Category: Adventuring

Spring Buds, Pedlar Lake 30 Miles over three days. 6,000 Foot Ascent on the second day. There’s a magnificience in the changing leaves that comes with the fall, but there’s also a sublime beauty in the sprinkles of green with the spring buds. Check out the complete flickr set here.

Taxonomy of Flight Walking around this fantastic collection of aircraft, I was immersed in thoughts of the Technium, the idea that technology is the seventh kingdom of life. The technodiversity surrounding me in the main hangar display was overwhelming. The technological adaptations for vertical flight, human-powered flight, jet propulsion, and numerous others are designed by…

James S. McDonnell Space Hangar It’s a happy coincidence that I had a space-themed flickr set to upload just the day before the 40th anniversary of humans stepping foot on the Moon with the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar. Displays of toys and science fiction models really convey the cultural impact space exploration has had…

Yellow-Crowned Night-Heron Check out the complete flickr set here.

There were a lot of neat miscellanous exhibits at the VLM, including an indoor bee hive, fossilized dinosaur tracks, and this nifty display of a snake’s fangs opening and closing: Fangs I finally managed to get some photos of a river otter. These are the most playful animals of the all, always hamming it up…

Eastern Newt The Virginia Living Museum, like zoos and other natural history museums, recreates many different ecological niches indoors, where visitors can get up close and admire the biology in detail. There’s a sense of wonder in admiring the uniqueness of life without it being able to run away and hide. Hermit Crab As nice…

Eastern Snapping Turtle Swamps, like deserts, are a metaphor for awful things in life. We get bogged down in swamps, monsters come out of swamps, to “swamp” a person is to capture them in a quagmire of responsibilities. But this derision of swamps is very anthropocentric, and I like the old German proverb, “Where there…

Striped Burrfish The Virginia Living Museum reminds me very much of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where the focus is on the natural world specific to the state. Like NCMNS, the VLM divides its exhibits into ecosystems found in Virginia, from the coast all the way up into the Appalachian Mountains, and the…

Devil’s Walkingstick The Great Dismal swamp sits on the Virginia-North Carolina border, surrounded by miles and miles of farmland on all sides. There is some sense of wonder as to how this 111,000 acres of swampland didn’t suffer the same fate as its surroundings. It wasn’t for lack of trying, as developers, like George Washington,…

When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that…

“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.” – Arab Proverb Cacti Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert,…

Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go. Check out the complete flickr set here.