Musings

I went down to walk the beach this morning when I thought it would be sunny. I was wrong, but got to see a soaring bald eagle. This was just after reading how hard hit their population is across the upper Midwest by avian flu. [Unspoken question: will our denizen(s) return next year?]

I walked all the way around the point to the end of our property. This is our almost-bay from the opposite direction from the post two days back.

The water and ice levels have been way too high (there’s a dam just below the mouth of the lake) for decades, undermining trees and washing away the shoreline. The level is now lower than I remember it in decades, the result of a reassessment that should have been done…oh, decades ago. The trade-off to the damage we have along our shore is that the speedboats with huge motors don’t hit the bottom on this essentially shallow lake.

Trees are ever-so-persistent, however, and become sculptures while staying alive.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Shoreline stories

I read that we might see northern lights last night, and we went out at the beginning of the window suggested, meaning a late bedtime for me. The camera caught hints, but we saw nada.

This morning I found a busy carpenter ant (guessing) on the birch stump, but by the time I had my camera, it was too shy to get its soul captured.

The sun sparkle was terrific at mid-day, and the waves were low rollers. Now, the wind is gusting (up to 33mph, my device suggests), and rain will roll in during the dark hours. Such is autumn in the northlands.

Posted at 8:42 PM | 1 Comment »

The lake was close to still this morning, so I walked in my knee-high rubber boots around the point to look at the shallow bay on the other side. We own all the trees and beach you can see in this photo. We are lucky to have this land, yet we rarely spend time here as the access takes an effort.

I saw many tracks in the beach sand. The largest are deer (front and back), and the middle ones are raccoon. There were also delicate bird tracks (not shown).

This one has me confused. It is dog-ish, but is it instead a dog relative? There were odd noises in the night that were not yips or barks, but what made them?

Posted at 9:29 PM | Comments Off on Beach visit

I was too lazy to head to the beach to watch the sunrise, but did get out to see the sun crest the treeline. Nice.

Now this is unexpected: a few lilac blooms in OcTOWber! They do smell like spring.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Expected, unexpected

Nice carpet of beach foam this morning…or only a welcome mat, perhaps.

Posted at 8:46 PM | Comments Off on Free-form foam

No saturation boost; this is what I saw. 🌅

Posted at 8:51 PM | Comments Off on Stunning sun

We finally got out from under the cloud cover associated with Helene, and had smooth sailing under blue skies…very pleasant. We crested a hill, and Eden was marred by a fog-belt. Turned out it was right over Sturgeon River, and when we cleared the valley, we enjoyed unbroken blue skies again. 😎

We dined this evening on a spring green salad with chunks of smoked whitefish…surely five-star dining for this part of the world. The orchard grasses are browning out, but the trees remain overwhelmingly green, with some brown-orange tinges.

Posted at 7:09 PM | Comments Off on Fish tales

I learned that the world’s longest lived vertebrate is the Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus. They can reach at least 400 years, and perhaps 500—that’s half a millennium! The latest research (thank you NYTimes Tuesday Science stories), discussed by Jonathan Moens, has discovered that this species has huge genomes, with about 6.5 billion DNA base pairs (humans have less than half that). This makes these sharks more genetically resilient (read the story for the details), and thus likely contributes to their longevity.

Still reeling about the (possibly) 500 year lifespans.

Posted at 9:40 PM | Comments Off on Not my photo

I’m really noticing the daylength getting shorter.

Posted at 8:53 PM | Comments Off on Seasoned

We tried to see the eclipse…the partial eclipse of the moon…nope: too much cloud cover. It does seem a bit brighter where the moon is supposed to be, though?

Posted at 10:24 PM | Comments Off on Moon-watch