August 22, 2020

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 22, 2020

August 22, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

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.

Scientists Awaken Deep Sea Bacteria After 100 Million Years | The Scientist Magazine® - Learning more about the durability of microbes in extreme conditions….and thinking about how we look for life elsewhere.

How Ancient Monsoons and Tectonic Shifts Shaped This Flowering Mountain Hotspot | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – China’s Hengduan Mountains….a lot of rhododendrons and delphiniums

Idol of the Painted Temple - Archaeology Magazine – Pachacamac in Southern Peru…a place venerated even before the Inca Empire

5,000 Pythons Reportedly Removed from Everglades Ecosystem – A lot of pythons…but still more need to be removed.

How lockdown may have changed your personality - BBC Future – It might not have changed very much or permanently for most people. Most of us are resiliently adapting to lockdown…we’ll bounce back or continue the aspects we developed during this ‘timeout’ that are positive.

Alaska’s Vegetation is Changing Dramatically – The impact is still to be determined but rapid changes are rarely good for ecosystems….they decline because they can’t adjust fast enough to the rate of change.

Bees' buzz is more powerful for pollination, than for defense or flight -- ScienceDaily – There is not just one kind of buzz! And some bees (like honey bees) don’t buzz flowers at all.

Top 25 Birds of the Week: Raptors - The birds of prey…some are powerful looking, some are cute, some a ugly…but that’s just overlaying our stereotyping onto birds like we do with other people.

Why Plastic Waste is an ideal building material – We need a strategy to upcycle all the waste plastic that is accumulating since we don’t seem to be able to wean ourselves from plastic packaging at all.

Grand Canyon's Prehistoric Past Appears In 313-Million-Year-Old Tracks - Sandstone rockfalls….near the trail…first spotted by a Norwegian geology professor on a field trip to the Grand Canyon with his students.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Clothes dryer working. Our 20-year-old clothes dryer has a new heating element and the dust/lint has been cleaned out from around the innards. The first loads we did were towels!

Doe and 2 fawns in our back yard. My husband noticed the deer in our back yard in the afternoon. They stayed around long enough for me to get some pictures. In past years we’ve had a doe and 2 fawns in our yard more frequently. This year their main path back into the forest must be through another yard because we haven’t seen them as often…and so it is a special day when we do.

The fawns are good size now, but their spots are still noticeable…not quite as well defined as earlier in the season.

July 11, 2020

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 11, 2020

July 11, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

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.

Top 25 birds of the week: Diet and Birds in Groups - Wild Bird Revolution – Catching up with collections of bird photographs. Some species appear in both sets!

Older adults share fewer memories as they age -- ScienceDaily – As I read about this study – I remembered that my grandmother often seemed surprised when I asked her about her memories of school…of what she remembered from her life before marriage…when my father was born, etc. She even asked why I was interested. Once she was reassured that I was…and that I wanted to take some notes…she was more than willing to share her memories which were often quite vivid well into her 90s.

Breathtaking Photos of Farmers Harvesting Lilies from the Mekong Delta – How beautiful! Near us – this type of water lily harvesting was done at Kenilworth Gardens in the first part of the 1900s.

Death and Drama Among the Cicada Killers – I remember collecting two cicada killers for my insect collection during the summer before my sophomore year in high school. I saw one go into a hole and put a jar over the hole….and two cicada killers came up into the jar. This article helped me understand what I found. First – they both had stingers, so they were females. Second – one of them had dug the hole…and the other was trying to covertly lay her eggs on the cicada the other had brought to the hole!

The hidden risks of cooking your food - BBC Future – There are benefits too….

Putting Communities at the Center of Freshwater Conservation – Cool Green Science – This type of thinking needs to be more prevalent re US freshwater resources as well. There are some parts of the country that are a drought away from severe water shortage just for the human population (particularly if water for agriculture is included as that allocated for humans)…nothing left for wildlife or riparian landscapes.

Tongue microbes provide window to heart health -- ScienceDaily – Maybe a new tool for detecting and treating heart failure.

The astonishing vision and focus of Namibia’s nomads - BBC Future – Detecting visual and attention changes caused by modern life.

Is It Possible to Shower Too Much? - The Atlantic – There is hygiene critical to health….and going beyond that might be harmful.

