Author Archives: Mark P

Impatient Opossums

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As I mentioned earlier, Nature decorated the Chrispersimmon trees at the front corner of our property. The decorations go on early, and we usually just leave them up until Nature takes it course.

Zeke has been extraordinarily interested in the two little trees for several days. Every time we go out for a little walk around the house, he sniffs excitedly around the base and sometimes stands up to reach as far into the tree as he can. I shine the flashlight up into the tree, but I can’t see anything different.

Christmas night I found out what was going on.

The decorated Chrispersimmon Tree, Christmas night

The decorated Chrispersimmon Tree, Christmas night.

The possum decided to take down the Christmas decorations. He’s way up there.

Is he grinning?

Is he grinning?

Possums are just unsentimental, and impatient to boot.

‘Twas the night before Christmas

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and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a …

Hey, Zeke, come on, you know Santa will never come if you stay up looking for him.

Zeke, get away from the door

Go on, Zeke, go to bed and go to sleep.

zeke in bedGood dog. Hey, Chloe and Zoe, you heard what I told Zeke!

chloe and zoe at the doorEveryone go to bed, right now!

That’s right, Lucy, good dog.

lucy in bedYou, too, Sylvester, good kitty.

sly kind of asleep

Come on, now, Smokey, you  aren’t fooling anyone.

smokey faking itLook, even Zoe is asleep.

zoe asleepOK, I think everyone is in bed.

And soon, we’ll be visited by that right jolly old elf …

st dogolas

St. Dogolas!

And so, from Leah, Mark, Zeke, Zoe, Chloe, Sylvester

happy christmas

and to all a good night!

Screech Owls

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We have two or three kinds of owls on the mountain. I have heard the barred owl and the screech owl, and possibly the great horned owl. Until recently we have seen only one of the larger owls, and then only a fleeting glimpse as it flew across the road and it was illuminated by our headlights*. And then over the last couple of weeks I have seen screech owls three times. Unfortunately, on two of those occasions they were dead.

Here is one I found lying along Fouche Gap Road last Tuesday, Dec. 17. I am not positive of the identification, but based on what I have read, it’s the only native Georgia owl that’s as small as this one was. Both were lying on their backs and I didn’t turn them over to get a better look. The size of this one was consistent with the eight inches given by several sites, although it might have been slightly smaller than that.

Dead owl, Fouche Gap Road

Dead owl, Fouche Gap Road

I made the shot with my iPhone. It’s overexposed, and all the detail in the lighter areas was completely blown out.

The first one I saw was also lying along Fouche Gap Road on the opposite side of the mountain. Their bodies were apparently scavenged quite quickly, so I assume both of them had been hit by cars the previous night.

It bothers me to see any animal that has been hit by a car, but these exquisite little owls were really sad.

The third screech owl was alive. I saw it some time between the two dead owls. I was taking the dogs on their last walk of the night. We were crossing the leach field that’s on the downhill side of the house. It’s surrounded by woods. Zeke had stopped and was watching something intently. It was so dark that all I could see was a vague outline that appeared to have some lighter spots. I assumed that it was Chloe, although I have never seen her in that location. When I turned on my flashlight I realized it was a bird.

Zeke was staring at it from about six feet away. The owl was staring back. I was afraid Zeke was going to charge it, so I pulled him back. At that point the bird flew away into the woods.

It was an odd confrontation. I wonder why the owl didn’t fly immediately. Maybe it had caught some small animal and didn’t want to leave it.

* Which reminds me of another time I saw an owl. It was in 1977. I was living at Lake Tahoe, and Leah’s brother Dan rode his motorcycle out to visit. We took our bikes on a long loop up to Washington and across to North Dakota. We had ridden into the night and pulled over some place in North Dakota to check a map or something. When we pulled back out onto the two-lane highway we were on, a huge white owl appeared just ahead and above my motorcycle, just at the edge of the headlight beam. It accelerated with me for a while and then eventually flew away. It was one of the eeriest and coolest things I have ever seen on the road.

 

He ain’t nothing but a hound dog

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Zeke was one sorry dog Monday night.

Not feeling so well, eh?

Not feeling so well, eh?

Late in the afternoon he went out on the deck with me, and saw/heard/smelled something in the woods. So he ran down the stairs, jumped over the gate and disappeared. I gave him a while, because I know from experience that it’s almost impossible to chase him down, and then I went looking for him. No luck. It was way after sunset when I got the car out and began looking up and down Fouche Gap Road. Zeke doesn’t really understand cars, so I was halfway expecting to come home with bad news. Instead I came home with Zeke.

I found him at the side of the road close to the house. I opened the back door and he jumped in. When I got him back home, I noticed that his stomach was absolutely full.

Full belly peeking out from beneath uncomfortable dog

Full belly peeking out from beneath uncomfortable dog

That bulge right in front of his right rear leg is not normal for him, at least not since he lost 15 pounds. What looks like a bulge on his left side is his rib cage, which is prominent because of the way he’s lying.

He was clearly uncomfortable. He moaned and walked around the house. He would lie down next to the front door, which usually means he wants to go outside. I took him out but nothing happened at either end of the dog. Some time before we went to bed, he wanted to go out and sit on our elevated front walk. There he threw up what looked like a couple of pieces of raw stew beef and organ meat, possibly smallish livers.

