An arachnophobe, a hemophobe, and an ophidiophobe walk into a forest…

(Arachnophobia: fear of spiders and scorpions. Hemophobia: fear of blood. Ophidiophobia: fear of snakes.)

In any job dealing with wildlife in the field, you’re eventually going to have to deal with things many people find frightening, disgusting, or just plain creepy. I have caught and been bitten by snakes, walked through countless spiderwebs, and waded around in ponds with a thick layer of scum on the surface.

One of my projects in the summer was to trap, measure, mark, and release snakes. To that end, my co-workers and I set up giant X-shaped silt fence arrangements with a trap in the center and buckets as pitfall traps at each end. The buckets were covered with little plywood tables to provide shade. One day I lifted up one of the plywood tops and found this:

Arachnophobe's Nightmare
Arachnophobe’s Nightmare

That is a pigmy rattlesnake in the bucket. Next to it is a very large wolf spider. On the underside of the plywood is a black widow spider and the dried-out corpse of a scorpion. An arachnophobe’s nightmare.

Continue reading An arachnophobe, a hemophobe, and an ophidiophobe walk into a forest…

In Which I Cheat at the Blog Award Game

So, Vibrant at blabberwockying! has nominated me for a Sunshine Blogger award, and both Kathy at PsycheServices and izabolinha at The Turtle Way have nominated me for a Premio Dardos award.

As we say where I live: “Thanks, y’all!”

The way these awards work is like a game. The English translation of Premio Dardos is “Prize Darts” and I think it’s very descriptive. You throw your “darts” in the form of links at other bloggers; then they throw them at more bloggers, and so on. Blog awards are like a chain letter, minus the promises of true love if you forward it on and a gory death if you don’t. I am resistant to threats of gory death from anonymous letter writers. But a compliment from a fellow blogger is another story.

So: Thank you for thinking of me! I appreciate it, but I am going to cheat a little. The problem is, I don’t know enough bloggers who would be receptive to this and who also haven’t already received both awards to write posts for all of these. So, to those who named me for the prizes, I hope you will accept this big combined award post, which gives me an excuse to mention some friendly Blogging 101 classmates who may not write about things that would ordinarily come up on a nature blog. So this is one big, combined, all-purpose award post. I’ll call it the Bethany-Is-Lazy Award, and it’s a one-time thing that nobody is expected to pass on. It also gives me a chance to try out this pagination thing, because this post is gonna be long.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

How I Succeeded and Failed with a B.A. in English

The Bitchy Editor’s post How Your B.A. in English Prepared You for Failure got me thinking about what constitutes failure or success in relation to a degree. I have a B.A. in English. It is my only completed degree so far. I was, by some standards, a success: I actually used it to get a job. It was still a giant mistake.

I was trying to double major in English and wildlife ecology, until I was so burnt-out and broke that I decided to just finish the degree I was closest to and get the hell out. I only needed one more class for English. I was working a string of temp jobs and just beginning what looked like a promising writing career, and I could see myself doing something like writing or editing until I could make a living writing my own stuff. So I took that one class and got out.

I bounced around in temp jobs until I was hired as a copy editor of construction textbooks. I thought, hey, I’m good with words, and I’d like to learn about construction. Perfect!

Not so much. The job killed what little attention span I had, and after staring at a manuscript all day, I found that the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was write. When I did force myself to write, it was not great prose. It was, well, forced.  I’ve never been a heavily stylized writer; I aim for an invisible style. But everything I wrote then was as flat as a plumbing manual for vo-tech students. Continue reading How I Succeeded and Failed with a B.A. in English

Weekly Photo Challenge: A very forgiving Pigmy Rattlesnake

This week’s photo challenge was “Beneath Your Feet.”

Pigmy Rattlesnake
Pigmy Rattlesnake

Pigmy rattlesnakes always look disgruntled, but this one has a really good reason!

It blended in so well, and I was paying so little attention, that I didn’t see it until I was bringing my foot down. I didn’t have time to stop it. I stepped right on it, trying at the last instant not to put too much weight on it.

Next thing I knew, I was standing about six feet away. I think I made an inarticulate squeak as I jumped away.

The snake never tried to strike at me. It just coiled up tighter and glared. I took a quick photo and then I left it alone. Every stick and leaf looked like a snake for the rest of the day.

Gopher Tortoise

The gopher tortoise is large, as North American land turtles go, but it does not stand out.

Adult Gopher Tortoise
Adult Gopher Tortoise

It’s slow-moving, grayish-tan, close to the ground, and when not moving it resembles a smooth, dome-shaped rock. On top of that, it spends a good part of its time underground. The tortoise is most visible when actively digging, as a fountain of sand flies up behind its claws.

The burrow is easier to find than the tortoise itself. The burrow of a mature tortoise can be spotted from a long distance in the hot, sunny, sandy habitat it prefers. A tortoise burrow is a crescent-shaped hole in the ground, with a wide mound of sand called an apron in front. These burrows go all the way down to the water table, so they stay relatively cool and moist in summer, and relatively warm in winter. This makes them an ideal refuge for many other species, and the tortoise doesn’t seem to mind sharing. Over 350 species have been found in gopher tortoise burrows 1. Personally, I have seen frogs, snakes, mice, beetles, and once a skunk.

Continue reading Gopher Tortoise

Who is this for?

