Bumblebees are out in droves here in the Great Lakes, buzzing low around old logs and grass tussocks. These are the queens, the would-be and welcome colonizers. Check out my thoughts: www.understorytales.com/post/long-li...
#pollinators #bees #bumblebees #nature
A Rusty Blackbird, mostly black with a hint of rusty copper on the back and a bright light-yellow eye stands in a shallow puddle filled with fallen leaves.
The world is in such peril, Rusty Blackbirds don't seem very important. Then again, maybe they're more important than ever. If you want to cleanse with some blackbirds, give my post a read. www.understorytales.com/post/rusty-b...
#birds #birding #blackbirds #nature
Close-up of a fallen tree branch covered in gray and white crustose lichens, with a dense cluster of bright orange, disk-like lichens standing out near the center.
Very close-up look at dark gray lichen apothecia ringed with very light gray edges.
Orange apothecia of a lichen ringed with yellow edges.
Xanthomendoza sp. (orange) and a Physcia sp. lichens on a stick that came down with a treefall. Always cool to see what was growing way up there where only birds get to see. Two close-ups taken with DinoLite scope. #lichens #dinolite #lichen
A decaying tree stump in a damp forest, its wood crumbling and covered in patches of moss and pale green lichen. Several small evergreen clubmoss plants sprout from the sides and base of the stump, contrasting with the brown leaf litter scattered across the forest floor. The background is bare trees on a misty spring morning in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania, near Linn Run State Park. .
The life of a tree is far from over when it sheds its last leaf and drinks its last drop of water. This tree "died" probably a decade ago, if not longer. Today it's a nursery for lichens, moss, and clubmoss. As full of life as ever! #LinnRun #pennsylvania #forest
And they (the military) voted for him by a wide margin, in 2024, knowing exactly what he was. That's the part I can't fathom.
The first sighting of this character is one of the days I mark every spring. Should be about two or three weeks here in Michigan.
You've never read the entire 78 inch long receipt, have you? It says in paragraph 17d.9 they have the right to kill you.
As a Kirby myself, Kirby makes me happy. (Note: I pre-date him, so I'm OG.)
Several moss-covered rocks on a forest floor covered with brown leaves.
A rock completely covered in a moss with wispy leaves that look like green hair.
Close up of a moss colony that looks like green hair with thin wispy strands.
Digital microscope image of moss leaves with very thin strands that look like green hair.
Four looks at Boulder Broom Moss (Dicranum fulvum), but your face keeps getting closer. Specimen found in Forbes State Forest, Pennsylvania, near Linn Run State Park. #moss #bryophyte #LinnRun #LaurelHighlands
A stunted and gnarled pine tree with yellow-green needles in a wet bog.
A stunted and gnarled pine tree with yellow-green needles in a bog that is fairly dry, but open.
Two photos of the same pine in Spruce Flats Bog, Pennsylvania, 24 years apart. April 2002 and yesterday. Time moves slowly in sphagnum bogs. #bog #nature
In a cluster of last year's dead grass and stems is a small fuzzy bee with black antennae and a typical black and yellowish striped abdomen.
Behold the Unequal Cellophane Bee! It's one of the first bees to fly around here in the spring - a pollinator of Red Maples. Cellophane bees are named for the females' ability to mix saliva with butt secretions to make something akin to saran wrap to waterproof their nest cells. #bees #pollinators
Close-up of a small brown, streaked songbird (a Song Sparrow) perched on thin leafless branches, facing the camera with its bill open as if singing.
I'm going to start a collection of animals that look like they're hurling obscenities at me. Today it was this Song Sparrow in my yard. #birds #birding #sparrows To be fair, I don't speak Sparrow, so it might have been obscenities.
The first Field Sparrows of the year in my back...uh...field. Such delightful birds. The nests they'll be building shortly will be on the ground in clumps of last years grasses and vegetation. (Eaton County, Michigan) #birds #sparrows #birding
A twig covered in gray lichen being held by a human hand. There's a tiny hot pink speck on the twig.
A pink speck on a twig covered in lichen. A US penny is offered for size reference. The pink thing is smaller than Abraham Lincoln's nose.
A hot pink blob of fungus on a lichen colony. Photo was taken with a DinoLite digital microscope.
Illosporiopsis christiansenii is a fungus parasitic on lichen. #Lichen are doing their complicated symbiotic thing, and this fungus comes along and says, "Yeah, gimme a piece of those nutrients." Same colony of I. christiansenii pictured at three scales.
This is so important. Elevate ideas, not people. Follow paths, not leaders. Erect support, not statues.
...which attracts a stranger who is one of the few people around who might fully grasp the grief and loneliness at that home. So my father-in-law, a devout introvert, goes out and they chat about stuff. I'm not necessarily a believer in the afterlife, but this was....something.
The very first birder to show up was a gentleman who had also lost his wife recently. So my mother-in-law passes on, has hummingbirds on her gravestone, and immediately a rare hummingbird arrives at her husband’s house.... (continued)
An orange and green humminbird is perched on a red plastic hummingbird feeder, drinking from a plastic yellow flower.
This relatively rare (for Michigan) Rufous Hummingbird showed up at my father-in-law's house in late September, a couple weeks after he lost his wife of almost 60 years, who happened to love hummingbirds. It stayed for a couple months and lots of birders ended up visiting his house. (continued)
I just wrote the line in one of newsletters for the weekend, "If you like dragonflies and landscapes with the saturation cranked up until they look like psychedelic fever dreams, you won’t find that here."
