Old Shaggy

I am not blogging as much lately because I've been busy with school kids at work (and home) but also because they aren't publishing my blog in the paper anymore due to "format changes". It bummed me out, but I do realize there are some of you "out there" that actually read my blog online still. So I'll keep at it as long as I can.

Today I was searching for something to write about and Cathy, the Office Manager/Nature Lover yelled, "Did you see what happened to Old Shaggy?" I knew it was bad news. Yesterday afternoon we had very high winds and Old Shaggy was, well, old.

Old Shaggy wasn't an animal or a Board Member or a character from Scooby Doo. Old Shaggy was a Shagbark Hickory snag (dead standing tree on left) that had resided in our meadow for a long time. He was part of the beautiful view outside my window since I started here 6 1/2 years ago. I have watched him house woodpeckers and squirrels and be the resting place for raptors and smaller birds. Many schoolchildren have flocked to Old Shaggy because he was beautiful and unusual and even kind of spooky looking. He has been the subject of a lot of photographs.

He has been losing his horizontal limbs one by one in the past several years. Yesterday he fell (right picture).

So what, you might be saying? It's just a tree. But it was more than a tree to people that work and visit here. It was a symbol of how even something no longer alive can still work to touch lives. How we shouldn't discount something just because it is old and seemingly no longer useful. How the landscape around us is important and should not be taken for granted or destroyed. I try and encourage people to leave snags standing when they can.

We are gonna miss Old Shaggy. I hope to convince people to let me keep him right where he fell so we can use him to teach kids about decomposition and how the life cycle works. Thanks Old Shaggy.

Poo Talk

Seeing the comment on my Crow & Raven article from Dr. B got me thinking about poo. Or maybe it's just because I hang around kids all day and they love potty talk. But I have noticted lately that the animals I have been taking out to see the hundreds of kids/day have been pooping (and peeing) a lot. Maybe they are just getting tired of being handled? I'm not sure, but seeing an animal poo (or pee) is something that invariably makes kids laugh and squeal and recoil and I have to stop whatever else I am talking about at the moment and address the poo. So if you are squeamish or offended by talk of poo, stop reading now.

Kids love poo. Technically we are supposed to call animal poop scat. We have a display of animal scat that is in kind of a discreet place and when kids find it they are rapt, especially elementary aged boys. There is scat from animals of all sizes; a bee, bats, fox, mountain lion. I've often thought that we could probably do a whole program on animal poo and it would be quite entertaining and educational. I'm not sure many teachers would go for it, but the kids would love it I'm sure. I would get to teach about digestion, what poo is made of (mostly water it turns out, but also other things like live and dead bacteria, fiber, broken down red blood cells and more!), how bird poo differs from other animal poo, stuff like that.

I could talk about animal defenses in relation to poo. Some animals (like some primates) do throw their poo to drive away threats while others, like the Potato Beetle Larva, makes itself a little less appealing as a food source by covering itself in its own poisonous poo. The Virginia Opossum when threatened faints, hangs its tongue out and poos on itself while releasing a green slime that smells like rotting flesh from its bum. All of this to appear to be dead because most predators don't like to eat already dead things.

I could even talk about why some animals, like rodents, rabbits, dung beetles and dogs eat poo. WHY do they you might ask? Plant eaters like rabbits and rodents eat their poo because their diet of plants are hard to digest so they have to eat their to get what they need out of a meal. Think of it as the second course. Turns out dogs and flies eat poo because poo contains a protein, and cat poo is really high in it, so dogs will likely choose cat poo to eat over their own.

OK, I think I've gone far enough. And I know, you probably said EEWW a few times, but poo is part of nature too!