Nature Noticings

Spring break time! I love how travelling gives you fresh eyes, especially when exploring different bioregions, where so much is unfamiliar and therefore so interesting. We recently returned from a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. We heard house finches singing and roosters crowing, but almost everything else was different from at home.  Here are some of my favorite small and strange nature things from the trip. These seed pods were at the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden just north of Hilo. They caught my eye with their almost-heart shape. I assumed it would be easy to figure out what these were later; I was wrong! Google Lens identified them as moon snails. Definitely nope. I regretted not examining the plant or tree they came from more carefully. After trying iNaturalist Seek and many, many random image searches, I had the idea of asking an expert: I emailed the botanical garden. I sent them the photo, and they replied a couple of hours later (nice!). These are fruits of the se...

Let's start big. Millions of years big. Thousands of square miles big. Between about 17 million and 7 million years ago, one massive eruption after another flooded lava across what is now eastern Washington. The lava flows piled up to thicknesses of more than two miles in places, and covered some 63,000 square miles. Then, some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, enormous floods repeatedly washed across the lava flows. At least 40 times an enormous glacial lake in Montana escaped its dam and spilled across what is now eastern Washington, tearing away at the ancient lava flows. In late March, we went on a geology field trip with Bruce Bjornstad , a geologist who has written extensively about the ice age floods. We hiked into the  the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge until we reached this. As basaltic lava cools, it sometimes forms vertical columns like these. These columns tower 50 feet, and  represent one lava flow. The ice age floods eroded away some of the lava, exposing ...