Don at An Iowa Garden points out in comments to the previous post the high cost of photovoltaics to generate electricity, which is surely one of the great impediments to implementing it. Also in those comments both Don and Mark mentioned passive solar, replacing incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, and other actions as cheaper alternatives to reducing power consumption and electric bills. All true.

We figured it would cost $40,000 to get off the grid and run everything on photovoltaics at the current cost of solar panels. That’s an investment that would not pay for itself for 40 years, by which time you’d need to replace the system anyway. Seen in this context it would be silly for anyone not made of money to do this.

However, I do think that active solar is a solution to certain types of problems. I’m anxious about being able to pull water out of the well when electricity fails - our submersible pump relies on it. This is the kind of problem that a limited application of active solar solves and pays for itself in just a few years. There are a few luxury applications that would be easily powered by active solar - circulating water through the ponds, for instance - that similarly pay for themselves if you first admit that you’re going to indulge in the luxury anyway. (Actually it’s not a luxury - the ponds are a source of water that is remarkably clean if kept circulated, and is a reservoir for fire protection as well.)

One nice bit of fallout from the limited application of PV to power a pump to lift water out of the well and pressurizing it is that the pump isn’t always operating. During the idle time when a PV panel is still generating, batteries can be charged, and once that’s done water can be lifted to tanks for storage. Not only is that itself a way of storing energy, but the stored water can then be used later in emergencies, watering gardens, and so forth. Indeed, if it’s done cleverly and the tank is situated high enough that in itself provides the pressure through gravity that runs water in the house.

So it’s those types of problems I’m thinking in terms of: here’s a situation where an interruption of power services robs you of a critical need. Probably any homeowner can identify similar kinds of things. On a personal financial level it’s appealing too. Once an application has paid for itself, and routine maintenance, it then begins paying for the next one.

Passive solar and conservation measures are both important ways of reducing consumption, and really, you’re limited only by your own ingenuity. We did build our house facing south, and with the proper angles to let sun in in the winter and shade the windows in the summer. We’ve now replaced all our incandescent bulbs with fluorescents. I can’t recommend enough replacing a clothes dryer with a clothesline. I find hanging clothes out to be sort of therapeutic, anyway.

A couple of months ago I made an entry concerning “solar future”. In it I referenced a recent article in the journal Science that pointed out that an investment by the government in “jumpstarting” photovoltaics could bring the cost down considerably. While I found the cited cost of this jumpstarting investment ($10 million) to be unbelievably small, the idea itself is a good one, and I would not in the least mind seeing the government spend a lot more money than that if it brought the price of PV down. It wouldn’t be the first time that the government has spent money to stimulate development and affordability of something - personal computers comes to mind.

I know there are perfectly understandable and utterly insane reasons why this particular government would not want to encourage the affordability of photovoltaics for personal use. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that real conservation measures and real development of alternative energy sources is the only long-term approach to solving several critical problems.

I’m beginning to look into purchasing a solar panel and the components necessary to run (hopefully) several items. I want to start relatively small and build from there, gradually isolating several appliances from the house current. After doing some research yesterday, I found some interesting things.

First, some terminology:

Voltage and current are the two measures by which everything can be calculated. All appliances have their operating voltage and current draw stamped on them. Voltage is a pressure, a *push*, that is used to drive the current. The current can be thought of as the water in a pipe being pushed by the voltage; it’s a quantity of electricity.

A watt is a unit of power. A 60-watt light bulb draws that much power. At 120 volts, it’s pulling 0.5 amps (power = voltage x current).

A watt-hour is a unit of energy. A 60-watt light bulb burning for 24 hours draws 1440 watt-hours of energy, over 30 days that represents 42 kilowatt-hours. Your house electric meter reads in kilowatt-hours. A typical house might use 1000 kilowatt-hours per month.

The electricity provided to your house is alternating current, and just about all your appliances are designed to take in this current, whether or not they use direct current (like computers). Transformers convert AC into DC inside the appliance. Solar panels and batteries output DC. So they can either run a DC-appliance directly, or an AC appliance if they’re outfitted with an inverter.

Looks like a 125 watt solar panel is a good place to start. One price I found for this is $640. Such a panel puts out 10 amps of current when fully illuminated, at 12 volts. This turns out to be about 1 kwh per 8-hour day, a fairly miniscule fraction, perhaps 3%, of what we use. Nonetheless.

Ancillary devices are necessary to run AC appliances. You need a deep cycle battery to be charged simultaneously when the appliance isn’t running, so you can use it at night and on cloudy days. You need a charge controller so you don’t overcharge the battery. And for ac appliances you need an inverter, to convert the DC output of the solar panel/battery to the AC most appliances require.

Here’s some interesting little factoids about power usage of some appliances:

Don’t even think about running an electric stove with solar. One burner uses 1500 watts of power. An hour of usage can easily use 1-2 kilowatt-hours of energy, the entire estimated output of the contemplated solar panel for a day. A microwave uses the same amount of power, but for a much shorter period of time.

Same for heating a house - no way we could run our fan and heat pump on solar. Better to insulate and take advantage of passive solar power.

Lighting - probably not the best application. Could run two 60-watt light bulbs with the above panel.

Refrigeration - need a high efficiency fridge. Standard refrigerators use 3000-4000 Watt-hours per day. High efficiency fridges use about 1/10 of that. A 125 watt solar panel soaking in the sun for 8 hours a day will accumulate 1000 watt-hours of energy, so that’s a possibility.

Washing machines use about 250-400 watt-hours per load. Dryers use an incredible 4000-8000 watt-hours per load. I’m glad I stopped using one four years ago and went to hanging clothes on a line! I calculate I’ve saved 5000 kilowatts-hours of energy over the last four years. That’s about six months of electric bills. Enough to pay for the contemplated solar panel.

Computers, stereos, TVs; all have small power drains and there are low-voltage DC versions available that wouldn’t require an inverter. Or you could add an inverter.

Where I’m going to start is to run the outdoor pump that circulates water through the ponds. We need a new pump anyway - our 10-year-old job is just barely hanging on. I haven’t done all the calculations of head pressure and flow-rate yet but it’s a good project to learn all the necessary things to hook up a system. With a 12-volt DC pump, I won’t need to worry about an inverter.

It’s also a good start toward pulling up our well water using solar. This is something that worries me - with a well, we are absolutely dependent on electricity for our water supply, something most urbanites don’t even think about with municipal water supplies.

Of course another aspect is that all this is a lot of fun.

We had rain this morning! We had 0.7" of rain this morning! I’d almost forgotten what the stuff looked like.

A few little thunderstorms formed over our area, completely unexpected, and gave us a little deluge.

