I enjoyed traveling over the past month and many of the places provided ample opportunity for some close photography. Some highlights in this set of zoomed images are:
Enjoy!
Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens are full of lotuses in bloom this time of year….and dragonflies and waterlilies. We made our first day trip to the place last week on the first sunny day after a huge rain storm. Some of the grassy paths between the ponds were flooded but the circuit wide path was passable. We’ll go again before the end of season.
Eventually I’ll get better at recognizing the different dragonflies. The Blue Dashers are the only ones I recognize easily (the ones that look like they’ve been dusted with light blue powder).
The surprise this year was pots of red hibiscus near the visitor center. I wonder if I somehow missed them last year.
Enjoy the Kenilworth Gardens via the slideshow below!
The small animals on or near plants are sometimes the challenge I choose for photography. The walk around Brookside Gardens resulted in a few worth sharing:
The spider on the yucca flower
A damselfly that must have been tired since it stayed put for such a long time. It is an ebony jewelwing!
A mourning dove enjoying the summer sunshine in the garden
Bees at the hollyhocks. I always associate hollyhocks with a great aunt’s house. She always had them planted around the side steps to her house.
A bee on a hydrangea. Brookside has quite a variety of hydrangeas these days and this type seemed the most popular with the bees the day I was there.
Montezuma Castle National Monument is a good stop on the way between Tucson and Flagstaff. The reconstructed ‘castle’ is in a large depression in the cliff face. But everywhere there are smaller spaces that were walled to make storage areas
And on flatter ledges near the base of the cliff there are walls were there were other dwellings.
Water is nearby. It is easy to imagine why this was a place people chose for building/farming.
In one of the rock niches on the cliff, there were combs of bees (I used my camera zoom to 30x)!
There is good signage for native plants like Desert Christmas Cactus
And Arizona Sycamore. The Arizona Sycamores look different than the ones we have on the east coast. There is green shading in the peeling bark and the lobes of the leaves are deeper.
Next time I am in the area, I want to plan enough time to check out Montezuma Well that is part of the same National Monument but not contiguous with the castle area.
The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.
Is it possible to reset our biological clocks? - I have just started a Coursera course on circadian clocks so am paying more attention to articles on the topic. This one is from ScienceDaily.
Wild pollinators at risk from diseased commercial species of bee - Honeybees, bumblebees, and social wasps are all colony living insects that makes the transmission of disease within the colony very rapid…and now there is evidence of transmission between colonies, even colonies of different species.
Google Talking To Automakers about Building Autonomous Cars - I would like to see autonomous cars…but is it just wishful thinking for the near term (say 2020)?
This Ancient Pigment Could Soon Be Used to See Through Your Skin - Egyptian blue (calcium copper silicate). And now it’s becoming a medical technology too. Other applications of Egyptian Blue in an article from Antiquity Now.
How to Uncover a Skeleton’s Secrets - From National Geographic. The examples in the article is from a project in northern Peru
One Scientist's Race to Help Microbes Help You - There has been a lot discovered about the human microbiome…but translating the new knowledge into treatments has been slower. This is a story about the American Gut Project - a massive citizen science experiment - which is focused on accumulating enough data to enable the move toward treatments sooner.
Humanity Is In the Existential Danger Zone, Study Confirms - Scary stuff. Are we engineering a wave of extinctions on our planet that will eventually include ourselves? We are pushing against and past several planetary boundaries.
A Smart Grid Infrastructure Demands Increased Engineering Smarts - One of the skillsets needed for the future. The article is about the program in Syracuse University’s College of Engineering.
Counties Lag Behind National Recovery, Report Finds - A breakdown of ‘recovery’ at the county level reveals key economic indicators on a more granular level that we usually hear about. The clickable version of the map is available here. I found that the county where I live has recovered 2 of the 4 indicators (which is considered ‘recovered’) but where my daughter lives in Tucson has not recovered any of the 4; having visited Tucson for the past 3 years, I do notice that things have improved - but they are not back to the levels prior to 2008.
Breathtaking Frozen Bubbles Look like Elegant Glass Ornaments - I hope we have a cold day soon so I can try making frozen bubbles like this! I’m pretty sure it takes lots of practice to make them look as good as these!
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
Powered by Squarespace.
