Nature Notes

September 2  The remnants of Hurricane Ida came through Boston last night and this morning, dropping 4.7" of rain between 6pm and 6am.  Torrential rain in the night, loud enough to wake me at 3am.  Maddie was hunkered down in the closet, hiding from it all.  When she came out, reluctantly, for her morning walk around 6:30 we found a large oak downed at the end of our street, along the Arborway.  The road department had already had machinery out to drag the fallen branches off the roadway. And by the time we went out for our afternoon walk, around 1:30, there was nothing left to see: it had been cut down, sawn into smaller pieces, put through the chipper and even the stump ground down. A little startling how quickly it was dispatched. At Jamaica Pond, the little beach by Eliot Street had disappeared entirely, with the higher water in the pond. Went out for a short bike ride to the Muddy River in the evening and saw 3 juvenile wood ducks paddling along.  Sept...

August 1  Walking Maddie this morning, I spotted a turkey feather on the ground. As I looked more closely, getting ready to take a photo, I was surprised to see a blue iridescence visible when I looked at one particular angle.  I'd never noticed the blue in turkeys before.  But now, looking online, I see quite a few photos of turkeys with a bluish haziness over the back feathers. August 2. Ok, so this isn't exactly natural history, but I had to take a photo of my neighbour's Triumph.  In the late 1930s, when my father was courting my mother, he would take her out on his Triumph motorbike, away from the sooty dinginess of their coal-mining town, Ashington, out into the beautiful, green hills of the Northumbrian countryside.  At some suitable spot they would stop for him to go fly fishing while she picked wildflowers.  My parents talked about "the Triumph" with great fondness well into their old age.  And I smile every time I see one.   August ...