Gleanings of the Week Ending December 31, 2016

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.

Best of Mulitmedia 2016 – From The Scientist so most from the Life Sciences perspective. There is a display of infographics then links to the full stories. After that there are some videos. Quite a lot happened in 2016!

How to draw PACH – I am so pleased with this pattern. Remember the paper chains that children enjoy making with strips of construction paper? I remember making them…my daughter made them too. This is a Zentangle® pattern to draw them! It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Happy Anniversary to Photo Ark! 10 Years, 6,300 Animals Photographed – The post is about Joel Sartore’s project to photograph the animals of Earth. Take a lot at the Photo Ark site as well!

Pregnancy leads to changes in the mother’s brain – I think most women acknowledge that there is a change…initially thinking it is just the effect of sleep-deprivation….and later realizing that part of the change is still there after the baby is sleeping through the night. For me – it not only helped me into motherhood, it also enhanced my ability to empathize with others. That made me a better manager and leader at work.

10,000-Year-Old Turf War – Even hunter-gatherers fought other groups of hunter-gatherers. I’m still following up on articles the students in the Osteoarcheology course on Coursera are finding.

Treasure Trove of Newly Discovered Species Includes a Newt that Looks Like a Klingon – My favorite is the first image (the Phuket horned tree agamid). Which one is yours?

“Celldance” Selections – 3 short cell biology videos: cell division, dendritic cell motion, and microscopy of living cells (within the body)

The strange effects of thinking healthy food is costlier – Evidently the health=expensive equation has a bigger impact on our perception (and purchasing) than objective evidence!

Phenology of Bee Genera: MidAtlantic States: USA – A slide show of graphs showing weekly counts for bees (by genus) in the area where I live from Sam Droege at the USGS Bee Lab….and links to other slideshows by the same author

Buying Experiences vs Buying Things – An infographic comparing spending choices (there is a link to expand the infographic…makes it readable). There are a lot of reasons that spending on experience adds to our happiness more than spending on things.

Zooming – December 2016

Winter is here in Maryland and I found myself choosing zoomed images from indoors for this month’s post: a bowl of seed caps at the Natural Holiday Sale earlier in the month,

The center of a poinsettia

And the sunlight on poinsettia petals – both in the Brookside Gardens conservatory,

The blooms and a young pod on a cocoa tree,

Water droplets on conservatory plants,

And two very sleepy cats.

I like the zoom on my new camera!

3 Free eBooks – December 2016

Scrapbook of Victorian Greeting Cards. Handwritten date of 1874. Available from Internet Archive here. I focused on the Christmas cards because – after all – it is December. Styles have changed considerably! This one of a child blowing soap bubbles – with a pipe held upside down…and, evidently, indoors – was one of my favorites.

Scrapbook of Victorian Greeting Cards. Handwritten date of 1874. Available from Internet Archive here. I focused on the Christmas cards because – after all – it is December. Styles have changed considerably! This one of a child blowing soap bubbles – with a pipe held upside down…and, evidently, indoors – was one of my favorites.

Gordan, Elizabeth; Ray, John. Buddy Jim. New York: P.F. Volland Company. 1922. Available from Hathi Trust here. I looked at everything the Internet Archive and Hathi Trust had with John Rae illustrations. I liked this one because of its depiction of outdoor experiences of a child in the 1920s. How many children today spend this much time outdoors?

Wolle, Francis. Diatomacae of North America. Bethlehem, PA: The Comenius Press. 1894. Available from Hathi Trust here. The drawings in this volume – over 2300 of them – from over 100 years ago prompted me to think about a photography project this spring (diatoms) and some Zentangle patterns. It was quite a visual feast!

Merry Christmas

We are having a quiet Christmas – guests and travel happening later this week. I bought some flowers for the table…and to photograph. It was a good project for the cold days leading up to the holiday.

We’ll have our big meal at lunch time. The brisket was started in the crockpot last night so will be very tender by then

Since the weather cooperated this morning (sunny) – we are going up to see the Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam– bundled up in our winter gear and hoping to get some good pictures. I’ll take a Thermos of hot Plantation Mint Tea to help me warm up from the inside. It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this on Christmas morning.

