Category: Nature

‘Oh look! another month’
– Tweeted by @Twitter

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Mr Squirrel was sitting on my fence this morning, nibbling on a chunk of fruit from my neighbour’s tree.

I went out after sunset tonight to find a spot here in my neighborhood that would enable me to look over the trees for Comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise*).
I found it with the help of my binoculars, and got a somewhat decent look at it.  The sky is definitely not an inky black here in the city!

*Neowise stands for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the space telescope from NASA that had discovered it in March.

The comet is on its way back to 715 astronomical units, or AU, from the Sun. (For comparison, Earth orbits at 1 AU, Jupiter at 5 AU, and Neptune at 30 AU.) The comet takes about 6,800 years to make one lap around its long, stretched-out orbit .. so it won’t visit our inner solar system again for many thousands of years.

A lot more flowers are blooming on my hydrangea this year, compared to last year. They are as always a deep pink (which means that I have neutral or slightly alkaline soil).
A neighbor right around the corner has beautiful blue ones (acidic soil).

I cleaned up some pictures from my old 35 mm negative scan archives.
These were all taken in the nineties in Botswana’s Tuli block⁠ — the eastern tip of the country wedged between Zimbabwe in the north and South Africa in the south.

I saw this old news clip from 2016 on Twitter. A 99-year old woman in Miami woke up with a strange animal sleeping on her chest: a kinkajou (Potos flavus).

Luckily, says the veterinarian that took care of the kinkajou, it was a ‘domesticated’ animal. (They did track the owners down. Kinkajous cannot really be domesticated, but the animal was obviously used to humans).

A Steller’s jay made such a ruckus in the tree in front of my house last night, that I had to go investigate. Sure enough, there was a second one on the ground, unable to fly. Oh no, I thought, I’ll have to do something.

I put the struggling bird in a shoebox, and left a message for the wildlife rescue center in Lynnwood. They called back in the morning.  I texted them these pictures, and they said to bring it in.

They found an injury below its left eye; could have been the work of a crow. It was also a little thin and they were going to take care of it for a while and set it free. What could also be going on, is that the bird is just learning to fly, said the bird expert. Most fledgling birds don’t fly straight out of the nest. They spend a day or two on the ground flapping their wings (and hope they don’t catch the attention of predators), and then get going.

These bird pictures are from Saturday, from around our friend Paul’s house in Hansville. (Hansville is in Kitsap County, north and west from Seattle, across the Puget Sound).

The summer of our discontent has arrived. Our city’s traditional Fremont Solstice Parade to celebrate it, has been cancelled this year.

At least the sun still rises, and sets, as if nothing on Earth had changed.
Daylight time here (sunrise at 5.11 am through sunset at 9.10 pm) is at its peak, now just shy of 16 hrs, at 15:59:17.

Here are flowers that I had found on my walk after dinner.
The first picture is of a single clematis, the next of pink and white rose campions, with their gray-green stems.
I believe the little yellow flowers in the last picture are damianita daisies.

I found these beauties in Summit Slope Park here on Capitol Hill, while I was out on my walk.

The deeper you go, the stranger things get.
– Dr. Bruce Robison, marine biologist, of voyages into the Monterey Canyon and beyond (Monterey Canyon is a sub-marine canyon in Monterey Bay, California).

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It’s World Oceans Day.

Scientists agree that there are still hundreds of thousands of undiscovered species of animals and plants in the oceans.

More and more has been discovered about the bristlemouth : easy in a way, since they are everywhere in the oceans — the world’s most prevalent vertebrate, by far. There may be a quadrillion – 1,000,000,000,000,000 (10¹⁵) – of them, all told. They live in the middle depths of the ocean where there is little light. They have bioluminescent spots that glow in the dark, and can open their mouths extraordinarily wide, baring needle-like fangs.

Many of them have another trick up their sleeve: start life as a male, and later, switch to become a female. Scientists call it protandrous — that is, a male-first hermaphrodite — a phenomenon also seen in certain worms, limpets and butterflies.