Several fuzzy caterpillars with black, orange, and white tufts of hair are crawling on a green leaf. The background is out of focus, showing dry stems and foliage.
A brown bird with a long tail and a white throat perches on a tree branch, partially shaded, with a softly blurred green and yellow background of leaves and light. This is a boom year for Milkweed Tussock Moths in my area. You always see a few of them around this time of year, but this fall there are an ungodly number of them. I don't really care, since I like them and I have way more milkweed than I want. For the past three weeks I've been hearing the calls of someone else who really likes them - Black-billed Cuckoos. It's probably not a coincidence that the caterpillar explosion coincided with several cuckoos moving in to patrol the yard daily, something that has not happened before. Cuckoos eat all kinds of caterpillars that have wiry, irritating hairs that make them inedible to most birds. The cuckoos allow the hairs to embed in their stomach, then they simply shed their entire stomach lining with the hairs stuck to it and spit the whole thing on the ground. The boom and bust cycle of the moths attracting birds with evolutionary adaptations to eat the plentiful moths...stuff like this is pure beauty to me. Waterfalls and mountains and multicolored fall forests are all gorgeous, but this stuff, the ecology of what's going on out there right now, that's the beauty that hits me on a spiritual level that no vista can.
We're having a Milkweed Tussock Moth invasion. Coincidentally (or not!) we're having a Black-billed Cuckoo invasion. Ecology lessons in the backyard! (Full story in the cuckoo pic alt text.) #nativeplants #birds #backyardwildlife
A nice salmon filet fresh out of the as fuck is tasty AF.
I don't expect anyone to know how these things are trained or coded, but just accepting that it is just something predicting what the next word in a sentence should be is enough. It's not analyzing a knowledge bank to give you an answer, it's playing Mad LIbs.
I have a less dystopian take on AI than many, but this inability of almost everyone to grasp what LLM's are does give me serious concern. I guess because it's portrayed as a conversational entity, people are absolutely unwilling to accept that it doesn't have a single shred of knowledge.
A small gray butterfly with delicate black spots and thin dark edging on its wings feeds from the stamens of a pale yellow-white flower. Around the flower are several unopened buds, dried seed pods, and green leaves, with a small dark insect (possibly just part of the plant?) visible on a nearby stem. It looks like a tiny caped monster with glowing red eyes. The background is a soft blur of green foliage.
Elegant moment in the yard with this Summer Azure (Celastrina neglecta) alighting on blossoms of Virgin's Bower (Clematis virginiana). At the time I didn't notice the Sauron-looking bug (or moth? or part of the plants?) lurking in the background on the right. #butterflies #nativeplants #pollinators
Close-up of a green leaf with jagged edges, cupping a small pool of clear water at the base of its central stem, with sunlight highlighting the leaf’s texture and veins.
This is why they call them Cup Plants. A valuable native or near-native plant in the midwest US. Deer love 'em, but they also spread like crazy. Songbirds spread the seed readily.
A small green frog (It's a Gray Treefrog, but its color is green) rests on a large, bright green leaf, blending in with its surroundings. The leaf has jagged edges where it has been partially eaten, and the frog is positioned in dappled sunlight near the stem where Cup Plants collect water. Frogs take in water through their skin, and many have highly vascularized patches of skin on the belly and rear thighs that act as water uptake zones. This frog is drinking, and likely praying to the frog gods for rain.
Gray Treefrog "drinking" from the "cup" of a Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum). We're having a severe drought in Michigan, so I spray the cups every evening to make sure they act as a patch of tiny oases for insects...and apparently frogs. #nativeplants #frogs "Drinking" explained in alt text.
A close-up photo of a bumblebee collecting pollen from the spiky, orange-and-red central cone of a purple coneflower (Echinacea). The bee is dusted with yellow pollen, and its fuzzy, black-and-yellow body is clearly visible in sharp detail. The background is softly blurred, with hints of green foliage and purple flower petals.
A close-up photo of a bumblebee collecting pollen from the spiky, orange-and-red central cone of a purple coneflower (Echinacea). The bee is dusted with yellow pollen, and its fuzzy, black-and-yellow body is clearly visible in sharp detail. The background is softly blurred, with hints of green foliage and purple flower petals.
Common Eastern #Bumblebee heading out on a foraging run in my yard. Her corbiculum (pollen basket on the rear tibia) is empty, so she's either eating the groceries at the store instead of taking them home to the family, or she ust got there. Nice view of anthers in the coneflower in the first pic.
Close-up image of a large wasp perched on a cluster of small white flowers. The wasp has a black head and thorax, large black eyes, and long black antennae. Its legs and part of its abdomen are a bright reddish-orange, while the tip of the abdomen is black. The background is blurred green foliage, highlighting the insect and flowers in sharp detail.
Great Golden Digger Wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus) on Virginia Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum) in my yard. No plant on the property attracts the diversity of wasps that the Pycnanthemum does. Six or seven species on one small clump is not unusual. #wasps #nativeplants #backyardwildlife #insects
Glad you clarified. I thought Jeffrey Goldberg got added to another Signal chat.
I want to put a thought bubble above those Meganisoptera flying by saying, "We didn't have this kind of commotion back in the good old days of the Carboniferous."