Beautiful Food – December 2016

I buy pomegranates almost once a week during their season. Their deep red color and the shape of the seeds are the ‘jewel food’ for the holiday. Of course, getting the seeds out of the peel and membrane is the challenge.

I cut the outer peeling and pull the halves apart --- then beat the peeling over a large bowl causing the seeds to fall it. It works well although there are still some splatters that escape over the rim of the bowl. The process is more like ‘play’ than food preparation!

Since the natural world is pretty drab this time of year – the bright colored foods are on my ‘favorites’ list. I like to make chicken salad with broccoli and cranberries (although I still include the celery that I usually use during the summer too).

I also like to stock up on homemade dried orange peel this time of year – to add to soups or stir fries….or to package up to give as a Christmas present! Have a small plate on the counter all during the month has just become part of my Christmas tradition.

Wintery Mix

Yesterday we experienced our first ‘wintery mix’ of the season – although it was more freezing rain than anything else. I took photographs through windows of the house; it was too cold and hazardous footing to venture out. It was a good day to stay at home. Our gutters started filling up with ice (but the downspouts stayed clear)

And the skylight on the covered part of our deck was covered with a layer of ice and fringed with small icicles.

Ice coated vegetation too. A small limb on one of our trees broke as I watched. There might be others that have split that will require trimming next spring. The pine branches are leaning – looking like giant bottle brushes – but will straighten as the ice melts.

The evergreen bushes caught water on their leaves that froze as it dripped off – a mini-cascade.

The azalea bush outside our front door is my favorite with its reddish leaves turned to cups for ice – overflowing.

Later in the day, the temperature climbed above freezing and much of the ice melted enough to fall from the trees. This was not an event that lingered!

Early Morning December

When I walked into my office yesterday, the moon was lighting up the room. It was moving down into the treetops to the west of our house. What perfect timing! I managed a few pictures…then continued with my normal routine of eating breakfast and checking the news feeds on my big monitor.

As I took my breakfast dishes back downstairs, I noticed that the east was photogenic at that very moment! I hurriedly put my dishes in the kitchen and ran back upstairs for my camera. It was about 10 minutes before sunrise…so the pinks dominate the oranges and yellows – particularly in the contrails. There are a lot of flights out of Baltimore in the early morning so if the conditions are ‘right’ for contrails to form, there are a lot of them.

I went back for a second look later to see if the blob at the end of the foreground tree branches (it’s the oak in our front yard) was a bird or a leaf….it’s a leaf!

A Walk in our Early Winter Neighborhood

I took a walk around our neighborhood this past week to try out my new ski bibs; I’d purchased them when we got home from New Mexico where my legs got very cold on some of our early mornings and I wanted to see that they worked before our next trek up to Conwingo to see the Bald Eagles. They – along with my long standing cold weather gear – kept be very comfortable even though the temperature on the day of my walk was in the 20s. They were very comfortable for walking/hiking too.

The neighborhood was so full of color just a few weeks ago – the memory of its brilliance still so fresh – that if found myself searching for anything that was drab winter colors. There were Christmas decoration, of course, but I was more interested in seeing color in the vegetation. I found a stand of Callery Pear saplings (i.e. escaped Bradford Pears) in an area that is not mowed behind the water retention pond. They were catching the morning sun and were brilliantly orange. I admired them even knowing that I shouldn’t like them because they are invasive and will crowd out plants we may need (in prior years this area was the best place to find milkweed in the neighborhood and the Monarch butterflies need that to survive).

The pond itself is typical of many in our area. The maintenance crews mow the slopes very short and they erode. In the case of our pond, the grass if very thin in some areas and there are beginning to be bare spots where there is no vegetation at all. Some moles or ground hogs or chipmunks have made tunnels on some parts of the slope and several have collapsed. There are cat tails and a willow at the edge of the pond. It seemed like both were a little further out of the water than I remembered. The pond is filling in.

The cattails did not offer any color relief but I like the texture of the ‘tails’ – the brown velvet and lighter color of the fluffy seeds.

As I walked back through the neighborhood, I realized that the distance seemed shorter than it usually does so I must have been very comfortable in my winter walking gear!

