forest
dr. dolittle | May 23, 2014While we are on the topic of cute animal stories, here is a family portrait with a newborn baby macaque at the Trentham Monkey Forest in Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
esiegel | May 11, 2013"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything." -Alan Watts
As we move farther away from the equinox and towards the solstice, my part of the world is seeing not only more daylight, but also more sunshine, warmer temperatures, and -- at least today -- some glorious days to be out in nature. This weekend, have a listen to Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ronu Majumdar, Sabir Khan & Tarun Bhattacharya's interpretive nature song,
Flame of the Forest,
while I share with you my list of the…
sastyk | February 1, 2012Counting Out Rhyme
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to…
laelaps | June 10, 2010
"Dinah", a young female gorilla kept at the Bronx Zoo in 1914. From the Zoological Society Bulletin.
Frustrated by the failure of gorillas to thrive in captivity, in 1914 the Bronx Zoo's director William Hornaday lamented "There is not the slightest reason to hope that an adult gorilla, either male or female, ever will be seen living in a zoological park or garden." Whereas wild adult gorillas were "savage" and "implacable" beasts which could not be captured (a photo of a sculpture included in Hornaday's article depicts a gorilla strangling one man, brandishing another about with its other…
laelaps | June 7, 2010
A female pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), photographed at Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.
edyong | July 4, 2009Walks through a forest are often made all the more enjoyable by the chance to watch brightly coloured birds flit between the trees. But birds are not just mere inhabitants of forests - in some parts of the world, they are the key to the trees' survival.
The Serengeti is one such place. Since 1950, around 70-80% of riverside forests have disappeared from this area. Fires seem to be a particular problem, opening large gaps in the canopy that forests can't seem to recover from. To understand why Gregory Sharam from the University of British Columbia has been monitoring the density of the…