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Category: Naturalist
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Shooting Snowflakes
The world is tucked neatly into a warm white blanket. Under the snow slumber the insects and arachnids I love to photograph during warmer times, so I am turning to my winter pastimes of preserving #lovelydeadcrap and shooting snowflakes. The problem with shooting snow… ok, there are several problems. One is that each flake is…
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Winter Sights
When it gets like this, all wet and cold and gloomy, I want to get some sunshine. But that’s not possible, so I go and look closely for the beautiful around the house.
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The Link Between Genetic Paucity and Extinction
Consider the dodo. When I asked a bunch of my friends on social media to contemplate it, the conversation ranged from ‘we can extract DNA from museum specimens? Cool! Bring back the dodo!” to “I hear dodos didn’t actually taste that good. Anyone have a recipe?” Which is a testament to human nature and the level…
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Conservation
We want to conserve the world around us. Not to eliminate the footprint of mankind, but to soften it, to pause it for a moment during the hurried day to smell the wildflowers, admire the industry of the bee, and thrill to the music of the songbird. Conservation understands the vital role of the green…
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Snake Hubbub
It was a quiet afternoon here at the writer’s house. It was sunny, but not too warm, it was Friday, and relaxation was happening. Well, I was relaxing, at least. I was torn from my contemplation of the story I was writing by an excited voice. The girls are as big as I am now.…
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Looking Outside
One of the wonderful things about living out in the country again, after three years in town, is the wildlife. I had been surprised how much was going on at the little house in town, in no small part because our house was tucked into the corner of thick brushy hedgerows. But out here, you…
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Spring Wildflowers
On my weekend (everyone else’s Monday) I squeezed in a trip over to Cox Arboretum, where there is a special garden. Woodland wildflowers tend to be difficult to cultivate, but they have succeeded, and filled out the garden with crowd-favorite domestics. It was an enchanting place to walk through and photograph, and introducing the Jr…
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Gotta Catch them All!
It struck me this morning that my laissez faire approach to insect hunting is slowly morphing into something else. I was stalking bugs yesterday after work, just casting around behind the house for some little thing, and as I hung poised over the flowers waiting for movement so I could focus and shoot, it crossed…
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Birdsong
I can hear birds outside, as the sun rises. Far from being silent, spring is noisy joyful chaos. This is country, although crowded for my tastes – but it is country, by the lights of the surrounding farm fields and forest that looms up behind the house. There are deer that walk by the fences…
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Just Weeds
I did something yesterday I haven’t done in years. It’s a thing I’ve done since I was a teen, but since the move to Ohio, I haven’t had the room. Some habits, though, just don’t die. I picked weeds for the table. See, the Otaku Princess gave me a vase for Christmas. She thought it…