Earth Explorations

When one has a bird feeder, one has small birds. And when one has small birds, one may have large birds like a hawk. I have an occasional hawk that visits the backyard. When the hawk--either a Sharp shinned or Coopers I'm not sure which--shows up the other birds flee. Except when they don't. This morning, I saw the hawk perched on the branches and a downy woodpecker, stock still, hiding from the hawk by clinging motionless to a bird food brick. The bird food brick was big enough to be a vision barrier between hawk and downy woodpecker (or DOWO using the American Ornithologic Union abbreviation) but would not have offered much protection had the hawk managed to spy the downy. The DOWO must have missed or ignored what is apparently the universal signal that a hawk was nearby.  I do not like to interfere in the affairs of animals, though you can make the case that in feeding the birds I've already meddled. Fair point. Also, full disclosure: in that moment I was Team Downy. (My

Full disclosure. The pandemic is kinda kicking my butt when it comes to every day exploration. Acedia, torpor, and ennui have replaced zest, curiosity, and wonder in my emotional makeup. Getting out to explore feels like a huge amount of effort, made more effortful by the cold and short hours of daylight.  Thank goodness for my bird feeder. Well, actually bird feeders. Plural. I have three plus a bird food brick or two. And a heated bird bath. Things haven't gotten out of control. Yet. We'll see where things stand when the pandemic abates. We have a goodly assortment of birds that come visit, the inevitable house sparrows, finches both goldfinch and house finch (and once a purple finch). Juncos. We have woodpeckers of the downy, hairy, red bellied and flicker variety. The red male cardinal and greenish brown female cardinal come visit as do the blue jays. There are fox squirrels, of course, and in the middle of the night the trail cam tells me that skunks, opossum, an occasiona

COVID19 numbers are high in my county right now which I means I have zero motivation to write. I rashly bought a family sized package of double stuff golden Oreos and a bag of ruffley chips and dip. My motivation is to eat it all, thinking I will somehow feel comforted instead of full of recriminations and regret suffering from a junk food hangover. I'll go on a walk instead. Before I go, I am happy to report that as of yesterday the spider is still hanging out in the ditch. I don't have photos as they came out fuzzy. I'm very aware that the hard freezes are coming and that will be the end. This would not bother me most years but this year it makes me sad as I have enjoyed my visits with the spider.  You know things are rough when you have an emotional support spider. The rubber rabbit brush is finally blooming. I saw a painted lady butterfly and celery looper moth fluttering around.  I also saw flies that look like bees but are actually Rat Tailed Maggots. I thought they

 I'll be brief but just had to share. I micro-meandered to the ditch and saw the most beautiful Banded Garden Spider. On one side she was banana milkshake with chocolate syrup lines, on the other she was a dark and light braided wool rug. She had not one but two grasshoppers in her web and I caught her feasting on one. The other had so recently become entrapped it wasn't even wound with silk yet.  A beautiful and unexpected gift. Thank you, Spider.

  My weird COVID19 dreams are back. Last night's dream while weird was kind of nice as I dreamed I saw a slime mold. In fact, I several different types of molds all, now that I think of it, were indoors which is not a great place for mold to be. Of course I ran and got my camera and uploaded the mold photos to iNaturalist. Perhaps I dreamed this in part because I have been busy adding observations to iNaturalist lately. I mentioned a few weeks ago the need to take a meandering nature walk where I look at things just to see what's there and take pictures if the thing I'm looking at will allow it. In the last ten days I've taken three such meanders (not much walking involved) in Badlands National Park, Indian Cave State Park in Nebraska, and the road ditch near my house. The road ditch near my house yielded the most interesting observations of the three. I meandered out there to check on a rubber rabbitbrush that in years past has often had multiple butterflies and bees s

  I have written elsewhere about the American elms found on the property of my workplace. To summarize, American elms were a favorite of city planners in the 19th and early 20th centuries until Dutch Elm Disease started mowing them down. Anyway, there is a stand of American elm trees where I work that somehow avoided Dutch Elm Disease. I suspect they are volunteers from nearby elms planted long ago since these volunteers seem randomly placed, milling about rather than taking a designated spot. True to the way of elms, the elms in this stand branch beautifully, forming a canopy that creates dense shade particularly in the mid to late afternoons. The arching of the branches reminded me of buttresses in a medieval church, thus I began referring to this area as the Elm Cathedral. A recent heat wave drove me to get my two walks done early in the day. Leaving aside the safety of walking briskly in 100° heat, there are the social mores about being red faced and sweaty at work. But to sit or

 As noted below, I take my walking seriously. I'm the one out there with earphones and arms pumping like I am sprinting the 100 meters at the Olympics. I listen carefully to Coach Hartshorn (the female voice on the Map My Walk app) when she gives me my splits and times, putting a little more burn into it if I'm lagging. Because of Coach Hartshorn I've gotten faster which in the way our society measures things is seen as improvement. There's a reason they call this style of walking power walking. Power walking does not lend itself to deep observing or really observing of any type. If I'm lucky I see the flits and flickers of critters when I power walk, a bird here (one yesterday aptly named Flicker), an insect there, a blooming flower, a tree with the first yellow leaves. Mostly though I'm watching my footing and if I think of it, I look up at the sky. Nature walking is meandering, directed by curiosity, called by sights and sounds that might yield discoveries (o

A few times a week, tiny black ants will emerge from between the bricks in the back patio. During a recent emergence, a juvenile brown thrasher flew in and started picking off ants one by one. I can't imagine that these tiny ants were satiating which is why I'm guessing the brown thrasher soon hopped away to under a nearby bush and emerged with a beak full of grasshopper. All About Birds says brown thrashers are omnivores and I, for one, am glad they eat grasshoppers. Apparently, they enjoy many insects which are pests to humans like tent caterpillars. This is important information. I'll keep some shrubbery in the backyard to encourage them to if not live here then at least feed here. 

Basil, eggplant, and new potatoes. Sounds like a meal or a new friend.

My last post was in mid February 2020, in what I sometimes refer to as the Before Time. My posting schedule during the Before Time was a post every two weeks or so at the beginning and middle of the month.   I was due for a post in early March, when COVID was rising. By the time I was overdue for a post in mid-March, COVID had risen and I was in no condition to write anything. All my emotional energy was spent on Zooms and getting through the day. There was nothing left over.  In April the smidge of brain space and emotional energy earned by coming to terms with a new-and-hopefully-temporary normal was consumed by doing live streams and the Nature in Place challenge on iNaturalist. As stretched as I was, it was deeply satisfying to see the Earth awake into spring. One year, I may write about it. But then May happened. May is when the White dominant culture learned about Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and when on the same day, May 25, there was Christian Cooper and George Floyd. On

Chances are pretty good you are reading this because you clicked through a link, perhaps my pronouns in my email signature, and were curious about this word ki, pronounced kee. I'm assuming you want to know what is ki and why is it in my pronoun list. To start, ki is a pronoun that refers to something animate and natural, an addition to he, she, and it. I came across this idea of ki while listening to Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's interview with Krista Tippet on On Being. Rather than me summarizing, I'll let Dr Kimmerer—botanist, State University of New York at Syracuse professor, and member of the Citizen Pottawatomie tribe—speak for herself. (T)he language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature. And by exploit, I mean in a way that really seriously degrades the land and the waters, because, in fact, we have to consume. We have to take. We are animals, right? But that, t

On the last day of 2019 I saw one too many political posts on Facebook that pushed my outrage button and realized that I needed a break. It was time see what I'd been missing for 10 plus years while I was in the scroll hole. I needed to go exploring. January in South Dakota is not an auspicious time to do much outdoor exploring unless you are hardy and have warm boots. Since I'm the equivalent of a Zone 6 on the human hardiness level and my boots aren't that warm my exploration would have to be of the indoor or maybe even internal kind. This is an inventory of what I have done on my month off of FB. In December prior to the Big Leave I set a goal of reading a book a month because that is what I could manage when I fed my evenings to Facebook. I ordered 8 books to get me through to summer. I read three of them in three weeks. I practiced French with an app. I am looking at going to Paris in the spring of 2021.  I applied to attend a field school in Mongolia this Aug

I hear Sunday Feb 2 is the Superb Owl Day. In all modesty, I think this photo I took of a burrowing owl last summer is kind of superb. I shared it on iNaturalist and...  What? Oh.

Christmas Day Sunrise Christmas to me has been, and still is, about light. I love the lights on the Christmas trees and displays in yards and on houses. So festive and welcome during these long nights. The Christmas season is also the Winter Solstice season. The Winter Solstice marks the day when the amount of day light slowly, gradually, starts to increase. The daily addition of a few seconds and minutes of sunlight results in the days of June being hours longer than the days of December. And here in the Northern Hemisphere, not only do we get a change in quantity of sunlight after the Winter Solstice, we start to get a change in quality too as the Sun rays become more intense. We are not sensible of the Earth's perpetual tilt (perpetual in terms of human scale that is) towards the North Star but it's this perpetual tilt to another star beyond the Sun that means the Northern Hemisphere lists towards the Sun roughly April through September and away from it October thro