Suburban Zooarcheology

I came home yesterday evening to find my brother had lopped off more than a dozen fronds from the pineapple palm out front. It is now possible for a full-size adult human to walk around the tree without ducking. (He did a similar chop job with the orange tree by the driveway last week that went even further. I'm not sure whether he got carried away with the pruning or he was cutting it down and just stopped part way through. See: Redneck Studies: The 70% Complete Solution.)

There's a good view of those nasty spikes

I discovered two things as I gathered up the fronds and placed them by the side of the road for trash pick up.*

First: Pineapple palm fronds have long, thin, spiky and incredibly sharp stiletto-like leaves at their base which are quite capable of stabbing one in the hand, thigh, calf or anywhere else that gets too close and they will draw blood.

Second (and less painful but much more interesting): A 'possum up and died under the pineapple palm. I found parts of its disarticulated skeleton pressed into the ground. I have the skull, both halves of the mandible, both femurs, and several vertabrae (probably lumbar, but I can't be sure without others to compare them with). No ribs, no tail bones, no other leg or foot bones although I may just have missed them since they would be very small and it was getting dark.

The bones I do have are in perfect condition. No breakage, no scratches, no teeth missing. And clean. The animal must have died a while ago because there was no soft matter anywhere. (There was the very faintest odor which was sufficient to intrigue Paribanour when I went inside and presented my hands to her but it was faint enough that the other cats were totally uninterested.) skullsunlimited.com is asking $50 for just a skull (of course) and mine is every bit as good and I have the other bits, too.

These are from washington.edu and not mine, but mine look just like this

They're all laid out right now on a fertilizer bag by the front door until I can find a proper way to display them. Some sort of shadow box or something. In the meantime, I'll go back out under the tree and see if I can find any more pieces.

UPDATE: I went back out last evening while it was still light and found the pelvis, more long bones (not sure which), some more vertabrae including tail bones, and several ribs. Still haven't seen any of the very small foot bones.

* We get three trucks coming through on trash day. One automated truck for recyclables in their designated container, another automated truck for non-recyclables in their separate container, and one truck with humans attached picking up "yard waste," basically anything plantish larger than lawn clippings that used to be growing on the property.

Infills, Outtakes and a Successful Tantrum

They laid in the metal guide rails for the sidewalk concrete this morning.

They started to do it yesterday but my brother chased them away (I was out at the time) when they called in a private tree trimming service (which contracts to the city) to butcher the live oak. Despite being able to run the loader/grader last week without any interference from the tree, somebody decided it was suddenly in the way and ordered it cut back. The ASPLUNDH clowns managed to take one major branch down before my brother knew they were there. They cut it off a good 20 feet back from the path of the proposed sidewalk and were getting ready to hack off another, higher, one (and therefore less in the way, even theoretically) when he stopped them.

They claimed they had to cut it back to the power pole line but had no answer when my brother demanded to know why they hadn't, therefor, touched the palm tree that fairly abuts the sidewalk right-of-way. He told them they were full of shit and that he was going to file a complaint. All of them, tree butchers and sidewalk layers alike, were packed up and gone in the time it took him to go into the house, get his phone and come back outside.

This morning, 7 a.m., the sidewalk guys were back, laying out the guide rails, snapping them together end-to-end, spiking them into place and leveling them. And very carefully not stepping off the right-of-way onto our property.

When they were done, a guy with a mini-front loader came down and began hauling dirt from a pile they had deposited in the vacant field across the street. The rigid and straightened rails didn't always touch the ground and there were gaps and low points all along the way that needed to be topped up or else the concrete would (slowly) flow all over the place. It took about ten trips and, for the record, the loader never left the street pavement, except for one pass, after all the dirt was deposited, in order to level out the fill inside the rails. It looks nice.

We sincerely hope this bunch passes on the warning to the crew that comes next to pour the concrete.

Meanwhile, they've moved across our road and started to scrape Neighbor Mike's place.

The Great Leap Forward

Boy, howdy, was I sure wrong about that!

Our sidewalk construction took a quantum leap forward this week. The warning sawhorses suddenly appeared all the way down the road past us just before the weekend, although I still couldn't see any other signs of actual work on the horizon. Someone did stack a load of paving tiles by a driveway made of paving tiles (again, also past our street) in preparation for altering that home's access approach. But that was it.

Today, I woke up to find the verge along our property already scraped. The scraping does not yet cross the street onto Neighbor Dan's property and should not be confused with either the leveling necessary or the trench that will hold the concrete forms. This is just a ripping of the sod in anticipation of leveling and trenching and is necessary because the crab grass and Mexican clover, among other things, form long, tough tendrils that snake across the ground. That's a strip we'll never have to mow again, although we'll have to see how much green they leave on the street side of the sidewalk. And it looks as if they're going to be able to work around the pineapple palm at the corner of our property. (For some strange reason, there is a pineapple palm almost exactly at each of the corners of our territory and, yet, no one has ever admitted to planting any of them.)

At least some of the machinery has moved in, as well. I'm not sure what they used for a scraper since it was all done before 8 a.m. and I neither saw nor heard them while they were at it. There's a backhoe just up the road, now, but that may be the trencher and, in any event, has not been used since I've been watching. There are also a couple of pieces of heavy equipment parked in the open field across the road. I can see personal trucks used by the workers to get to and from the job site parked in the median way back up the road but no people are in evidence anywhere.

It's amazing how much can get done with nobody around.

Accidental Home Remodelling

My brother was out whacking weeds the other day and apparently uncovered the rabbit's home. There's a small hole under the pineapple palm (so named because it resembles an overgrown pineapple sitting by the driveway). There're some tufts of grayish fur at the entrance and, if you poke gently at the opening, something pushes back. Our supposition is little bunnies but we haven't seen them directly, yet. My brother recovered the hole with some whacked weeds to try to maintain the camouflage. We'll see if it works.