An inquisitive old fart with a camera
General observations, generally during dog walks
My wife asked me just last night when we get our first frost, and I said usually in June.
First frost of 2022: June 1.
Last year it was July 5.
In 2019 it was July 7.
2018: June 25.
2017: June 20.
2016: June 11.
You can almost feel the ice caps melting.
Long expected, this huge dead tree went down in a windstorm last week, taking with it a parrot nest. I saw one dead parrot, and of course there could be several more.
The tree had a double trunk. One side fell on one side of the power pole, and one side on the other. But the power line was still there! How was that possible?
It took us an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the power company had already been out to repair the line: note the shiny new clamps on the darker pole….
The rest of the harvest from my strange volunteer hybrid squash plants that grew out of a non-compost bin.
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.