Solstice, and other pagan goings-on

Jad recently e-mailed me a BBC article about Stonehenge, which depicted how thousands of people stayed up through the night just to have the dramatic sunrise moment blotted out by an inopportune cloud. They should have come out to the desert instead! We've been having 100% cloud-free opportunities for pagan worship. This eclipse of Venus by the moon would have been really neat at any Druid's party (thanks, Jad, for waking me up so I could take a picture):

Also popular with the New-Age crowd is this sacred dung beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, or perhaps one of its very similar relatives like Scarabaeus semipunctatus. These sacarabs have been coming out at night on the border by the hundreds. It's hard to think of them as cool, exotic bugs anymore since I am always trying not to step on them. So far, I have seen them roll a dead gerbil on two occasions, but I haven't yet seen one with a dung ball. I did find and dig up two of their hatched nest burrows last winter, which did not even have dung ball shaped cavities. I am starting to wonder if they are mainly necrophage species around here, but I have yet to find one underneath a dead bird.

Thanks again for the great package, Noelle! Of course, with the summer solstice and all these Noelle-ish happenings, I should have guessed I would soon hear from you again.

More fun with reptiles!

This viper is the classic reptile that we see on the border at night. I am hesitant to identify it, although it looks like a close relative of the desert horned viper. This particular one is about two feet long, which isn't terribly large but still probably adult size. I also caught one about half that size. These poor vipers are the target of constant hassling by everyone from civilians to Kuwaiti and US military personnel. They are routinely being run over by trucks, beat into the ground with miscellaneous objects, captured for sale to the Scientific Center in Kuwait City, and even shot. I feel a little badly about having caught them, but they would probably be dead by now had I not snatched them up.

This little guy may not be terribly unusual, but he definitely won the "cute reptile competition." He is a gecko known in Latin as "Stenodactylus arabicus," that my turret gunner caught. He is about as long as a finger, and a fairly fast runner. I was at first surprised to find out that he wasn't able to climb walls, but then again there are no naturally ocurring smooth vertical surfaces for geckos to climb around here. Instead, they have little hands that look a lot like human hands. This gecko is the most fragile-looking of the many species of small lizards I have found around here.

And the greatest reptile I have ever found is this one: a Diplometopon zarudnyi worm lizard. I found it while looking for buried sand boas. These worm lizards burrow so close to the surface of the sand that they leave a little raised track everywhere they go. By following these tracks to their end I can just dig around the sand and pull them right up.

Worm lizards are technically known as Amphisbaenia. Amphisbaenia are legless lizards that live underground and tunnel through the substrate to find small prey (arthropods, whatever is available). I got a lot of information from the webpage http://garaje.ya.com/aligatorjazz/amphisbaenia.htm, which is great but in Spanish. This species excavates its tunnel by moving its head from side to side, unlike its relatives which have shovel-shaped noses and move their head up and down, and those that have a recurved snout and swing and turn their heads. The only species that doesn't use only its head to dig is a Mexican one that has two tiny arms near its head and uses them to get the burrow started. To deal with underground life, worm lizards have a layer of clear skin over their eyes, a layer of keratin on their forehead, and their nostrils face back.

Playing with reptiles

The three weeks since I last posted a blog entry have been entirely swallowed up by interminable hours of dreary shift work in the heat, and a move to new barracks where we just now got internet installed. The best things I have done in the past three weeks are:

- I read a few books in Spanish.
- I bought an airplane ticket to Santiago, Chile, for when this deployment is over (I am planning to be in Chile from early November until January).
- I put an eighteen inch “Dhub dhub” lizard in the commander’s desk.

“Dhub dhub” (or “Dhub,”) is the Arabic name of a sort of whiptail lizard that is extremely common around here. Its genus name, I guess, is Uromastyx sp. It is a pretty impressive lizard that is completely harmless. In fact, it lives rather like a tortoise, eating vegetation, drinking little or no water, sleeping and hibernating in burrows, living a long time and growing slowly. Rather unlike tortoise, however, Dhub lizard are very fast runners, and hard to catch. Some of us have been able to outrun them, but I haven’t caught one yet since I am not much of a sprinter. This one was caught by an undisclosed friend, and I took this picture after we fashioned a little leash for it out of parachute cord, and tied it off to my couch (yes, I have a couch!).

