Quote of the Week, Perhaps a Bit Longer

"The biological community is a vast and complicated system for sharing and distributing the energy of the sun among a diversity of life forms." ~Martson Bates

2/25/09

The Insects Are Coming! The Insects Are Coming!

On Friday (2/20/2009) I saw my first insects of the season. It started with a small butterfly/moth (not really sure which), that caught me off guard. It was small and purplish-grayish. The first thing I thought when I saw it was "isn't it too early to be seeing a butterfly?" A few moments after I saw that Dan said "I'm being swarmed by flies!" and then I also saw a small group of flies hovering around my head. When we came back to the house there were a couple of house flies buzzing around our ceiling lights. Since then we've been seeing more and more insects; Dan saw a big moth outside our kitchen window and the house flies keep seeming to find their way into our house, we'll have to figure out where they are coming in at and how to keep them out. The coming of the insects means the coming of spring and the pollination of plants and flowers... I can't wait. I love spring in the mountains, the warming of the air that is then cooled by the melting of the last snow, the wild flowers pushing up out of the earth coloring the hillsides bringing a new life to the land which appears so lifeless, in it's dormant state, over the long cold winter. I love it!

Tonight, Tuesday (2/24/2009), armed with our monoculars, we rode our bikes out to the small bluff above the ranch to check out the stars. The ranch is a great place to view stars - there are no city lights for 90 miles. You can see so many stars out here, especially on a new moon (tonight). The main purpose of our excursion tonight was to see if we could find Lulin, a comet which is supposedly making it's first visit to the inner solar system. Lulin is a unique, double-tailed comet that appears green due to the gasses making it up. We are pretty sure we saw it, it is supposed to be just past Saturn which is currently next to the constellation of Leo. We saw a very small - green tinted - object in that location. The best way for us to know, is to go out a couple nights this week to see if the object we were looking at is still there. We'll keep you updated.

This image is from the NASA Image Gallery

3 comments:

Unknown said...

It definitely has seemed like spring is coming the past few days and I'm sure we saw the comet, and that we should take more night bike rides! :)

Margery said...

Beautiful pictures! I haven't seen any insects in Reno but it has been so windy they probably blew east. Love, Mom & Ozzie

Renee said...

Did you like my reference to The Lord of the Rings (mom)? I don't know why but that was the first thing I thought of when I saw those first insects.