Justfolk's photos

It's a long time since I studied biology -- more than half a century. And I understand the mosses and liverworts, taught to me as plants, are "plants" no longer. Like poor Pluto not being a planet anymore. Well, I still see them as plants. We've had a couple of weeks of mostly sub-freezing weather, but the mosses seem to hold up well in almost any weather. This was this afternoon while ice was not melting, but running brooks were still oozing down through the lucky mosses. ————- EDIT, next morning: I have been corrected by a short look through the Internet's many bryophyte discussions. Mosses are indeed still “plants.” They are seedless and non-vascular, but plants nonetheless.

Despite its reputation of being a soil-less barren rock, the island on which I live has a lot of trees. And the capital city is particularly well-treed. I cannot get much clear view of the sky from anywhere near our house. Yesterday as supper was cooking, I went out the front door to the street to see the moon rising in the northeast sky. It was a day before the actual fullness (today), but it nonetheless looked full to the eye. I liked the colour in the sky, here heavily pixelated from the high ISO I used, and the patterns of wires and telephone poles.

This is the main sign for a small shop in our neighbourhood. I like the sign partly because of the mix of serif styles.

It's a dull day. Here are the boys hanging about. Nipping down for a peanut. Now and again. Accusing one another of small improprieties. For a laugh. Not a hard life. Mostly.

Today is the 80th anniversary of this plant moving from my great-grandmother's hands to my mother's. My parents were married today in 1943 and this plant was a gift from her grandmother. It's been cloned a dozen or more times in the family. This is the mother plant (ha ha: "mother" plant; get that?) which Mom kept close at hand for decades and which I inherited after she died seventeen years ago. It blooms every year in time for her wedding anniversary. Happy dark days getting brighter, short days getting longer!

In the group of three dozen purple finches which came through our backyard this morning, there seemed to be only a single adult male. They are the ones for whom the species is named: all others are brown and white, perhaps with a dash of drab yellowing on the side. Here Mr Purp sits in the apple tree, taking a glance back towards three of his consorts.

We've been seeing very few finches in the garden lately. But this morning our resident chickadees and juncos suddenly became very frisky and excited, and a flock of purple finches came in. The visitors weren't there for the seeds in the feeder, but for the berries on the waxball and holly bushes. They stayed three or four minutes and were off, off to the SW, up the valley. Among the, say, forty purple finches was only one adult male (the guys who are *actually* purple) and he's not in this picture.

The moon in her first quarter, behind the bare trees of our back yard and the light scudding clouds in a steep breeze.

It's been cold enough that all the big puddles on the path we were walking today were frozen hard. But the air was just above freezing and ground water was dripping down off the hill through the mosses and running along little brooks. Across one brook, I saw this, what seemed to be a bunch of flowers just past their peak bloom. I took a picture and this evening asked the experts on our local "Wildflowers" page what it could be. You will, I hope, excuse me for thinking so, but they are not flowers at all. They are a white form of one of the Sphagnum mosses, probably S palustris. A lovely surprise on a mid-December day.

I sawed off the bottom of the Christmas tree to get a fresh cut before I stuck it up, and I saw the tree was very young. The rings are ambiguous but it's about six years old. Six good years. It is a Balsam fir, the favourite for Christmas trees around here. And this year we went for a smaller-than-usual one. Nonetheless, it is nearly eight feet (uuh, 2.5m) high.

I keep saying, "You seen one, you seen 'em all" about moon pictures. And it's true. But they are still pretty. So I keep taking them. This was at suppertime, or just before, while the moon was still in the sky. It's gone down now.

I've taken so many pictures over the past four decades or more that whenever I hear of the death of someone, one of the first things I do is see what pictures I have of them. So when I heard today that a former teacher of mine, who became a friend and colleague, had died, I pretty quickly found a couple of dozen pictures of her. Other pictures show her bright and cheery face, but this one might be my favourite. It was 1996 and I was attending a conference in Bath, an informal part of which was a tour of Glastonbury by another friend, Marion, who is on the right in this picture. Our deceased friend Gillian is on the left, and they were strolling back down the Tor after we had visited the chapel of St Michael on it. We also visited a few sacred spring wells in the area. (We're all folklorists, not uhh believers.) When she died this week, Gillian was 84 years old. I'll lift a glass to her.

Mundy Pond had a thin skim of ice in several places today. There were several days of cold weather and there had been more ice. But it was well over freezing today and the ice was breaking up. As we walked around the pond we could hear the sheets of ice clattering against one another. Out in the middle of the pond, the gulls were resting on what was left of it. I can rarely hold a camera level. I turnt the picture somewhat to make up for my lack of plumb..

I hear these guerrilla-decorated Christmas trees in public places have been growing in numbers in recent years elsewhere than just hereabouts. I never saw any until about five years ago. This one is in a park near our house and where we often walk.

Although I know the crows have a few other human friends, and anyway they'd look after themselves well enough in the wild, I often think about how we've created a community of dependents outside our door.

What's wrong with the younger generations, anyway? Time was, in my day, you'd never see a rat out before dark. And they don't even slink away anymore when they see you. Nowadays, sheesh, it's like anything goes.

I was brushing my teeth when I looked closely at a black spot in a little pool on the edge of the sink. There was this bug, apparently dead. With the corner of a paper towel. I retrieved her and examined her with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. And of course I took a couple of dozen pictures, none of them very good. I was testing the focus-stacking software on my camera but that was no big success. This picture was not focus-stacked. And although it was under the magnifying glass (and thus the two lightspots in the upper right) I was shooting at this point through the plastic side of the glass. My 60mm macro lens can get in pretty close on its own. I think it is a tiny ichneumon wasp, no more than 3mm long from head to arse tip. Where she came from in the first week of December I don't know. I say "she" because at least in some of the other shots I can see her ovipositor sticking back from the rear end of her body. I like finding bugs. But really, in this case I just like the picture. [And . . . maybe it wasn't an ovipositor at all, but a leg shoved off in a strange position. Oh, who knows?]

Yeah yeah. It's an old joke. I bet if you searched on the Internet, there'd probably be thousands of photos so-titled. A mere shadow of myself. But it's still mildly amusing. I suppose it's what they now call a "Dad joke," funny to aging men, but partly because it's not funny to most. Oh well. I'd stept outside this morning to see if there were any oddities among the half-dozen chickadees bouncing around the yard. There weren't. But there was this shadow. :)