Category Archives: Wildlife

Blogging, Domestic Bliss, Wildlife

Audrey

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So Sweetie got a gift of a flower bulb. This thing was a wax-coated ball a bit bigger than a softball with a spot on the op that wasn’t waxed.

The instructions were simple:  Set it on the window sill and wait.

Darned thing started growing – sending up a green shoot as thick as my thumb.  Interesting.

Then the tip of the bulb started expanding.  Each day it got bigger, reminding me of ‘Audrey’ in Little Shop of Horrors, hence the article title.

Here’s the original Audrey:

And here’s our version:

And she’s still growing.

Cajun culture, Wheels of Industry, Wildlife

Wandering

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Yesterday at 1701 hours my phone went off.  The name was one of my co-workers who is the technician for a couple of natural gas compressor stations in the heart of Cajun country.  He has the accent to go with it.

Me:  This can’t be good.  What’d you blow up?

Him:  Lemme tell you what’s happening.  We just installed some new stuff and now a circuit breaker’s tripping…

And he laid out a tale of woe.  My task was trying to reconstruct what the problem was.

Only one solution:  Site visit!

Ninety miles, much up I-10 on the outbound route, I arrived at the site at 0730.

Problem was that a decision was made to change the heating in the office building from the previous natural gas system to electrical.

Yes, I’m astounded too.  I mean, it’s a NATURAL GAS compressor station.  We move millions of cubic feet of the stuff every day at over thousand pounds of pressure.

But nooooo…  Let’s do electricity.  IN a building with the original electrical installation straight out of the 1960’s.

Fact, folks!  In a normal American home, electric heat is the single largest load.

We hadn’t provided for adding that kind of load.  No big deal, though – just up-size the building’s transformer fifty percent.   Which means an up-sized circuit breaker for a panel that’s sixty years old.  So, new panel, okay?  And since that new transformer is going to put out the higher current we need, we can add new, up-sized cable from that transformer to the distribution panel.

No big deal.  All it takes is money and time.  Job done!

Driving the ninety miles from the station back to the office I avoided I-10, choosing instead Louisiana Highway 14 which meanders through farmlands and swamps and small towns.

Winter is waterfowl season down here.  I saw and enjoyed the huge flocks of geese – snows and specklebellies mostly, plus other wading birds, ibis by the thousands, white, black and the occasional red for punctuation.

It’s also hawk season.  I saw a large hawk of various varieties at a rate about one per mile.

Other attraction of this section of highway is that the section between the little towns of Lake Arthur and Hayes runs through cypress swamp.  In places, the canopy of cypress arches over the road and the sides of the road are lined with trees, complete with the knees unique to the cypress tree.

All in all, a very pleasant day.  And I get paid for this.

Cajun culture, General, Wildlife

Mosquito season

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It’s that time of year.

Actually, we have it pretty good – the parish spends a bit of money on mosquito control and here inside of the city limits there are only a few hardy survivors.  However, in the marshes between here and the Gulf, the swarms have been known to kill cattle.

Cajun culture, Politics, Recipes and Food, Wildlife

PETA-philes…

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Or, as we say it “People Eating Tasty Animals“:

Dad used to run a couple of crab traps in the bayou behind the house. He’d catch a few each day, toss ’em in the crisper of an old fridge on the back porch. In the cool, they’d stay alive for a few days, during which he added the number until he reached the quantity Mom characterized as ‘a mess’ – enough to boil and shell for the meat. Mom stuffed everything short of Dad’s slippers with crabmeat stuffing.

Crabs were just one of many proteins we harvested from the bayous and marshes where I grew up. There were weeks when every meal besides breakfast was something we’d taken from the fields and marshes and bayous.

And that trap? That’s the hi-tech, production version of crabbing. You can drive down the roads in South Louisiana and see people crabbing with nothing more than a dip-net and lengths of string with chicken necks and backs tied to one end for bait. Just toss it in the water and wait. You’ll see the string straighten out when the crab finds a free meal and takes off with it. All you have to do is carefully pull him close enough to dip him up with the net and drop him in a waiting tub.