Decorating for Christmas 2016

We decorated less than usual this Christmas since it will just be my husband and I for the holiday – before we have a flurry of activity with my daughter and son-in-law at the beginning of the year (him moving to Pittsburgh to start his post doc at University of Pittsburgh, both going off to conferences, and then coming back). Then my daughter will be traveling to give a talk at Penn State in February. Christmas will be low-key in comparison to what is planned for early 2017. We did put up the tree. I like the glow it has in the early morning when I come downstairs for breakfast.

The ornaments reflect a lot of our history – from the oldest ones (about 50 years)

To the newest (1-year-old – purchased at last year’s Natural Holiday Sale). I play a game with myself to notice different ornaments every morning.

I put up Christmas cards from years past on giant scrunchies that fit perfectly over doors (of the coat closet and the pantry)

And under a clear plastic table cloth on our table. We enjoy the variety of the images while we eat.

And that’s it for the decorations this year.

Thanksgiving

I am interrupting my blog posts about our travel to New Mexico to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. It’s a good time to contemplate…to be thankful for the abundance that is ours.

In times past, the season was celebrating the abundant availability of food as everything was harvested before winter. I still feel a little of that from the CSA shares this past fall. I have sweet potatoes and garlic in a big bowl on our (unused) dining room table. There is butternut squash puree and shredded squash in the freezer. I have frozen greens (for soups) and fruit beety in there too. I made zucchini bread with the shreds and mousse with the butternut squash puree for our Thanksgiving dinner. It feels good to still have the direct linkage to the fall harvest for part of our Thanksgiving meal. I am thankful that between the CSA and Wegmans – there are bountiful choices for flavorful and nutritious foods that are easily available to us.

We are just back from our trip to New Mexico. On recent trips, it seems like we have honed our focus to the types of activities we enjoy…in new locales. Having the wherewithal to make choices for travel and other activities is certainly something to be thankful for.

Sometimes little things make a substantial impact on our perception of how life is going. Right before we left for New Mexico, our washing machine broke. There was not time to get it serviced before we left….so it waited until the day after we got back. I’m thankful that it was easily fixed (sock in the water pump…not something that would require a new washing machine) and that we’ve already done the piles of laundry from our trip.

This holiday finds us feeling good physically and emotionally. My son-in-law defended his dissertation research on Monday and already has a postdoc lined up at the University of Pittsburgh. My daughter will defend in the spring and is busily applying for postdocs now. They’ll spend a quiet Thanksgiving in Arizona and we’ll do the same in Maryland; the rest of the family is in Texas. I’m thankful 2016 has been a good year for us all.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Take 2 - Photographs Through a Window – November 2016

To many birds stuck around for me to photograph them from my office window…I decided to do a second post this month of ‘photographs through a window.’ So – here goes. The first juncos have returned from the far north. They aren’t quite at the numbers from last winter so there may be more on the way.

A red bellied woodpecker investigated the gutter on our covered deck – calmly surveyed our yard. It was long enough for me to get two reasonably good pictures.

The white breasted nuthatch is around as well – contorting itself to get seed from our feeder. They are easy to identify at the feeder since they are one of the few that are head down at the feeder.

One morning the birdbath was frozen and a very frustrated blue jay was thirsty.

The chickadee had the same problem a few seconds later. It's time to put the heated bird bath out - avoid this problem for the birds.

Zooming – November 2016

November is my second month with my new camera (Canon PowerShot SX720 HS). My earlier posts this month have used a lot of zoomed images…but I’m sharing 7 in this post that are new. The first is an immature milkweed bug. See the stubs where the wings will be in a later instar? In October, I thought they would gone by November but the weather stayed reasonably warm and there were still green milkweed pods well into the month. Some of the bugs probably didn’t make it to maturity before the first frost.

November included the brightest fall color this year. I like the light shining through these maple leaves.

The Bald Cypress cones were more obvious against the rusty brown of the foliage being shed this time of year.

Ferns have sporangia on their underside; these reminded me of the dots on dominos.

Inside the conservatory at Brookside the banana plant had maturing fruit.

I’m not sure what this is…but it is growing (and blooming) in the Brookside Gardens conservatory.

I discovered Virginia Creeper growing on the brick in front of my house. It is turned red with the cooler temperatures.

