Last Day for Tulips

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Last week my husband and I walked around Brookside Gardens enjoying the tulips. Some of the early bloomers were past prime enough that the volunteer gardeners were taking the bulbs up from the beds. I will have to find out next time we go to the garden what replaces tulips.

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Some were widely open, and I enjoyed the curls and graceful curves of the waxy petals. My favorite tulips are the ones that are mostly yellow…tipped with orange. The colors remind me of sunrise and sunset.

There were some hybrid tulips up near the visitor center that were catching the mid-morning sunlight. They had a stronger scent and I wondered if the original plants were more heavily scented that the hybrids that we plant now. Tulips have gone through extreme breeding; perhaps bloom shape, color and longevity are more important than the smell.

I enjoy them all as a fleeting vision of spring. We’re on to the next round of blooms.

Blemont’s Nature Place Space

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I have been volunteering with the Howard Country Conservancy’s preschool programs at Belmont recently. The weather was a little cool for the first few weeks…but it’s warming up – a lot – this week.

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The station I fill for most of the programs is about trees. We talk about trees growing from seeds and look at ones from trees around us like sycamore (pictured below), sweet gum, tulip poplar, and maple.

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A new addition that the children enjoyed this week is a nature play space. There are still some features that will be added, but the preschoolers were excited to jump from stone to stone and to climb up onto the big log….all in the middle of the meadow where it was just warm enough for cabbage white butterflies to be moving about.

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The joys of being outdoors in the springtime!

Wings of Fancy – 1st shift

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I had my first shift for this season’s Wings of Fancy shift at Brookside Gardens earlier this week. The exhibit is opening an hour earlier this year to take advantage of the morning temperatures. Visitors will appreciate that during the summer. Like last year – I took a short walk around the gardens before heading into the conservatory. The gardens are lush even with the variability of rain and temperatures so far this spring.

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The azaleas are blooming but I decided to walk through the are where the tulips are blooming….lots of color on a spring morning. I walked fast because it was chilly at 8:30 AM (in the 40s and breezy).

I was in the conservatory waiting for the first visitors and decided to take a few pictures. I was surprise what I was able to do in 10-15 minutes! My theme was heads – eyes, antennae, proboscis, and papillae. I’m sure they’ll be many other butterfly pictures this season (the exhibit runs until September 16), but I’m pleased with my first batch. Hopefully a reflection of the happy place the exhibit creates comes through too!

Ten Little Celebrations – April 2018

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April has gone by very quickly…full of company and travel and the beginning of the spring volunteering blitz.

Six of the 10 little celebrations were experiences outdoors – typical celebrations of springtime everywhere:

  • Blue birds and tree swallows were making their nests I the boxes at Mt. Pleasant in Maryland.
  • There were ducklings at Josey Ranch Lake in Carrollton, Texas.
  • An eared grebe at Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge near Sherman, Texas.
  • Macroinvertebrates in the Middle Patuxent close to home.
  • Spicebush in the forest behind my house and at Belmont Manor and Historic Park (both in Maryland).
  • Deciduous Magnolias blooming at Brookside Gardens. Maryland got a freeze at the wrong time in 2017 and most of the blooms turned brown from the cold just as they were opening. It was a treat to see them again this year.

I celebrated the end of two long driving days between Maryland and Texas. Both were blustery and more traffic than expected. It felt good to be done!

My new iPad is something I celebrate every time I create another Zentangle with it! I a pleasantly surprised with how easy I made the transition from pen and paper tiles to digital.

I thoroughly enjoyed a meal at a Brazilian steakhouse – this time managing to savor the flavors and not overeating. I even topped off the meal with dessert!

Finally – the Watershed Summit where the high schools of the county presented their report cards to the county government for their steams and school yards – based on data they collected last fall. Each of the 13 high schools had 2 presenters. They all were so poised and organized. It was a double celebration: the environmental findings trending positive in most cases and the quality of the students in attendance. Both bode well for the future.

Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge in Spring

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I visited Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge earlier this week. The day was too cold and too windy….but was the only one that fit it the schedule. I remembered to take pictures of the metal work near the visitor center.

