Photo report from Gotland

O.K. is on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea this week, in the cold, blustery November fog.  Here are some of his photos, posted by me.  Enjoy!

 

crane

 elephants

 Elvis

 grill

 handle

 handsome

wheels

 panorama

 the bottle

the stick

 

the door

the rock

 train I

the tower

 train II

the perspective

Fieldtrip to Payette River, Idaho

Last week I was on a day trip to look at mosses and lichens in the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, USA.  We drove up along Payette River, a clear-watered small river with many rapids that is beloved by kayakers and rafters (in inflated rubber rafts).  The river is surrounded by tree-less, browned grass mountains, but in the past there was a lot of trees around here.  Extensive logging in the last 200 years took down giant ponderosa pines, and cattle grazing by the settlers and onwards changed the vegetation to dry grasslands. 

We saw many, many lichens, and here is one of the most common one.  A striking yellow makes this one easy to identify, it is wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina).  It loves to grow on the ponderosa pine twigs and it toxic.  It is called wolf lichen because it was used as a poison to treat bait that was used to kill wolves.

Ponderosa pines against the clear blue Idaho-sky.  These pines are adapted to fire and survive it unless they are small seedlings.  Their bark insulate against hot raging forest fires that regularly comes through.

Wildfires were raging about 15 miles away, but didn't affect us.  Fires are common in these landscapes and part of the natural renewal cycle. 

This moss is an amazing little thing.  The left and right is from the same tuft of moss, and is the same species.  The left got a little water sprayed on it, and came back to life in a few minutes.  It is used to study cell biology, since it literally shuts down its metabolism in its dry state, and then can resurrect itself incredibly fast.

The rapids are very treacherous, and each year several people die here.  Rivers for kayaking are divided into categories 1-5 based on difficulty.  The North Fork of the Payette River (on this picture), is a number 4 I think.  We saw lots of kayakers including one that tipped under and then came back up.

And further down the river, where the ponderosa pine forest is gone, you could see the old logging and mining railroad from the late 1800s.  It is still in use but now it transports tourists. 

A little further down from the last picture is the little town of Horseshoe Bend, population 707. You know you are in a different part of the country when there is a plea for support to help a family's baby that was born with a heart defect, and the lottery prizes in the raffle they set up to help them financially with health care bills include three things: a chain saw, a new rifle with a spotting scope, and a large box of ammunition.  That would not happen in New Jersey.

A giant miniature train place

When EH and her family were here last year we visited Northlandz, an amazing model train museum here in New Jersey.  Now there is a little movie about it and how they photographed it. Watch it.

Here are some photos from this great place.  Visit Northlandz if you have the chance, even if you have never liked model trains. (More photos from our visit here.)

Time passing

Welcome to winter and the change of the clocks!  It happened today here in the US (Swedes are ahead of us as usual, they changed their clocks a while ago).  Back to normal Eastern Standard Time for us now, no more Daylight Savings time (which is called Summer Time, 'sommartid', in Swedish).

The amazing hybrid solar eclipse (Nov 3, 2014) we had planned to watch this morning was hidden by a large could bank.  Oh well.  Somewhere behind those clouds were a partially visible sun.  We will have to wait to 2014 for another solar eclipse. There is some photos and info here of this rare event.

And, sad memories and news - it is 50 years since developers in New York City crushed the old, beautiful Penn Station and built a mega-ugly box on top of it.  Penn Station now are horrible cramped tunnels below Madison Square Garden.  Look at the photos of what once was here... At least Grand Central Terminal is still standing in New York, and Penn Stations are left in Baltimore and Philadelphia.  If you wonder about the names - Penn Station comes from the old Pennsylvania Railroad, and Grand Central was the railroad station for the rival New York Central Railroad.  Union Station in Washington, DC, had several railroads, that is why it was called 'Union'.  (PP can correct me if I am wrong :)

Emigrants from Sweden

The summer has turned over and autumn is closing in on us again here in the Northern hemisphere. Daylight is still 14 hours and 30 minutes, when the winter is here we´ll have the shortest days with 6 hours and 7 minutes. The migrating birds have started to group together already.

But, no need to ponder on that now. On the other topic now, Emigrants from Sweden to America, as it was in the 19th century. The book series about a Swedish group of people who were leaving a poor life in the rural Småland, written by the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, has been reprinted. What´s interesting are the book covers, embroidered by a Swedish needleworker, Karin Holmberg.

I think they are beautiful, and maybe very Swedish. LS, what do you think?

Swamps, wetland, bayou, canal, river, sea, and lake - all in Louisiana

Southern Louisiana is a land on water - thousand miles of waterways through the fresh and brackish delta of the Mississippi, with vast lakes,slow-moving rivers, handmade canals and floating vegetation that creates wetland vegetation over open water.  It is all called the bayou.


In the higher areas there are pecan forests with saw palmetto understory.


Sometimes the forest is just water at the bottom.


