Ee-o-lay!

This is an audio recording of my favorite bird song. The wood thrush sings his song well-concealed in the forest. This year I've heard a couple in the city park near our house, which is pretty awesome. I made this recording by taking a video of the woods outside of the deer enclosure. As usual, I never saw the bird. Other birdsong can be heard in the recording, but the wood thrush is the loudest, and last call heard,

Kids love chickens

This wasn't a 3:00 snapshot, but I kind of wish it was.

Workplace rock balance

The bottom rock is one I set up every work day and balance, to check in on my centeredness.
The top, thin dark one was just for fun.

Orange tentacles

Cedar-apple rust (Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae) is a fungus that infects juniper (notably the eastern redcedar) and apple trees. The fungus' life cycle takes it from one plant to the other, and produces these exciting and bizarre fruiting galls on the juniper tree. I covered the closely related quince rust in the 365 project. The gall is a plain woody lump until the spring rains and then the weird orange spore-bearing tentacles come out.( more )

3:00 snapshot, #112.

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Star-of-Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum)

Well, you all know some stuff about the Asian Ladybug from my post about it last year around this time, but I just learned a whole lot more from txtriffidranch. Go check out this post and find out what Asian ladybugs, pitcher plants, poison dart frogs, and sauvignon blanc have to do with one another!