Blogging 101’s Day 4 assignment is to consider my intended audience. The easy thing to do is say, “Whoever wants to read what I want to write,” but let’s get a little more specific.

When I write fiction, my ideal audience is me. I start writing something I’d like to read. (When I edit fiction, the readers I have in mind are my college fiction workshop professors, which is both helpful and terrifying. Those folks pulled no punches.)

But for Overlooked Nature, my ideal audience is not me. At least not the real me. It’s some alternate-universe version, a me who studied archeology or illustration instead of ecology. Perhaps a me who stuck with the fiction writing and actually made a living from it, instead of getting sidetracked right when she was starting to sell stories.

I want to present things I know, the same way I like for others to present things they know to me. Factual, but memorable. Detailed enough to be interesting, without being too detailed for the curious adult or teen to grasp. I want this to be a visual version of the podcasts about psychology and physics and history that I listen to in the car. I have never taken a class in any of those subjects, but the narrators break it down so I never have trouble understanding, without sounding like they’re talking to children.

That’s what I want to do. So, my ideal audience is the curious layperson. Maybe a recent arrival to the South who wants to know what’s in the creek in their backyard. Or someone who wonders why they should care that the sandhills are being developed so quickly — it’s just some pine trees on a lot of sand, right? (Spoiler: No, it’s not.) Or someone from far away who wants to see pictures of exotic-to-them creatures. And, of course, anyone who wants to read what I want to write.

Post All The Links!

Conveniently, the WordPress.com community is running a Blogging 101 course just as I’m starting this site, so I’m using it to help me get the blog off the ground. As a result, there will be more posts about the process of blogging in the next few weeks than there would ordinarily be. The assignment for Day 1 was writing an introduction post. Day 2 was selecting a title (and tag line, which I still need to do). And now it’s Day 3, and I’m supposed to follow 5 tags and 5 new blogs.

Of course I have interests other than wildlife photography. I write science fiction. I grow vegetables. I climb (badly) at the local rock gym. I’m always happy to find easy vegetarian recipes. And I’m not too shabby at orienteering.

But, really, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably looking for nature photos, or at least outdoors-related content, right? Okay, here are five blogs you might like:

  • Living Alongside Wildlife: What kind of snake did you just find? Email a photo to David Steen, and his commenters will happily ID it for you.
  • Eaten By Bears:  How do you enjoy the outdoors when you can’t hike? Brandon blogs about UTV-ing in the wilds of Montana.
  • Back Yard Biology: Mother and daughter bloggers photograph and write about the species they find in Minnesota.
  • Nature Has No Boss: full of beautiful wildlife and landscape photography.
  • Naturally South Australia: Barry Silkstone’s photos and essays from a part of the world I know nothing about.

Or perhaps you’d like funny stories about the mishaps scientists have in the field?

In that case, you need to go over to Twitter and check out #fieldworkfail right now. Here’s my contribution:

IMGP0604

My blog! It has a name!

As promised by the old tagline, this thing finally has a real name. After writing my introduction post, it was staring me right in the face, and, amazingly, the URL was available. So, henceforth, this site shall be known as Overlooked Nature, and will be located at overlookednature.com.

I almost made it Overlooked Wildlife, but there’s already a book with that title, and “wildlife” usually implies animals. I want to post plants, too. And rocks. And random interesting things that happened to catch my eye. If it’s found outdoors, and I know something about it or can find out something, it’s fair game. I figured “Nature” was a better fit even though it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely.

And because this is primarily a photo blog, above (or below, or somewhere on the page, depending on the theme and device you’re using) is a very easy-to-overlook bit of nature: the eggs of the common nighthawk. You have no idea how many times I almost stepped on one!

Introduction

Several years ago, I was working as a field biologist. I was out in the woods all summer and winter, trapping small amphibians and reptiles. It gave me an appreciation of the sheer diversity of animals hidden in the trees, underwater, underground, in any patch of grass. The places I worked were only a mile or so from suburban housing developments, yet most people I talked to, even the anglers and hunters and hikers, were unaware that many of these species even existed.

And I did talk to a lot of people. It’s the sort of job people are curious about. If I happened to stop by the grocery store while wearing my work T-shirt, some random shopper would ask how to get my job. “Do you have to have a college degree?” I’d tell them that I did have a degree, but it was possible to get a job without one if you had relevant experience. They would begin to look hopeful. Then I would regretfully crush their dreams: I’d tell them how much it paid. They would look at me disbelievingly and tell me their nephew made that holding a STOP/SLOW sign for the road company.

After a while I realized I was never going to pay off my student loans, so I left that job and went back to school to accumulate more. I’m now a graduate student, and I spend a lot less time in the woods these days.  But one thing that happens when you walk around in the woods and look at things for a living is that you take a ton of pictures. Some of them even turn out well. A few months ago I was looking for a specific photo to show a friend, and ended up scrolling through the photos I took and thinking, hey, these aren’t bad. I should do something with them.

So this blog is for showing some of the hidden and lesser-known species of the southeast US: the burrowers, the swimmers, the creepers, the camouflaged, and the just plain overlooked.

Rough Green Snake
Tiger Moth
Parrot Pitcher Plant
Ornate Chorus Frog
Yellow Garden Spider
Blue Phlox
Eastern Fence Lizard