I cleaned that up and let him back inside. A little while later when we were in the bedroom, he started making the noise that dogs do when they’re getting ready to vomit. I couldn’t get him outside, but at least he threw up on the tile in the dining room instead of the bedroom carpet. It looked pretty similar to the earlier sample, but without livers and with more fat.

Later still (I didn’t get much sleep Monday night), he went out on the front walk again, where he vomited a larger portion of whatever he ate. It still looked like he had found and eaten someone’s stew beef.

Even later, he wanted to go out, so I got up from the bed, put on a jacket and walked him around the house. I didn’t bother to put pants on over my short pajama bottoms. I don’t recommend that. Zeke didn’t do anything other than sniff the air. Looking for more raw meat, I guess.

I am pretty sure he didn’t catch and eat an animal, because there was no sign of fur or bones. All that came out, other than the possible organ meat, looked like fresh, red beef that you might see in the grocery store. I started worrying about someone trying to poison coyotes, but it had been long enough since he ate that, at least based on some Web research, he should have already started showing signs of strychnine poisoning. Whatever it was, he apparently got rid of enough of it that he was able to sleep for most of the night, which is more than I can say for myself.

Today for breakfast he got a few individual pieces of dog food instead of his normal portion. By lunch he seemed more like his old self, and by tonight he seemed almost recovered, although he didn’t eat the two dog biscuits he normally does. He mouthed one unenthusiastically for a while, and then Leah picked up the second and put it away. Right now, he is still lying next to the front door instead of in his bed.

I don’t think he’s quite over it yet. I would like to think he learned a lesson, but that would be fooling myself.

Good luck with that

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Here in Georgia, it’s almost impossible to avoid regular news reports of how much money the MegaMillions lottery is worth, and with the jackpot at over a half a billion dollars, it’s even worse than usual. It’s like they’re conspirators with the lottery organization, trying to drum up more business. If that’s not bad enough, most of the reports have been full of stupid probability comparisons.

According to the back of the play ticket, the current probability of winning the MegaMillions jackpot is one in 258,890,850, usually shortened to one in 259 million. (You can calculate it yourself. Here it is: 75*74*73*72*71*15/(5*4*3*2). If you want, you can express it this way: 75!*15/(5!*70!) where “!” is the factorial notation.) Lately the news reports have been adding that you are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than win the lottery.

Is that true? I decided to look into it. There are a number of Web sites that indicate that it’s true. For example, Wired says the odds of being hit by an asteroid are one in 250,000 (They should really express odds as 1:249,999, which is one chance in 250,000, but that’s way too abstruse.) But Wired provides nothing to back up that probability.

The Economist quotes the chance of an asteroid impact of 78,817,414/1 (the apparent source is the National Safety Council; National Academies in Britain, presumably, and also presumably an impact that results in one’s death). So maybe that’s a good number.

On the other hand, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab should have a pretty decent idea about the probabilities of an asteroid hitting the Earth. According to their Web site, although the Earth has been hit by quite a few large asteroids (Apparently a body smaller than one kilometer would be a meteorite if it hit the Earth. A larger one would be considered an asteroid. But that’s way too abstruse.), “no human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite or the effects of one impacting.” They note that there are ancient Chinese records of such a death. The say that as best they can tell, there is no large asteroid (the kind that causes widespread destruction and mass deaths) that is likely to strike the Earth in the next several hundred years. That seems to imply probabilities far, far lower than winning the jackpot, at least when calculated over reasonable time spans, like a human lifetime.

The requirement for calculating over a reasonable period brings up another point. I’ve been trying to decide whether the comparison between the probabilities is right or wrong, but I think the asteroid comparison is not just wrong, it’s worse than wrong. It’s actually meaningless. The lottery is a single event, one that takes place once at a specific time, and so the probability applies only for the event. The probability that I will win the lottery before the drawing is zero. So is the probability that I will win after the drawing. But the probability of being hit by an asteroid can only be specified over a period of time. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next second is vanishingly small. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next 20 years is also small, but different. So saying that the probability of being hit by an asteroid is larger than the probability of winning the lottery is meaningless unless a time period is specified. But, for the news media, that’s way too abstruse.

Even if you grant that they actually mean that the probability of being hit by an asteroid over the remainder of your lifetime is greater than winning the next lottery, they’re still wrong. I think you can get a pretty good idea of that from a purely intuitive sense. Consider that the population of the United States is about 314 million. To my knowledge, no one has been killed by a meteorite this year, or last, or the one previous to that, for as long as I can remember. The population of the Earth is about 7 billion, and still, according to the JPL, no one has been reported to have been killed by an asteroid within the last 1000 years. If the probability is greater than the lottery probability, I am pretty sure there would have been reliable reports by now. And since there have been none, I am pretty sure the probabilities are not as great as the news reports are saying.

But still, the probability of winning the lottery is very small. It’s so small that it’s hard to come up with a comparison that has makes any intuitive sense. I always say that your chance of winning the lottery is essentially the same whether you buy a lottery ticket or not. Of course, that’s not really true. But it might as well be.

Admission:

Despite the irrationality of playing a gambling game with odds so absurdly skewed towards the house, Leah and I do buy lottery tickets, and have since we started dating. My mother played the lottery even before that and for a long time I refused to buy her tickets for her. I thought it was just a waste of money. We recognize that it’s basically a tax on the mathematically illiterate, but we explain it on the same basis as a lot of people – it lets us fantasize for a while about what we would do if we won. I’ll let you know how it turns out.