It’s kinda the way that the Democrat party keeps voters happy.

Wheels of Industry, Wildlife

Mommy

Yesterday I was at my station in north Mississippi to gather some information on adding a circuit breaker to the protection scheme for the station’s power system.

This is one of those malum prohibitum things.  The system as originally designed and installed, was based on the idea that ‘protection’ was there to make sure that damage to equipment was limited.  the circuit breakers already in place made sure that the cables and transformers were protected from overloads.

That was good enough for decades.  Not any more.  The driver now is personnel protection, and while that big ol’ breaker is plenty fast enough to keep us from burning up a cable or a transformer from a fault, it still allows a lot of energy to be emitted if that fault is in the vicinity of a worker.

so we add a new circuit breaker whose sole reason to exist is that it trips very fast, clearing a fault while exposing the worker to as little of the sturm und drang releases by an electrical fault.  Easy-peasy.

While investigating the installation, we opened up the cable compartment of a little 2300 to 480-volt transformer and found this fine example of mommyhood in action as the mommy black widow spider protects her egg sac.

Current events - national, Wildlife

But i was okay in the Disney movie…

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Sadly, much of what the average person “knows” about animal behavior comes from the anthropomorphized version in animated features, and Disney is among the worst perpetrators of these things.

Truth is, animals are NOT people, and are seldom as cuddly and peaceful as they’re portrayed.

So when this happens, it’s a shock to those who’ve been fed the pablum for their whole lives. To those of us with both feet in the real world, particularly the version of the real world that exists on the banks of bayous and ponds in Southwest Louisiana, this is no surprise:

Gator drags boy into lagoon at Disney resort; Deputies search for body
2-year-old dragged into Seven Seas Lagoon at Grand Floridian
Posted: 10:36 PM, June 14, 2016
Updated: 1:31 PM, June 15, 2016

WALT DISNEY WORLD, Fla. – The search for a 2-year-old boy who was dragged by an alligator into a lagoon at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa at Walt Disney World is now a recovery effort, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said.

The alligator, estimated to be up to 7 feet long, snatched the boy around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday in a sandy waterfront area outside the hotel near the Seven Seas Lagoon on hotel property near Magic Kingdom.

Disney announced Wednesday that it has closed beaches at nine of its resorts “out of an abundance of caution.”

The boy’s family — father, mother and 4-year-old sister — are on vacation from Nebraska and arrived at the resort Sunday, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.

The toddler was wading in about a foot of water when the gator grabbed him, Demings said.

“The father actually went into the water to wrestle his son from the grips of the alligator,” Demings said.

Officials said the boy’s father suffered minor scratches on his hand, but was unsuccessful in getting his son back from the animal. Demings said the boy’s mother also went into the water, trying to find her child.

This is what alligators do. Your average gator is not particularly bright, and prey is always on his mind. Seven foot gator sees a forty-pound kid? That’s a menu item.

It’s sad that it happens, but when you put tender prey in the vicinity of predators with a few million years of ‘if it’s smaller than me, eat it’ programming in their tiny reptilian brains, this is going to happen. It’s inevitable. I saw a distraught Yankee tourist woman freaking out because one of the gators at a nearby wildlife refuge made a meal of her poodle. she was walking Fifi along a canal FILLED with real, live gators so the two of them could experience the wildlife up close. At least SHE had the sense to let go of Fifi’s leash. Besides, she was too big for any of the gators to tackle.

Wheels of Industry, Wildlife

Wild Life

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To keep things from getting too routine around the office, I ended up on a conference call about the specifications for electrical power equipment for a new station down in Florida. The call started yesterday at 1500 hrs. I had a sheaf of drawings and three specifications, Low voltage (480 volts) switchgear, low voltage motor control cnter, and medium voltage (13,200 volts) swtichgear, two people in an engineering office in Houston and one in Minnesota. We hammered things out. Took us until 2100. but we finished. Somebody’s deadline, don’t you know… It’s fun stuff for me, but all in all, I’d rather not be doing it at nine o’clock at night.

