Snapping Night Suns I’ve written multiple times about my love of fireflies. I find them so wonderful that I anointed them with the over-the-top nickname of “Suns of the Terrestral Night.” I called the late-spring, early-summer period when bearable humidity overlaps with lengthy daylight and the appearance of nature’s bioluminescent beetles as “The Best Time of […]
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Like a Moth to a Flame Thus hath the candle singed the moth. –Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Many of the oldest similes and metaphors feature an elemental timelessness. The notion of “a moth to a flame” connects us to our ancestors around fire rings before the advent of artificial light. Watching an insect inexorably drawn to
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The Walking Sticks of Ball’s Pyramid Today’s topic might win an award for the most misleading title. Given our penchant for hiking, one might surmise we’ll explore a special cane used on trails to a majestic pyramid crafted by humans (or aliens, amirite?) to look like a sphere. I’m not exactly sure how a spherical
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The Best Time of Year Every so often, one will encounter a popular, unending debate question: what’s your favorite season? I always had a tough time answering. As I pondered the query, a response would move to the tip of my tongue, but I would hesitate to vocalize. Yeah, I love the cooler temperatures and
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A Stormcloud of Bees Throw out the word “electricity” today and one clear connotation rules. The juice that runs the world, coming to us through hanging power lines or buried cables. The electricity that runs computers, televisions, appliances, and, increasingly, automobiles. This type of power is current electricity, a stream of charged particles that travels
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Plants Can Hear As humans, we are experts at anthropomorphology. We easily identify aspects in other organisms that match our own. For example, we understand the eyes of animals, which appear largely similar to our peepers, provide the critters with sight. In art, a long tradition of attributing human traits to non-human entities has provided
Denizen’s of London’s Underground The British constructed the world’s first underground passenger railway in London in 1863. The first tunnels built for the Metropolitan Railway used the cut-and-cover method, forming conduits just below the surface. Circular holes at deeper levels soon became the preferred method. The round tunnels provided a nickname by which locals
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Fireflies: Suns of the Terrestrial Night In the dry summer field at nightfall,fireflies rise like sparks.Imagine the presence of ghostsflickering, the ghosts of young friends,your father nearest in the distance. –Marilyn Kallet For me, one of the greatest parts about summer is the emergence of fireflies. For a month or two each year, I
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Prime-Period Cicadas Depending on where you are in eastern North America, every 13 or 17 years something magical happens, figuratively and literally. Out of the soil emerge broods, all at once, of Magicicada, otherwise known simply as cicadas. For most of the lives of these insects, they exist underground, sucking up the juices from deciduous trees. When
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