Photographs Through a Window – November 2016

November has been a good month for photography through my office window. The crows come to look for things in our gutters.

House finches come for water (this one is a male).

There was a purple finch (female) that visited too – seemingly very nervous.

There were bluebirds too – two days in a row. The second day was colder and the feathers are fluffed to keep the bird warmer.

The Carolina Wren is still around. The noises it makes in the fall are quite different than the spring song.

The bird I got the most excited about was a Northern Flicker (yellow shafted) that was in the maple tree long enough to get several pictures.

The blue jays have been around (very noisy)…but have not settled for long enough for me to photograph.

The squirrel has visited our deck several times and I suspect that the bird feeder is the attraction. It is supposed to be squirrel proof and – so far – has not been dumped. One squirrel figured out how to do it last spring….but so far the area under the feeder has remained free of large amounts of seed.

Usually we do have leaves on the roof --- but the leaves are swirling and it rained, so we have a few that are temporarily stuck: tulip poplar and maple. They dry out soon and be blown away (hopefully not into the gutter).

Leaf Rubbings

I decided to make some leaf rubbings during one of my leaf raking flurries. I took out a clip board, scratch paper, a red crayon, a graphite pencil and a blue colored pencil.

When my daughter was young we had always used crayons. But we still had some left-over fat crayons from her first grade. The crayon I used was found in a junk drawer – probably from a restaurant. I peeled off the paper to enlarge the area of crayon available to make the rubbing. It was hard to hold the leave still pressing down on the paper from above while I was trying to also hold the clipboard and move the crayon! The small leaf in this first one is a tulip poplar…the larger one is a sycamore (a rather small leaf from that tree).

The second page was a small tulip polar leaf and two maple leaves.

I switched to the blue colored pencil. There is a partial tulip poplar leaf in the lower right corner. The others are maple leaves.

The last one I did was a larger tulip poplar leaf with the graphite pencil. I couldn’t resist using it as a string for a Zentangle!

And now I have another round of raking to do….

Of Milkweed and Milkweed Bugs

Most of the milkweed pods have released their seeds over the past month. I enjoyed photographing them in the sunlight and

In a staged setting of cut plant (it was blocking the path for the trick or treaters to my front door). The seeds are tightly packed and are usually released a few at time with each little breeze. If it rains, the fluff often becomes so matted that the seeds are bound together and eventually fall to the ground near the parent plant.

The milkweed bugs are out on warm afternoons all during this time – feeding on the pods before they open and then on the seeds. This year they were plentiful in the first week of November – with all stages of their bug development. (Note: the small yellow critters are aphids....they seem to enjoy the milkweed at the same time as the bugs but are on stems and leaves rather than the seed pods).

And then they were gone for this season. The milkweed and the bugs are ready for winter.

Seeing Trees as Individuals

Often we see trees as a group – a forest…and not as individuals. There are three in my backyard that I see as individuals even though they are closely associated with other trees. I can see all three from my office window. The first is a red maple. The first picture was taken on Halloween through my office window over the roof of our covered deck.

The next was taken from the ground in our backyard about a week later. Its leaves had started to fall by that time. It is not a forest tree. Our neighbor planted it on his side of the property line before we moved into our house over 20 years ago. But the tulip poplars and beech trees of the forest provide a yellow backdrop to this trees red foliage. It survived a large grape vine that grew from the forest into its crown before I took my big pruners into the forest and cut the vine at ground level about 10 years ago, annual deer munching on its lower branches in the winter and spring, and being squished by some pines and an oak before they were cut down. It is a survivor.

I enjoy its shape and color…all through the year: the red stems of late winter, the tiny red flowers, the new leaves that start out red then turn green, the red samaras that turn brown and fly off the tree, the lush green of summer, and then the mixture of red and green leaves that fly off the tree in the fall – usually in one week.

The section tree is a tulip polar. It is at the edge our forest. It has never been as straight and many of the others of its kind in the forest. It never has been. I think I like it more for its imperfections.

This year the tree seemed to have many flowers in the spring and they must have been fertilized because there are large number of seed pods now.

