Harold von Schmidt’s illustrations for Death Comes for the Archbishop were greatly admired when they first appeared in 1927. And they still are as far as I am concerned. Von Schmidt did over 60 illustrations for the book, and they are artfully interspersed with the text to create a book that is itself an aesthetic object. …
Eagle vs Heron
Still shot of a Bald Eagle capturing a Heron for its lunch in Glenwood, NS. Wow, I didn’t know they would do this. Hopefully, not fake.
Warthogs? Really?
Forest Thinning and Snowpack
What they found was remarkable. Over a single winter, this targeted thinning increased snowpack by 30% on north-facing slopes and 16% on south-facing slopes. That additional snow amounted to about 12.3 acre-feet of water—around 4 million gallons—per 100 acres on the cooler, north-facing slopes, and 5.1 acre-feet (about 1.5 million gallons) per 100 acres on …
Quite the trick.
Richard Bischof, a wildlife biologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, sees a better way forward for this field of study, known as wildlife telemetry. He’s now building and experimenting with devices, described in a recent preprint, that would allow researchers to apply collars on animals without needing to capture them. Rethinking how we put …
Crocodile Bites at Leopard
Spectacular footage likely to be seen everywhere soon. Prime fodder for Ozzyman. Text article. Many more videos, etc.
Amazonian Archaeology
Great mysteries of archaeology: an ancient Amazonian world revealed from the sky A good review article on the Amazonian archaeology and the lidar revolution.
Fairy Snow
BARREN SHADE —— That’s no fresh-fallen powder you’re seeing, no fluffy snowfall somehow snuck in overnight. It’s surely not smoke or a low-lying fog. What you’ve got here is the leavings of dandelions, all scattered where the wind would carry. Just south of here are a few fields gone feral, overrun with wild yellow …
Form, Color and Pattern
A beautiful resident coastal cutthroat from a small spring fed creek that feeds the Lois lake watershed. Quite the combo of Form, Color and Pattern. Gorgeous
“The tree that hits the moon.”
In 2023, this persistence paid off: the team located the reigning champion of the island’s forests: an 84.1-meter-tall (275.9 foot) Taiwania fir (Taiwania cryptomerioides). This massive tree currently holds the title of the tallest tree in all of East Asia. To the Indigenous Rukai people, these gargantuan firs are known by a much more poetic …