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Bryan, this is a phenomenal piece. Thank you. You've got me thinking - as you always do - about our mental maps of the living world. Species and habitats/communities seem more like a deep set of concentric circles than an assemblage of parts, with each set of circles overlapping with so many other sets. Bog, moose, spruce, etc., have ess…
Bryan, this is a phenomenal piece. Thank you. You've got me thinking - as you always do - about our mental maps of the living world. Species and habitats/communities seem more like a deep set of concentric circles than an assemblage of parts, with each set of circles overlapping with so many other sets. Bog, moose, spruce, etc., have essential relationships which link ever outward. You do such a beautiful job of connecting us to the connections, simply by narrating what you're seeing and what you've learned. It's a gift, and a necessary one.
And on a more prosaic note, my first thought looking at that beautiful spruce bog image was how rich and wonderful it is. And then I thought about the absurdly difficult and patient work you do to find and observe your winged pennies in that blackfly-infested morass... Valhalla should be filled with naturalists and field biologists.
Thanks, Jason. That means a lot to me. As you know, some of these bogs are so vast, and, yeah, that butterfly is so furtive. Then again, I guess that's part of my bond with those places. When I bushwhack there, dragging along my personal cloud of black flies, sometimes stumbling along the way, never sure whether I'll find the elfins, when I finally arrive at the bog everything suddenly goes right in the world for me -- butterflies or no butterflies. I suspect we have have places like that — where we can stop, exhale, sit, think, be, and truly feel as if we belong (where even the black flies don't matter ... well, sorta). Thanks again!
Nicely said, Bryan. I do think we have those places, assuming we've been outside enough to find them. Certainly Antarctica, in that deep silence away from the base/camp, was that way for me, but maybe that's kind of cheating? First, no bloodsucking insects, and second, the whole place was sort of a Zen idyll, like a vast mountaintop.
I kinda want to see Antarctic midge (Belgica antarctica) before I leave this Earth.
You could go on an Antarctic cruise and be the one person looking for midges instead of penguins... One of my favorite places on the ice is a 3-person helicopter refueling station I worked at near the Dry Valleys. Just a huge coastal moraine in the shadow of a piedmont glacier, but here and there as I walked around I'd find a clump of moss tucked under a stone, and knew (or assumed) that there were midges and springtails (the largest Antarctic terrestrial life) hidden in it. For me, though, it was the bright green color that thrilled.