More, more!

The color of the month appears to be yellow.

My favorite sunflower, confirmed by the impeccable taste of Floridacracker, is Helianthus angustifolius. The specific epithet refers to the narrow leaves, which are exactly that. Despite its common name, it’s perfectly fine in drier conditions and can grow quite tall - way over my head. The flowers are so yellow they’re practically luminous, and if there’s even the slightest amount of light at night appear to glow.


They’re perfect citizens, and we’ve planted them in a lot of places. The poor guys all went through two generations of pearl crescent butterfly larvae, which stripped them of leaves, but they kept growing back, and despite the ill treatment and our completely dry last five weeks are flowering vigorously.

After a completely dry September, it looks like we might actually get some rain today, remnants of Rita moving across from the west! Did anyone in the midsection get a lot of rain?

I’m still seeing a hummingbird now and then but it looks like the population is decreasing quite a bit. Does anyone else notice this? I hope they don’t get caught by weather, winging their way across the Gulf of Mexico.

The bats have abandoned us too. They do this annually and have been largely gone for the last month or so. I take it they’re doing the socializing and mating thing, and then they’ll be back for the winter. Are everyone else’s bats doing this?

They are: leucine, isoleucine, valine, threonine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, and lysine. These are the amino acids our cells cannot make from other things; we have to get them from what we eat. The other twelve we can make ourselves.

Lysine and methionine are particularly problematic, and you’re probably very much aware of this if you’re a vegetarian (if you eat meat, you’ll get all eight). But no plant source supplies all eight. To get complete coverage you have to eat from the plant family that includes grains (Poaceae), such as corn, rice, wheat, and so forth, AND from the plant family that includes legumes (Fabaceae), such as beans, lentils, peas, and so forth. The former gives you methionine but not lysine, and the latter gives you lysine but not methionine.

At any rate, that has little to do with today’s presentation - I just find it interesting - except that one of the plants below is a legume, although you’d never eat it. Sorry!

Here’s two late summer species that I like for their flowers AND fruits, especially.

Prairie Rosinweed, family Asteraceae, Silphium terebinthinaceum (there’s the possibility that it might be Wholeleaf Rosinweed, S. integrifolium; I’ll have to wait til the sun comes up to check!). For two years this plant did nothing except make rosettes of a few huge leaves, and then suddenly this summer it put up a seven-foot inflorescence with wonderful yellow heads. Even nicer, I thought, were the buds before opening.


Despite its name, this rosinweed occurs mainly in the eastern US, excepting the New England States and Florida. My “Forest Plants of the Southeast” by JH Miller and KV Miller (highly recommended) indicates that Silphium has no particular wildlife value, but with seeds as large as it makes (approaching a cm long) I’d be surprised if it weren’t browsed by birds and small mammals.

The second plant is the promised legume: Desmanthus illoensis, Prairie Bundleflower. It’s a subshrub that makes a mimosoid sort of flower, and has mimosa-like leaves and leaflets. But the fruits are especially interesting - a cluster of twisted pods. “Forest Plants” doesn’t list it at all, but I suspect that like most legumes it would be a bobwhite quail target. It occurs east of the Rockies.

It has seemed to me that September has been inordinately hot this year, with temperatures in the 90s for much of the month. That, combined with a lack of rain since the latter part of August has resulted in a desiccated world around us. And it appears no rain is in the forecast until next week, a measley 20-30% chance with continued temperatures in the high 80s.

So has it really been this hot? I took the data for the month of September from The National Weather Service Forecast Office and plotted it for the last 15 years, since 1990.


And the answer is yes and no. Since Sep 12 or so this September (the red line) shows the hottest or second hottest two-week period in 15 years. During the first 12 days it was relatively normal, but has been trending upward since.

Yet it’s not the hottest it’s *been*; the 150 year highs occurred during as indicated by the blue line, mostly in the mid- to late-1920s, early 1930s, and 1950s. These were indeed years with very hot summer and autumn temperatures (the 1920-30s corresponding generally with the Dust Bowl of the midwest). These periods of hot weather may be associated with the thirty-or-so-year cyclic Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which was in warm phase during these times and is warmer now than it’s ever been.

Interesting to me, the AMO is breaking into the big time and actually being mentioned in the SCLM as responsible for not only warmer, drier weather in the east and midwest, but also for increased frequency of hurricanes.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was a whiz at deduction, as probably everyone knows. He had an uncanny knack of noticing the smallest details and coming up with a deduction that explained them, and as we all know, he was always right. Poor Sherlock, he never enjoyed the thrill of the last part of the process - making a prediction and then testing it and finding it wrong - he was always right!

This is what scientists do, of course, and really it’s what we all do when we solve some kind of problem, whether we realize it or not. A scientist engaged in his or her own specialty involving some unexplained phenomenon will read everything available, do some puttering around in the lab seeing what happens, and then come up with a statement that summarizes her explanation for what she’s seeing. If it’s worded carefully, it will be possible for her to test a prediction that follows from her hypothesis, and if she’s very brave she’ll come up with an experiment that is capable of disproving her explanation. If she can’t disprove the statement and it still stands, it’s well on the way to becoming a valid explanation.

All good scientists, and many normal people, do exactly this sort of thing, and if you’re attentive to the process then it is truly a thrill when a prediction addresses the issue. It’s almost unfair to pick out three people and describe in more detail the process they went through, but these three people came up with explanations that not just rocked the scientific world but provided an inspiration to all people who love to think and test out their predictions.

Of course tons have been written about all these people and I can’t add substantively to it, but I’m going to muse a little bit on the matter of thinking.

Mention Charles Darwin and you’ll get a whole host of responses: “survival of the fittest” or “discovered evolution” being among the most common. Darwin did not exactly discover evolution; by the mid-1850s, he explained one way by which it occurred and in that way greatly refined the understanding of it. Natural selection was the mechanism that he proposed as likely to be the major motivator behind evolution; he admitted and discussed the possibility of others. Common descent was his deduction, and natural selection was the mechanism he hypothesized to drive it.

What is particularly interesting is a prediction that arose from Darwin’s explanation: all organisms on Earth - humans, bacteria, cats, sunflowers, sponges, mushrooms - we’re all related. *SHINE* For those who can get beyond the ickies, it’s a marvelous feeling to know that everything living around us is a relative. I myself find it an absolutely potent thought, among the most ethic of thoughts. For those who can’t, well, I’m truly sorry. You have an empathetic disorder.

It took more than a century to confirm his prediction directly, but the analysis of DNA sequences, the commonality of the genetic code, and the universal presence of certain basic types of molecules all show that the prediction that arose from Darwin’s hypothesis was, way beyond any reasonable doubt, correct.

