An inquisitive old fart with a camera
General observations, generally during dog walks
Another dead turtle (link to 10 April), which I only saw because I went a block east en route to the beach because I intersected with someone going my usual route with two apparently-not-friendly dogs on leashes. This one about 1.5 m long.
It has been a while since I’ve seen interesting dead things on the beach. Yesterday’s was a good-sized sea turtle.
A young boy came over and started explaining something, but I could not make head or tail of what he was saying. Rioplatense Spanish can be pretty brutal, even more so when spoken by kids.
…what are you looking at?
The crazy plant: I took a picture when it was almost the height of the fencing. It was very pretty, very symmetrical. Then it reached my height, and then the gutter, and then some of the branches fell over. Their ends then turned skyward and kept growing.
I suppose I should get rid of it, but instead I’m amazed by it, growing out of a tiny bit of sand that rarely gets water.
Around the corner from us.
Several months ago, we were quite dismayed to find loggers destroying a significant number of trees (and hence shade) where we walk dogs. I just ran across this photo I took, illustrating why it’s less dismaying than it might seem. My shoe is size 13 (45), so that stump grew from nothing to 24″ (61 cm) in 18 years.
In a wonderful book The Hidden Life of Trees, the author tells of doing a core sample of a spruce sapling, the width of this thumb (say, the first two rings) and about a meter tall. He was astounded to discover it was 80 years old!
So the trees will be back, as long as people stop setting fires.
It is widely accepted now that the last big fire was the work of an arsonist.
A first!
We have never before seen a tortoise on the dog walk. You think that, if there were tortoises around, the dogs would have encountered them. But they acted absolutely mystified by this thing that wasn’t moving, but they knew by smell was alive.
We gave them a few minutes to be curious, then left the tortoise in peace.
Hard to do it justice with a photo: the farthest part of the beach was absolutely jammed. Today (at 6 PM) is the busiest I have ever seen the beach. The number of cars was amazing.