The tulip polar leaves turn brown very quickly once they fall from the tree. I always feel lucky to find one that still has some green. The first year we moved into our house, on the first of November, the leaves were flying off the tulip polar with every breeze. They are at least a week later this year.

The last tree that I see as an individual in my backyard is the newest. It is a black walnut and a relatively recent addition. In this jumbled picture – it is in the middle with the stems containing multiple leaflets – yellow and green as it changes for the winter. It came up on its own, probably planted by a squirrel. I didn’t realize it was a black walnut until last year when it had two nuts on it.

About 5 years ago I had cut honey suckle and grape vines off a small tree in that area but I didn’t know what kind of tree it was at the time. Now the crown gets sun late in the day in our neighbor’s backyard and the lower part gets sun from late morning onward in our yard. Its tall enough now that the deer can’t hurt it very much. So – I am watching to see how soon it will perturb the forest around it. Black walnuts make space for themselves once they have a good start and this one is getting close to the size that it will have that impact.

Turkey Vulture

I was working in my office recently and saw a large bird swoop in front of the window – just in the periphery of my vision. There are a lot more crows about these days but my impression was that the bird was bigger than a crow. I got up to look out the window – expecting to not see the bird. But – the bird had stopped on the roof of our neighbor’s house and seemed to be posing for a picture!

It was a turkey vulture! I have learned to recognized them as they soar (their outstretched wings look white on the tips and back edge; the black vulture’s wings look white only at the tips) but don’t see them on the ground frequently. This one was close enough to use the camera zoom and get a ‘vulture portrait.’

The bird seemed to be looking right at me at first – but then turned. It flew away eventually. I was glad there wasn’t something dead in by backyard that had attracted it!

Raking Leaves – 2

I started raking leaves toward the middle of October and still have quite a lot to do based on the leaves still clinging to the trees. Even the oak that was my focus in October still has some leaves – although there are noticeably fewer still on the tree. I’ve raked the area around the purple-leaved plum tree too although the tree still has leaves on it too; they don’t change color – they just fall. They are more fragile than the oak leaves and compress more easily into the trash can.

I noticed a small pine tree growing in the mulch of oak tree.  Maybe a squirrel planted a pine nut there? If it survives the winter – I’ll dig it up in the spring and move it someplace where it can grow more easily.

I’ve also noticed that a small azalea that is about 25 years old has turned red this fall when the sun shines on it. It looks good in front of the green bushes…and I should do some weeding around it while I’m out raking leaves.

In the back – I rake the leaves back into the forest. The maple is just beginning to drop its leaves. They fall more rapidly than the oak leaves once they start. Every breeze makes the tulip poplar and maple leaves swirl away from the trees. I’ve made one pass so far….and know that there will be at least one more…probably two…over the next week or so.

Moving Day - Fall 1994

I found a set of pictures my daughter took the day we moved into our house in the fall of 1994 – and promptly scanned them. She was 5 years old and in kindergarten. She documented ordinary things – like the view of the partially unloaded moving van.

She also took pictures from the front porch of the house. The small tree with red leaves by the mailbox is an oak that is now almost too big for me to reach around (and it a major contributor to the leaves on our front lawn that I need to rake every fall).

Taking a slightly different view – the small tree near the front of the van was a maple that was never healthy. It eventually died and we replaced it with a red leafed plum. Across the street the ever greens are now very tall. Twenty-two years does make a difference in the tree size all through the neighborhood.

But my favorite picture is one that shows the perspective of a 5-year-old --- the washing machine coming into the house!

Raking Leaves – 1

I have a ‘little at a time’ strategy for leaf raking this year rather than waiting for the majority to fall before doing some marathon raking sessions. Almost none of the leaves have even turned on the maple….the few red one stand out against a green backdrop.

But the oak has dropped about half and the purple leafed plum is shedding too. I raked the areas with the most leaves before my husband mowed late last week – letting the lawn mower chop up and distribute the few leaves that remained.

I measure my raking progress by the number of trashcan loads I take back to the brush and leaf pile in the forest. I compress the leaves to reduce the number of treks from the front yard (where the oak tree is) to the back. So far, I’ve done 5. The leaves from the trees in the back yard I’ll rake directly into the forest – no trashcan involved!