Gregor Mendel, who lived about the same time as Darwin, is often called “The Father of Genetics”, but he just squeaked by. If his work hadn’t been re-discovered half a century later, the Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries would have been The Father. Mendel spent years setting up lines of pea plants that had certain characteristics, and then did crosses between lines and observed what happened. He deduced that there must be two factors in each of his pea plants that controlled a given characteristic - his “First Law.” Without any knowledge of DNA, no electron microscope, no knowledge of meiosis, and no modern techniques, he predicted what we today call genes, and further hypothesized that there were two of them for each trait, something we recognize when we view ourselves as diploids. *SHINE*

As far as I know, Mendel didn’t write about any observations that invalidated his second great observation and hypothesis: that two traits were inherited independently of each other - his “Second Law”. There’s been a considerable amount of discussion on the likelihood that Mendel “fudged” his data, but at least with regard to this he seems to have only presented the results that supported his hypothesis. Pea (Pisum sativum) has seven unique chromosomes in its haploid set (14 total, of course, it’s a diploid, just like us!), and it turned out that each of the traits that Mendel focused on were controlled by a pair of genes essentially each on a different chromosome. What is the probability of this happening randomly? Why, 1 out of 7!, that is, 1 out of 5040. Had he pursued the less tractable data that probability shows he must have observed, he would have also predicted the presence of chromosomes, the process of recombination much later explained by Thomas Hunt Morgan, and done it without a microscope. Ars longa, vita brevis.

(Parenthetically it should be emphasized that this is not “fudging” of data, as in changing numbers. This was selection of the clean set of data, a lesser offense and one engaged in by many, if not most, if not all, scientists.)

The third individual is Barbara McClintock. Class, raise your hands if you know who Barbara McClintock was. No? Well, ok, I’ll tell you - she is one of my heroes. She was a “small scientist”, like many of us, who, in the mid 1900s, pursued a passion for years to its ultimate conclusion. She didn’t receive huge funding, she wasn’t pursued by big money, she didn’t have and probably never could have gotten huge numbers of grad students (unless of course the fickle little bastards could have known in advance that she would become a Nobel Laureate), she worked essentially alone, and she never become a “helicopter scientist”. Far as I can tell she was an extremely modest person who never flagged.

McClintock was a plant geneticist who for decades doggedly pursued an explanation for the observation of unstable genetic traits in corn. Among other things she isolated lines of corn that had well defined but unstable traits - among these were the colors and spotting patterns in the kernels of corn. Some of these lines were always unstable. Some appeared stable unless she crossed them, and then they became unstable. With the aid of electron microscopy as a way to validate her hypotheses she predicted the presence of transposable elements, or jumping genes. The instability, she said, was due to a piece of DNA that became removed from one place and inserted itself into another. When it did this it sometimes interrupted genes that made color in the kernels, and the instability occurred. Moreover she showed that a second gene was necessary - a gene to allow the jumping gene to be removed. This explained her observation that two apparently stable lines of corn could be crossed to produce unstable kids. The instability was there only when both necessary genes, the transposon that moved, and the transposase enzyme that allowed it to be moved.

I’ve been told that McClintock’s writeups of her work were very dense and very difficult to read; perhaps this is true. Whatever the explanation, no one noticed her work particularly until many years later when transposons were discovered in bacteria. As in the case of Mendel, the importance of her years of work was only recognized by the larger genetics community at that later date. She went on to receive for her work the National Medal of Science in 1970, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel. *SHINE*

I actually had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the 1985 Savannah Georgia Meetings, the First International Plant Molecular Biology Symposium. She was a tiny, elderly woman, and she had difficulty with her microphone - even then she was rather frail. She was probably as obscure in her talk as she was in her earlier writings. She was wonderful. The audience of around fifteen hundred listeners was utterly charmed.

(And obceleb: a very young Joshua Bell performed in an evening entertainment (was it the Mendelsohn Violin Concerto? I believe it was.) - he became very pissy when some of the more nekultura members of the international audience clapped in-between movements. Oh well, I suppose he’s more grown up now, 30 years later.)

Has this turned into a tribute to one small person from another? Yes, I guess it has.

The full moon is climbing ever higher into the sky! Relish these figures that I made with my own two hands.

We’re just past September’s full moon, but already we’re seeing it much higher in the sky by the middle of the night than in June or July, and in December and January it will be climbing nearly to the top of the sky, the zenith. Here’s why:

The sun is in the middle, of course, drawn completely out of scale to the earth-moon systems on the left and right. The earth is in blue and the moon in gray.

On the left we have the relationship between moon, earth, and sun in the northern hemisphere summer. I’m the little black dots sitting on the earth at night and in the day - I’m at 34 degrees latitude, and that’s fairly important.

As you know, earth is tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees (that’s the line drawn through the north and south poles; the perpendicular line is the equator). Because of this we have seasons, but now you know why. On the day side, we’re tilted so that we receive the sun’s rays directly and strongly, but on the night side we’re tilted much more upwardly and are looking down (to the south) at the full moon. So in the summer the moon doesn’t climb very high into the sky.

On the right side is the situation in the northern hemisphere winter. The earth’s axis is still pointing in the same direction, but we’re now on the OTHER side of the sun. Now the little black dot that is your humble writer is upward from the sun and receives its rays rather feebly; our weather is consequently cooler. On the night side though we see the moon straight on - because of this is looks like it is climbing much higher into the sky.

All of this is for the full moon, which at the time of being full, is situated in its orbit around the earth so that the earth is between it and the sun. We see the entire face backlit and we call it full, and rightly so! For folks who live at higher latitudes, the moon might hardly clear the horizon in the summer, and might not climb quite so high in the winter as those of us who are lucky enough to live in Athens, Georgia. For folks who live in the Southern Hemisphere the situation is similar but they see the moon travelling across the northern sky rather than the southern sky.

I sketched out some geometry and figured that in mid summer the moon could rise as high as 39 degrees, but some times might not get up as high as 27 degrees above the horizon. In the winter it can rise anywhere from 77-89 degrees above the horizon.
Here’s what it looks like during the months of the year:


Why is this important? If you do binocular or telescopic viewing, it’s much nicer to be looking up than toward the horizon. There’s a lot less atmosphere that way and objects like the moon are much more vivid in the winter because they’re higher in the sky. It’s true for the planets too, because they also orbit in the same plane as the moon and earth, so Mars for instance will become ever nicer as the season progresses into winter and its close approach Oct 29.

Of course each season has its charms and a low full moon its own drama.

I’m just testing something out.