Climate Change Tied to Increased Pregnancy Risks, Analysis Finds - Yale E360 – Air pollution and heat exposure are linked with negative pregnancy outcomes in the US…..and both of are increasing in the US. And the impact of air pollution and excessive heat is problematic for babies too.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

2 fawns. For the past few days, we’ve had two fawns in the back yard in the morning – after my usual early morning hour on the deck. Sometimes the doe is close to them…one morning she stayed back in the forest while the fawns wondered around. One day the flies were bothering them; they are particularly noticeable on the doe. It’s not unusual for deer to have twins. It seems like it is the norm for the ones we see in our backyard during the past few summers.

Fashion as Design office hours. The Fashion as Design Coursera course from last April provided two Zoom based sessions this week. Both provided references that update the course relative to the current crises in the US. I managed to open many of the links posted to the chat during the office hours and am passing some of them along:

Design Emergency – Instagram Live sessions that explore design’s role in the COVID-19 crisis. A collaboration between Paola Antonelli (design curator at MoMA) and Alice Rawsthorn (design critic). I am going to work my way through the videos on this site.
That Time When We All Fell Back in Love with Nature | British Vogue – From the August issue of British Vogue.
Kerby Jean-Raymond on Defunding the Police: “Anything else isn’t worth talking about” – Jean-Raymond is a designer that was one of the people featured in the course videos. Recently he drafted a list of actionable demands that the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) members and its associated companies could be held accountable for. He was interviewed for the latest edition of Frontpage. His bottom line: “Now all you can do is pick a side — and if you don’t pick a side, that means you picked a side.”
The Tuxedo Redefined – Virtual Exhibition from earlier this year curated by NYU Costume Studies Graduate Students.

June 15, 2020

Flowerbeds in the Morning – Part 2

June 15, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

One of the advantages of cool mornings is that the small critters move a little more slowly – making them easier to photograph. It was in the mid-60s on the morning I went out to work in the front flower beds – and took a few minutes for some photography. The first insect I noticed was a small damselfly flying around and then landing on a day lily leaf. I sat there in the sun long enough for me to get a picture with my phone. I clipped the best part of the image.

I used the same technique with the bee on the clover. The bee was working its way to all the tiny flowers.

The oak had a lacewing larva several years ago, so I always check the lichen for another; I didn’t fine one this time…. But there was a slug moving over a lichen patch.

20200612_071838 clip.jpg — Later – after I finished most of my work, I noticed a fly on a milkweed leaf. It too was a little sluggish because of the temperature.

Overall – I was pleased with the photographic results – concentrating on taking focused pictures without using the digital zoom on the phone – then clipping the portion I wanted for macro viewing.

Unique activities for yesterday:

First Fawn. When I first went into my office about 6 AM – I saw a doe and fawn in our backyard….headed toward the forest. By the time I got the camera turned on and zoomed, they were at the forest edge. This was my first fawn sighting of the year. Last year we had a doe with 2 fawn that came through the yard frequently all through the summer. There don’t seem to be as many deer this year; the path into the forest is growing over with vegetation and my day lilies have not been eaten. It would be good if the deer population were trending lower – although I enjoy seeing them in the forest.

New low weight for the year. I’m 7 pounds lower than my max weight for the year! I celebrated with dark chocolate for breakfast – of course.

July 26, 2019

Zooming – July 2019

July 26, 2019/ Gwen Morrison

I probably use the zoom on my camera for most of my pictures. It allows me to frame the picture the way I want and to ‘see’ the environment better than I can with just my eyes. Sometimes I am at the limit of what my camera can do. For example – the tiger swallowtails are particularly numerous in my back yard this summer and I kept seeing then flying under the maple tree where my compost pile is located. I used my camera like binoculars to see that the swallowtails were ‘puddling’ in the compost pile after a rain. They must have been enjoying the nutrient rich water!

There was a smallish robin that fluttered down from the maple and sat in the grass – just looking around for a few minutes before returned to the tree. It didn’t look or find a worm! Probably a fledging.

On the hottest day of the summer (so far), a wasp got a drink from our bird bath. Sometimes I find wasps that have drowned in the bird bath but so far it hasn’t happened this year. Maybe they are getting better as just getting the drink that they need.