a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Happy Friday.
Exactly 324 years ago today— on Jan. 26, 1700, at 9 pm— the Juan de Fuca plate slipped an average of 20 meters (66 ft) along a fault rupture about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) long in the Pacific Ocean.
The magnitude 9 earthquake caused a tsunami which struck the west coast of North America and the coast of Japan.
We arrived at the cruise terminal on the Paracas peninsula near Pisco this morning at 7 am.
Our excursion was to nearby Paracas National Reserve, an area with protected desert and marine ecosystems.
Most of the area is a moonscape with no vegetation.
It is really part of the Atacama Desert— the driest nonpolar desert in the world.
I caught this one digging a little crab out of the sand at the edge of the surf.
[Wikipedia]
We spotted the coast of Peru this morning.
The Norwegian Sun is on course to arrive at the port town of Salaverry early in the morning, after three days at sea.
After breakfast, we went on our excursion for the day: an aerial tramway tour through the Gamboan forest canopy.
At the top of the tramway― called Cerro Pelado― there is an observation tower with panoramic views of Soberania National Park, the Chagres River and the Panama Canal.
Our tour included stops at a sloth sanctuary, an orchid house and a butterfly enclosure.
There was a beautiful rainbow in the sky today at sunset.
I did not get a picture of it, but here is rainbow picture from the Seattle Times’s Best Pictures of 2023 collection, instead.
The photographer is Daniel Kim.
The invasive beetle first arrived on the U.S. East Coast in 1940, and has moved as far west as Michigan. It was spotted in British Columbia in the early 2000s — presumably transported along with freight — and is now spreading rapidly in Washington.
– Sandi Doughton reporting in The Seattle Times of Jan. 10, 2021
My neighbor and I are pretty sure it was an invasion of European chafer beetles (Amphimallon majale) that had attracted the crows to come and tear up the lawns here.
There are no easy solutions to the problem, but most invasive insects enjoy a boom period when they move into new areas, but eventually, ecosystems adjust and natural predators and other factors combine to impose a type of equilibrium, says Todd Murray, director of Washington State University’s Puyallup Research and Extension Center.
The soil is now very soft everywhere, after all the rain.
Who or what could it be, turning up whole pieces of grass sod, from my lawn and the grassy edge by the street? .. I had thought for several days.
Today my neighbor and I caught the culprits red-handed: crows digging for worms.
I look at the eyes and head of this Sumatran rhino, and I think: surely some dinosaurs that roamed Earth 100 million years ago looked exactly like this.
The Sumatran rhinoceros once inhabited rainforests, swamps and cloud forests in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and southwestern China but today fewer than 50 of these animals remain, in Indonesia.
[Photo courtesy of the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry]
[Photo courtesy of the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry]
A wake of buzzards
A confusion of chiffchaffs
A chattering of choughs
A commotion of coots
A murder of crows
An asylum of cuckoos
A curfew of curlews
A trembling of finches
A swatting of flycatchers
A prayer of godwits
A crown of kingfishers
A parcel of linnets
A cast of merlins
A conspiracy of ravens
A worm of robins
A parliament of rooks
An exultation of skylarks
A murmuration of starlings
A hermitage of thrushes
A volery of wagtails
A museum of waxwings
A chime of wrens
An orchestra of avocets
A mural of buntings
A water dance of grebes
A booby of nuthatches
A quilt of eiders
A mischief of magpies
An aerie of eagles
A wisdom of owls
A quarrel of sparrows
A wisp of snipe
A kettle of swallows
An invisibleness of ptarmigans
A committee of terns
A descent of woodpeckers
A pitying of turtledoves
A banditry of titmice
A circlage of house martins
A scold of jays
A charm of goldfinches
A fall of woodcock
A deceit of lapwings
Source: countrylife.co.uk/nature
A pair of northern flickers (woodpeckers) were foraging for earthworms on my front lawn this afternoon.
Here’s one of them.
A circus lion escaped and was seen roaming around heavily populated streets for hours in a suburb of Rome on Saturday, before it was sedated and captured by authorities.
– Reported by NBC
Sadly, a great number of many different types of animals are still forced to perform in circuses every day, all over the world.
In the USA, the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 is the main federal law that regulates the treatment of animals in research and exhibition. It has been amended eight times, most recently in 2013. Even so, it still falls short of adequately protecting animals that perform at shows and in circuses.
There are lots of leaves on the ground here in the city after a weekend of blustery and rainy weather.
Seattle-Tacoma airport recorded 2.77 in. of rain for October— below the average of 3.46 in.
November is the wettest month of the year (usually coming in at 6.5 in), and we’re off to a good start with a forecast of 1.4 in over the next seven days.
Happy Monday.
It’s Seattle Forest Week— a yearly campaign by Seattle Parks to promote the city’s green spaces, healthy urban forests, and encourage the planting of native plants.
Surely there can’t be flowers anymore in Thomas Street Gardens, I thought, as I made my way there yesterday.
I was wrong though, and there they were— outrageous splotches of color against the gray sky.
The Carboniferous is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic that spans 60 million years from the end of the Devonian Period 358.9 million years ago, to the beginning of the Permian Period, 298.9 mya.
[Picture: Bibliographisches Institut – Meyers Konversationslexikon]
The Carboniferous* lycopod forests were not like this at all (trees with wood and bark). The lycopods, like their Devonian forebears, were hollow, supported by thick skin rather than heartwood, and covered in green, leaflike scales. Indeed, the entire plant— the trunk and the crown of dropping branches alike— was scaly. With no columns of vessels to transport food, each of the scales was photosynthetic, supplying food to the tissues close by.
Even stranger to our eyes, these trees spent most of their lives as inconspicuous stumps in the ground. Only when it was ready to reproduce did a tree grow, a pole shooting upward like a firework in slow motion to explode in a crown of branches that would broadcast spores into the wind.
Once the spores had been shed, the tree would die.
Over many years of wind and weather, fungi and bacteria would etch away at the husk until it collapsed onto the sodden forest floor below. A lycopod forest looked like the desolate landscape of the First World War Western Front: a craterscape of hollow stumps filled with a refuse of water and death; the trees, like poles, denuded of all leaves or branches, rising from a mire of decay. There was very little shade and no understory apart from the deepening litter forming around the shattered wrecks of the lycopod trunks.
Fall colors, seen on 17th Avenue East here in Capitol Hill, Seattle.
[Infographic by capturetheatlas.com]
Please note: a camera presents severe limitations when the lights appear in an animated fashion, and in the entire night sky overhead!
The photographer is Francois Theron and he used a Sony NEX-3 digital camera with a 10-second exposure.
Today we drove in a southeasterly direction from Fairbanks, on Alaska Route 2 South along the Tanana River.