Yes, the temperatures in the past week have been in the upper eighties to nineties, and tomorrow is to be 94 deg F. But the plants and animals know what time of year it is. The Araneus orb weavers are coming out!

Last night, while listening to PHC and sitting on the front porch, Glenn and I watched an orb weaver making its web. It had selected a negative space (Hi Pablo!) between the hornbeam and the silky dogwoods 15 feet off the ground. I don’t suppose it’s afraid of heights. For about 15 minutes it made its spokes, running back and forth radially across the center of the web. For a few minutes it sat in the center and then began adding the cross-lattices, spiralling outward ever more distant from the center. The chimney swifts were coming in, and the bats were going out, and I just knew someone was going to wreak havoc with all that careful web building, but it didn’t happen.

It was still there this morning and apparently enjoying a sumptuous repast:


Yes, I know it’s not a very informative pic - it was in the manner of an extreme experiment, using the 300mm zoom to attempt a photograph of a 2-cm object in the early morning dawn from 15 feet down.

Early early yesterday morning on the south deck I spied two of what I think are likely Araneus species, perhaps even Araneus diadematus, the Garden Spider, or Cross Spider. Since it’s in the habit of these males to build their web close to the female, I assume it was a male (left) just a few inches behind the female’s web. The female was very shy - as soon as I started to take her pic she ran into a hollow pipe supporting the outside light (right):


She wasn’t nearly so shy this morning; she’d caught a juicy katydid during the night and nothing I could do would dislodge her from her breakfast. The male sat dejectedly behind her in his web, without a catch.


The above photos were taken in the early dawn, but a little later she’d moved around to the front:


Orb Weavers make the familiar, classic spiderwebs, and are in the family Araneidae. Members of the family are present throughout the warm season; I had earlier posted a pic of the black and yellow argiope.

The above large colorful orb weavers, at least in our location, don’t make an appearance until late summer and will last until the first frost drops them to the ground. The most famous Araneus of all is Charlotte, of course, of “Charlotte’s Web”. She was A. cavaticus, a barn spider. Did you cry when she died? I did.

At least some of the orb weavers, including the garden spider A. diadematus, will take up their webs in the morning, consuming them, and then retire to a sheltered place until night. This time of year I have to check the clothespins extra careful; I don’t want to squash anyone, and they love to use the clotheslines as a foundation. These particular ones above seem content to hang around all day and night, so their behavior doesn’t quite conform to what I’d expect for that species.

A Preliminary Checklist of the SPIDERS OF ALABAMA lists 17 Araneus species in Alabama (close enough) and four others that have Araneus synonyms.

The mystery snake has left yet a third snakeskin, this time in the Bufo Pond. The second one was left a month after the first one; this one was left somewhere around 7 weeks after the second.

I’m assuming, since we’ve seen red-bellied water snake babies, that that’s what this is. But it brings up a question - how often do water snakes have to breathe? Shouldn’t I see it come to the surface occasionally?

Would it like a platform to rest on? There is a small island in the middle, and I do have a 5" diameter log floating in the pond for the frogs. Any ideas?

The weather here is hot and dry - temperature in the mid-90s, but so dry and somewhat breezy that you really don’t feel the heat. We haven’t had any rain since the remnants of Katrina went through, and then only received 0.1". Most of August was similarly dry, with only a few similar spats of rain amounting to 0.1" or less, not quite enough to wet the ground. It’s getting to the point of being worried about woods fires, and no rain in sight.

So it was a good day to retreat into the cooler woods and take a look for rocks suitable for grinding corn. I did find such a pair of rocks, a nice flat one with a depression in the center, and a handsized grinding rock, but I also saw a couple of other things.

Downy Lobelia, Lobelia puberula, is flowering now along the shady banks of the creek, providing a little bit of color.


Occasionally while walking along the creek, situated and winding its way through a long, deep hollow, I’ll find little artifacts of humanity - pottery pieces and so forth. Today it was a bottle:


The label says “Temple Garden Atlanta Georgia”. I did a google on this and while I didn’t find a concern called “Temple Garden”, I did find an ad on ebay under “Bottles and Insulators”, with the entry of a nearly identical bottle. It’s a “Corker Temple Garden Medicine Flask”.

My bottle of course has a piece out of it, and perhaps it’s because it’s been lying in the mud and creek for the last 80 years that it’s a dark brown color rather than clear glass. The starting price on the ebay piece is only $6.99 so that’s irrelevant anyway. It’s just cool to speculate that the housesite up the hill might have a date now: sometime in the 1920s.

Here’s something interesting I found while I was shucking the Bloody Butcher cobs:


At the right end of the cob you can see several kernels germinating, with their little green shoots. This is a phenomenon called precocious germination or vivipary.

This can’t be a good thing, of course. Farmers don’t like their seeds germinating on the plant before harvesting. For this corn, it’s probably due to a combination of genetics and environment. Crop plants have been bred to produce seeds that are not dormant and germinate quickly and synchronously. Farmers don’t like to plant their seeds and wait months, with a little germination here and a little there.

It’s likely that many crop plants therefore produce seeds that are really on the verge of germinating, and given the right environment, high humidity, maybe a little help from whatever the fungus at the end of the ear is releasing, will germinate precociously.

Mutations have been discovered, too, in crop and wild plants, where not only do the seeds germinate precociously on the plant but they also transmit the behavior to their progeny. The mutation has usually been mapped to genes associated with abscisic acid production or reception. Abscisic acid is the plant hormone that confers dormancy on seeds, so they don’t germinate until a period of “resting time” has passed.

Obviously this is a lethal mutation in the wild. Seedlings that germinate on the mother plant are going to die, and so this gene wouldn’t normally be transmitted to progeny. However in the lab we rescue seedlings like this and plant them, and then have plants all of whose seeds germinate precociously.

Oddly it turns out that such mutant plants are water stress intolerant - they wilt terribly if not kept in a humid atmosphere. It also turns out that abscisic acid is involved in closing up the stomata in a plant when it’s dry, and the mutants can’t close theirs. Neat.

Americans call it corn, but the word “corn” is a generic term that just means “the grain that grows here”. In Norway, it’s barley (Hordeum vulgare) that’s called “corn”. In biblical Egypt “corn” meant what we call wheat (Triticum spp). Everyone else in the world calls our “corn” maize. It’s Zea mays.

This year we grew two varieties of corn, or maize, both “heirlooms” as opposed to hybrids, because I want to be able to propagate seeds next year and you can’t do that with hybrids. Well, you can, but the plants you get won’t produce the same kind of corn. There was a sweet corn, Golden Bantam (right), and a “dent corn”, Bloody Butcher (top left and bottom). The less colored Bloody Butcher is just a little less mature and the anthocyanin pigment hasn’t had a chance to fully develop:


And yes, the yellow sweet corn on the far right doesn’t look so great, but that’s because I was using later season cobs to save seeds with. We really enjoyed this one earlier in the season. You harvest sweet corn quite early before it has a chance to fully mature.

