Marty’s blog

Just hanging around the house again today, communing with nature, as it were; the plants in late summer flowering or going to seed, huge spider webs slung across the walking path.

This red oak has been hit by lightning several times in its hundred-plus-year lifetime - old scars healed over decades.

It [...]

Okay folks, here’s the rub.  While we’re all really looking forward to a new administration, BushCo is still in office, and intent on sucking more blood out of the country, the government, and our children’s future, creating further disasters through the end of their term in January ‘09!
The campaign is a nice diversion, and provides many [...]

Bats (3.2 MB - .AVI video file)

Conservation does work.  And that’s why we should celebrate the rare successes - more then we mourn the many failures.
People have to know that the profound losses we’re now causing and experiencing of our planet’s diversity of plants and animals are not inevitable.  To think otherwise is way too darn depressing!  The good news stories are few and [...]

I don’t know how to adequately describe this, but our back yard, which is actually a small woodland, is filled with fireflies. It’s about 11 P.M., dark and very quiet except for a slight wind in the treetops, and it looks like thousands of blinking Christmas lights strung up from the ground to the [...]

A neighbor found this snapping turtle in her yard and asked me if I would bring it back down to the wetland about an 1/8th mile downhill behind our property. Unfortunately, that property behind us is nearing being bulldozed and developed by a large builder. (The worst! - landscapes raped and regraded, trees clear [...]

Up at 6:30. Who could sleep with this flying overhead for a half hour!? The crop duster is spraying again for gypsy moths. Back and forth just above the treetops. Had plenty of tijme to grab my camera, but it’s hard to catch a moving target trying to anticipate where it [...]

This is the kind of thing that makes me completely lose my faith in humanity.

It does make it easy to understand, though, why so many people in general don’t give a fuck about anyone else. When tragedies occur around the world, and a neighbor the other day said “Myanmar, what’s that?”
Who cares?
When people only [...]