Nature Notes

Tuesday July 1 Canada Day! Susan has been organizing a group of friends to participate in Visibility Brigades, holding signs over highways, protesting the Administration. Visibility Brigades have been happening for the last few months all over the country, sometimes with the same message at the same time at bridges over a single Interstate for hundreds of miles. We do our protests on the Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington over Interstate 95 during rush hour every week or two. (For my non-American friends, Lexington is the site of the first battle in the America Revolution, on April 19, 1775.) Here's today's sign, along with the special shirt I got in honour of Canada Day. I know this isn't exactly a nature note, but I couldn't resist.   Thursday July 3  Went to Ward's Pond to check on the swans and their cygnets - everyone is fine, still 5 cygnets. There was also a female wood duck with 11(!) ducklings, still fairly small. The wood duck mom swam over to the swan ne...

Tuesday June 3 Perfect spring day, sun, slight breeze, 70F. Went to Mass Audubon's Broadmoor sanctuary in Natick for a walk though the woods, along the marsh and across to the Charles River. Lots of turtles basking on logs. And I was tickled to see this  tree swallow , peeping out of a nest box. Friday June 6  Had a lovely day at the  Norcross Wildlife Foundation conservation area a few miles southwest of Sturbridge, in central Massachusetts, on an outing with Mass Audubon. Arthur Norcross inherited 100 acres of land from his father in the 1916 and gradually amassed 3000 acres by the time he set up the Foundation in 1964. Additional land acquisitions over the last 60 years have increased the property to 8600 acres, roughly 13 square miles, equivalent to a circle 4 miles across. To improve the fishing on his property, Norcross built dams to create a series of ponds. Mass Audubon is advising the Foundation on dam removal to restore the original wetlands. To give you an id...

Thursday May 1 On my way to Princeton to give a talk I stopped in Morristown, NJ, to go to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum , 127 acres of trees and gardens with trails throughout. Lots of blossoming trees; spring is ahead in New Jersey, compared with Boston. Friday May 2 While waiting to meet with my colleague, Cassie Stoddard in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, I admired a few prints on the wall.   I sent the bat print to my friend, Sharon Swartz at Brown, an expert on bat flight, who told me: "That print is by Jonathan Kingdon, a very famous mammologist and illustrator based at Oxford who focuses on the mammals of Africa, especially East Africa. He published a seven volume series of books on the mammals of East Africa that I obsessively devoured as a graduate student. " And I was taken with the print of elephant shrews, with their elongated snouts. Elephant shrews are, it turns out, not shrews at all. They're more closely related to elephants than to shr...