Dent corn on the other hand, the two cobs on the left, is meant for feeding to primary consumers, like pigs and cows, so that we as secondary consumers can eat those pigs and cows. That’s not all - it can be ground up as cornmeal and that’s why I had planted it. Isn’t it pretty! You wouldn’t believe all the molecular work that’s been done with the gene, the R-locus, that causes the red color!


Botanically, corn is a monster. That’s a real term; it means an organism that is unlike any other. The corncob is actually a multiple fruit - each kernel is a single fruit with an embryo inside; the majority of the fruit is starchy endosperm, which nourishes the embryo as it germinates. The cob is actually a highly thickened inflorescence stem. The pesky silks that you have to pull off are the leftover styles that caught the pollen and provided a pathway down to the baby kernels to fertilize the egg and make an embryo.

Part of maize’s monstrosity is that it has been highly bred from a “normal” grassy ancestor. Corn originates from South and Central America and is the result of Native American breeding that’s been going on for thousands of years. Its original ancestor is almost certainly teosinte, an unimpressive little grass that produces a few tiny kernels on an inflorescence that shoots out from the top of the plant. There’s several species of teosinte, including Zea diploperennis, and it can be crossed with maize. In teosinte, the female flowers are at the ends of the shoots and the male flowers shoot out from the sides. In corn, it’s the opposite. So not only has corn been bred to produce large numbers of large kernels all on a single cob, there’s been a sex change as well.

Here’s a neat pic of a cross between the teosinte on the left, the maize on the right, and the hybrid in the middle:


A lot of work has been done in using these wild teosinte species as sources of new genes to introduce into maize, and there have been efforts, some successful, to conserve habitats in Mexico and Central America where these wild plants live. It’s not clear that it would be a good idea to have a perennial maize, but the possibility exists. Insect and fungus resistance and so forth might be other valuable additions from outside wild species of the teosinte relative.

Maize is one of those organisms like E.coli bacteria, yeast, fruitflies, Arabidopsis, mice, and nematodes, that are heavily used as models for how organisms work. All of these organisms have had their entire genomes sequenced or in the process of being sequenced.

Be sure to be checking out Mars in the sky anytime from midnight on. By dawn it is unmistakeable and directly above. Right now it is about 90 million kilometers away and has a magnitude of -1.3, brighter than any other object except Venus (and the sun and moon, of course). I’ve been watching it daily since early summer and it’s gotten much brighter in that time.

On Oct 29 it will be at its closest, 69 million kilometers. It will have a magnitude of -2.3, which means it will be more than twice as bright as it is now.

It came closer, 56 million kilometers, at the end of August in 2003, and had a magnitude of -2.9 at the time, but fret not - this will be spectacular enough. Bask in its warm ruddy glow!

Here’s a fun screenshot for you!


This is an Earth-centered view of the solar system, where Earth is in the center and the planets loop around it.

Concentrate on the red loops with the blue dates. This is Mars, and Earth is in the center. You can see how Mars came closest in August of 2003, and how it will come close again 26 months later in October of this year. For the next 13 years its closest approach will be farther and farther away, until October of 2018 when it will once again appear very bright in the sky.

(FYI, the green loops are Venus, and the yellow loops are Mercury. The odd white tracks are Asteroid 1999RQ36, one of those “potentially hazardous Near Earth Orbit asteroids”. In just 7 days it will come within 4 million miles of earth travelling at 7 kilometers per second relative to us. On September 23 2060 it will pass even closer, within 1 million miles. This rock is probably about 600 feet in diameter, but in neither case is it expected to pose a danger.)

This is just a short post to indulge my curiosity. I’ve noted that various 9/11 memorial ceremonies around the country have been covered fairly extensively, and with good reason, all except for one:

I’m wondering about the Pentagon-sponsered Freedom March in Washington DC. Was it held? Did everyone enjoy getting their plastic dogtags and names taken in this freedom-loving country? Did everyone enjoy the pseudo-country music? Were there hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people attending? Did the National Park Service report overestimates, or are they going to get their funds cut for reporting the truth?

I’ve been scanning the NY Times and CNN webpages for news of it, and have seen absolutely nothing. Could it be the media spotted this for the public relations ploy it was and decided to have nothing to do with it?

Even without a TV I’m generally not out of touch. But without one, and when my usual “news” webpages don’t report it, I grow curious.

Let us imagine, and why not, since programming and space stuff are two of my hobbies, and since you are a captive but fickle discerning audience, and since we are all here to have fun at least on occasion, that you are in a spaceship five billion miles directly above the sun and the solar system, hurtling toward the sun at an unimaginable velocity.

We are well outside the distance from the sun of the currently outermost planet, Pluto. If you had very very good eyes, you’d see something like the image below. You wouldn’t see the letters, of course, they’ve been added and signify the current position of the planets whose name begin with those letters. Neither would you see the blue curves; these are the orbits of the those planets.

(Click on the pics below for a large, full-scale screen shot if you want. Right-click into a new window - I wouldn’t take over your computer to do it myself; I’m not that kinda guy):



There’s not a lot to see at this great distance, but you’d notice that there’s a large glut of millions of pieces of matter close in to the sun. So let’s move in to about a billion miles out, just about the distance of Saturn from the sun. It would become clear that these millions of rocks occupy a volume of space that is doughnut-shaped and is situated between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.


These rocks are the asteroids, of course, and range in size from dust to huge flying mountains with a few dozen being the size of a small moon, up to 400 miles in diameter. They are probably the remnants of an unformed planet that would have formed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter but were unable to cohere due to the influence of massive Jupiter.

From this vantage point, especially if you click on the above picture, you’ll notice the doughnut has two concentrations of white asteroids at about 6 and 10 o'clock. These are the fascinating regions of space called lagrange points, where the gravitational influences of the sun and Jupiter (in this case, but all planets have them) cancel. Any object drifting into these regions tends to stay there, and over billions of years Jupiter has acquired quite a few of them. The asteroids in these regions 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit are known as the Trojan asteroids. They’re very special.

As we move closer in toward the sun, just inside the orbit of Jupiter, this is what we’d see:


The doughnut is clear but so are a large number of objects, many marked in red, that travel in orbits that are not confined to the doughnut. We don’t worry about the 100,000 or so white asteroids plotted here; it’s the colored ones that are of concern. These are the Near-Earth Orbiting asteroids, also called PHAs or Potentially Hazard Asteroids; they have the potential to strike the Earth at some point in the future because they cross its orbit. There are about 3500 of these now known and catalogued. Some of them come quite close indeed in the next hundred years, but none is predicted to strike in that time span. I’ll discuss these in a later entry, but you can find a lot of juicy information here with dates of closest approach, and a lot more info here.

