All My Blogs

Kangaroo rat (added in post) in the Palm Springs Desert Water is necessary for life.  And yet, there are plants and animals that don't need direct access to it in order to thrive.  A good example of that is the kangaroo rat, a rodent that is neither a rat nor a mouse.  They live in arid regions of North America.  Although they are capable of drinking water, an individual may go its entire life without ever drinking.  That's because they get their water from somewhere you may not expect. As you probably know, photosynthesis involves turning sunlight into sugar by using carbon dioxide and water.  The opposite of this is cellular respiration, the cellular process of converting sugar (and other foodstuffs) into carbon dioxide and water.  The carbon dioxide is dealt with through breathing (CO2 out and O2 in).  The water stays behind. The ability of kangaroo rats to conserve water is amazing.  The seeds eaten by kangaroo rats may contain some water...

Bend Oregon.  Shot with my D70 camera in 2010.  I haven't looked at this image for over 15 years. I have been organizing my digital images lately, saving all my 2025 stuff.  In doing so, I have also been perusing my archives for old photos, ones that I haven't worked on before.  This one (above) fit the bill for the blog I want to do today. Keep your old files/images.  You may never need them, but having them allows you to access them should the desire or need arise.  Memory is cheap; you can buy a 6 or 8 TB hard drive for around $250.  Unless you shoot a lot of video, that is enough memory to hold hundreds of thousands of images. Most of my images are in raw format, so I can open them anew and work with them using editors that far surpass the ones from days of old.  As well, my understanding of the workflow has improved and so I am also better at the adjustments.   Over the years, I have upgraded my cameras, starting with my Fuji S1Pro ...

An Individual American Coot at Munson Pond, Kelowna.  Feb 14, 2026. Inset:  a group of coots I photographed in 2012 (location unknown). American coots are highly social birds.  Whenever I see one, I know there are others nearby.  What I found in this case, though, was that it was alone.  Now, I can't prove that, as others may have been hiding in the nearby clutter of overhanging branches, but it still was, in my mind, unusual. It turns out that coots do migrate in groups, but not necessarily with others of the same species.  Coots may hitch a ride with ducks or geese that are migrating, both to and from their breeding area.  Another possibility is that this individual may not have migrated at all.  Coots are known to stay in the Okanagan Valley throughout the year.  Given the mild winter we have had, this is a very plausible explanation.  They like open water, so the pond where I found them wouldn't have been an option as it was frozen o...

Male common merganser.  A female hooded merganser is in the background.  Munson Pond. I was at Munson Pond yesterday taking photos of birds.  The ice had just recently come off the surface and the entire water body was clear of it.  What was there in its stead were birds; hundreds of them.  The largest collection was Canada geese, but I was amazed at how many hooded mergansers there were too.  And then I saw them; large and colourful - male common mergansers. In all, there were maybe a dozen common mergansers, both males and females.  The common variety were much larger than the hooded ones.  However, they didn't mind hanging out together, and they exhibited a most interesting behaviour.  They all dove at once. Called cooperative fishing, it is a behaviour that increases the chances of any one individual catching a fish.  One bird on its own has to either be very lucky on its dive or has to chase down a fish fleeing for its life.  M...

Canada goose driving off competition.  Munson Pond, Kelowna.  Feb 14, 2026. It's Valentine's Day today, and an excellent time to talk about monogamous birds, such as the Canada goose.  But is it love? Monogamy is the word that describes species that mate more than once in their lifetime, and only with the same partner.  There are a surprising number of bird species that behave this way.  Male and female, they find each other, usually both young and both inexperienced with mating, and they stay together.  For years.  How long? - Canada geese may live up to 25 years in the wild, but often live up to their early twenties.  Imagine staying together with the same partner for that long.  Better than many humans. Canada geese are monogamous.  They mate for life.  If a partner dies, they will eventually find another to mate with, but not right away.  They typically go through a period of mourning.  Yes, they are sad, depressed, mi...

Crabs, lobsters, and crayfish - all members of the decapods You probably know about our equilibrium organs making up the inner ear.  Called the vestibular system, the three loops of tubing (vestibules) give us a sense of balance, each tube corresponding to each of the three dimensions of our reality.  It turns out that balance systems are not unique to life - many other creatures have a similar system. Many aquatic creatures use statocysts, somewhat analogous to our vestibule canals.  However, instead of there being three individual organs, there is a single organ that essentially does the same thing.  The one I want to discuss today in my blog is found in decapods - crabs and their relatives. I copied the image below from this source - it shows the statocyst of a lobster.  It is essentially a round ball of cells, empty in the center - with hair-like (cilia) projections facing the center.  A small, hard object, the statolith, has its position within the sph...