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In the garden near the front of the visitor center, I didn’t see any butterflies…but there were dried blooms from last season left on the trumpet vine growing on the arbor and a clump of bluebonnets (we’d seen larger patches as we drove to the refuge along the highway).

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We decided to use our car and a moving blind and protection from the wind….making our way slowly around the wildlife drive of the refuge. There were not many birds but enough to make some photography attempts. The most unusual was a Eared Grebe in breeding plumage. Someone in the visitor center had commented about seeing a pair but we only saw one.

There were some American avocets a little too far away for a good picture on a cloudy day. They can be identified with the picture I took….and there is a Great Egret in the foreground.

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There were also Snowy Egrets (black bill and legs, yellow feet).

Very far out in the water on snags were American White Pelicans and Double Crested Cormorants.

The Greater Yellowlegs was closer and intent on finding some lunch.

The Great Blue Herons were numerous and seemed to all have the blue topknot of mature birds.

We saw one turtle positioned for maximum sun (warmth) but there were probably more.

There were still some Northern Shovelers on the water; most of them have left for their breeding grounds in the north. A pair of Blue Winged Teals were hiding in the plants beside the road as we were leaving; they are close to their breeding grounds based on the allaboutbirds map…so might have just been making a last stop over.

I took a few shots of wild flowers as we drove out of refuge….just rolled down the window and used the zoom!

Not bad for a cold, cloudy day!

Posts from my visit in November 2017: part 1, part 2.

Carrollton Texas Yard

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It’s a good time of year for gardens in Texas --- the weather has not gotten too hot. I like plantings around base of trees. They’ll go into the summer too.

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The iris displays are at their peak right now. They still have a lot of buds so will be going strong for another week or two.

An amaryllis bulb keeps coming back every year is blooming as well beside a garden gate as well!

Spring is sprung!

Josey Ranch Park in Carrollton, Texas

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The baby ducklings I posted about yesterday were the spring highlight for me at the part….but I was pleased with other sites too.

The buttercups in the grass…and the serendipity of catching a butterfly in flight between flowers.

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The male grackles were facing off…asserting their dominance.

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There was a scissor-tailed flycatcher that posed on a post for picture.

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I hadn’t realized how similar they looked to mockingbirds that are also in the area….except for the vary long tail.

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I saw two pairs of ducks (other than the mallards) that are probably getting ready to leave for their breeding ground further north: gadwalls (photo is of the male)

And northern shovelers. Both were probably more numerous in the area a few weeks ago.

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There was a squirrel that did not look happy for me to walking nearby as

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An American coot that didn’t seem to know I was there at all.

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My round-trip walk was about 2 miles…good exercise…and a good outing for some photography.

Ducklings

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There were two cohorts of Mallard ducklings at Josey Ranch lake in Carrollton TX last week. I walked saw them on two different days – one group had 7 ducklings and the other 8. There are some larger turtles in the lake that might be a threat while the ducklings are so small – but the parents (sometimes with extra helpers) were attentive and keeping the ducklings in the shallow water away from deeper water where the turtle could pull them under.

Most of the time the ducklings stayed together. There were several instances that it appeared that the female was making sure all of them were still with her! There seemed to be more males that females around the lake and all the adults seemed to be near where ducklings were.

Enjoy the ducklings – one of the sure signs of spring!

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 21, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Adventure Photographer Captures Majestic Scenes of the Natural World – Starting out this group of gleanings with some eye candy!

Arctic sea ice extent at 2018 winter maximum was second smallest on record | NOAA Climate.gov – It will be interesting to see what happens to the Arctic this summer since there was less ice this winter.

With a Green Makeover, Philadelphia Is Tackling Its Stormwater Problem - Yale E360 – This article discusses what Philadelphia is doing…also what Philadelphia has learned from other cities. Dealing with stormwater has become a challenge in many urban (or suburban) environments….and rain gardens, green roofs, wetlands, and other techniques are leading to more sustainable solutions.

More Reason to Leave the Car Behind When Visiting the Columbia River Gorge - News | Planetizen – Have to keep this in mind for a vacation to the Northwest.

A North American Climate Boundary Has Shifted 140 Miles East Due to Global Warming - Yale E360 – Quite a few of my family members live in the Dallas area…and they are now on the dry side of the boundary!

