing water everywhere on our walk, even when I can’t see the streams.

This is where one stream crosses Fouche Gap Road near the bottom of the mountain in Texas Valley.

Sam always wants to drink from the ditches beside the road when we start back up the mountain. I usually let him. He didn’t notice this little fellow,

I suspect this is a red salamander, rather than a mud salamander. According to Caudata Culture (“The information resource for newt and salamander enthusiasts”), the two are hard to differentiate. The red salamander is “often associated with the environs of clear, rocky, streams” while the mud salamander frequents muddy areas. Unfortunately, I see their squashed little bodies in the road fairly often.

The rain ended Thursday, although the clouds stuck around for a while. Thursday night is supposed to be the coldest since last spring. Leah feels sorry for Dusty and Chloe, who stay on our front porch, which is soaked with the blowing rain. They do have cat houses with heating pads, and a foam insulation surround. Leah drapes a bed spread over the beds to try to keep the wind from blowing directly on them.

I meet a visitor

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I met one of our close neighbors a few days ago, a nice, lovely widow.

I first noticed her a couple of weeks ago when I was changing a hose at our outside faucet. The connected hose almost always has some pressure, so water drips out when I unscrew the fitting. The drops hit her web, and she comes out to investigate. I’m not quite sure how I managed to get my phone to shoot the video upside down. I guess it couldn’t tell which was was up when I held it pointed down.

Here’s a still shot.

This spider has the characteristic red hourglass shape on the abdomen, which she graciously presented, but it also has a red dot towards the rear of the abdomen. There is no mistaking a black widow spider, with its shiny, black body, even if the red marking is not visible.

I seldom bother black widows, or any other spider, for that matter. If I can, I remove the harmless (or, based on some reading I just did, usually harmless) spiders from the house and release them outside. I have never found a black widow inside. I might or might not try to capture it with a plastic container, depending on how brave I felt and how aggressive the spider was. I have also never found a brown recluse spider, for which I am thankful. They are apparently more likely to be found in a house than a black widow.

The link above says that the wolf spider bite “may be very painful.” I see wolf spiders very frequently at night when I take the dogs out. The orb-weaving spider, which I believe lives around here, spins webs that are easy to walk into, especially at night. The web site says, “Be careful not to walk into their webs at night – the fright of this spider crawling over one’s face can be terrifying and may cause a heart attack, particularly to the susceptible over 40 year olds.”

I guess I will continue to appreciate spiders, but only from an appropriate distance.