How do a lovelorn insects find a mate?
There are various strategies, but one of them is to gather in a mating ball or mating swarm. Such swarms abound at this time of year, hanging over fixed references such as a tree or post, or marshalling along the edge of a sunbeam.
In the swarm the insects perform a dance which involves flying to the top and floating down. When they find each other, they will mate in the air.
A mating swarm of mayflies had anchored itself along the edge of a sunbeam.
A fledgling Great Blue Heron performs its matutinal callisthenics.
The kokanee are spawning in local creeks. Bears come to feast upon them. Locals and tourists come to delight in both.
There is a family of black bears with two cubs working a spawning channel. However, getting a good picture through the intervening brush and trees was difficult. The best I managed yestermorn was a portrait of the sow.
A black bear sow lifts her head from the water after failing to catch the fish she was after.
During the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, telescopes looked up; I looked down.
Well, fair’s fair, I looked up also, but I concentrated on the ground. Let me explain.
I leave it to the folks with good equipment in the path of totality to take the inspiring images of the corona. However, my title, Sun pictures, does not refer to such pictures of the Sun, itself, but to pictures made by the Sun.
The first hint I had that the Sun could paint pictures on the ground came from a book I read as a student. M. Minnaert’s book, Light and Colour in the Open Air, told of the way the gaps between tree leaves behave as pinhole cameras and projected images of the Sun on the ground. Normally when projected on a horizontal surface, these images would be elliptical. However, during a partial solar eclipse, they match the appearance of the Sun and become crescents.
I first saw these crescent Sun pictures during the solar eclipse of 1970. I wanted to see them again.
Sunlight passing though the gaps between tree leaves normally project elliptical Sun pictures on the ground. The lawn provides an uneven screen.
This is a shot of the Sun just as the partial eclipse was ending (the Moon still takes a tiny bite out of the Sun at seven o’clock), but the Sun is essentially circular and would produce elliptical images on a horizontal surface. The picture shows both sunspots and limb darkening.
Here is the Sun at about the greatest extent of the eclipse at my location.
Sun pictures are projected through the gaps between tree leaves during a partial solar eclipse. A less cluttered image was obtained by placing a kitchen mat on the grass.
“Please go away. Producing butyl mercaptan is expensive, and I don’t want to waste it on you.”
Having one’s home on a wildfire Evacuation Alert is a stressful experience — but, it would be worse having one’s home on a wildfire Evacuation Order.
Portraits of Local Wildlife:
My presentation is this evening.
The fire prompting the alert does not look very threatening in the picture, below. However, it was taken on Sunday, after a day of both water bombing and rain. Earlier extensive flames and candling were intimidating.
The fairly thin smoke on this occasion does allow the sighting of interesting colour variations: bluish against a dark background; reddish against a bright background. Much of the smoke is composed of small carbon particles, yet it is not the colour of carbon that is controlling the appearance. Rather, it is the smallness of the particles that preferentially scatters (deflects) the bluish light (just as do molecules in the atmosphere).
The light coming through the smoke seen against the bright sky has lost some of the shorter (bluish) wavelengths and so looks reddish. However, against the dark mountainside, there is little transmitted light, and the smoke is seen primarily by scattered light and so appears bluish.
The colour of the smoke is not due to the material composing it, but rather to the small size of the particles. The result is that the colour depends upon how the smoke is illuminated.
Only days after a marmot accosted a local hiker, I was attacked by a raven. Had our local wildlife started to run amuck? It was easy to be reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror-thriller, The Birds.
There was no need to conjure up a wildlife conspiracy. The raven was a freshly hatched chick that had taken to begging from humans whom it mistook for its parents.
The raven chick begged incessantly, pulled at my trousers, and tried to eat my shoe laces. I had no food to give it, so it soon transferred its attentions to someone else.
There were a few clues that this was a chick, but the striking one was its flesh-coloured gape.
Murray, the Hoary Marmot, is a mugger. It hangs out near a popular sub-alpine trail and accosts passing hikers. Murray prefers those with bare arms and legs for it likes to lick salty limbs.
Murray’s activity has a long tradition behind it for it seems that marmots along this trail have been doing this for decades.
Permission for me to post this picture of Murray mugging a hiker was given by Finn, the photographer, and Julia, the hiker. That the permission of Murray, the marmot, was not sought is probably a violation of animal rights.
A visiting Black Bear bears a blaze (a white V) on its chest. Fans of redundancy are wont to call this feature a white blaze.
Some websites that discuss the blaze claim that it is a common characteristic of Black Bears; others say that it is rare. Possibly the occurrence of a blaze varies from one region to another; possibly some websites are just poorly researched and edited (imagine that!).
What I can say is that around here, a blaze is rare. Indeed, the last time I photographed a bear’s blaze was a decade ago.
It is a rare bear that bears a blaze.
By continuing to…
Satire often gains its effect by joining disparate ideas. So it was that when I encountered:
• The government of BC’s recent (partial) ban on hunting grizzlies;
• A CBC story that told of the thrill of killing a grizzly;
• The many websites that assert: “By continuing to browse our site,
you are agreeing to our use of (tracking) cookies.” (Huh?)
I imagined our wilderness filled with notices to wildlife.