Basking sharks gather in large groups off northeast US coast: Group sightings are fairly rare -- ScienceDaily – Opportunist data gathering…maybe someday it will be clearer why they happen with the second largest fish in the world.

Google X Spinoff Dandelion Raises $4.5 Million To Explore Residential Geothermal – Residential Geothermal primed to become mainsteam?

Birding For People Who Do Not Like Lists – Cool Green Science – This is me…a birder that does not like lists. I’m just thrilled to watch them…trying to get good photographs of them.

More than 50 new Nasca Lines, found with the help of GlobalXplorer and citizen archaeologists | TED Blog – citizen scientists searching satellite images.

Top 25 Wild Bird Brood Parasites – National Geographic Blog – I never can resist the collections of bird photographs….even these that are brood parasites.

Road Trip to Texas – Part 2

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The next morning, we were up and having breakfast shortly after it the service opened at 6 AM. It was a cold start to the day – a frosty morning in Dickson Tennessee. The sun was just coming up through the trees we loaded the car and headed out about 6:30. We’d were already on central time so would not benefit from a time change on this leg of our trek.

The first rest stop was about an hour later. I cheered when the vending machines had my favorite caffeine drink (diet Pepsi). The day was still chilly but not frosty. The rose bushes at the rest stop were full of buds.

Our next stop was the welcome center after we crossed into Arkansas. It was a newer facility with some interesting architecture and posters; my favorite poster was the one of ‘mud bugs.’

We had a long wait on the highway that added more than an hour to our drive; a truck had lost part of its load and a crane had to be brought in to move it off the roadway. When we went by all the traffic was slowly funneled by on a shoulder. We recovered with a barbeque lunch near just before we got to Little Rock.

Then it was on to Texarkana and the welcome center for Texas. It’s a little tricky to exit the highway for the place…it was large with relatively few people around.

The next stop was the old-style Texas rest stop with tile mosaics unique to the place. The surprise of the stop was the historical marker; my sister recognized the name from her genealogy work!

The last stop of the trek was just before we entered the Dallas traffic…wanted to make sure we were in good shape for the final push to our destination.

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Road Trip to Texas – Part 1

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I drove from Maryland to Texas with my sister earlier this week….a 2 day trek. We left my house about 6:30 AM and headed west on I70 rather the dealing with the traffic around Washington DC. I am getting very familiar with the South Mountain rest stop since this is the route to the Pittsburgh and State College as well. This trip – it was in the low 40s and wet. The daffodils were blooming.

We got to I81 and headed south through West Virginia and then into Virginia. The welcome center in Virginia is a green facility….and has the big LOVE in front too.

The next stop was as an older Virginia rest stop but is one of my favorite with a terrace for picnic tables. We talked fast to get some exercise…and because it was too cold to dawdle.

The next stop was for gasoline. The flowers in the wooden pot were past prime but I appreciated them anyway. The Prius was doing well although the wind was beginning to pick up and I was aware that I was gripping the wheel a bit too hard.

We had food for lunch in the car so used the stops for walking around. There were daffodils again at the next stop.

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Finally, we got to Tennessee. The rest stops along the interstate have a log cabin side and rock cabin side. I like the rock side since they are rock from the immediate area.

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We were making fast stops because the temperature was dropping. There was a dusting of snow along the highway between Knoxville and Nashville! The wind was gusting and made it feel very cold.

The last stop before we got to the hotel in Dickson, TN had a different kind of rock and a historical marker for Senator Albert Gore Sr…and the interstate highway system.

Tomorrow I’ll post about the second day of the road trip.

Washington DC in Traffic

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We have been in and out of Washington DC 3 times over the past couple of weeks for sightseeing and getting a guest delivered to/from her hotel. We don’t make the trek very often, so we notice the uptick in traffic every time we go; it’s stressful.  I was glad my husband was driving rather than me both because of the heavy traffic – even during non-rush hours – and because I could take pictures of what we were passing by. With all the stops, there were plenty of opportunities! If the car is moving – I always take pictures through the windshield but can use the side windows if the car is stopped. Enjoy the slideshow below that I captured as we made our way through Washington DC.

