New England – The Smaller Majority

Lungless and happy about it

Of all the organs in my body, the one that I would be most reluctant to part with (perhaps with the exception of my eyes) are the lungs. It seems that we need them more than anything else. True, we need all the other bits, but lungs seem particularly useful. Without them the brain stops working in…

A new voice in the chorus

Yesterday evening, right before the weather turned nasty, as I stood on the deck over my garden I suddenly caught a sound wave, one that I immediately recognized but had never before heard around my house. I ran to grab my recorder and was able to capture a snippet of the call. Seeing me pointing…

Tough as nails

Last night I finally managed to see the movie “Gravity”, which proves to me incontrovertibly that humans are not meant to stick their noses outside the protective layer of Earth’s atmosphere, despite having developed all kinds of high tech space gear (which, incidentally, seemed to have been designed primarily to kill Sandra Bullock’s character.) But…

Hugewings

As somebody who grew up in Europe I was really hoping that enrolling in a graduate school in the US would give me a chance to see many organisms that are rare or completely absent from the Old Continent. And, sure enough, as soon as I arrived in New England I almost got into a…

Bog killers

The one thing about plants that we take for granted is that they cannot really hurt you. Sure, some are full of toxic compounds and can be deadly poisonous if ingested. Others are covered with nasty spines or irritating hairs, and a tree can fall on your head during windy weather and crack your skull….

Say’s trig

Yesterday my wife called me – “You need to come to Mahoney’s [our local garden center], there are tree crickets on every Holly bush.” I promptly grabbed a few containers and was there in a matter of minutes. And indeed, the place was resonating with soft, bell-like calls of dozens of crickets, but I did…