Fieldnotes
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Cocoon
The winter woods are quiet and relatively monotone in color. But look closer. (And listen!) We were looking at tree buds. This big cocoon with remnants of leaf-covering was just hanging there. One of the giant moths of the family Saturniidae made this, I think. Will it make it? Has it already be taken over…
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Vents
White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis).Note the color in the vent region. This russet red can be more wide-spread on some examples of WBNs. The Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis), on the other feather, is this color from the throat on down. So you would think these two species wouldn’t be hard to distinguish. The Red-breasted is smaller…
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Thoreau Thursday
Orwell is our go-to guy for the political perversion of language, but I discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson was on a similar track a century earlier. Corruption of character leads to “the corruption of language,” he wrote in “Nature.” “In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding…
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Raptor Wednesday
It sometimes seems like I have a raptor sighting every day. So, for the last month, I’ve been keeping tabs. My “daily raptor” is a good practice. In the political shitstorm, it is my daily rapture. Over the 31 days of January I had 37 raptor sightings, the majority of them (21) from my windows.…
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Betula Lenticels
Lenticels are pores in the bark of trees (and some plants and some fruits) through which trees exchange gasses. Many lenticels are raised dots, but birches, like this Black (Betula lenta) have scar-like horizontal ones. There’s a danger with all these passages inside though; they can also be the route of disease. B. lenta is…
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Tuliptree
Remember that Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) we got such close-up views of back in the spring?This is what it looks like now.These “cone-like aggregates of samaras” as Core and Ammons put it in Woody Plants in Winter, persevere. The hypocrisy would gag a snake, but the Republicans are beyond any shame (and certainly any claim to…
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Yowl and Owl
Well, that was the week that was, as succinctly digested here by Think Progress. This shambolic crew reminds me of the amateur ideological warriors who gutted Iraq after Bush II’s military victory and political disaster. Those were the bozos who set up the rise of Daesh/ISL. Meanwhile, back in 2017: Septuagenarian tantrums, White House chaos,…
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A Shaggy Nest
Steve Brodner is a caricaturist. But grotesque caricatures are what this crew is.
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Thoreau Thursday
“When the thermometer is down to 20, the streams of thought tinkle underneath like the rivers under the ice. Thought like the ocean is nearly of one temperature. Ideas, — are they the fishes of thought? Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it. Would you see your mind, look at the…
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Red-bellied Woodpecker
I’m seeing, and hearing, more Red-bellied Woodpeckers (Melanerpes carolinus) this winter than Downy Woodpeckers. In the Spartan woods of winter, their loud calls can be the only sound other than the wind. I learned recently that this bird, with its ambiguous name (the Red-headed Woodpecker is a whole other species, and the red-belly here is…
Backyard and Beyond 