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
Category: Nature
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
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.
Living in the past II
Once again, our selection hails from 2009*, but this is likely the last from that year, since my posts were initially quite thin, and most of the images smaller. I happened upon this little scene entirely by paying attention to my hearing, catching the rustle near my feet
Nein, November
Hah, get it? Because ‘November’ actually means, ‘Ninth Month,’ since it used to be, until Julius Caesar introduced a new, slightly more accurate calendar and had to add two months to it so that Groundhogs Day would keep falling in February, and he liked the summer so he put the extra months in the middle and named them after himself and his Shetland pony Augustus.
Okay, that’s
Busy bee
The image above, naturally, needs no explanation, because you certainly should recognize it if you are a decent human being – you’re honoring the holiday just like the rest of us. But for all the insolent and sulky teens out there, this is residual pollen – specifically, the pollen of lemon trees – the stuff that remained behind on the paint brush after I
Profiles of Nature 54
Life isn’t fair, and it’s not even well-balanced. We can’t try to get philosophical and consider it a test – that’s just lame. We’re here with yet another Profile after we thought they were dead and gone, with no dramatic, heroic denouement to occur. Deal.
Today we meet Hrisovalantis (‘Hrisovalantisbusbyberkeleydomperignon’ to his