Ready for Butterflies

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Last week, I went to the hour-long class for volunteers for Brookside Gardens Wings of Fancy. It was a refresher about how to handle the containment of the butterflies in the conservatory and the stations within the exhibit. The exhibit opens on April 18th and opens one hour earlier than it did last year – taking advantage of the cooler temperatures in the morning during the hot summer. The exhibit was under construction during our training, but it was already obvious that Wings of Fancy is going to be as wonderful as it has been in past years.

As I walked out to the parking lot, I noticed that the skunk cabbage blooms are finished, and the green leaves are all around the bald cypress…which is still bald.

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There were grackles all through the woods near the parking lot…making a lot of noise on the spring day. They use their whole body to make their call!

Hurray for Spring Field Trips!

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This week I volunteered for school field trips with the Howard County Conservancy – three mornings in a row. The first two were 5th graders at Belmont. I did two hikes with groups of about 10 students and their chaperone on both days. The school buses arrived on time and both groups wanted to head to the forest.

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Along the way to stopped to see a pecan tree and a southern magnolia with lots of seed pods around its base. The students measured and described nuts, husks, pods and leaves…and then it we moved to the forest where we found millipedes and a tiny red mite. The spicebush was in bloom. It’s an understory tree so the students could take a close look at the flowers, see the stoma in the bark (white dots) and smell the ‘spice.’ They were thrilled that the trees are surviving in the forest behind Belmont…and that means there will be food for the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars as the days warm and the leaves emerge.

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There was a bird in a high tree as we started the hike back from lunch. We thought it was a crow…and then it flew and ‘cawed’ to confirm.

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As we waited to regroup in the field we compared seeds of sycamores and sweet gums…and picked out the sycamores in the distance along the drive into Belmont.

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I took pictures of the lilacs planted in symmetrical plantings in front of the manor hour as I walked back to my car after the last hikes. The buds for the flowers were not numerous and I wondered if a recent frost had damaged them.

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The third field trip of the week was for 3rd graders and was at Mt. Pleasant Farm. The students arrived in school buses and the normal chaos ensued to divide into groups.

The topic was ‘habitats and home’ which is always a great topic for a hike but particularly in the spring. The hike included observing blue birds and tree swallows jockeying for the bird houses along the trail. My group stood on a little hillock to observe the action. The tree swallows seemed to have staked a claim but weren’t building their nest there yet.

I completely missed the wood frog orgy in the little pool in the Honor’s Garden this year. It evidently happened on some warm days we had back in February! There are a lot of tadpoles in the pool now and were part of the lesson for the students during the non-hiking part of the morning.

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Three days – six hikes….Hurray for spring field trips!

In the Middle Patuxent River

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Last weekend I participated in the quarterly water quality monitoring of the Middle Patuxent River at Robinson Nature Center. The temperature was in the mid-40s it felt warmer with the sun shining and the river level less breezy that the top of the nearby hills. We hiked down taking a short cut through the forest and crossed the river.

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The crossing was a little tricky for those of is with boots (Me and several others) rather than waders but we made it across with only one person getting water in one of her boots. There is a whale-shaped rock that is a landmark for where the quarterly surveys take place.

We used D-nets and tubs to collect macroinvertebrates from leaf wads and riffles. The leaf wad my partner and I worked on had lots of little critters, a very large crane fly larvae and a frog. Everything went into the tub except the frog which we put back into the river (not a macroinvertebrate….and not easily contained anyway). After collecting for over an hour we headed back across the river to the lab with buckets to search through of macroinvertebrates to identify.

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Back in the lab we emptied the buckets into smaller plastic bins and started separating the macroinvertebrates into ice cube trays for identification. We were after diversity and numbers of macroinvertebrates, so we were sifting through everything very carefully. I used a macro lens attached to my cell phone camera to get a few pictures.

There were a few things that were not macroinvertebrates but they were in the sample which were generally bigger than the macroinvertebrates and moved around a lot – a little distracting while we were searching. Several of us had salamanders (me included) and one person has some small fish!

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Our team lead completed the form to submit for the monitoring session; the river scored about the same as the last sampling in January which is better than 85% of other Maryland water sources. Hurray for the river!