A note about the programming - I find myself frequently unsatisfied by the plots and “charts” and statistical routines available through software like Excel and SigmaPlot. I end up writing my own. The program that produced these images is a modification of a program I have been working on that plots the orbits of asteroids into the future and takes into account the perturbations that change the orbits of the asteroids with time. More about that later perhaps.

In order to plot the positions of asteroids and planets you need Keplerian orbital elements. These elements, and there are six important ones, define the shape and inclination of the orbit in space, and the position of the asteroid at a particular time. The program takes the elements and for each asteroid plots its position. There are about 100,000 known and catalogued asteroids, and their elements were downloaded. Isn’t the internets wonderful? It takes about 45 minutes to plot each of these images.

Just for fun and drama, because we love drama, let’s look at the asteroid belt as if we were traveling toward the sun from about 30 degrees above the ecliptic, the plane of the earth’s orbit. We’re about a billion miles out, and we can see the whole asteroid belt tilted in space:


Finally, just outside the orbit of Jupiter, we’d see the belt of asteroids and within it, the four inner planets including our own nestled around the sun. The potentially hazardous asteroids are colored in red, and occasionally green, to mark their special significance. And I’ll remind you that you can click on the pics to get a full screen enlargement.

The weather has been remarkably fine the last few days, and so I’m going to remark on it. Temperatures at night are in the low to mid 60s, cool enough to cut down the fan a notch and sleep with a comforter on. The days are warm - mid 80s - but breezy and dry. Ten or eleven months out of the year our winds are out of the west, but in late summer they come from the east for just about a month. I assume that this is due to the retreating Bermuda High, that often covers us and traps heat and humidity much of the summer. Winds will get back to normal once the Bermuda High goes back where it belongs, over the Atlantic.

Our Anglepod, or Climbing Milkweed, Matelea carolinensis, which is quite a common plant around here, is playing host to the fun-loving Milkweed Tussock Moth larvae. Milkweed Tussocks, Euchaetes egle, are tiger moths, in the Arctiidae. The adult moth is a non-descript LBM, but the larvae are striking in the varieties of hair colors, lengths, and textures they present. They change quite a bit as they grow too! Despite their ample warning coloration, they don’t sting. Lies, all lies.

Earlier I posted the Gulf Fritillary caterpillar story. If we had any caterpillars here, and we must somewhere, I hadn’t seen any. But Glenn found a bunch of them on passionflowers (Passiflora incarnata) on campus and brought them home to our own wild passionflowers. Even at that time I’d seen an adult fritillarying about but had not been able to photograph it. They’re way shy compared to the swallowtails and admirals which will perch on your fingers.

With the new camera though I was able to zoom in from ten or twenty feet away. I know that in some places these guys are common as hell all year around but I swear I think we only have the one lone fellow here. Maybe next year we’ll have more!


Such an amazingly brilliant orange color! It almost makes me want to abandom my favoritism toward primary reds and blues. This one’s enjoying a sip from Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia, which is turning out to be our major workhorse plant as a nectar source for just about all the butterflies I see.

Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) are heliconian butterflies, mostly tropical so this may be the only species that finds itself this far north, and extends to a line between Kansas and North Carolina. Apparently the adults will migrate southward for the winter, according to the USGS Georgia Butterflies Webpage.

I’ve been exploring the new Nikon D70 camera for the last few days. I was very disappointed in the behavior of the diopter lenses for closeups. Diopters are basically just magnifying glasses that you screw into the front of the lens, like a filter, to let you get closer to the subject. They come in levels with names like +1, +2, +4, and you can use them singly or in combination. Anyway, it was just good fortune that I tried one with the zoom at its shortest extension, 70mm focal length, and they worked perfectly. Above about 130mm they begin to degrade, and I had been trying them at full zoom, 300mm.

The autofocus is a bit confused when the diopters are mounted onto the end of the lens, and don’t focus perfectly. Manual focus is essential; fortunately that is very easy with this camera. I’ve already stopped using the auto setting and have gone to experimenting around with the manual settings. Just a few tidbits.


The Rose Mallows, Hibiscus coccineus, have been flowering for several weeks now and yesterday I caught this probable Pearl Crescent resting in the center of the flower. It could be a Phaon Crescent, but probably not. We have lots of these complexly marked butterflies around, and they make my brain hurt trying to figure them out.


Rose Mallows (aka Scarlet Rosemallow) are native to the southeastern tier of US states from Arkansas and Louisiana east to Virginia and south to Florida. They’re in the family Malvaceae, which includes all the 50-odd species of cotton (Gossypium), okra (Hibiscus esculentus and other hibiscus), and various sorts of mallows and cheeses.


Species in the Malvaceae have things in fives, unless they have them in dozens. So five petals and five pistils. If you look closely at the end of the style from which all the dozens of stamens bristle, you can see the five stigmas curled out - just below that they fuse into a single style and the ovary and later the fruit will have five locules or sections to it.

Our plants derive from an ancestor that belonged to Mrs Hatcher in Athens, an elderly woman who rented her next door property to our friend Bill. When Mrs Hatcher died 20 or more years ago, Bill bought her house and presented us with her ailing rose mallow. Our seeds derive from that plant, so you could probably call it Mrs Hatcher’s Rose Mallow.

They’re happiest in moist soil and full or part sun; they’re even tolerant of wet soil. They look pretty much like okra in height and shape. They’ll die down to the ground in the winter and then produce new shoots in the spring.

Something for America’s Labor Day that comes at a different time from the Rest of the World’s Labor Day:

A year or so ago I discovered Landover Baptist Church, and my life was saved. It took awhile to figure out whether it was real or memorex. Among the regular columnists is Mrs Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian.


Now I don’t normally do this sort of cut and paste, but I think you heathens will all benefit in your future lives if you could only give yourselves over to Landover and Mrs Betty Bowers. Here’s a sampling, and I fervently hope you will take her observations to heart.

I see that our gallant President has decided that it is taking far too long for Iraq to look like American. So he has decided to meet them halfway by making New Orleans look like Baghdad. Only, perhaps, he went too far, as New Orleans could only aspire to a lawless anarchy as dry as Iraq’s. And here I thought dear Katherine Harris and her faux-felon purge was the model for trimming the voting lines of Democrats! Frankly, Katherine’s glorious efforts to relieve the registration lists of nefarious liberals can’t hold a candle to the magnificent indolence of FEMA in New Orleans. And while dead people may vote (especially in Ohio), they don’t show up in court to whine about being harassed at the polls. Glory!