This morning I got up to drive to my station northwest of Houston to get some paperwork to close out a project and to talk with one of my cohort about training issues. While we were in the office, some body hollered “Anybody know anything about snakes?”

I have some familiarity with snakes. My brother and I collected live snakes commercially when we were in high school, so I volunteered. I was followed by several others. This is what I found.

2013-10-29 10.04.14
(Click gets you a really big version)

That’s a beautiful, healthy specimen of one of dozens of varieties of water snake. At first he was a brave little serpent, viciously striking and looking just soooo impressive. I needed to move him to the nearby pond. There’s a trick to handling these snakes: Call the bluff. I taunted him in the midst of his display of bravado and he backed down and went into defensive mode, hiding his head and neck under coils of his body. When that happens, it’s a mere matter of reaching through the coils to grasp him gently behind the head. He tossed a stinky coil around my wrist and I carried him easily to the bank of the pond and released him.

Oh, yeah… We’re those eeeevil industrial sites, right? You know, all about raping the environment and wasting the ecosystem. Well, this one little snake ended the day back on the edge of watersnake paradise, this pond.

dux
(clicky gets you bigger)

That’s the station pond. Those are Mexican, or black-bellied, whistling ducks, a completely wild flock that chooses to spend time in our little station, along with about a billion squirrels and other varied bits of fauna.

This station is far from unique in this respect. I walked out of the break room at our station in north Mississippi and saw several wild turkeys walking on the bank of their pond.

Pets, Wheels of Industry, Wildlife

Watchspider

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So Wednesday I had to got to my station in the piney woods of East Texas. We had a minor issue: the voltage on my 480-volt system was running around 505 volts or so, causing some occasional tripping of sensitive electronic devices. That’s not a difficult thing to fix. We have a little transformer that takes 24,900 volts from the utility company and drops it down to 480 volts.

All we have to do is kill that power from that transformer to the station. The station automatically starts the emergency generator, which picks up the station loads, and then we disconnect the power going TO the transformer, open it up and change the tap. These transformers are made with the ability to deal with higher or lower input voltages. By manipulating that ability, i can get my 480-volt (nominal – because it’s just silly to say what the real numbers are) system closer to what it should be.

So we open up the cabinet that houses the breakers feeding 480 volts to the facility and I find that I have acquired a watchspider. Here she is:

watchspider

Clicking will get you the embiggened version at full resolution from my iPhone.

Yeppers! Black widow. And from the detritus of discarded tiny insects, she’s been doing fairly well in the seclusion of a locked steel cabinet.

My crew noted her presence, and since she’s on the DEAD side of the cabinet, i.e., no exposed electrical parts, and she’s well away from where she might offer hazard to somebody operating the breakers, we left her there.

Oh, the transformer? We bumped it up one tap, dropped the 480-volt side to 493, a number I’m happy with, and I cautioned the guys to monitor that from time to time because the utility company’s voltage may change, as well as our own voltage when we get into a fully-loaded mode. Low voltage is a whole other set of problems.

Cajun culture, Wildlife

Sunday Stroll

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A little trip along the edge of the marsh, reconnecting with my Cajun roots.  Ran into a few old aquaintances.

Here’s a coot:

COOT

A little alligator with a big smile:

GATOR1

A heron:

HERON

A couple of examples of a wide selection of ibises:

IBISES

 

A pair of pintails:pintails

A pie-billed grebe, commonly known as a ‘helldiver’ in these parts.  Normally shy and elusive, several of them stayed on the surface of the water and let me snap pictures.

PIEBILLEDGREBE

All of these photos are clickable for really big ones, 2464×1632, except the pintails, which enlarges to 1024×768.  The camera is a Nikon D5100 with a Sigma 70-300 zoom lens, a toy that I am slowly learning to employ properly.