NASA Visitor Center

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Back in the early days of HoLLIE classes, we met in the parking lot of the NASA Goddard Visitor Center before going to our class; it was before it opened so I wanted to go back to see the visitor center exhibits. Last week – it happened. It was a cloudy morning with rain in the forecast. The center opens at 10 and I was there a few minutes afterward. There were only a couple of other early visitors.

I decided to do the outdoor Goddard Rocket Garden and Astobiology Walk first – since I wasn’t sure the weather would stay dry. Did you know that grooved pavement used for airport runways and other pavements was the result of a NASA Wallops Island study from the 1960s?

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I took a lot of pictures of the astrobiology walk and made a slide show of them below (use the arrows to go through at your own speed).

My favorite displays were the two showing banded iron specimens.

Inside – there was a full-side mechanical prototype of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). We saw the operational control room for the mission during the HoLLIE class. It’s quite a thrill to know that the mission is ongoing – knowing that my daughter was an undergraduate at Cornell when LRO reached the moon and she helped with some of the initial image calibration since she had developed calibration skills in her part-time job calibrating images from the Mars rover.

There was also an exhibit of the new James Web Space Telescope – comparing its mirror with the one on the Hubble Space Telescope.

There was also a fun exhibit with two cameras and monitors. One was an infrared camera. It picked up the residual heat from ones feet on the carpet as one walked away from its field of view!

I bought a Cassini Grand Finale t-shirt for my daughter at the gift store; she used some data from Cassini for a couple of papers while she was an undergraduate. Hurray for good experiences!

Fishmobile

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Last week, I volunteered when the Phillips Wharf Environmental Center’s Fishmobile visited an elementary school in Carroll County, Maryland.

The Fishmobile is a bus fitted with aquarium tanks for live exhibits of animals from the Chesapeake Bay and bookcases/walls of related materials. It’s a field trip that comes to the school! Groups of 10-12 students take about 15 minutes in the bus to see everything…spending another 15 minutes outside getting more details about horseshoe crabs. There were 4 classes of 4th graders that came through in 2 hours!

I managed to take pictures of some of the animals in the Fishmobile before the students arrived. There were small horseshoe crabs – the smallest being a little larger than a quarter. They were active all over the bottom of their tank.

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The oyster toadfish was not happy after the first few groups and retreated to the back of the tank. I was glad I got a picture of him.

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The lined seahorse was one that was harder to photograph. It was a good discussion starter since the seahorse depends on the grasses in the bay and is becoming more numerous now that they are recovering. I was impressed that the 4th graders were aware of the grasses even if they didn’t know about the seahorses.

The only animal in the Fishmobile that the students could touch was the diamondback terrapin. They were told to use 2 fingers gently on his back…because he can bite! He evidently is very accustomed to handling…and he has a name: Larry. There was a baby diamondback terrapin (hatched last fall) in a neighboring tank that didn’t move around very much.

There was also a small box turtle and a mystery box with a box turtle shell. We prompted the students that tried the mystery box to feel whether the shell was flat or domed…and then to look at all the turtles on display to identify what kind of shell was in the mystery box.

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The fish that had a name linked to history was the hogchoker. It is a flounder like fish that lives in the grassy areas of the bay. When the colonists collected the grasses to fee to their pigs, sometimes this fish was harvested with the grasses….and choked the pig that tired to eat it. That’s how it got its name.

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The bookcases had jaws from a modern shark…and a fossil tooth, a dolphin skull, and the molt of a horseshoe crab. There was a wall of various kinds of trash with estimates of how long it took to degrade. Plastic water bottles and fishing line take 100s of years!

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 7, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

How Do We Carry Our Shopping Home Now? | CleanTechnica – I’ve been using my collection of reusable bags for years. Some of them are over 10 years old and still in great shape. Occasionally, I still get a Lightweight Plastic Bag (or a newspaper in plastic, or other plastic bag packaging) which I take back to the bag recycling bin at my grocery store. I’m always sad when I set a grocery cart full of stuff in the plastic bags…hope none of them escape into the environment.

A Harlequin Duck’s Long Cross-Country Migration – Cool Green Science – A bird banded in Glacier National Park migrated to Long Island! Zoom lenses on cameras and binoculars make it possible to record banding info from a distance.

