Camels in the Backyard

Yes, camels!  Not in our backyard, but I guess this is somebody's backyard.  I was returning last year from a visit at the newest University of California at Merced, California, driving down a country road just a few miles from the campus, when I looked to my right and saw these camels.  They were standing in a muddy pasture and looking as out of place as a duck in the desert.  Or an igloo in Ecuador.  Or a camel in California!

I had my camera, so I stopped and took these pictures.  One of the camels became very interested in me and came over to the fence that separated us.   Or maybe he is just a ham and wanted me to get some good closeups of his handsome(?) face?

These are the Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus) which once roamed wild in Mongolia and the Gobi desert but now are completely domesticated.  There were some feral camels, both Bactrian and Dromedary (with one hump) loose in the American southwest.  They had been imported for use as military vehicles, but the project was terminated in the mid 1800s, and some of the animals escaped or were let loose.  The rest were shipped to a now abandoned Army garrison at Benicia, CA and auctioned to the public.  The feral camels were last seen in 1972 and are presumed to have died out.  A large and thriving population of feral camels live in the Australian outback, and are considered, like rabbits, to be an invasive species there.  

Another local angle: Fossil evidence indicates that camels evolved here in North America, then split into two groups.  One group went south and evolved into llamas, alpacas and vicunas in South America.  The other group went into Asia and evolved into Bactrian and Dromedary camels.  Evidently none stayed here.  Maybe they had a beef with the bison.

Raccoon on the Deck

The other night, just after we fell asleep, we thought we heard some noises in the house.  I tried to ignore them at first, but I finally really sat up and listened.  Yep, there was a strange noise, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from.  We were both awake by now and  looked out the window. There was the source.  A raccoon was on the deck railing, eating birdseed out of the feeder stationed there!

I went and grabbed my camera and tried to take a couple of photos through the window.  Most of these did not come out because the flash reflected off the glass.  I was going to open the sliding glass door to try to take a better picture, but he shimmied down the railing to the deck and came right up to the door to face me down. I was sure that  if I opened it he would come right inside.

After I took another couple of photos he turned and ran down the stairs and out of sight. Then we realized one cat, Paloosh, was still outside and we were worried he might run into the raccoon. I opened the door, called his name and in a few seconds he came racing up the stairs and into our bedroom. We're pretty sure he must have passed the Masked Bandit on his way up but luckily there was no fight.

The photos posted are the only decent ones I got.  They are rather amusing.

Cottontails on both coasts

Traveling around America, one of the things we notice is the differences in the flora and fauna in the different regions.  We were on Long Island in New York a few weeks ago and saw cardinals in a bird bath, a very interesting bird that is never seen in our Bay Area backyard.  We also saw robins as we do here, but they seemed to be bigger and fatter there.  Maybe there are more worms?

We were walking down a trail at Montauk point--the farthest east point of Long Island--when up ahead we saw a couple of cottontail rabbits.  Those critters we do see frequently. We did not get a good picture of them in NY, but here are a few photos of some we saw in the East Bay Municipal Utilities District (EBMUD) watershed near Upper San Leandro Reservoir.  We took those pictures a couple months ago and I have been waiting for an excuse to get them up on this blog.

On that same Long Island hike we were happy to see some bright orange orioles, another bird we don't see here.   And we got bit by no-see-ums, which, thankfully, we don't have out west!

Does this fawn look OK to you?

The Doe and Her Progeny

Sitting at my desk today I noticed one of the local black tailed does walking through my neighbor's backyard, so I grabbed my camera and went out on our back deck.  Critter Watch had begun.

The doe heard me open the door and she looked up with concern, but I hunkered down below the railing and she started grazing again on my neighbor's plants.  I was hoping they wouldn't eat much.

The fawn with the swollen muzzle

Then I noticed something in the weeds behind her, a spotted fawn!  The fawn soon came out in the open and I took a few pictures.  The doe would walk a few steps up the hill and her spotted baby was trailing close behind.  As they approached the back of my neighbor's house, I noticed a second fawn that must have been ahead the other two as they came up the hill.  I took a few more photos. Several times, the deer heard me as I maneuvered to get a better shot, and they would look up in my direction with some concern. But after a few seconds, they would get back to the task at hand, eating my neighbor's plants.

The other, normal looking fawn

It wasn't until I looked at these pictures on the computer that I noticed something wrong with one of the babies. Its muzzle is swollen on both sides, below the eyes and up to its nose. Take a look. Maybe it's due to a bee sting, or a mutation?  Last year we saw a fawn that had a huge swelling on the side of its head by the neck, like a goiter, but we didn't get a photo of it.  A friend of my dad's speculated it may have been due to a rattlesnake bite.  We never saw that fawn again, so either the swelling healed or that fawn did not make it.

I'll send these photos to the local Lindsay Wildlife Museum and Hospital and see if they have any explanations. We'll keep you posted on the fawns' progress and hope for the best for the odd one.