Yes, it has been four long years since 9/11 (registered trademark) and nothing has apparently been done in this country to prepare for or help a disaster (an alarming fact that was amply proven on “Being Bobby Brown”). But I am getting increasingly impatient with liberals bellyaching that Katrina serves to underscore a lack of planning on the part of our President.

On the contrary, dears: it shows an arrangement that works just like it is supposed to not work! You see, Mr. Bush wisely cut the budgets for emergency response agencies and the rebuilding of levees in New Orleans to pay for our efforts to establish an Islamic theocracy in Iraq (and to send emergency tax relief to desperate people not nearly as liquid as New Orleans, desperately clinging to billions tied up in real estate and leaking stock portfolios). Who was to fill the gap, impertinent fact-obsessed people ask? Well, American’s religious corporations, mouths agape under the bounteous spigots of tax-dollars flowing to faith-based initiated! That is why FEMA lists Brother-in-Christ (and assassination cheerleader) Pat Robertson’s very own Operation Blessing as one of the first places you should think about when sending dollars to help poor people being devoured by rats in New Orleans. Say what you will about Brother Pat, but he knows how to loot without getting wet! Glory!

The tiny snag with relying on churches to fill the gap left by a government too preoccupied with the testosterone of waging war abroad to succumb to the girly impulse of feeding those left at home, is that the churches with the most money didn’t get that way by turning it over to those in need. Indeed, in a novel twist on Scripture, most American Christian mega-churches have been called by the Lord Jesus to get money from the poor – not the other way around. This is precisely why it was the secular Astrodome in Houston, not Joel Osteen’s new 16,000-seat indoor stadium (former home of the Houston Rockets) that threw open its doors to the poor and needy. After all, a stadium full of poor people with diseases would simply ruin the bottom line by keeping out rich people with tithes. Besides, who wants a bunch of water-logged black people dripping all over the recent $75,000,000 renovation? Not Jesus!

Let me take a moment to join President Bush in praising his administration’s inerrant efforts in response to Hurricane Katrina. The administration’s initial, rather crafty response was a calmness that absently flirted with disinterest, so as not to let the water know that it had won. A still-vacationing W strummed a guitar (pronounced “git-tawr”) while New Orleans burned. No, that was Rome: New Orleans drowned. And Condoleezza Rice, always the go-to gal for feigning obviousness with alarming verisimilitude, went shoe shopping in New York for a kicky little something to wear to giggle herself to death at Spamalot. As she might have told Louisiana children dying without needed medications in the Ninth Ward, had she actually been there to speak to them: “Don’t worry about not having penicillin, kiddies. As any rich Broadway cognoscenti will tell you - laughter is truly the best medicine! Don’t touch the Ferragamos!”

Following Condi’s always exemplary coolness in the face of disaster (which she seems to have appropriated from Terri Schiavo), our handsome President hasn’t been without solutions to the current crisis. Why, just today he offered the sage and innovative suggestion: “If you don’t need gas, don’t buy it.” Pesto – problem solved! (Well, for that one lady out in Indianapolis who doesn’t drive.) Actually, a better suggestion would have been: “Instead of wasting money on gay, use the money to buy gas stock instead because when it comes to making the best out of a crisis, nobody comes close to America’s oil companies. Yee-haw!” Or, better yet, sell the lumber from what used to be your house in Biloxi on E-bay and use the few dollars you get to buy Halliburton stock. Shares in that company, which Dick Cheney still gets money from, sold for $8.60 in 2002. Yesterday, they hit $63.44. Don’t tell me the Lord doesn’t turn lemons in to lemonade! Glory!

Of course, the first priority of our proactive President was to do what the White House always does to solve any problem: schedule a panacean photo-op! So, four long days after Katrina hit, President Bush stood in Mobile before news cameras, looking like what he thought a concerned person would look like. America watched in heartened triumph as the head of FEMA told Mr. Bush that the water that submerged New Orleans had gotten there because something called “levees” had broken. Who knew? Here it is Friday, and it is such a joy to watch as someone finally shares with Mr. Bush what the rest of us knew (and, apparently, were selfishly keeping to ourselves) all week.

Now, the only thing left for we Christians to do is to decide the most important issue: who exactly was the loving Lord trying to kill with Katrina? While many of my fellow right-wing Christians bicker over whether it was a Great Flood aimed at homosexuals or abortionists, I think one thing is clear: when it comes to poor black people without food or drinkable water, the Lord has quite an axe to grind.

Well, all I can say is if a terrorist blows up Chicago or a major earthquake decimates Los Angeles, make sure you have batteries in your flashlights and learn to drink sewage with a smile because the Bush administration is otherwise distracted, dismissive and disinterested, dears. You’re on your own. Welcome to the new, every-man-for-himself America! Glory!

So close to Jesus, I can be driven to Crawford, Texas without even seeing the inconveniently mewling mother my SUV limo is splashing with mud,

Mrs. Betty Bowers

America’s Best Christian

A woman known throughout Christendom for her joie d'après vivre

Glenn was investigating charities to donate to on Wednesday. He discovered that FEMA’s website was inordinately populated by faith-based charities, number 2 among them was Pat Robertson’s “Operation Blessing” (later demoted to number 3).

NPR Weekend Edition Saturday had a late piece with a broader theme of the success of charitable giving in the last few days. However they did mention secular charities that are furious with FEMA; apparently 20/22 of FEMA’s links were to faith-based charities. FEMA claims they had no devious intent here; nonetheless they have since expanded the listings. Apparently they just got caught.

In particular, NPR noted that “Operation Blessing” was listed number 3, as I described above. I can’t vouch for anything I find on the web but all you really have to do is google with the keywords +"Pat Robertson" +"operation blessing" +africa +diamonds to get at least one view of what his “Operation Blessing” does. Not that it matters - I’d never recommend anyone donate to a Pat Robertson charity.

What was particularly weird was an email forwarded to me from Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) with a list of charitable organizations. Number 3 on the list of charitable organizations? Operation Blessing. It appears they just copied and pasted from FEMA’s website, apparently trusting the government to give complete information. So if you’re relying on DCCC emailed recommendations, be aware that they trust the government far more than I do. As for the DCCC website, I can’t find anything except Red Cross donation links, so I find it rather odd.

(Note that I’ve nothing against faith-based charities, so long as you know what they are. I am a bit perturbed that FEMA would try to sneak a vast majority of faith-based charities and recommend little else.)

I don’t get it.

