Dam it.
Suburb
Another of those suburbs with a haunted forest.
I swear, they’re getting to be as bad as fountains.
LA at night
At night, if you see a sharp point of light, that means that light is going straight from that light to your eye (or camera). If it’s a bit spread out and ill defined, that means that the light is bouncing off the ground. When you’re doing this from a plane and see something like this, you know that it’s a place that cares both about economics (putting light only where it’s needed), but also about light pollution.
Farm
When you have to keep being reminded that harvest time is hard.
River
When you *really* don’t want your river going anywhere unexpectedly.
The West
meep meep
Water system
Rivers don’t always do what the maps say they do.
Farmland
Humans make farmland by basically shaving off all the trees.
Sunset
Sunset photos from the air look more interesting when you look away from the sun.
Infrared water
Usually, water looks dark in the infrared spectrum.
Usually.
Panamanian Golden Frog
This animal is extremely poisonous, producing, among other things, zetekitoxin AB. This is a tetrodotoxin compound that blocks voltage-dependent sodium channels. You’d think, from that name, that if you accidentally touched one of these guy, you could treat it by eating salt and increasing your body voltage. This is not true. Were you to do this, all you would do is confuse the medical examiner as to whether you were poisoned, electrocuted, or choked on a pretzel.
Gharial
Thought you might like to see a gharial that’s more in focus.
American Bison
The bison has an udder where milk is only released when the young calf slams into it with their head. So when you visit a field when the babies are young, you see lots and lots of little bison headbutting their mothers so they can have lunch.
In other words, all the boys bring the milk shake to the yard.
Maleo
Just another view of the bird that once thought “Sitting on eggs is boring … hey! A Volcano!”
Bird
Having made short work of the inner bar, superbird makes his escape.
Gharial
The gharial’s thin snout allows it to move much more quickly to catch fast moving fish.
The evolutionary trade off is that they can no longer eat larger prey.
Gibbon
Despite what you may think, this is actually a foot.
Kihansi Spray Toad
This is the other animal I went to the Bronx zoo to see. This is the Kihansi spray toad, native to a an area at the base of the Kihansi River waterfall in Tanzania. Their entire habitat was less than 0.0077 square miles.
In 1999, Tanzania built a dam across the Kihansi, which reduced the amount of water going through the waterfall, which reduced the overall amount of spray that created a moist enough environment for them. A sprinkler system was added to help keep them alive, but in 2003, the system broke at the same time that the chytrid fungus showed up in that area and the dam was flushed, which released pesticides into their environment. In 2004, they became extinct in the wild. We are fortunate that they breed well in captivity.
Today, the Bronx zoo is one of the only places on the planet where you can see them. The others are: the Toledo Zoo, the Chattanooga Zoo, the Detroit Zoo and the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.
American Bison
There are, sadly, not as many uses for hover-bison as you might think.
Crimson Rumped Toucanet
Thinking back over the last several million years of evolution, this toucanet realizes that evolving sentience is when things started to go wrong.