Being a pop musician is not, it appears, a stable career choice, and cataloging the various iterations involved in this one would take more effort than I’m going to expend – Wikipedia exists for this reason, but I grew up before cut-n-paste was a thing and learned how to write my own essays, so I’ll just send you over there if you want all the nitty-gritty. And I admit that I was
Author: Al Denelsbeck
Visibly different, part 50
I actually use this image in my introductory nature photography seminar, as an example of what not to do, and also as a kind of penance. Initially it might look like an okay portrait of a sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis,) though it quickly becomes clear that it could be a lot better. The background is cluttered and complicated, and too close in focus to the
Living in the past VI
Back in 2011, I’d planted a whole bunch of wildflower seeds and, very typically I was to find out, almost none of them sprouted. At all. The only one that I could dependably say did was some form of aster, but it fulfilled its purpose in that it attracted a certain number of pollinators, and with them, a certain number of pollinator-predators. This is one of them, a jagged
Living in the past V
In case this is a little too eye-bending, this is my own hand dipping into an absolute buttload of tadpoles – we needed a spring image in here at least once. This was from back in 2011 at a local park, and the pond was small, but not that small – the tadpoles had instead followed the flow into an area where they couldn’t easily swim back out again, and
A winter subject
With heavy rains the other day, I stuck some watering cans out on the porch railing to fill. Naturally it stopped raining soon after that, and later on I glanced out there to find I’d collected only about a centimeter of water. But in one of them was a dead beetle, which I found curious, becoming more curious when I discovered that it wasn’t dead at all, but a live diving beetle that
More fossils
Just a quick one here. When my brother came to visit for the second time, he brought with him some of his fossil finds from central New York, ones with really intricate detail. We didn’t have the time to tackle detailed photos while he was here, so he left them with me for the time being, and I finally got the chance to feature them, with both still photos and video, which shows the contours
Our ignorance made it plausible
That’s a new phrase in my critical-thinking arsenal now. By itself, it seems counterintuitive, but that’s really the point. Let me explain.
A century or so ago, as telescopes got better and we began to understand more about our closest stellar neighbor Mars, we realized that it was not too much smaller than Earth and not too far away, and surmised that, given these conditions and the
Living in the past IV
Another from 2010, I was delighted to find this itty-bitty black rat snake (though I suppose it’s properly eastern rat snake, even though we should have used up the ‘eastern’ modifier by now, but Pantherophis alleghaniensis to be technical) when it was crawling across the near-vertical surface of a tree in the backyard – I mistook it for
Visibly different, part 49
This image comes from 2011, when I happened upon the egg sac/ootheca of a Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) sporting the newly-hatched young in a local park. The darkness of their eyes, I was later to determine, showed that they’d hatched out within the past several hours, and their proximity to the egg sac indicated that it was probably within the past 3 or so.
Living in the past III
Today we have an image posted in 2010, the first of the ‘Just Because’ images back when I suspected that it might become an ongoing thing (present count is 50 such posts.) However, it’s even older than that, coming from my saltwater aquarium in Florida back in 2004.