Despair.com, eh?

Despair.com has always been one of my favorite places to kill a few minutes every few months checking out the latest ways to top off my half full optimists glass with despair for balance. These are perfectly appropriate for here, eh?

eh?? I couldn't agree more. Mostly this is just a bad holiday letter gone global and unseasonal. So why am I drawn to the format? Is my cynicism waning? Kinda doubt that. Maybe I enjoy documenting and creating and have delusions that I can be wittier than just cutting and pasting someone else's photography and pop humor,, but that will have to wait, definitely not happening for this post, eh?

Boy of Steel! Video at five!

Boy thwarts attack by man eating Mallorcan Pterosaurus!

Mindbending video captured of this amazing boy teaching his sister how to run right through steel!

It's all Garrigue to me

The Garrigue biome of the Mediterranean is a result of thousands of years of human activity. Between overgrazing, erosion and wood harvest all that remains is a community of the very hardy. Here you'll find poor rocky soil, long hot summer drought, salt spray, harsh winter winds and lots of goats. If you are a plant and want to live here you better have spines, be unpalatable or have great chemistry.


It is good to have spines here even if most of you is dead.


Many of the world's great aromatic plants come from here. This is wild Rosemary in bloom.

Plenty of spurges with caustic latex here too, and that is a nice fragrant fine toothed lavender around the spurge.


Looking down. Can you tell which way it is to the sea from here?

Here is a bloomin` onion. It found the best way to live here is under a rock.

Move up and away from the sea a bit and you find yourself in a pine-oak woodland, very similar to Chaparral, except with more goats.


Here is Jonathan in what I think is a sumac, so it is also probably toxic.

There is one more strategy that seems to work here: being very small and very sexy. With eyes honed from years of orchid seeking around Jena, Jonathan spotted both of these beauties.


They are both small almost leafless bee mimics. Male bees see these hotties and can't resist trying to copulate, but only get hit in the head with pollen for their effort. The flowers have to be so sexy that the bees fall for the charade at least twice to make a pollen transfer. They look pretty sexy to me, too.

Being on the Mediterranean in spring was a perfect break for this plant geek!

Nice Bellin'

Just my Luck

I'm the luckiest guy around. For me, a Land Rover with a kayak in front of my house to pick me up is a great sight to start a day.


Meet Holger (Kristi thinks he's a cutie), one of the field ecologists in the group who have a project site on the polish border. It is an old military site that is now a gated wildlife preserve. They are studying an endangered poplar species that lives on floodplain islands. Of course this sounded interesting to me, and he didn't mind a bit of cheap help and an extra driver.


The water is still high so the kayak is needed to ferry equipment to the island which is home to lots of deer, pigs and hares that wait until you just about step on them before they dart away.


There were 500 poplars on the island, many mapped, numbered and their sex already determined, but the beavers are taking more every year and without flooding there aren't any young trees.


This is ol' number 48, ain't she a beaut?


I find getting in the tree easier than wrestling a pole pruner.


We took a few hundred cuttings to start in the greenhouse, which will be used for caterpillar food. Feeding caterpillars cause the tree to release volatile signals that other trees and branches on the same tree are suspected to use to ready their caterpillar defenses.


Getting insect traps and volatile collection equipment, etc. into the trees is essential to the experiments this spring. I'm good with ropes, that is why I get to go along. Here we are practicing using the crossbow to shoot lines over branches. It would also be effective on unsavories. Since Poland joined the EU a year or so ago, anyone who has skills has left for the west, especially the women, so there is a disproportionate number of frustrated skinheads. We got dirty looks, but they didn't return with twenty friends a beat the crap out of us which is good, because the crossbow is a bit slow to fend off more than one.

Not a bad way to spend a day, eh?