After dark, I managed to sneak into the commander’s area , remove some pens and supplies from his desk drawer, and replace them with the lizard. Sadly, the command post’s air conditioner is a true blast freezer, chilling the tent to a quasi-arctic 60 degrees F (it is eighty degrees F inside my room right now, and about 118 degrees F outside). This caused the lizard to go into hibernation inside the desk, so when the commander opened it the lizard didn’t leap out. The effect was still quite worth the effort – according to people who were there at the time, the commander almost fell backwards over his chair in fright. Here is another Dhub lizard – this time a baby that is being kept as a pet by a friend:

Speaking of reptiles… I think this is the Arabian sand boa Eryx jakayari. We caught it at night, in the desert. Its eyes and nostrils are located on top of its head, so it can lay buried in the sand and still be able to see and hear, like an alligator in water. Also like an alligator, it will wait for a prey to come by, and emerge at the last split second to pounce. Since it is a boa, it will then crush its prey like a constrictor, and swallow it whole. When we caught it, it got scared and coughed up a half-digested young gerbil. It is a very fast little creature that kept trying to get away from me, but after a few minutes of harassing it so I could get its picture it calmed down and I could just hold it in my hand.



As always, I have been reading the news. As you probably have heard, seen and read, there are a lot of tragic events in this region of the world and others. However, they managed to be trumped in my mind by the idiotic Fatwa of a Kuwaiti cleric.

Doctor Ezzat Attiya (yes, I am talking about a guy who has studied for many, many years) has recently put out a religious edict saying that in order for a woman to work in a place where there are men, she must breastfeed the men. Yes, that’s right! According to this highly trained genius, if a woman breastfeeds a man, he will become her son in the eyes of God, and the man will stop having sexual thoughts about her. And no, he didn’t say that breast pumps were authorized for that purpose by Allah. In my neophyte opinion, that shows precious little knowledge of the male psyche and a worryingly low opinion of his deity’s intelligence. More worrying: the guy is in effect a government employee, because his university is part of a mosque, and all Kuwaiti Sunni mosques fall under the ministry of Awqaf and Islamic affairs. It is kind of funny to ponder some problematic scenarios, such as: what about royal family women who are government ministers? What about women who cannot produce breast milk? What if a woman ends up marrying a coworker after he has been declared her son?

10.000.000.000 dollars for education in the Middle East!

The stultifyingly boring mission for which our group of motivated volunteers was pulled back out of Iraq has one upside: more time for reading. In this photo, my friend Jad is reading a book on WWII. He has been devouring magazines, and prowling my shelves for books that aren't in French or Spanish, or about birds. In just a few days I finished Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, read half of a book on prehistory which turned out to be of little interest to me, and I am working on Mario Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los Perros, which is a very difficult read for me because it is filled with Peruvian slang. All the while, I have been reading the newspaper every day, The Economist every week, and various online newspapers and blogs. I haven't read that much since I worked for a polling company on suburban buses in France almost ten years ago.

I came across an interesting article on the BBC's Spanish news website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_6673000/6673535.stm). Apparently, the Sheikh of Dubai announced at the World Economic Forum that he is giving 10 billion dollars for education in the Middle East. I was expecting to find this news on the New York Times' website, but even after searching UAE news within the Middle East section all I got was a depressing scoreboard of suicide bombings and deaths in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. The deed was not even mentioned in an article on the World Economic Forum in the Kuwait Times!

Apparently, only 40% of Arab women can read and write, Turkey publishes more books than the entire Arab world combined (thanks to Ataturk), and fewer patents and research papers come out of all Arab universities each year than out of a single company like Hewlett-Packard for example. As for the books that are published in this part of the world, the majority of them are mostly religious books that extoll stasis over progress. In my admittedly limited experience in the Middle East, I have come across many things that are simply wrong - pervasive racism, religious intolerance, illegitimate leaders, etc... Most of them are better addressed by schoolteachers and books than paratroopers and bombs. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al Makhtoum of the Emirate of Dubai is doing the right thing here, and he should be praised far and wide for it. At the very least, he should get more press coverage than suicide bombers.

