Adhesive Problem

I have what I think are a lot of nice photos hanging in the Stella Fae Miller Gallery in the Plumas County Museum, but with an amateurish means of hanging them.  As you can see from this photo, which shows just half of the exhibit, a few have become delaminated and fallen off the wall.  I plan to visit the museum tomorrow with some sort of superglue and fix things.  Meanwhile, the show, complete with natural history notes, will be up through the month of December.  Many of the photos appeared first in this blog.  The museum is open Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 4.  Come on by.   I'll be there during Art Walk, the evening of December 7.

Pretty Things

 A possible week-long deluge has begun. Wind, possible power outages, floods, and landslides.  Puts me in the mood to seek out beautiful things and share them.  Here are two from my archives.

I've been thinking a lot about global warming lately and the widespread denial about the seriousness of it, much less the existence of it.  Very weird and scary to me.  The denial I mean.  I just read one writer's hypothesis that the most power leaders in the USA, industry, military, government, etc., actually think it would be a good thing because they believe that in a world-wide struggle for survival, the USA would come out on top and ultimately be better off than we are today.  This is so bizarre and scary that I had to go into my photo archives and look for some pretty things - sort of those guys in the movie Soylent Green fawning over the last real tomato.

What to call this?

 When I pulled these two from the archive, my first thoughts had to do with how awesome flight is, and I got to wondering about what sort of sequence of evolutionary events could lead to the development of flight.  A title for this post that crossed my mind was "The Miracle of Flight."  But I don't believe there's such as thing as miracles, just low probability events.  But that doesn't make a very good title.  I'm actually sick of the talk of miracles because I think that such a belief is an excuse to suspend thought.  There are actually people in this world who believe rational thought is a trick of the devil.  I'd say "to hell with such people" but I don't believe there's a hell either.  Meanwhile, click on either of these photos for a closer view of one of the wonders of nature.  The critter above of course is the familiar honey bee.

This one is a Dobsonfly, often found landing among willows and alders at streamside, but this one conveniently (for photographers) landed on the big green water tank above my house in Boyle Ravine.

Unconventional Beauty

 One way to look at Teasel, or any plant covered with spines, is as something to avoid.  The flower heads in early summer can be beautiful, especially while they are being visited by various insects.  However, there's no avoiding the fact that to get good pictures of Teasel one might have to brave the spines.  I find beauty there which I might never have found if I hadn't looked at lots of photos of Edward Weston.  His photos of, say, a nude women curled up in the fetal position on sand and of a bell pepper on a table, which, aesthetically look more alike than different.  I'm also finding more and more beauty in unconventional places as a result of an ongoing dialogue with talented young photographer Spencer Dykstra.  Google Spencer Dykstra Photography for a sampler.

This photo of a dead crawdad, believe it or not, was inspired by my memory of Georgia O'Keefe's cow skulls.  Her paintings of extreme close-up views of flowers and her comments about her intentions with such paintings have always interested me, but her combinations of death and beauty in a desert setting are a challenge to one's aesthetic sense.  To me, a crawdad, like most any crustacean or insect, is an architectural marvel.  It's beautiful even in death.

Lovely Beetles

Since I've been writing about beetles lately for my book-in-progress, I've needed to revisit my beetle photo files.  These are so bright and colorful, I thought I'd post them again in case you're having a problem with the damp, grey weather.  The top photo is of the Dimorphic Longhorn Beetle, Anastrangalia laetifica, of the Cerambycid family.  This is a female, nearly an inch long.  The males are solid black, thus the name dimorphic, and only half as big.
The bottom photo is of a Common Checkered Clerid, Trichodes ornatus, of the family Cleridae.  I've seen this species on dozens of different species of flowers.  I assume that it eats the pollen on all of them, but I am not sure.  They're reluctant to fly unless seriously disturbed or on a mission, so they are easy to photograph.  In both cases, when I encounter the flower-bug combination, my enthusiasm varies from excitement about the beetle to enjoying the details of the flower.  Also, there are times when I'm mostly motivated to take photos and other times I really want to write.  Thus, an essay-in-progress is titled On Relative Enthusiasms.

Aphid Hiding

I was trying to decide whether the subject of this photo was the beetle or the flower.  Then I decided it was the aphid.  Click on the photo for a closer view.

Shroomin' at FRC, Part II

 Here are some more trailside attractions from my Wednesday morning hike on the FRC campus.  What started out as a pursuit of a particular mushroom, the purple one posted in Part I, turned out to be a more varied adventure.  The nature trail was covered with leaves and looked like it hadn't been visited by humans for a while.  There was a lot of moss on the tree trunks and fallen branches which gave the air a quality I love to breathe.

 When Pine Drops die at the end of summer, they sometimes remain standing for several more years if the winter snows don't smash them.  I've been watching this particular one for two years.

 The moss seems greener than green and I can't stop photographing it. 

 Scratches on this trunk of a young fir confirmed my suspicion that I was being watched.  When I spotted these fresh scratches my heart quickened... as did my pace.

 There were several parches of fruticose lichens erupting from beds of moss like gray-green fountains.

 An old dead oak is losing its bark, but meanwhile provides habitat for all sorts of mosses, lichens, and bugs.  In summer, this is a good hiding place for bluebelly lizards.

Near the end of my walk, I had a flashback of the Orange Peel Fungi I photographed a week or so ago.  I thought I had stumbled across another patch of them, but it turned out to be a real orange!

Is it possible for an Orange Peel Fungus to look more like an orange than an orange does?  That's the impression I got.