I’ve been missing my pets lately, including my iguana whom I had for 17 years. What were his kinfolk doing all the way out there in Fiji?
Beautiful creature, isn’t it? I wonder what they look like when they get much older. Our American iguanas develop strong jaws, and their colors fade.
Winding up in Fiji, though–that’s a genuine mystery.
A sky full of stones
To this day nobody knows why showers of rocks fell on the town of Chico, California. The rocks fell for four months and then stopped.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=MM19220314.2.8
No one knows where the stones came from, or why Chico was their target. It is said that someone called “The Ghost” wrote in to the local newspaper to take credit for the rock showers. He or she has never been identified.
There’s a One Step Beyond episode that gets into this (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0507859/). But not very far. The trail dries up pretty quickly.
There’s still so much we do not know.
You can’t get much farther away from the Caribbean than Fiji Island in the South Pacific. Like, they’re only separated by the widest ocean in the world.
So how does Fiji wind up with two iguana species?
These lizards have gotten kind of rare, so the Fiji government protects them.
You’d think there’d be some iguanas living on islands between Central America and Fiji, but no one’s ever seen any.
Just another mystery of Creation.
Some of us have heard “lake guns” and some of us haven’t. You might not know you’ve heard them: they might easily be mistaken for thunder or something else.
You don’t hear them at every body of water and you don’t hear them all the time. We simply don’t know what makes these sounds. Patty and I used to hear them occasionally on Barnegat Bay–always on extremely calm days.
They do sound like cannon-fire, sometimes.
One of the coolest, most intriguing places I’ve ever visited is the Ringing Rocks Park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In this video you’ll see and hear that some of the rocks–but not all of them–emit musical notes when struck with a hammer. While I was there, another visitor worked out how to play “Happy Birthday” on the rocks.
There are not many of these sites. Ringing rocks are always found in boulder fields. If you break off a piece of one, it won’t ring anymore. There are all sorts of theories to account for this, but the long and short of it is, we don’t know why they ring. Why don’t they all sound the same? We don’t know that, either.
Secrets of nature–never let it be said that God is not a wildly inventive Creator.
Even if you’re not interested in lizards, stay with me for a minute or two–because this is a mystery of nature.
This lizard is an Australian bearded dragon. He thinks his reflection in the mirror is another lizard, so he goes into a head-bobbing display to warn the stranger off his territory. He even has some idea of going behind the mirror to see if the interloper might be hiding there.
Travel halfway around the globe to, say, Florida, and you’ll find little green anoles performing the same display for the same reasons (courtship and threat). These groups of lizards are not related, and thousands of miles of planet lie between them. Behavior doesn’t show up in any fossil record. Why do these very different, widely separated lizards do this same ritual?
God’s work is endlessly fascinating: you never get to the bottom of it.
Meanwhile, I’ve had many different kinds of lizards as pets and by rights some of them should have head-bobbed (also known as lizard pushups)… but none of them ever did. I did have an anole who went totally ballistic when he saw his reflection in a hand mirror; I had to take the mirror away before he did himself a mischief.
Then there are the two large families of lizards, one in the Old World, the other in the New, who look just about exactly like one another but aren’t related at all. But that’s another post for later sometime.
Next time you happen to pass Death Valley, visit Racetrack Playa and see the famous and mystifying “sailing stones.” As you can see by the photo above, the stones leave plain tracks in the dried-out mud of the playa. (“Playa” is a dried-up lake or pond that sometimes fills when it rains. We had a nice one right next to our high school football field.)
What makes the stones “sail”? Well, no one has observed it happening, but time-lapse photography in 2014 suggested the stones were powered by a delicate balance of ice, water, and wind. A thin layer of ice sticks to the bottom of the stones–some of which weigh several hundred pounds–and when a stiff wind comes up, off they go. That’s the theory, anyway.
There’s also a theory that space aliens may be responsible. UFOs traverse the incalculable vastness of interstellar space to come here and push rocks around. I don’t think much of that theory.
What are the crown jewels of cryptozoology?
Gotta be the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and this, the dinosaur rumored to inhabit the swamps of the Congo–Mokele Mbembe.
By all accounts, Mokele Mbembe resembles a scaled-down (to elephant size) brontosaur living in some of the most difficult and inhospitable terrain in the world. It’s all swamps, even the pygmies don’t like to venture too far in. But the people who do live there declare that Mokele Mbembe is real.
So far, none of the expeditions sent to those swamps has come back with proof of Mokele Mbembe’s existence. The best we’ve got is this grainy, wobbly little bit of film, displayed above. Of course, if they ever did succeed in obtaining proof, Mokele Mbembe would instantly cease to be cryptozoology and be regular zoology instead. This is what gives cryptozoology its slightly cracked but also slightly noble flavor.
What if, somewhere in the world, there is a living dinosaur? What hath God wrought! What if dinosaurs have only gone almost extinct? ‘Cause “almost extinct” means “a little bit extant.” I mean, heck, the stories don’t go away, there are always stories: always people saying that they’ve seen a dinosaur.
And who wouldn’t want to see one?
I like to trot these out now and then–the “ringing rocks.”
Jambo, everybody, Mr. Nature here. I’ve visited this boulder field in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Probably left behind by the melting of the Ice Age glacier, these rocks yield musical notes when struck with a hammer. No one knows for sure why they do that; and worldwide, there are only a very few places where this happens.
Somewhere there must be someone who has learned how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Happy Birthday” on the ringing rocks.
God’s stuff–He’s left us so many things to think about!
Hi, Mr. Nature here!
I have to admit I’ve never seen this for myself: “marsh lights,” also known as “will-o’-the-wisp” when they move around. Lights that you see at night in the swamps. When no one else is there.
Folklore has it that the will-o’-the-wisp is a mischievous spirit that leads unsuspecting victims into the swamp and then gets them lost. Science has it that these are methane gas created by decomposing plant matter. Tolkien had it that they were candles carried by the spirits of those who’d died in the swamp and sunk below the mud.
Kind of spooky, don’t you think? I mean, when you see what looks to be a lantern bobbing around at night, it’s disconcerting when you realize no one’s holding it.
I must also admit that I don’t understand what they’re saying in that Indian TV clip that I used. But it does show you that will-o’-the-wisp can turn up anywhere in the world where there are swamps.
Here’s a video with the marsh lights caught in the act. Watch patiently, and you’ll see them dart across the scream from time to time.
The video comes complete with raccoon. Totally cool!