Category: Natural history mystery
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Yard Mystery
Experience suggests it doesn’t matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive. ~Lois McMaster Bujold I took this photo of a Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea) in May of 2006. I was walking around the yard looking for insects to photograph and stumbled upon this frog, backlit on a Tulip Read more…
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Naming Nature
I wonder what it would be like to go into a forest where nothing had name. How would we act in a forest if there were no names for anything smaller than an ecosystem? How could we walk, if there were no way to talk about anything larger than a cell? ~Kathleen Dean Moore When Read more…
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Attention to Detail
Details create the big picture. ~Sanford I. Weill Back in the day, I worked for a truly remarkable visionary, Mary Ann Brittain. I learned a lot from her and (I think) we made a good team for the museum as educator/naturalists. I remember when I first started going on the road with her to do Read more…
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Haw River Saunter
…whenever I felt emotionally overwhelmed, I would take a walk in the woods. Being in the stillness and grandeur of trees had always calmed me. ~Brenda Strong We hiked (I suppose sauntered is a better word, really) along a short section of the Haw River with some good friends on Saturday (practicing social distancing, of Read more…
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Alien Life Form Answer
There were a lot of interesting guesses and a couple of what I believe to be correct answers. I will preface this post with the disclaimer that I am certainly no expert on fungi (or anything else, for that matter) , but here is what I think our mystery photo is… I thought it was Read more…
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Alien Life Form?
I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. ~Bill Watterson Today’s mystery comes to us courtesy of Beth Howard, a friend and teacher extraordinaire in the Wilmington area. She found this in her yard and sent me a Read more…
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Cherry Tree Mystery Answer
We had a few good observations and comments on our mystery post from yesterday. Deb noticed the silk strand in one of the images (reprinted below) which made her suspect some sort of silk-spinning critter. That pretty much limits what type of animal since the only two groups of terrestrial critters I know that can Read more…
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Cherry Tree Mystery
He who finds a thought that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great peace. ~Albert Einstein Melissa and I have been talking about how we can help students and teachers during this time of online learning so I want to try to do some different Read more…
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Roads End Naturalist 