Lucy's Love Bus

Kat & Courtney carry baskets of butterflies

Butterflies fly free!

Danaus plexippus

Butterfly traveler taking a break

Daktari has not taken any trips lately, and his blog has been on summer vacation, too.

However, that doesn’t mean nobody from Amesbury has been traveling this summer.

On Sunday September 12th some 1200 Monarch butterflies took off from Amesbury's Woodsom Farm headed south. Their final destination – Mexico. My friend Kat and her daughter Courtney were butterfly wranglers for the event so I got some excellent blog photos of these itinerant lepidopterae and their keepers.

Monarch’s are colorful orange and black butterflies which live on common milkweed and migrate South to Mexico in the winter. No single individual can fly all the way. It takes 3 or 4 generations for them to complete the migration. The grandchildren of the butterflies we released in Amesbury will hopefully arrive at the buttefly trees in Michoacan in December or January.

The butterfly release was a fundraiser for Lucy’s Love Bus (www.LucysLoveBus.org). an organization named for Lucy Grogan. Lucy was an Amesbury elementary school student who died in 2004 from complications of a bone marrow transplant for acute myelogenous leukemia.

Friends of Lucy are now students in Amesbury High School and they are helping Lucy’s mom, Beecher, raise money so that other kids with cancer can have integrative therapies like massage, Reiki, acupuncture, etc for comfort and control of their symptoms and side effects. Most of these services are not covered by insurance and they are not free.

You can help too! As you read this blog, please take out your cell-phone and text 102459 to Pepsi (73774). That will register one vote for Lucy’s Love Bus. Text every day from now until September 30th. If Lucy’s is in the top 10 vote-getters on Oct 1, then Beecher and her teen leaders will receive a $50,000 grant from PepsiCola to help kids with cancer.

You can also vote on-line at http://www.refresheverything.com/lovebus .
In fact, you can do both – vote on-line and then text also. That’s two votes per day for Lucy and her friends! The dream lives on.

DAKTARI

Retired MD Changes Lightbulb in Record Time

BEATING THE HEAT

CLINGING TO THE WILD SNAPPER

CASTOR CANADENSIS

RELAXING POOLSIDE

ANACONDA!

How many retired doctors does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one but you have to wait at least a month for an appointment.
This is no joke - it is literally true. But that as they say is another story.

Daktari has been on permanent recess for two months now and loving every minute of it.
After entertaining Grandma Gerry and completing a road-trip with Rena to Maine and Cape Cod, I’ve settled down at home to enjoy my best summer ever.

New England summers vary tremendously but this one is spectacular -- early, hot, and a helluva lot of sun with hardly any rain. The yard is browned up nicely so I haven’t had to clamber aboard The Snapper - my adolescent (17 year old) ride-on (or should I say hang-on) lawn decimator - very often. The swimming pool is percolating cheerfully at 34.3 degrees C this morning. (Normal body temp being a mere 2.7 degrees higher!) I water my veggie garden daily and it surprises me with pods and pods of, can you believe this? Okra! It’s so hot that I’m even starting to talk with a Southern accent - y’all.

This week I have a new visitor in my back yard - a.k.a. Lake Gardener. I’m out early one morning doing Qi Gong exercises wearing only my pirate boxers when a large-headed water mammal comes swimming up to the dock. I stare silently at his/her head and she stares back. She calmly munches a yellow water lily. I slowly and quietly gong some more Qi. She/he seems to enjoy just watching me as I gather up balls of Qi and pass them through my belly button. I’m moving sooo slowly but a sudden creak of the wood under my feet raises the alarm and whap -- a large beaver-ly tail slaps the water at least 3 feet behind the submerging head of my backyard visitor. This causes me to jump back about 3 feet myself - an equal and opposite reaction. The darned thing is big. Beavers are BIG rodents!

I may have to paddle upstream sometime and try to locate Beaver’s lodge. It may take a little longer than changing a light bulb. But so what? I have all the time in the world. My neighbor Bruce is an amateur naturalist, too. Maybe we’ll go together. (You may remember Bruce from our Christmas Coyote hunt and a more recent stargazing experience during a fly-over by alien spacecraft.

Bruce has enlisted me in a new scientific endeavor - sampling Lake Gardner for nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen content, pathogenic bacteria and pollutants. It’s another mad-scientist adventure funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Lots of plastic containers, thermometers, pH meters, weights, calibrated poles, ropes and trekking through the swamps looking for storm drains. I surely do enjoy mucking around in the name of science! It reminds me of my hail-chasing days at NCAR. Plus it gives me something legit to tell those skeptics who believe my post-retirement schedule is composed of: a.) absolutely nothing, b.) whatever I feel like c.) some variation of ‘up to no good’ or d.) all of the above.

Here is yet another weird science encounter of the too close kind:
Lucky for me, it turned out to be a false alarm.

On Tuesday, my friend Kat and I are walking toward Lake Gardner dam for a Mono-fin practice session. Suddenly I spy what looks to be a very large serpent between the forest edge and the footpath to the town beach. There, on the very brink of the town swimming-hole, is what appears to be a 40-foot orange and black striped python. And young Kat is an ophidiophobe of the first water!