I made only one really good bird observation lately: a very tame flock of black-crowned finch larks Eremopterix nigriceps landed right next to me when my camera was packed away for the move. I think they are fairly unusual around here.

Camel spiders, warblers, and a return to my old location

Camel spiders (Solifugids) are probably the most infamous animal around here. I have been told that they become huge, pursue and jump on people and camels, eat the flesh of sleeping soldiers, and so on… In fact, we see them very rarely and I don’t know anyone who was ever harmed by one. Like scorpions, they are arachnids but not spiders. This brown camel spider is one of the two species that Ian, a friend from Juneau, caught on the border. It was badly wounded when it was caught, so I was able to hold it in my hand without being harmed (its legs span about the width of my hand and two thirds of its length), and photograph it without having it always try to run underneath my camera.

This small whitish camel spider is much less stereotypical. It is a fascinatingly tough and primitive little creature with the solifugids’ typical huge chelicerae. In this photo, it is tearing apart a poor scarab that we threw at it. Its behavior seems rather easy to predict:
If we throw it an insect, it will attack.
If we put it near shade, it will run to the shade.
If we place a rock next to it, it will burrow itself under the rock by digging sand out with its legs, and periodically turning around to push the sand out like with its jaws acting like the blade of a snowplow.

As for birds, I have been seeing many problematic warblers, including this Upcher’s warbler Hippolais languida that spent hours in the shade underneath our truck in Iraq. The Upcher's warbler was completely unafraid of humans, and I had to photograph it in macro mode as if it were an insect. Other difficult warblers were: bushels of Phylloscopus warblers that I don’t even try to identify anymore, and the gray warbler below. At first I thought it was a Hippolais warbler, then a white-eye, but a thorough review of the field guide suggests that it is in fact a young barred warbler Sylvia nisoria. Just when I thought there was at least one warbler I could easily identify…

As the mission changes, so do our assignments. The latest change within the battalion means that our little group of volunteer for task force Denali has to go back to the same camp which we were assigned to before. So my address will revert to what it was a month and a half ago, and I will be back to working on the border. I will really miss the mission even though it meant we had to spend days at a time out in the desert heat, eating MREs and drinking warm water, away from everything. The greatest treat was getting to sleep out in the desert, under the stars, in almost complete darkness, knowing that scorpions, foxes, camel spiders, huge lizards and other strange creatures were all around us.

More desert animals

Just one day after I had found my first great reed warbler Acrocephalus arundinaceus, I found one in a rather unexpected birdwatching hotspot: inside the shower trailer! We have trailers here that contain about twenty showers and a dozen sinks, and they have nothing in common with the great reed warbler’s natural habitat (you guessed it: reeds!). At first I had misgivings about the wisdom grabbing a camera and starting to snap pictures in a trailer full of guys in varying states of undress, but the birding passion took over. In the end, I got a few good pictures like the one that opens this paragraphs thanks to two of the other soldiers who helped me by getting the bird close to me, and then chasing it out of the showers when I turned the light off to draw it outside. It was nighttime, and I usually get trapped birds out of our buildings simply by turning the lights off and catching them.

Up in Iraq, our truck’s shade lured all kinds of interesting birds, such as a flock of Spanish sparrows Passer hispaniolensis. Spanish sparrows are much more distinctive than I had expected them to be. I had been scrupulously scanning flocks of domestic sparrows, searching for slightly more striated ones, but the striation on the male is in fact so boldly marked that I identified them in flight. The other “new” bird I saw this past week is the desert lark Ammomanes deserti, which was a rather un-excitingly plain bird even compared to the great reed warbler. At least the great reed warbler stands out by its sheer size. The desert lark looks like a cross between the world’s most boring pipit and a non-descript finch.

The most endearing bird in the Iraqi desert so far is the hoopoe lark. Around sunrise, they start to sing a few simple melodies, which are performed during what I would call a “leap-flight.” The hoopoe larks – which have big, black and white wings and sand-colored bodies – leap and fly about two or three meters above the ground and let themselves glide right back down. The amazing thing is that they can do this leap-flight almost perfectly vertically. The effect is great at five in the morning, like dozens of tiny singing geyser spurts that gradually stop as the weather becomes unbearably hot. The shade of our trucks is also used by such birds as: feldegg and thunbergi yellow wagtails, masked shrikes, red-backed shrikes, a spotted flycatcher, rufous bush robins like the one in this picture (taken near my barracks back in Kuwait), and some redstarts.

I had a lot of fun turning over rocks and chunks of Gulf War vehicles to look for animals like this large emperor scorpion that is trying to bury itself to get away from me. I was surprised to find out that they have organs under their abdomens that look exactly like the gills on the underside of crabs. Other interesting desert animals are desert foxes, praying mantises that have a wide abdomen (and are dark, as opposed to the almost white ones in Kuwait), spiny-tailed lizards, desert monitors, hordes of migrating dragonflies, etc… We even saw a black-and-white dog, which seemed uninterested in us even though it was located a good twenty kilometers away from the nearest Bedouin camp and the temperature was already above a hundred degrees with no water or shade. One desert fox got overly interested in me while I was sleeping (I just slept in the sand), and had to be chased away by a watchful gunner who saw it and threw a water bottle at it.

Finally, there has been some controversy lately regarding soldier’s rights to post information on blogs while deployed to a war zone. The policy has not changed, and I have applied myself to abide by it. What I do is not “combat blogging,” as it is sometimes called even by the army. I try to be as vague as possible when it comes to operations, and as accurate as possible when it comes to birds and flowers. There should be no issue.

Watching the news and the birds

Over the last few days, I spent a lot of time reading the news. We have surprisingly easy access to the media here. The army provides us with a free newspaper called “Stars and Stripes” is a surprisingly objective and well-edited newspaper, which even runs most of my favorite comic strips. I also get the daily Sitka Sentinel in the mail. As for weeklies, I have a subscription to “The Economist,” and we’ll get the Army Times most weeks. The only drawback here is that I don’t have quite as easy access to the internet, which means I haven’t been reading the news in Spanish. And finally, there are televisions in the chow halls that are set to CNN and Fox News. I have been very disappointed by both channels, since they have very little news coverage. A few days ago, Fox News distinguished itself by cutting off mid-sentence a presidential speech about Iraq, to interview the editor of a tabloid about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby! A less obvious Fox News strategy to avoid covering the real news is to instead run long specials on how the New York Times and rival TV channel pundits are biased, unreliable and incompetent. They also have long “news” specials about the show “American Idol,” which is of course produced by Fox. As for CNN, the European version we get here is very much a “rich white businessman’s channel,” with long analyses of golf competitions, interviews of fashion world personalities, advertisements for investment funds and expensive vacations, etc… If I sit for lunch in front of the CNN television, my odds of getting to watch the news are pretty low, but my odds of being told about mergers and advertised luxury products are pretty high.

As for my little ongoing adventure in Kuwait, I ran my first 5 kilometer race in over a month (in 18:01, which is good for me running on gravel), and I saw two birds that I hadn’t ever seen before: a barred warbler Sylvia nisoria (it is the grey bird at the beginning of the paragraph, with grey underside striation much like on a sparrowhawk), and a great reed warbler Acrocephalus arundinaceus. The great reed warbler was so large that when I first saw it I didn’t recognize it as a warbler. It landed next to the male rock thrush in the photograph at the end of this paragraph, and I thought: “weird, I didn’t know that the female rock thrush was plain brown.” Then I realized it was in fact a gigantic reed warbler and I snapped a picture of it. Had I not taken the picture, I wouldn’t have been able to eliminate the possibility of a clamorous reed warbler. I guess the main field identification difference between the two species is the length of the projection of the primary flight feathers, which is fortunately just barely visible enough on my photograph.