PREDATOR WARNOFF: A device that transmits a signal interpreted by the brain as “I’m harmless, but I’ll make you sick if you try to eat me or otherwise attack me.” Very useful against predators with a central nervous system, and even helpful against biting insects if a high enough intensity is used.
Tag Archive: creatures
WARNOFF: Generic term for any device that prevents a potential enemy from approaching. Two examples are predator warnoffs and plantary warnoffs.
JEWELS (TINERAL VARIETY): Tinerals with solid-colored, usually brilliant feathers. They are the friendliest and most spectacular variety, but not the best singers. (All tinerals are good singers; the jewels and skies just aren’t quite as good as the natures.)
Here in Interior Alaska, moose are a fact of life. You drive with one eye out for moose—they are big enough and leggy enough that if you hit one, there is a very good chance it will come through the windshield and kill you. Not that the moose—or the car—will be in much better shape.
They love anything in the cabbage family—cabbage, broccoli, turnips, cauliflower—and they aren’t content with eating the occasional plant top. They will go down a row and take one bite out of every head of cabbage, for instance. Small decorative trees have to be protected in the winter, when moose are living on twigs and dormant buds. Fences are merely a nuisance—they used to step right over the 5’ woven wire fence around my property, especially in winter.
They can be dangerous—moose have trampled people to death. I’ve never actually been attacked, but my dogs have scared me silly a time or two. The Shelties used to be quite certain they could run off a moose, and Dot, my Border Collie, was totally confident she could herd one. Unfortunately moose don’t agree. As far as they are concerned, dogs are wolves, and they’ve had to fight wolves to survive for generations. They’re very good at it—much better than the dogs are at dodging moose hooves.
They do disappear during hunting season.
On the whole, I enjoy having moose around. I will grab the camera and take pictures if they come into the yard or are browsing just outside the fence, and I pause to watch them—warily—if I happen to see one near the highway, though I don’t try to take pictures when I’m driving. I do worry a bit about them when I’m riding my tricycle, even though the bike path I use is right beside a road. But my biggest moose scare involved one of the dogs, specifically, Dot.
Dot was already trained to herd when I got her. She taught me a lot about the sport, and I showed her at ranch dog level at both the Tanana Valley and Anchorage Fairs. We also attended the Aussie Fling in Anchorage a few times, and she got her Advanced Trial Dog title on ducks and her Open titles on sheep and cattle. (As to how she got the title on sheep, you’re welcome to pop over to http://bowlingsite.mcf.com/Border/Dot.html.) Suffice it to say that she did not always obey my “that’ll do,” which means “Stop herding and come back to me.” She was, however, reliable enough that I had no problem walking the tenth of a mile to get the mail with her loose at my side.
We were returning from the mailbox, almost to my driveway, when Dot suddenly alerted and went into her Border Collie crouch. I glanced idly across my front yard, and froze. Dot was already starting her outrun, but it wasn’t a sheep in the yard. It was a moose. A large moose, with a very small calf at its side. Moose are dangerous to wolves—and dogs—at the best of times. A mother moose protecting her calf…
Dot’s intentions were clear. She was bred to bring sheep to her handler, and she obviously had every intention of bringing this moose to me. The moose, just as clearly, considered Dot a wolf that was after her calf. The huge ears went down, the hair on the neck stood up, and I knew she wasn’t going to be content with just killing my dog.
“Dot,” I screamed as I speeded up my walk down the driveway toward the house door, “that’ll do.”
I don’t know whether Dot was in an exceptionally cooperative mood or whether she’d noticed that this was larger than any sheep of her experience, but she obeyed more promptly than at any trial we’d ever attended. I grabbed her collar and we both retreated indoors–fast. The moose didn’t hang around long—no doubt she was looking for a place without wolves.
I’ve seen plenty of moose since. I grow my broccoli in pots in the old dog runs, behind 6’ chain link. I don’t think it would stop a really determined moose, but there are plenty of other things to eat during gardening season. Besides, moose are fun to watch—as long as you don’t get in their way!
| Real planets come in all sizes, geographies, climates, geologies, and probably ecologies. They circle a wide variety of stars. But they do all follow certain physical laws, and these laws constrain how the various aspects of a planet work together. Orbital mechanics and the physics of how stars work do provide some limits. In inventing a planet, you need first to consider what you require of that planet. Is it to be a carefully chosen object for colonization by human beings? The site of an accidental colonization? An uninhabitable world with something worth exploiting? The home of a non-human and totally alien species? A base for scientific exploration?
For Homecoming I invented three planets. Two are intended to be fully livable, Earthlike planets, the results of long-ago modification. Both circle sun-like stars and have climates, year lengths, day lengths and axial inclinations similar to Earth’s. The ecology of Central is assumed to be a mixture of species imported from Earth and the home planet of the R’il’nai, and differences from Earth ecology are unimportant for this story, though they do exist. That of Riya is a combination of a native ecology with that from R’il’n. In the native Riyan ecology, land animals with internal skeletons have six, rather than four, limbs. This allows for four-legged animals with wings, like the little lizard-like animals that act as pollinators for the native vegetation. Photosynthesizers also differ from Earth’s, with a growth structure based on expanding sheets (with holes) rather than branches. Both planets have components—like the tinerals on Riya—brought in from planets other than the primary sources. On the third planet, Mirror, I let my imagination go. This is not a comfortable planet for human beings, nor is it intended to be. It is, however, modeled on the early stages of evolution on Earth, with an interesting twist—both left-handed and right-handed biochemistry co-exist. Is this possible? I don’t know, and neither do my characters. But every scientist I know would agree that this is a planet to be preserved for study, not colonized. Mirror circles a star much like our sun at a distance that allows water to be liquid, so as real planets go it’s pretty tame. Its atmospheric pressure is high—like that of early Earth—with a significant fraction of the pressure coming from carbon dioxide, which contributes to its hot climate. There is nothing surprising about a planet having lots of water and carbon dioxide. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen are the four most common reactive elements in the universe, so we expect their compounds to be common. Water is just hydrogen and oxygen, while carbon dioxide is carbon and oxygen. What is unusual is to have free oxygen, as on Earth, and pressure and temperature that allow water to be liquid. On Mirror the process of combining carbon dioxide and water to produce carbohydrates and free oxygen, using sunlight as an energy source, is just getting started. There is oxygen in the air, but not enough to support much in the way of land dwellers. My castaways are quite reasonable in wanting to get away as soon as possible—they’re not properly equipped for the scientific study they recognize the planet needs. Besides, they want to get home! I’ll have more to say on planet building later. For now, welcome to my blog and I hope you surf on over to my website and find out what Homecoming is all about (www.sueannbowling.com). |
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