Five Things #22

Fauna Florida’s black bear (Ursus americanus floridanus) is a subspecies (one of sixteen) of the American black bear (Ursus americanus) and one that’s mostly found in Florida. The bears above are American black bear cubs who were rescued after losing their mother.

Black bears tend to eat way more plants than most people expect (Florida black bears eat about 80% plants, 15% insects, and about 5% meat, often carrion). They like saw palmetto berries when they’re in season.

They’re also pretty mellow unless they’re feeling harassed or threatened. Most people have encounters with them because they moved into a new development that stole the bears’ home or they go camping and don’t utilize a bear box or hard-sided car to store their food. Even if you’re leaving food out, though, you’re more likely to lose your breakfast to racoons than bears. Black bears that aren’t habituated to people tend to hear us and go the other way. The problem, though, is with the loss of so much habitat, more and more bears are becoming used to people because of proximity.

Moral of the story: Don’t feed the bears. Don’t steal their home. Don’t take their saw palmetto berries. Do enjoy how cute they are.

Fauna Resurrection ferns (Pleopeltis polypodioides) are very well named because they can lose 75-97% of their water during dry seasons and drought and still spring back to luscious green life as soon as a hard rain falls. Most plants can’t survive losing even 9% of their water and even “hardy” plants can rarely live after losing 12%. Since they’re epiphytes, you’ll usually find them growing along the limbs of trees, especially oaks. That last link also mentions a fun little experiment you can do with kids if you live in an area with resurrection ferns.

Books This week’s books include I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney, which wasn’t as funny (to me) as other reviewers found it. Frankly, I found the narrator a little whiny, but that might have just been because I was listening to the audiobook while I ran 3000 errands or so. Maybe it’s better on paper.

I also listened to Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison, III. It always fascinates me when people write so passionately about pop culture, especially TV shows because it’s been years since I kept up with any. I do appreciate his love for and analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though. I loved that one back in the day and was so annoyed when it moved to UPN because our cable company didn’t carry it the first season after the move. By then, I’d moved on to other things, so in my head, the show ended with the main character leaping to her death. It took me until streaming came around to finally watch the final seasons. Her moping around at being dragged from the dead didn’t hit quite the same in my thirties.

Art Local artist Stephanie Leyden used to run a gallery called Art Attack and she still hosts Art Brawls sometimes. Her paintings are very colorful and we have a few prints in my husband’s office. She also does custom animal portraits if you need to immortalize your favorite floof. It’s too bad the city’s gentrification swallowed the arts district and shat out boring condos because this lady and her cohort of artists were a force in Mass District for awhile

Wild Card One of our cats is an “iPad kid.” She started playing cat games on my phone and the iPad when she was very young because she had surgery to heal a broken leg and she couldn’t run around and jump like her little sister. She has since taught Kiki how to “iPad” with cat games on the big TV. I’ll add a video below.

Kiki came to live with us because I “traded a turtle for her.” This is not entirely accurate as I did not own the turtle and it isn’t like I intentionally handed over one for the other, but it’s become the running joke.

I work at an attraction that’s full of plants and animals and we do outreach with school kids, often involving the world’s angriest box turtle. (This is where you wonder why I’d take a furious box turtle to meet kindergarteners and that’s a fair question, but since he has no fear, he wiggles all his little body parts so the kids can see them instead of hiding in his shell and waiting to be left alone. Also, since someone kept him in a tank of water for a decade and it left him deformed, he’s also a good way of explaining that box turtles can swim, but they’re primarily terrestrial—like kids.) Thus, I was returning said the cunty little menace when a couple of animal care staff lured me into their lair with promises of seeing a kitty.

Now, we are not a cat sanctuary, but people will sometimes toss cats over the fence in the night which has led to a burgeoning feral colony. Some of these cats are decidedly not friendly. Others of these cats are clearly someone’s pet that was suddenly deemed too much trouble.

Kiki (she had about six other names before I decided she looked like the cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service and decide “Kiki cat” was more fun to say than Jiji) was one of the latter. No one had fixed her and decided to dump her when she got knocked up. My coworkers got her a kitty abortion (because if you work at any kind of animal rescue you know that cats and dogs do not need to be breeding because shelters are overflowing, especially during economic downturns) and spayed.

“We’re trying to find a home for her because she’s too sweet to put back outside.”

While this was a true statement, it’s also true I did not need more cats. As mentioned in Five Things 21, cats around the neighborhood already know to come here. I sent a picture of her to my husband, which he responded to the way ovulating women in sitcoms respond to infants so we zip-tied her into a carrier (so she couldn’t escape in my window-less Jeep) and that was that.

(My coworkers joked that I wasn’t allowed near animal care again, but that only lasted until someone needed to dig the naughty turtle out of the mud.)

Want to help feed all these rescues? Buy me a “coffee.”