Road to Elko

It was a pretty uneventful drive to Elko—at least, compared to what Leigh Ann said could happen.

“The first time I drove through here with Sean, we saw the bumper of a semi wrapped around a cow on the side of the road. The semi was gone, just the bumper and the cow were left. There were two other cows standing right next to the dead one. Just standing there, like ‘Duh…hit us, too.’”

Highway 51 between Bruneau and Elko is nothing but open range land and prairie. "I'm going to need you to help me look for animals in the road," she said, which did not make me happy. It only took one graphic story for my Drivers' Ed. teacher to convince me that hitting a large animal with a car is not good, because said large animal will fly right over your bumper and come through your windshield.

I became especially vigilant, whipping my head counter-clockwise and clockwise, scanning the roadside for cows, horses, deer, elk, bears, water buffalo, hippopatomi, anything. We didn't see any big animals that day. Not even a single cow.

Not that we didn't see any wildlife. At almost the exact limit of Mountain City, Nevada, we came upon a phenomenon I'd heard about but never seen: a Mormon cricket migration. It was as disgusting as I'd heard. The katydids' fat red bodies clotted the road; some living, some dead, most at least partly crushed and baking on the hot asphalt. The wave of insects jumping out from under passing cars reminded me of the wake thrown up behind a racing speedboat. Leigh Ann said she couldn't stand the sound of them being hurled about in the wheel wells.

Cricket corpses paved the road blood red for a few miles, then disappeared, then reappeared for another few miles, then disappeared again.

To be continued...

This is for Kelly

I went to a benefit with a silent auction this weekend, and this handsome fella was up for auction with a minimum bid $500. I did not bid on him, but I did bid on and win a purse and framed drawing. Woo-hoo!

An Offering

I photographed this handsome fellow on my deck this morning:
According to Wikipedia, he (or she) is a young sharp-shinned hawk. This bird must like me, because later it left me a present:
Headless bird: yummy!

Crustacean Massacre

As I was getting out of my car with my breakfast burrito this morning, my neighbor showed me a crustacean in the parking lot. "He's cold," she remarked, and covered him with a leaf.


The last time I saw one of these guys was two summers ago in the middle of the summer, also in my parking lot. I named him Lobby the lobster, and I saw him alive once before he got run over and squished. I guess these crawdads must live in the ponds at my apartments, but I never see them anywhere except in the middle of my parking lot.

When I left for my eyebrow appointment this afternoon, I saw that Lobby had been squished, which is to be expected. When I got home, though, there were four squished crawdads!

Poor Lobbies! The parking lot resembled the lake shore when I was a kid and we used to catch crawdads and smash them between rocks. (Those crawdads had rainbow guts, whereas these do not). Was it mass suicide? Or some sort of cruel pet murder?

Wow, today is not a good day for the wildlife at my apartment complex. As I was typing that last part, a squirrel ran up the tree outside my window, tried to jump onto the roof and missed, falling down to the mud two and a half stories below. I hope he's okay! He ran off, so it seems like he wasn't too badly hurt. Poor little insane squirrel!

The squirrels are going to be mad...

Here's what I did today.

I made my storage space go from this:

to this:

and my deck go from this:

to this:

The squirrels will be mad they don't have pots to bury peanuts in and knock over. While cleaning, I found poop that was way too big to be squirrel poop. I'm scared to know what's been hanging around out there; I suspect it's raccoons: