Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California.

Now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the Mojave once again.

And night is the most interesting part of the day in the desert, very much so in the summer.

When most wild animals are at rest in cool underground burrows,

humans, horseflies, ravens, roadrunners, the academy. burrows. Humans,

horseflies,

ravens, roadrunners,

the occasional brain-fried coyote.

That's the kind of animal foolish enough to be out in the heat of the day.

You look at a seemingly barren desert landscape like the Kelso sand dunes, a Mojave National Preserve.

That place comes to life in the night.

Fringtoed lizards, kangaroo rats, sidewinders, and kit fox.

Now, if you take a walk through a Joshua Tree woodland at dusk and return in the morning,

you'll find whole highways of tracks.

Herds of mule deer and big horn.

The wandering heavier prints of the coyote and the mountain lion and the bobcat the rope-shaped tracks of rattlers and gopher snakes on the hunt look in a dry wash and try to find a sandy spot without tracks,

especially the tiny marks left by deer mice and beetles, centipede, and scorpions.

I want to tell you about the most desert of desert animals, a life form so insane it hardly seems real. It prowls by night, it howls like a high-pitched

wolf. And it mostly eats centipedes and scorpions. I'm talking about the fierce rodent we call

the grasshopper mouse. It's about four inches of pure nocturnal terror, not including its long tail.

These New World killers don't just eat scorpions. They eat the stingers. They eat the stingers first.

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