BBC - Future - The small Scottish isle leading the world in electricity – Eigg has an off-grid electric system powered by wind, water, and solar…they average 90-95% renewable energy. The time of year they tend to need back up generators is in the spring.

Implications of access to high-quality fruits and vegetables: Quality has potential to impact consumer selection and consumption in rural areas -- ScienceDaily – There has been a lot of discussion about food deserts in big cities – places that lack affordable, high-quality food. It appears that food deserts occur in rural areas as well.

Top 25 Endemic Wild Birds – National Geographic – The weekly bird photography fix! The chickadee we see frequently in our areas of the Mid-Atlantic of the US is endemic to our part of the world (and is one of the 25 pictured).

New Beginnings: Cherry Blossoms and Helen Taft's Landscape Diplomacy – Some years we manage to see the peak of the cherry blossoms around the tidal basin in Washington DC….but every year we enjoy the cherry tree in our front year. It is always at least a week later than the ones in DC.

US electricity use drops, renewables push fossil fuels out of the mix | Ars Technica – Total electrical generation was down 1.5 percent in 2017. Coal and natural gas declines were more than that with renewable energy projects coming online. Energy efficiency has made a difference! Another article reported that some utilities are planning for the uptick in electric vehicles to cause the trend in electricity generation to turn upward again. Right now – it seems like people that buy electric cars are often the same people that install solar panels; that could result in no uptick to the draw from the electric utility.

The Life Issue | WIRED – A collection of thought provoking articles about ‘what it means to live in an age of improvisation.’ I started with the articles about the 55-infinity age group.

Microscopic Images of Seeds • Insteading – hmm…maybe I’ll take a magnified look at seeds before I plant them in my flower beds.

Meditate regularly for an improved attention span in old age – Nice to know that something enjoyable immediately is also good for the long term too!

Brookside Gardens – April 2018

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The day after we were at Arlington Cemetery, we walked around Brookside Gardens. It is one of my favorite places to take visitors to our area. We decided to walk around outdoors first.

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 There were several kinds of deciduous magnolias blooming. Last year many of them were caught in a late frost so I was glad to see them.

The crocus and snowdrops were done for the year but there were other bulbs providing color and there will be tulips soon; they are just beginning to send up their buds.

I saw a stump that I hadn’t noticed before beside one of the paths I use frequently. It’s rotting from the outside in!

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Now sprouting plants draw are colorful…draw attention with their textures as well.

When we went inside the conservatory, the warm moist air felt good after being out in the cold. There was a lot of work going on in the building. The room where the butterfly exhibit will be by the end of the month was completely closed and the other room was getting some new plantings. I noticed that the large white bird-of-paradise plant had a lot of dried flowers and a few that were still fresh. We warmed up – made a quick stop at the gift shop – and were on our way – pleased with our morning out and about.

Arlington National Cemetery

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Earlier this week we walked around Arlington National Cemetery. It’s a place we take out-of-town guests occasionally…more when we first moved to the area than recently when the traffic between where we live in Maryland and Washington, DC/Arlington, VA has increased so much. It was easy enough getting there the morning we went – easy to park in the garage near the visitor center. It was a little colder than we anticipated and there were busloads of students and tourists both arriving and leaving as we walked toward the visitor center. There was a short line to go through security and then a lot of people inside the building.

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I was glad to walk through the doors to the cemetery side of the building! The first sight I photographed was the sculpture that was there….something to look at and appreciate.

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The long rows of white marble tombstones flow in every direction broken my trees and walkways. The deciduous magnolia were the main trees in bloom. Arlington House is closed for rehabilitation and we didn’t walk up to it; the flag was at half mast in front of the house so there must have been a funeral near the time we were in the cemetery.

Just below Arlington house is the John F. Kennedy grave site. Every time I have visited Arlington Cemetery this has been a place to see. This time I also turned around and photographed the Washington and Lincoln Memorial and one of the famous Kennedy quotes.

The guard was changing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We arrived a little after it started so I was not able to get a good picture. As it finished, and we turned to leave I enjoyed the frilly daffodils and understory of violets in front of the balustrade.

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We walked back through the cemetery and I managed to take pictures of Lincoln Memorial as we drove over Memorial Bridge. There appears to be some renovation work going on with this monument too.