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I hope he doesn't mind me doing this. The Urban Pantheist is just the sweetest livejournal there is. Jef rambles around Boston's environs and takes really good picture of urban organisms -- a lot of very handsome invasive weeds, some bugs, and a really nice series of a slime mold.
Unlike me, this guy knows what he's talking about, and when he asks for help identifying a species, it's not "I didn't get a good picture of this hawk -- is it a redtail like all the others or one of the other hawks we get sometimes?" like it is for me, it's "Which cranefly is this?"
Especially if you're back East you'll get a richer appreciation for what's happening in the cities by reading his journal. Even as a westerner, I recognize some of these species and I definitely recognize the issues and the patterns.
And he has dogs. And hates Ronald Reagan for his tree remark. ("if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all" -- which is not nearly true, even though they are all clones -- there's tremendous diversity in a redwood grove, and even within one crown that all looks like it's clones of an original, vanished tree in the middle, members of the crown can be clones of trees a long ways away. And, at the big native plants nursery, there's named varieties -- named for places in my area, mostly. I guess we have prettier trees than the North Coast!)
On another note, somewhat related: the baby redtail at Lighthouse Field has gotten big enough that its fuzzy little head can be seen poking up from his nest at the top of the tallest snag in the field (which is really really tall -- the Monterey cypress which is famous for being kind of small and gnarly grows pretty tall when the coastal wind is not so strong). And I didn't even notice till Nadine pointed it out -- because I've been crawling on my belly trying to get comprehensible pictures of the plants!
For example, white flowers always elude me -- this is watercress growing on the cliff at Its Beach, across the street from Lighthouse Field. See how the features of the flowers are largely wiped out in glare? This is one of my best results, and I got it by setting the camera to "snow scene" which works this much better than the "white flower" setting.
Unlike me, this guy knows what he's talking about, and when he asks for help identifying a species, it's not "I didn't get a good picture of this hawk -- is it a redtail like all the others or one of the other hawks we get sometimes?" like it is for me, it's "Which cranefly is this?"
Especially if you're back East you'll get a richer appreciation for what's happening in the cities by reading his journal. Even as a westerner, I recognize some of these species and I definitely recognize the issues and the patterns.
And he has dogs. And hates Ronald Reagan for his tree remark. ("if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all" -- which is not nearly true, even though they are all clones -- there's tremendous diversity in a redwood grove, and even within one crown that all looks like it's clones of an original, vanished tree in the middle, members of the crown can be clones of trees a long ways away. And, at the big native plants nursery, there's named varieties -- named for places in my area, mostly. I guess we have prettier trees than the North Coast!)
On another note, somewhat related: the baby redtail at Lighthouse Field has gotten big enough that its fuzzy little head can be seen poking up from his nest at the top of the tallest snag in the field (which is really really tall -- the Monterey cypress which is famous for being kind of small and gnarly grows pretty tall when the coastal wind is not so strong). And I didn't even notice till Nadine pointed it out -- because I've been crawling on my belly trying to get comprehensible pictures of the plants!
For example, white flowers always elude me -- this is watercress growing on the cliff at Its Beach, across the street from Lighthouse Field. See how the features of the flowers are largely wiped out in glare? This is one of my best results, and I got it by setting the camera to "snow scene" which works this much better than the "white flower" setting.