Golden orb spiders, snakes, and frogs are everywhere. Here is a small tree frog that I found along the boardwalk.

 
You can find midden heaps with their thousands and thousands of seas shells collected by prehistoric Native Americans for food.


In even more wet areas you get the bald cypress swamps with their long hanging Spanish moss, fluted stems, and roots that come up like knees.  The alligators like to hang out here.  We saw an alligator that was maybe 8 feet, who laid still for 10 min and then suddenly exploded in diving action in a microsecond.


Along the canals there are traditional part-time settlements with docks and small cottages that have been in families in generations.  In Jean LaFitte National Park these settlements, often used as vacation houses, are grandfathered in and allowed, but they cannot be sold, only inherited and kept within the same family forever.

 
The only way to reach them are on the water, and everything has to be brought in, including drinking water (unless you have rain tanks).


During hurricane Katrina these were hit hard with wind, but there was no big flooding - not like in New Orleans where the areas below sea-level flooded catastrophically.


People personalize their docks and houses and live here for months on end.  But some houses have seen better days...

 
During our swamp boat tour we got hit by an amazing rainstorm - 15 minutes of horizontal rain that drenched everything, and then it was over.  The captain of our boat, run by Louisiana Swamp Tours (appropriate name, don't you think), was great, funny, and smiled a little at the poor scientists (not me) that got first muddy up to their knees in the swamp and then drenched to the bone in the rain storm.

 
Dragonflies everywhere!  I have no idea of how many species, just many.

 
And these beasts, called 'devil's horses' in Louisiana are giant black grasshoppers that eat vegetation voraciously.  They come out in swarms in the spring - and you do not want them in your yard or there won't be much left for you. 


This is the land of the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild.  See it if you haven't!  It is an amazing place, not like any other place I have been in the world.  Hot, flat, mosquito-rich, magical, mystical, and rick with life of all sizes.

(More photos from Jean LaFitte National Park here.)

Old daffodils

I visited an old mansion a few days back, with an old overgrown garden and park. My interest was to see if there where any old bulb plants left, and it was! Large stands of narcissus, scattered daffodils and peonia rugs where visible. The narcissus I found was a kind I never seen before. A Google search later I think it could be A narcissus called White Lady. It's known in cultivation before 1927, but the origin is not known. It is the big white one with a yellow trumpet.

Stamp of the Day: Baltimore checkerspot

This is an American stamp of the Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton), a butterfly in black, white, and orange. Its caterpillar lives on a plant called White Turtle Head.  Don't you love these common names!?  It has also sometimes switched over to the weedy Lance-leaved Plantain, which came to the US from Europe with the colonialists.

The post office released this stamp for the particular use on large envelopes for greeting cards.  How practical!  I use them for letters to Sweden that need more than the usual postage. More on the stamp, the art, and the orange, black and white here. These were the color of the coat of arms for Lord Baltimore, who not only gave name to the city, but also this butterfly, and the bird called Baltimore Oriole, which we have in our yard.  It hasn't arrived yet this year, but it will, and it builds hanging woven nests in the big silver maples along the road.

This butterfly is relevant to me, because tomorrow I am driving to Baltimore to pick up AREA who has finished her first year in college (yeah! congratulations!!!).  I doubt we will bring back any butterflies or birds in the car, but there will be art, more art, kitchen stuff, a table, microwave, unused foods, and who knows what that will need to be emptied out from her college apartment and stuffed into my car.  Welcome home AREA!

Train cars: The Chevy Shot

The Chevy Shot, originally uploaded by ericwill.

We often feature train shots by our friend EW here on the blog, and here is another one.  I don't know the back story, but just look at this - the diesel locomotive running by, the old car from the 1950s, the grain silo and the funnels to release who knows what into sacks, barrels or truckbeds. It is a historical moment, just like so many other moments that pass by us without notice. A photo of America's past, but taken just a year ago. Click on the photo to see more of Eric's fantastic train photos.

Stamp of the Day and Book Review: Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

I recently reread a most amazing book that I hadn't read for probably 30 years - Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, by Thor Heyerdahl.

It was like seeing an old friend, and realizing that the old friend was even more interesting, nicer and fun than I remembered from before.  The book is a classic of course, and describes the rather crazy trip of 6 explorers on a small balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia and their 101 days at sea.  They proved that pre-historic people could have traveled such distances before modern navigation and metal tools.

Thor Heyerdahl's prose is great, he pulls you into the story and the diary, and there were only a few times I felt 'I want to know more! Give me details!'

Kon-Tiki is both an adventure story and an academic description of fieldwork, a great combination.  The thing I remember most from when I read this book as a teenager was the description of picking up the flying fish that had landed on board during the night, and making fried flying fish for breakfast each day. Somehow that image had etched itself into my memory.

Now I have more images, of whale sharks, crashing onto the reef around the final island, and the monotony of just sea, sky, and a tiny raft...

It is now 55 years since this trip was done, and it has been memorized on many postage stamps. Here are a few from Norway and French Polynesia: