Fireflies

It's not easy to get photos of fireflies, but just imagine their flashing from ground level to canopy.

We've been treated to evening displays for days now. Lovely, and unexpected.

Normally, we'd have sucessional waves, from ground to canopy over weeks, not days - so it's a treat to see the night sky full of flashes.

Years ago, in Maryland, we saw similar views in the canopy forest below the house we rented in summer (while during field work). Nice to see that again in our urban ravine forest behind the house.

 

Posted with Blogsy

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Morning view

Orchid, cyclamen and banana bran muffins

 

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Sunset at Beaver Lake

A favorite morning walk (at Beaver Lake in North Asheville) is also a wonderful evening stroll. 

The light and clouds were exceptional this evening, with Woody on a post-dinner walk.

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Another bear saunters by

Eating dinner out on the deck this evening brought another bear sighting.  This fellow was larger, with an ear tag, so wasn't the younger fellow of a couple of days ago.

He checked out (the empty) bird feeder, poked around a bit, and headed up the ravine (towards town). 

I hope he turned around and headed back down, towards more woods and the larger neighborhood...

So this is the 4th bear sighting in our urban Western NC site.

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A young bear helping himself

A morning fuss from Woody (our Golden retriever) had me looking from the deck (what was he barking so vigorously about?)

It turned out to be a young (presumably) male black bear, quite small, who was helping himself to the black oil sunflower seeds in the feeder.

According to our neighborhood list-serve, he must have just been wandering through our end of the neighborhood.  We're close to downtown, so don't normally get visits. 

This is just the third bear we've seen in 7+ years.  They've all involved the bird feeder -- so no seeds for a while...  He was so small, I just let him eat the seeds, without doing too much shooing away.

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The power of water: Niagara Falls

We'd never visited Niagara Falls before.

It always sounded touristy; years ago, driving from Maryland to Toronto, I skirted the falls, avoiding what I thought would be tacky tourist stuff (the edges of town at that time were downtrodden, to be sure).

But traveling this time, from Western North Carolina to Toronto and back, visits on both sides of the falls were powerful experiences.  The falls are massive, of course, but standing next to some of the major "drops" (on the American side) are remarkable, both for power and sound.

I took a couple of videos (on my new iPhone), which recorded the sounds of the water, too.

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Toronto Music Garden: a remarkable garden experience

I was reminded while visiting one of North America's great cities recently (Toronto) how easily many city dwellers can become disconnected from nature.  Opportunities to experience nature become both more precious as well as perhaps more important, too.

A luminous visit to the Toronto Music Garden, listening to the wonderfully crafted audio guide as part of the visit, I was struck by a comment in an audio snippet (describing the dance forms).  The commentator mentioned that during Bach's time, people in Europe were very much still part of nature, even living in cities, where he said, birds, animals, and the more gritty realities of life were always evident.

Interesting to contemplate, in an antiseptic age where it's quite easy to see nothing particularly natural while walking along a city street, much less hear birdsong. 

So it's always a delightful experience to seek out those places that do remind us of the natural world, whether restored, created, or evoked.

The Toronto Music Garden and its surrounding restored wetland areas are places that give respite and restore the spirit, for sure.

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