Two weekends ago we lucked into some of the most beautiful fall weather for our walk-a-ton. We’re trying to replace our old playground that had become somewhat decrepit. While our objective is not quite up to the Skudeneshavn Primary School‘s standards, it’s somewhat closer than what we had before.
Most of the kids who walked around the lake were from the lower school – after all, they’re the ones who expected to “play”- but I expect it will gets a lot of use by the middle and high schoolers once it’s installed.
Some walked more than others, but everyone had a good time.
Maggie E. has a wonderful eye for spotting small fauna. She found this mason wasp (Monobia quadridens) while we were weeding the Heifer Ranch’s herb garden. It had caught this caterpillar and was trying to take off with it. It was a difficult job – the caterpillar probably weighed as much as the wasp – but it finally managed to take it away.
The wasp found the caterpillar difficult to move.
According to the Atlas of Vespidae, these wasps prey on small moth caterpillars. Which is probably why they are usually found in open habitats with flowers; hence the herb garden.
They also use caterpillars to feed their larvae (Wikipedia, 2011). They’ll lay an egg in a cell of their nest and stick a paralyzed beetle larvae, spider or caterpillar in with the egg to feed the wasp larvae when it hatches.
References
The wasp finally managed to drag the caterpillar to the edge of the wooden bench before it could take off.
Identifying these wasps was not too hard. The first image in the google search for “wasp caterpillar” looked just like the bug we found, carrying almost the same type of caterpillar.
The image was from the wonderful “What is that bug?” where you can send in bug pictures and the author (Daniel Marlos) will try to identify them.
What’s That Bug referenced the BugGuide which gives the full taxonomic classification and a lot of information about habitat, food and life cycle that’s in an easily readable form.
A spicebush swallowtail butterfly (Papilio troilus) in the herb garden.
At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.
A variegated fritillary butterfly (Euptoieta claudia) in the herb garden.An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus; officially documented by Linnaeus in 1758).A skipper (family Hesperiidae) extracts nectar from a flower in the herb garden.
Butterflies are classified as:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
References
Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.
Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).
Nine year old Daisy Mora takes the zipline to school every day. Her five year old brother is in the bag. Image by Christoph Otto via the Daily Mail.
Photographer Christoph Otto has a few utterly amazing photographs of the kids of Rio Negro in Columbia, who have to take a zipline to get across the valley to school.
I was sorting through my slide collection, while preparing for our recent move, and came across my binder of slides from New York on 9/11. These are actual, physical slides, organized neatly in plastic binder pages, not digital images.
If I remember correctly, I was just visiting the city that day, staying with my grandparents in Brooklyn. The visit was for work, I’d a post-doc lined up at Columbia and I’d lived in the city before, so I’d not thought to bring my camera with me.
So I walked into Manhattan, against the crowds turned out by the silent subways. Edging against the flux of humanity walking across the bridges away from the tragedy.
And I bought a camera, on the afternoon of September 11th, in a small shop somewhere around 32nd Street. The proprietor was sitting behind the glass cases, following what was going on outside on a small television set. Fortunately, the electricity and credit card system were still working. He was happy to sell me a good, used, fully manual Pentax K1000 (just like the one I’d left at home), and enough slide film to get me through the day.
I’ve always had faith in the strength and resiliency of New York. It’s where I’d spent my first four years, as an impressionable teenager, after immigrating to the U.S., but I would not have been able to harbor any doubts about those first, likely naive, impressions after that day. And this was without seeing or even knowing about the heroics at the World Trade Center. All I could see was the calm and matter-of-factness of the people on the street. Though the arteries had clogged, the blood of the city, its people, still flowed.
Nor was I the only one headed towards the dense clouds of smoke, made eerily attractive by the clear sunlight and pellucid skies of that clear September day. I don’t think I would have made it over the bridge if there were not a few other people, hugging against the railing, edging their way across. That infinitesimal trickle turned into a small but steady stream on the streets of Manhattan itself, which was then dammed up by the police line at Canal Street. Being unable to see anything from there, I turned left and joined the crowd this time as took me back across the Manhattan Bridge back into Brooklyn. A flag flies over the Brooklyn Bridge.
I figured the opposite waterfront would be the best place of any for me to get any glimpse of what was going on. So, once across, I looped under the eastern side of the bridge and walked along the roads that edge the shore until I ended up in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The picture at the top of the post is from the Brooklyn Bridge Park. I managed to get two major icons into the frame that are important personal symbols: a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge is on the right edge and, if you squint, you can see the Statue of Liberty (my favorite landmark) on the left. They’re a good reminder of the history and purpose of this great city. I also like that the picture captures the silhouette of the city dove, a graceful symbol of peace, standing against the roiling clouds of smoke, dust and turmoil.
Under London, in the River Fleet. Image by suburban.com via Flickr.
History is hard sometimes, when all you have are dates and events to remember. It helps to have context. Montessori schools build a lot of history and social science on the concept of the needs of people. While the need for electronics excites many of my students, another fundamental need is for sanitation.
RJ Evans has a wonderful post, full of excellent photography that will go a long way toward capturing the imagination, which encapsulates the history of London by looking at the evolution of the River Fleet – from a “clear and sparkling” stream in medieval times, to a chartered, elegant, underground sewer system built by excellent, Victorian engineers that still functions today.
Everything is in place, thanks to the ingenuity of the Victorian engineers, to ensure that the Fleet is confined to these tunnels. Yet it was not always like that. If we travel back a few centuries we find a different story altogether – one which is not without its own pathos if such an emotion can be felt for a river.
In seeking their identity, adolescents try out a wide variety of different personas. These are often closely associated with changing appearance and style. What I find interesting is how the different styles increasingly cross cultures and other traditional divides (like race). This is evident in Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek’s photographic series Exactitudes.
There’s something sad about the loss of local cultural uniqueness to globalization; it’s a bit similar to the feeling you get when you hear about another interesting species becoming extinct. Curiously, however, when Versluis and Uyttenbroek tile together photographs of different people from the same subculture striking identical poses, they not only highlight the similarities between very different people, but also the minute variations that individuals employs to make the subgroup’s “uniform” their own.
All 128 pictures sets are thought provoking and worth a look. I think they would make useful subjects for students to reflect on (though, warning, there is a little nudity in one of the sets).
Jonas Bendiksen has an amazing website of photos, sounds and stories from life in slums in South America, Africa and Asia. It’s quite a poignant. You get wide-angled photos from far away and then the photographer steps closer to his subjects until you’re in a panorama of someone’s small apartment, hearing their story.
