>Brad DeLong wrote: > >> Are California Quail Conscious? >> ------------------------------- >> >> "Hey! A car's coming!" "Great! Let's all run across the road in front >> of it!" "That's a wonderful idea!" "Yes!" "Genius!" "A good plan!" >> "Go! Go! Go!" > >Sounds like some of the squirrels around here. > >I assume that at least some of the folks in the US reading this are >familiar with the commercial where a squirrel runs out in front of a >car, the car swerves all over the place, and you hear sounds of a crash >once the car is offscreen. Then the squirrel is high-fived, etc. by >another squirrel. "You da SQUIRREL!" seems to be implied. Anyway, I >feel like I'm living in that commercial sometimes as I'm coming home. > > Julia > >who is feeling really burned out, but not so much from list stuff as >packing, getting the new house ready to move into, dealing with a >1-year-old, etc.
Oh. We have squirrels too. Including a three-legged one. And large piles of furry coyote poop on our driveway. In fact, let me look for something... Aha! Here it is: MEGAFAUNA MORNING At dawn this morning I headed out the front door with the dog--and we came face-to-face with two stags: an eight-point buck and a six-point buck. They wheeled away and trotted off, stopping a third of the way up the hill to look down at us, and be sure that we maintained our distance. I looked up. A red-tailed hawk that had been perched on a branch of one of the oak trees spread its wings--it looked like a huge one with a nearly three-foot wingspan--and took off on its morning search for mice. It was a megafauna morning. Yesterday afternoon there were the other deer: three fawns and two does grazing outside our kitchen window. I attribute this to watering. In its normal state, by now this part of California would be bone-dry. There would be a patch of mud up in the blackberry batch, where there is a small spring. There would be a little water a mile away and 200 feet down in Burton Valley itself. But this late in the year all of the animals should be gasping for water, and populations should be scarce. However, we came. And we like lawns, flowers, and bushes. So we build water mains, and we water. And so the mice and the deer come. And so the hawks and the coyotes come. I wonder how the "charismatic megafauna" population today in my neighborhood compares to the population in 1500. I wonder whether we are exercising powerful selection pressure--on deer, hawks, coyotes, raccoons, et cetera--for the trait "willing to tolerate being near humans"...