For a lot of people the season of sneezing and wheezing is approaching. They’re going to breathe in various late season pollen grains and their mast cells are going to pump out inordinate quantities of histamines, which cause exactly those symptoms. (I’ve always been lucky enough to not be allergic to pollen; cats, yes, at one time but I seem to have desensitized myself. Probably from living with around ten of them over the last twenty five years.)

And they’re going to blame goldenrod (Solidago spp), which is unfortunate because goldenrod is not to blame. The culprit is ragweed, and below we probably have Annual Ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia.


Ragweed produces these reduced green flowers that are not attractive to insects; ragweed is wind-pollinated. In fitting with the requirements of wind pollination, the plant produces huge quantities of a very lightweight pollen grain.

Goldenrod is insect-pollinated. In fitting with these requirements, it produces much fewer quantities of a heavy and sticky pollen that isn’t released into the air. So it’s just not present in the air allergy-stricken people are breathing. Consequently it’s not the culprit. Makes sense, right?

However it is showy and obvious and ragweed is practically invisible. Goldenrod gets the blame because it flowers at the same time as ragweed and is most visibly associated with allergy time.

The moral of the story is - recognize and get rid of the ragweed, and enjoy your goldenrods. The wild bees and tiny wasps certainly will!

CNN for the last four and a half years has been pretty much a shill for the Administration. I think you can actually, finally, trust them on this.

Read it. It will be interesting to see if it disappears.

Pretty clear to me that either Chertoff and Brown are liars, or hopelessly incompetent. Demand more of your Senators who confirm these people.

OK, so I do have something more to say.

If you’re in the United States, that which we call America, go to near the bottom of the right sidebar on this webpage, click on the “109th Congress” link, click on your state, and write a letter to your senator. Copy it, paste it onto the next senator, and your representative. (You can probably imagine that with two Republican Senators, I have little hope of an effect. Nonetheless.)

Here’s mine:

Goodness, I have no idea what topic to select. “Homeland Security”, I suppose.

I hope to see that the Senate and House begin within the next VERY few days to ameliorate the immediate situation for the people in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.

I wouldn’t have been able to have imagined how unresponsive and late in response the Administration has been in dealing with this emergency.

There are human beings who are not receiving sufficient water or food and are being treated in a way we’d never treat our own animals. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about whether you’ve contributed sufficiently, then heaven help us all.

Yes it’s short, it’s sweet, it’s naive. That’s how their Little Brains like it.

Do it.

You can see what the Mayor of New Orleans is saying about the federal government here: “Get off your ass!” I suppose he should know; the guy had the wit to order a mandatory evacuation two days before the storm hit, no resources to help get people out who had no cars, and no help from the Bush Administration. That in my mind earns him instant credibility.

Nothing that wouldn’t be a repetition of outrage that becomes increasingly tiresome to express and to hear or read, and that does little good at the moment. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t use your outrage to move a heartless administration in the right direction, but apply your intelligence and do it in a productive way. It’s almost a cliche, but email or call your representatives and senators and make your concerns very clear.

Nothing about myself or the usual topics, topics that appear to me at the moment so trivial in the face of such great disaster and misery.

And not much constructive, except this: Make a donation, whatever you can, especially if you’re too far from the scene to help in other ways. If you must rationalize it, inform family and friends that all you’ll have to offer during the winter holiday season is yourself. Then send the money you’d otherwise have spent.

There will come a time to express this pent-up outrage in a channelled fashion. Make a list. Check it twice. And then when that time comes use your outrage to demand an accounting of what by all accounts appears to be a deluge of massive incompetence. Don’t forget.

I’m not going to go silent, or on hiatus; I’ll check in periodically. I wish everyone the best.

Our five-year-old Nikon Coolpix 990 bit the dust a few weeks ago, as I might have mentioned at the time. We’re still looking for a repair, since it is a marvelous little camera, but the advice Glenn and I get is that it is a “throwaway”. Something about that really rankles me, so we persist.

But we felt at the same time that it was finally necessary to upgrade anyway given the possible professional uses. Thanks much to Thingfish23, who also recently made a purchase, for his patient advice and explanations. After a week or two of me becoming increasingly frustrated, Glenn took the search over and applied his usual intense focus to the problem. Ultimately we purchased the Nikon D70 body, and two basic lenses. The Quantaray 70-300mm single lens reflex arrived with the camera. It’s a zoom, with macro capability, and we also got a set of diopters for extra closeup. I haven’t played around with those yet. The workhorse Sigma 28-135mm single lens reflex hasn’t arrived yet.

In looking through cheaper “packages” or “sets”, where the camera is bundled with one or more lenses, it was usually hard to figure out exactly what the lenses were. The packages are attractive because they are usually cheaper than the individual items, and come with a number of other accessories thrown in. However in at least one case we were able to determine that the bundled lenses were discontinued (which doesn’t automatically mean bad), non-CPU, non-macro, although these characteristics were not defined in the package description. At any rate, we reluctantly decided to avoid packages, and again Brian was instrumental in recommending this.

It’s quite exciting. I’ve spent a day learning a bit about the camera and the use of the zoom as a macro. There are a lot of bells and whistles and it’s clear that some of them will prove useful. Perhaps the oddest thing is that without the diopters added in front, closeups are taken from two or more feet away. With the old 990 I was used to being able to get to within half an inch for closeups, but it seems that that is more of a handicap than an advantage. I’m also having to get used to the difficulty in keeping the camera, with its ten or twelve inches of protruding lens, steady while shooting. The old 990 with its lens flush to the body was much easier to keep steady. I’ll improve steadily in short order.

At any rate, here’s the requisite hummers. They’re either females or juveniles - we seem to have very few adult males right now.

These are photos that would have been very difficult to take with the 990 and its less than adequate automatic focusing. You can do manual focusing with the 990, but it consists of estimating the distance and plugging it into the camera. The D70 has spot-on automatic focusing - it’s really incredible. And you can also do manual focusing in the usual way, by rotating the lens.


Black Swallowtail caterpillar (Papilio polyxenes) on Common Rue (Ruta graveolens). This is the same plant that I found the Giant Swallowtail caterpillars on a few weeks ago - poor old plants are getting a double whammy, but that’s what they’re there for.


Caterpillars keep disappearing. I keep looking for pupae and chrysalises but have only found one, for a sibling of the above caterpillar, yesterday. I suppose birds could be responsible, but it’s odd.

And could this be our old friend Papilio glaucus, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail? It’s on a tall thistle, Cirsium altissimum, one of our natives. (I know, DPR. Thistles. But the butterflies do love them.) There are some advantages to staying three feet back from the subject, rather than having to get within six inches.