True Nature Stories: Signs of Life

Strange life forms: the female flowers and male catkin of a hazelnut tree

The cover story in the February issue of Scientific American (magazines always seem to arrive well before their cover dates) is called Life as We Don't Know It, and it's about astrobiologists who are looking for life signatures for beings that might not breathe oxygen or even be carbon-based. Instead of looking for the kinds of chemical signatures that life on Earth would reveal, they are looking for any kind of structure that appears to be non-random. That's all just fine, looking for signs of life that might be unlike our own, but they are still looking at only five percent of what's out there, if Dark Matter and Dark Energy turn out to be real.

I mean, there's supposed to be about five-times as much Dark Matter as the Ordinary Matter we can detect. So I am imagining a science fiction story that would involve life composed of Dark Matter, beings who thrive on Dark Energy. (Cue the evil laughter.)

I was just about to take credit for being the first to imagine this when I decided to do a quick internet search, and dang it, someone beat me to it.

I photographed the hazelnut flowers above by cutting a sprig to bring indoors and out of the considerable wind. I wanted a second "strange life form" for this post, so I went back down and looked for one in our little garden. I chose the huckleberry that I planted at the same time as the hazelnut, both of which I bought around 15 years ago at Bay Natives.

While I was scoping out the huckleberry flowers I spotted a tiny jumping spider descending a single strand of silk. It landed on a leaf, then pounced like a shot to another leaf surface below it, and that's when the fun began. I went back upstairs and brought my camera down, and of course the spider became alarmed by my return and did its best to hide from me, ducking behind the leaves. I kept spooking it back toward the front, when I would try to fire off a few frames before it ducked back under cover. I had to put on my reading glasses to see the little tyke, then take them off to put my eye to the camera's viewfinder and try to find the spider through the lens. Meanwhile, gusts of wind would toss branches around like crazy. I was pleasantly surprised to get a few half-decent frames.

I noticed on a birding e-mail list recently that San Francisco's first Allen's hummingbird of 2023 was reported at North Lake (in Golden Gate Park) on January 17. I'd also recently noticed that the first bloom of the pipevine in my back yard appeared on Jan. 19, a couple of weeks earlier than last year. That was the first time my new plant, bought at Strybing Arboretum a couple years ago, produced a flower. It flowered again in late July.

In other back yard shenanigans, I found several holes a couple days in a row and wondered who had been digging back there. I thought it might be a cat, a skunk, or a squirrel, but only my wife guessed right (see short trail cam video clip below).