Category Archives: Not about plants

Natural sound

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great-animal-orchestraThis summer, sitting by a lake, I read this book about paying attention to sound in a natural environment. There’s the water and wind, and mainly, all the layers of creature sounds. The author is a musician and a guy who has recorded thousands of hours of natural environments. A lot of it is about how in untouched wild areas, the recordings are incredibly rich and full of variety, and these areas have shrunk so much in just the few decades of his career recording. And how much noise pollution drives out creatures from habitats. (Made me think of the over-the-top fireworks shows put on by private homes on the lake and wondering how this long session of tremendously loud explosions affected the loons and eagles that we’re so excited to glimpse…)

He mentioned that like a camera is a tool to help you learn how to see, headphones taught him how to listen. Since I read it, I’ve been more aware and more appreciative of the “biosymphony,” such as it is around here, always blended with distant car tires, leaf blowers, engines of all stripes. The birds, the timeless summer sound of cicadas.

Also last week, was out in a dark field around midnight watching for signs of the Perseid meteor shower. Thinking about how hard it is to find a little dark sky around here, and about the few times I’ve seen a truly black sky and how breathtaking that grand sweep of stars is… and about how some things that were a given of our existence for thousands of years have slipped away from us with very little notice.

Bernie Krause: The Great Animal Orchestra

My new plan

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MilkweedGlobes

My original plan for the blog was to photograph all the local wildflowers as they came into bloom and post them right away so that I would have a good record of the flowers with information about them and their blooming times. I was thinking I would do this multiple years and keep track of trends in the blooming time. That year we had a freakishly warm winter which really had me wondering how the plants would be affected. It was a big job; some days I’d barely walk out the door and I would see 10 new kind of things blooming. Plus I didn’t know what anything was and it took me a while to get efficient at identifying the flowers.

This spring I started out with the same plan, but I have been out of town so many weeks that I fell hopelessly far behind. So my new plan is to continue to photograph new discoveries and write about them, and when the growing season is over, I’ll create a good index to make this a more useful tool for Massachusetts wildflower identification. And post interesting flower photos when I have them. That’s the new plan.

Common Milkweed, Butterfly flower, Silkweed (Asclepias syriaca)

Marathon memorial

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marathon memorialFollowing up about the bombing… the church where my chorus rehearses was closed for a week as that area was shut down as a crime scene. Last week we had rehearsal and first I went over to check out this crowd-sourced memorial that has sprung up. I was just visiting in Illinois and everybody I met who heard I was from Boston wanted to commiserate, to know how I was affected. It felt like the whole nation was shaken up.

Red-eared Slider

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Turtle

There are stone steps leading from our driveway up to the yard, and one day, a turtle was positioned vertically against the bottom step, with one arm mightily extended onto the top of the step, ready to hoist itself up. I went in to get a camera, had to answer the phone, and by the time I got back, she had gone to plan B. (This is how slow I need wildlife to move for me to be able to take their picture.) Anyway, I think this is a red-eared slider, which is the kind of turtle that people have as little pets, and so many have been released, they are an invasive species in the Northeast. They have green skin and yellow stripes, and a red stripe on each side of the head. They are omnivores, and must be submerged to eat. This one was about 10″ in diameter and was coming from the pond, and still had pond vegetation on its shell. Where was it going?

Red-eared Slider (Pseudemys elegans)

About the Boston Marathon

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Brian in the 5K crowd2I just want to digress for a moment from wildflowers to the task of living in the world. Yesterday was the running of the Boston Marathon. The day before that, they held a 5 K race that loops around downtown Boston and everyone gets to cross the same finishline as the marathoners will cross the next day. B ran that 5K race and I took pictures. It was a beautiful morning and it was fun to be part of the huge crowd with their energy up and ready to run, and all their friends taking their pictures together. This second picture is of the finish line area, still getting set up before the race.BostonMarathonFinishline

Behind that line of flags is where someone detonated a bomb the next day, during the marathon, when that area was full of spectators. I was there myself, behind the flags, looking for a good view of the finishline… but it was Sunday, not Monday, so we walked away safely later that day and thought nothing of it. And the people in this picture are the kind of people that got blown up: young people, families, people taking pictures of their friends. I assume the bomber was there on Sunday, when I was there, planning where to distribute death, and could look at these people and somehow, he still carried out his plan.

Wasp Nest

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Nestled in the spurge and poison ivy, a cozy wasp nest. There are two categories of wasps: solitary and social. The singletons don’t construct nests, and they’re all fertile. The socials live in colonies with thousands of their buddies and often only the queen and males are fertile; the rest are sterile female workers. Also, most wasp species are parasitic; i.e., they lay their eggs directly into the body of a host insect. Ew.

Charles River Peninsula

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Here are two HDR shots by A.F. Aaron, where I was only the art director (and HDR technician). The meadow at Charles River Peninsula — a shagbark hickory at the top of the hill and lots of bedstraw, madder, milkweed, clover and cypress spurge. And a snail on the bedstraw. It’s an Oxyloma retusa, a tiny land snail with some sort of topo map on its shell.

I took a walk here that was so fascinating, new things revealing themselves… and later read a blog entry at happiness-project.com (July 13, 2012) that made a lot of sense to me: “Recently, I noticed a pattern among activities that people find fun: Go on a mission. There’s something about having a playful purpose, of trying to achieve something, that makes an activity more fun. For example, a friend told that she loved visiting flea markets and antique stores to look for old globes – not fancy ones, cheap ones. She has a rule that she’ll never pay more than $20. She’s the kind of person who loves poking around in those kinds of shops in any case, but having a mission makes it more fun, less aimless….. Taking photos is a common way to incorporate a mission into traveling. Not only does this help keep memories vivid, it also makes you more attuned to your environment while traveling.” Anyway. It’s funny how this project has transformed my perception of our walks — What will I find?!

Six-spotted Tiger Beetle

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When we were photographing the Bristly Locust, a couple of these showy iridescent beetles were zooming around and grabbing our attention. A.F. Irit felt they really should get their own post. Now that I know the name, I can see the six spots, three on each wing. Evidently they are super fast, often outrunning their prey by so much that they lose track and have to stop and re-orient themselves to their desired lunch.

Six-spotted Tiger Beetle (Cicindela sexguttata)

Bluebird egg

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This morning we went on a novice birding hike at Redwing Bay. The leader, Peter Oehlkers, is also the Trustees’ birdhouse monitor, so he could let us have a look at a nest, and it had an egg! It was very interesting hearing my familiar stomping grounds through new ears, listening to the bird calls. Beautiful morning! Bonus picture: