All in a Day’s Web
Yet another spider web. This one, freshly minted, just opened for business. Another day, another web. If you’re an orb-weaver, it’s your work. It’s what you do. No big deal. But I never tire of wondering how the radians are…
Category Arts And Science
Plant Ballistics: Mountain Laurel’s Explosive Pollen Bullets
The intricate design of the Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) was a marvel for me in 1970 when I was a student on a field trip to the Smokies from Auburn University. Systematic Botany was a wake-up call to a budding…
Not New To Science But To Me: Spikenard
I was alerted of a low tire by the pressure sensor dashboard light before I reached the hardtop one day last week. So I pulled off at the next wide place along our gravel road and plugged in the small…
Abbott’s Sphinx Moth Caterpillar
As if I knew this beauty–or even did the work to key it out for myself. I’d never seen it, and failing in a five-minute scroll of Google and Bing images of North American caterpillars, I resorted to a kind…
Go Get Dumpa!
Regrettably, we have a long distance relationship with our grand daughters. Looking back a couple of decades from now, their memories of their mother’s parents will be sporadic visits to Goose Creek or on their home turf for a long…
Saved by The MetaGenomics of Dirt
Below are some annotated bits from an article in Wired that describe the early successes in the battle to find weapons against the increasingly numerous and increasingly virulent microbes that are resistant to all known antibiotics. We worry about the…
Snows of Narnia
If every snowflake is different, then every snowfall must be too. This one was unique. It was the last snow to fall before my personal odometer turns to a new zero. And so I am trying to pay attention to…
SomeWhere
And SomeWhen. Finding the pot of gold means a bit of good luck. And keeping your eyes open. And having a camera in your pocket 24 And stopping in the rain to step out of your car in the middle…
A Season To Be Mired in Quicksand
To everything there is a season, we are told: A time for effective and meaningful engagement in a full life; and a time to be mired up to your acetabulum in an unending, onerous, complex, emotionally draining and impossible slog…
Gandy, Going, Gone
Gandy is gone as of an hour ago, after seven years and four months. That’s a lot of dog years, and they were good ones. She had an enchanted life on Goose Creek after being a rescue puppy that could…
Plate is Full, Blog is Empty
I made the mistake a few weeks back of saying I hoped to be doubling down on efforts to apply the brake to the creening path of humanity towards the brink–as if one person can make a difference; and yet……
The High Places Made Low
One of the places I stand and ponder in our daily silvan peregrinations is up back, beyond the last extent of floodplain of which our five-acre pastureland is the remainder. Beyond that point, the path skirts high above the rock…
BlueWater Dream of the Great Below
I awoke with a start. I had fallen asleep slumped against my favorite leaning poplar a ten-minute walk from the house. I was most certainly not exactly there now. I had nodded off on a warm summer afternoon, but now…
Mountain Lake(less)
Mountain Lake (on Salt Pond Mountain) in Giles County, Virginia, was familiar territory once upon a time. I took five-week-long studies at the UVa Biological Station there in the summers of 1977 and 1978. I have been back a few…