For a few months each summer, I live in a cottage in the west of Ireland that is unoccupied for the remainder of the year. When we arrive in June, every nook and cranny is occupied by one or more common cellar spiders, Pholcus phalangioides, sometimes called “daddy-long-legs.”
Nature
Pholcus phalangioides• Photo by Filipe Resmini on Unsplash
A tiger swallowtail • Photo by Tom Raymo
Beauty and the brain
It was one of those blessed days. In the morning I saw a tiger swallowtail butterfly.
Arum maculatum, or cuckoo-pint • Photo by Olivier Pichard (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The lore of the flowers
Every now and then a book comes along that finds a place on the bedside table and stays there. So it has been with Richard Mabey’s “Flora Britannica.”
Baltimore oriole • Illustration by Emma Bell Miles (Public Domain)
Folds in the fabric of time
In her autobiography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty writes: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological.”
A research mouse • Photo by Rama (CC BY-SA 2.0)
It’s love vs. knowledge
The other day on a nature walk with students, I used my penknife to open a gall — one of those woody growths on plants that are caused by insects. At the center of the gall was a tiny larva.
Bahama woodstar • Photo by Mike's Birds (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Lili left hummingbirds down, but not out
Our previous visits to this island have been graced with hummingbirds: Bahama woodstars, no bigger than your thumb, caped in iridescent green, with amethyst faces, white breasts and soda-straw bills.
Photo by Külli Kittus on Unsplash
The skulking grave robbers of fall
A fabulous autumn for mushrooms. More mushrooms than I can ever remember, particularly impressive after last year’s drought. In the woods, the meadows, the garden paths. A Halloween bounty of fungal spooks, eating the detritus of summer.
Photo by Corey Agopian on Unsplash
Starry summer nights
Childhood has two seasons: anticipation and summer.
Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) • Photo by Melissa McMasters (CC BY 2.0)
From the beetles’ point of view
A famous story in the history of science has the classical scholar Benjamin Jowett ask the biologist J. B. S. Haldane what he had learned about God from his scientific studies.
Photo by Serafima Lazarenko on Unsplash
The sounds we hear too rarely
Maybe it’s because I don’t hear as keenly as I used to that I’ve been paying more attention to my auditory sense.