“Don’t look now,” I exclaim, whipping off my cheap Walmart sunglasses to get a closer look. “Do you see what I see?”

This time, we both give a Newtonian leap backward of at least three feet!

However, after the initial startle response, it turns out that Amesbury’s answer to Anaconda is merely a cleverly disguised straw barrier to protect the local lagoon from runoff from a recently constructed walkway. But boy, did it give Kat and me a start! If we had beaver tails instead of Mono-fins the other beach-goers would have been treated to two very large Whaps of alarm.

Which all goes to prove that you don’t have to go far to have unusual adventures and/or mad science experiences, at least on this planet. Be it ever so humble there’s no place like Earth.
“What is the good of having a nice home without a decent planet to put it on?” - Henry David Thoreau. I say, Amen to that.

DAKTARI
(P.S. Any readers with a good gumbo recipe using homegrown okra please forward to Daktari!)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN - Oct 31, 2008

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM MONKEY SOPHIE

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM NURSE LINDA AND DAKTARI

Coyotes at Christmas - December 25, 2007

"The strength of the wolf is in the pack." - Rudyard Kipling

"And the strength of the coyote is in the cocoa." - Daktari Mark

Calling the Coyotes for Christmas – December 25, 2007

It’s been a typical Jewish Christmas in Amesbury. The Powow River is frozen solid and the hills snow-covered. Rena and I go skating on the river in the morning and then off to see Juno, the movie, with our friends Carol and Katie. Very good flick! Afterwards we try a new Chinese restaurant in Topsfield. We have the restaurant all to ourselves! There aren’t many Jews in Topsfield, it seems.

Back at home Rena settles in with her crocheting to watch the Country Music Channel. “Where’s the adventure in that?” I think to myself. The nearly full moon rises over the white fields and sparkles off Lake Gardner. “Ah,” I think. “The Call of the Wild.”

I phone my good neighbor, Bruce. “Looks like a good night for an adventure. What do you think?”

“I’m way cool with that,” says Bruce. “Whazzup?”
(Bruce works from home. Too much jazz on the internet has affected his speech.)

I explain to Bruce that I was at the Whistling Kettle yesterday and Dean the pool guy was there. He was taking a break from snow-plowing. The breakfast conversation turned to coyotes. Dean claims the best way to find coyotes is to go out in the boonies and set off your car alarm for one minute. When you shut it off, all the coyotes for miles around will be howling. Then drive to where you think they are and repeat the process as necessary until you locate the pack.

“Count me in,” says Bruce.

We assemble at Bruce’s house. Bruce, Bruce’s son Luke and myself with the two dogs Panna and Brixton and our respective collections of coyote gear. I carry the binoculars and wear the official decoy hat. Bruce has a stout cudgel, rope, flashlight and camera. Luke thinks we are way over the top and settles for dog leashes and a Petzl with red filter for night vision. We are ready for whole packs of coyotes. If this were Transylvania, we could probably even take on werewolves or charge Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. But that, as they say, is another story.

We get in Bruce’s 4-WD Cherokee (the only vehicle with an alarm) and head out. Our ears are pricked and our tails (for those who have them) are wagging. As we head east on S. Hampton Road we pass a darkened cruiser parked at Syvinski’s farm, trolling for speeders and scoff-laws. Collectively we entertain the same thought at the same time: If coyotes can hear the car alarm, then so can Officer Krupke!
”What would you call our crime exactly,” asks Bruce.
“How about disturbing the peace on Christmas night,” I opine.
“Groovy,” says Bruce. On the way to Battis farm we rehearse our cover story:
“OK, when I went to unlock the car I pushed the panic button by mistake and the keys fell in the snow. We all had to hunt through the snow to find the keys,” says Bruce.
“Groovy,” I reply.
“Incidently, Mark, you should ditch the wolf hat, if we see the cruiser,” says Luke.
“Even Officer Krupke might tumble to that one!” I agree.

We stop the car and get out. Clear and cold with no wind at all and not another car in sight.
“Plunk your magic twanger, froggy.” Boiing-oing-oing.
Bruce presses the panic button for as long as he dares. In the dead silence that follows, we hear nary a coyote. We try again with a longer blast of the alarm.

“Maybe, it’s the wrong type of alarm,” I say. “Let’s go see if Officer Krupke will let us use his siren.”
I am outvoted 2 to 1. It would be better, we decide, to beard the wild coyote in her den.

We start hiking up Po Hill – at 331 feet above sea-level it’s the tallest hill in Amesbury. We tramp through the packed snow to the top. What a marvelous panorama – the great sweep of Atlantic shore from Cape Ann in the South to Mt. Agamenticus in the North. 'All is calm, all is bright.' Not one coyote yip intrudes on our silent night The stars in the sky look down where we lay, resting for the return tramp through the woods. The moon, herself, lights our way back to Bruce’s for a Rob Roy. Exertion and alcohol commingle nicely. Peaceful and pooped after a long day, I too will be soon be 'away in the manger asleep in the hay'. Peace on earth, goodwill to men -- and good night Officer Krupke, wherever you are!