Another view of the swollen schnozzola

Crawdads and Crayfish

We have a cat, Ninja, who likes to go on walks with us.  Yes, I said 'cat', not 'dog'.  If we put on our shoes and jackets in the evening, she will wait by the front door and follow us out and down the street, even around the block.  We wonder what the neighbors think, "There go those critter bloggers, walking their cat again!"  We wouldn't mind, except she is slow, very slow.  She lags behind us and we worry that if we get too far ahead of her she will get lost and not be able to find her way home.  If we need exercise and want a brisk, long walk, we have to escape the house without her.  

So the other night, we did just that, slipping out the front door before Ninja could squeeze out. And we did feel guilty. We walked to a nearby park that has a couple of shallow ponds.  Shining our flashlight into the ponds as we passed, lo and behold there were a slew of crawdads!  We had never seen them there in the daytime although we go to the park frequently.  I didn't have my camera--of course not!--so we returned the next evening and got some of these photos by flashlight.  (I diverted the cat's attention, again, and we darted out the door). 


I went by the pond again the next day and found several crawdads hiding in the shade of a footbridge.  No wonder we had not seen them before.  They can burrow into the soft mud pond bottom and become barely visible. I chased one out with a stick and took a couple more pictures.  It's not easy getting a clear picture of a critter in a pond, even if the water is clear.

You say crawdad, I say crayfish.  Where I grew up, the names were interchangeable.  But neither of them seemed to fit.  If they are crawdads, are the females called crawmoms?  And crayfish?  They are certainly not a fish, more like a mini-lobster.  The names come from the the French "ecrevisse" which sounds a bit like "crayfish" if you don't speak French.

They are crustaceans and related to lobsters.  There are many species in California and some of them, including the 'signal crawfish' and the 'Red Swamp Crayfish,' are invasive.  I am not sure if the pictures here show 2 different species or if they are the same.  The redder one is about 4-5" long and is probably the invasive red swamp variety (Procambarus clarkii). The smaller one, about 3" long, with blue on it's claws may be a juvenile or perhaps a different species.  The Red Swamp crawfish are a drab color when younger, according to the Elkhorn Slough Foundation.

When I was a kid we would tie a bit of bacon or liver on a string on a stick and leave it on the bottom of Pajaro River for 10 minutes. When we pulled it up we would have a crawdad or 2 hanging on the string.  One time we went with a bunch or people and caught hundreds of them.  We had a party afterwards, and dined on our catch.  It was a lot of fun.  I wonder what Ninja would think of these critters?

Metallic Green Beetles in NY

We haven't posted in a week or so because we were on vacation in New York--Long Island, Brooklyn and Manhattan, to be precise.  While we were there, we visited Wildwood State Park on the north shore of Long Island, which despite its name, is better known for a spectacularly beautiful beach on the LI Sound that stretches for a mile.  As we walked down the trail to the beach, something bright and almost iridescent green caught our eye. We spotted a half dozen of these bright green beetle critters flitting about.

They are called 'six-spotted tiger beetles' (Cicindela sexguttata), although if you look closely it appears that one of them has 8 spots on its wings.  The metallic color makes them stand out against the vegetation and ground.  I figured it was an evolutionary strategy to warn other critters of their poison, but references say that they are eaten by a variety of birds, reptiles, rodents and other bugs without adverse effects.  A few references say they can give off a foul odor, but we didn't smell anything.


Long Island has had a particularly wet spring, which creates the perfect conditions for some not-so-pretty and really annoying insects. While visiting family there, we had to battle mosquitos and worse, hoards of no-see-ums, which aren't actually invisible and can drive you crazy with their persistent and unpleasant biting. In the Bay Area, we don't have those tiny pests--just big ones, like scorpions (see this post!) and medium sized ones, like ticks (this post).

Two Spotted Fawns and a ?

The game camera, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. Sometimes little or nothing is captured, but sometimes we reap a bonanza of great images.  Yesterday was the bonanza.

We moved the camera last week to a different critter trail, also in the open space area near our house.  The trail leads from a clearing in the brush under a large spreading oak down to a small creek.   It looked well used, but when we checked the SD card after 3 days we had no critter pictures to show for the time.  We left it there another 3 to 4 days, and look what we found!  The first photo shows a pair of spotted fawns.  Both look healthy and alert, evidence that the local herd is thriving nicely.  This is, of course, good news  for the local nature lovers, but bad news for the local gardeners.

The other photo is obviously of some sort of animal from the cat family, but we are not sure what.  The cat was moving and it is quite blurry.   Our best guess is that it is a house cat or maybe a feral cat.  There are homes a quarter mile away.  And we do see feral cats around the neighborhood from time to time.  There are wild cats in the hills nearby, both bobcats and moutain lions, but this guy is too small to be a mountain lion and has too much tail for a bobcat.