Saw a bunch of them on Springer Mountain. Please leave a comment if you know.
Click each image for a larger version.
Anybody know what kind of flowers these are?
North Pole could be ice free in 2008
I am not a global warming alarmist, but I found this to be a bit disturbing.
You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.
“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.
In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.
The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.
Hawkish Behavior
I took a drive over to Rome today and got some nice shots of this hawk.
Click each photo for a larger version.
Baby giraffes are cute!
Some nice photos of a baby giraffe in Britain.
Here is the link to the entire gallery.
Daily Coyote
This is one of my new favorite blogs.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteCharlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my doorstep this past April after both his parents were shot for killing sheep. Whatever reservations I had about raising a wild animal simply didn’t matter - couldn’t matter - when I realized his survival, at least in the short term, depended on me.
At the time I write this, Charlie is nearly six months old. I don’t think of him as “my pet,” even though he sleeps curled against me every night (every night except the nights around a full moon), and happily rides in my truck, and adores my cat. I don’t wish to own him, just to live together in harmony. And that we do.
7 Incredible Natural Phenomena
Now I want to do some traveling to see these.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteThe mysterious “Relámpago del Catatumbo” (Catatumbo lightning) is a unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency. The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages.
US National Park Backgrounds
Amazing stuff here.
I actually have a couple of good ones I took myself in San Francisco if you’d like to use one of them.
Oh what a tangled web we weave…
It looks like some spiders have been busy in Texas. (Click image for larger version)
Baby Mammoth Found Frozen in Russia
I haven’t posted anything from National Geographic in a while, but I had to get this one up.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteA Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. (See a map of Russia and its remote Siberian regions.)
On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.
The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.
“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.
At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.
Yes, it’s a real photo.
I first thought that this had to be photoshopped, but a little research has proven its validity.
The photo appeared in an edition of Africa Geographic in 2005, and even Snopes found it necessary to assure it.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite Underwater Tigers
This is all very cool, but those of us who know better realize that this is just another skill that the tigers have been working on in preparation for the day they will take over the world.
You looking at me?
This goat didn’t look too happy to be the subject of my photograph.
Tigers making a comeback
Should we welcome our new tiger overlords yet?
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteAfter decades of chilling population declines, the Siberian tiger may be treading toward a slightly sunnier future.
Hunted down to 40 animals, the Siberian tiger barely survived the 1940s. Since then it has slowly clawed its way back, with help from a Russian hunting ban and the efforts of conservation groups. In 2005 the Wildlife Conservation Society estimated the subspecies at 431 to 529 animals worldwide.
But the world’s largest wild cat—such as this mother and cubs photographed in Russia in the mid-1990s—has now grown in number to about 600, the highest such count in over a hundred years, according to a new Russian census heralded by the international conservation organization WWF.
