Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
In earlier travel posts about the Isle of Arran, I’ve shared photos of Neolithic remains and fairy glens, as well as the petroglyphs at King’s Cave. But that doesn’t begin to exhaust all that we found worth seeing (and photographing) there. Continue reading “2013 in photos: The Isle of Arran”
Yes, it’s cold. Continue reading “Cold snap”
Less than 1 percent of the ancient Caledonian forest remains, much of it in the Abernethy region, where Rachel and I camped for a week in mid July. She wanted to prove to me that real forests still existed in the British Isles. Our first evening there, I went for a walk and discovered this dead sheep. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A week in the Caledonian forest”
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned our visit to the studio of the Welsh artist Meri Wells. That was last July, in the course of a weekend with Clive Hicks-Jenkins (pictured above with Meri) and his partner Peter Wakelin. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A visit to Meri Wells’ studio”
I took a lot of photos this year, most of them during the two months I spent in the UK. I never did get around to sharing them all, so let me try to make up for lost time with a few gargantuan posts. One benefit of taking a look back is seeing patterns that one might not notice otherwise.
Here’s Rachel laying her hand on beech trees in Hebden Bridge, Continue reading “2013 in photos: Touched by a Rachel”
I have had some company on the morning porch this Christmas season,
and together we have bathed in the long, long sunrises of midwinter.
(Photo by Rachel — click to see larger.)
An icy mist or fog drifted in just after supper last night, and by morning (if I may be so gauche as to quote myself) every twig was spiky with eldritch feathers. Continue reading “Ice fog”
We posted an extra essay on my mom’s website this month. Since she originally wrote it for the June issue of the Pennsylvania Game News, it’s filled with summertime stories. Her subject: the about-face in scientific thinking about how non-human animals think and feel.
For almost half my life, treating wild creatures as thinking beings was scorned as anthropomorphizing them. Most scientists considered them to be little more than thoughtless robots. They neglected the study of animal minds because they didn’t believe that they could tell the difference between automatic, unthinking responses on the part of animals from possible behavior that showed an ability to make choices in what they do.
In school, students learned that it was unscientific to ask what an animal thinks or feels. If they were so bold as to ask, they were “actively discouraged, ridiculed, and treated with open hostility” as Donald R. Griffin wrote in his ground-breaking book Animal Thinking back in 1984. A renowned bat biologist, his previous book, in 1981, The Question of Animal Awareness, had been the subject of widespread derision. Still, he was able to give many examples of seemingly thoughtful wild creatures who, when they were confronted with new problems, acted creatively to solve them.
The writings of Griffin and other scientists, interested in what Griffin called cognitive ethology, have encouraged some scientists to study learning in vertebrate and invertebrate animals. They have been bolstered by the work of neurobiologists, who study the brains of animals and have made some amazing discoveries, most notably the fact that an animal that has loops between its thalamus and its forebrain is a conscious thinker. Birds and mammals, including humans, have these loops. So too do reptiles, although their loops are minimal.
As an aside, I reprocessed an old porcupine photo for the article. It’s taken me many years to learn the simple truth that being slightly out-of-focus isn’t always a bad thing for a photo:
Not to mention the importance of proper light levels, color balance, etc. Here’s what I did with the same photo back in 2007:
Our third day under ice was the sunniest so far. I took my camera up into the field to try and capture some of what I’d seen yesterday, much of it blurred as my niece and I hurtled past on my old runner sled. Continue reading “Captured in ice”
Yesterday morning’s lovely, quiet snow turned to freezing rain in the afternoon. In the evening, it really began to rain hard, and continued for hours. Around 11:00, I started to hear crashes from limbs breaking up on Sapsucker Ridge — the side of Plummer’s Hollow dominated by black cherry, red maple, and other weak, fast-growing trees. By two in the morning, when I finally went to bed, the rain had almost stopped, but there was still a constant barrage of crashes. I feared the worst. Continue reading “Learning from the ice”