BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website

Subject: RE: BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website
From: pdq
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 06:47 PM

This is the picture from his website...

                                                 right here

Subject: RE: BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website
From: katlaughing
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 06:38 PM

The guy is just prolific. I cannot believe his email newsletter. Every week, it's just chock full of incredible stuff. Here's an example of the first few paragraphs for this week:

JIM CONRAD'S NATURALIST NEWSLETTER
Issued from a "ciber" somewhere in MÉXICO

October 8, 2007

*****

LEAVING JALPAN
On Saturday, September 29th, I was reminded how easy it
is to leave a place you've been rooted in for a year,
or even a lifetime, I suppose. An hour before dawn you
gather bags you packed the day before, you hike down to
the main road, and then a car comes with two friends
you've been talking to about this trip. Within five
minutes Jalpan is a scattering of lights in the valley
below and, for all anyone knows, this is the last time
you'll ever travel this road.

Months ago plans for this first stage of my current
move began falling together when I heard that one of my
coworkers, Gabriel, was from Toluca, a fair-size city
across the mountains west of Mexico City, in Mexico
State. Rising above Toluca is the impressive volcano
called Nevado Toluca, which reaches ±15,197 feet (±4632
meters), higher than both California's Mt. Whitney and
Switzerland's Matterhorn, but only fourth in height
among Mexico's peaks. Several times in years passed
I've camped on Nevado Toluca and now I want to do it
again. You may enjoy my birding notes from a visit made
to Nevado Toluca in October, 1996, posted online at
http://www.backyardnature.net/mexbirds/08toluca.htm

When we arrive in Toluca around 10 AM only the
volcano's lower slopes are visible, the rest being
cloaked in clouds. Gabriel wants to camp with me the
first night so his sister drops us off at the park's
entrance. It's possible to drive on a gravel road to
near the summit and actually enter the crater, which
many people do, but we want to hike. It's all upslope,
maybe 16 miles or so. Near the top, cold and with dusk
approaching, we both suffer from the altitude, Gabriel
with a headache and racing heart, me trying to manage
one attack after another of hypoglycemia by gorging on
animal crackers but still I get dizzy, disoriented, and
have the chills.

We're planning to camp inside the crater but darkness
comes too soon and a storm is brewing. Near the ranger
station at 13,287 feet (4050 m) I finish setting up my
tent just as rain with lots of hail and wind hits.
Gabriel's tent isn't ready so he abandons it and dives
into mine. I haven't had time to trench around my tent
or tie things down. In fact, my fingers are so numb
from the cold that I couldn't do those things if I
wanted. In the night it rains hard and the wind keeps
blowing like crazy. Water drains beneath our tent's
floor so we end up lying in icy pools and twice I have
to go out to pull the tent's fly back in place, getting
soaked each time. At dawn Sunday morning the tent is
blotchy white with ice.

*****

SUN AND WIND
It's not as bad as it sounds. At dawn Sunday morning
Gabriel is exuberant and I can't take my eyes off the
valley below as golden sunlight floods over the ridge.

After visiting the crater Gabriel hitches a ride
downslope, for Monday is a workday for him, back in
Jalpan. As he leaves I have one thing on my mind: If I
don't dry my sleeping bag and clothes, tonight will be
a real mess. Immediately I pack things up, wet as they
are, and hike a mile or so to an exposed, boulder-
strewn slope with abundant sun and wind. Soon all my
wet things are spread on pink rhyolite boulders flat
against the cold but intense sunlight, with the wind
whistling and whooshing all around.

The clothing dries fast but for the rest of the day
every half hour I need to turn and fluff the sleeping
bag. By the time slate-gray clouds start boiling over
the ridge above me, cutting off the sun, the sleeping
bag is crisp and dry.

On that isolated slope there's so much sun and wind
that somehow as my stuff dries out, so do I. Hours of
cross-legged perching on a pink, hippopotamus-size
boulder becomes the ceremony needed to formally make
the transition from my Sierra Gorda Life to what comes
now.

You can see the view of the volcano from my pink perch
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/07/071008nt.jpg

In that picture the cluster of white buildings to the
peak's right is the ranger station near where we spent
our first night. Notice how the tree line begins just
below the station. Nearly all the vegetation from the
tree line to where only bare rock outcrops is covered
with clumps of clumpgrass, probably the genus Trisetum.
Each clumpgrass tuft is topped with open panicles of
straw-colored, fruiting spikelets the size of
mosquitoes. Buzzy sunlight explodes in each of the
millions and millions of spikelets on that slope as
cuttingly thin, icy wind shakes them as if trying to
get the attention of the whole Universe. Immobile on my
boulder, painfully blue sky above, hard cold wind, and
all these hysterical, sun-exploded clumpgrass
spikelets...

A picture loses the animation and you can't see how
sunlight erupts in the spikelets, but there's a picture
taken upslope from atop my pink boulder at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/07/071008sk.jpg

As with my sleeping bag, atop that boulder throughout
the day I get lighter the way that mud gets lighter as
it turns to dust; like the wet clots inside my sleeping
bag, now my interior clottings of Sierra-Gorda
routines, job descriptions, co-worker and friend
interdependencies, institutional status... all come
undone, shatter, blow away in icy wind as ebullient
sunlight imparts its paradigms to me.

And the main paradigm the sunlight shares with me is
the one based on the fact that pure, joyous sunlight is
a concoction of a rainbow of colors: Diversity refines
itself into brilliance: Empathy and love for all things
reveal unity.

*****

Subject: RE: BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website
From: Bill D
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 05:51 PM

wow!...that IS a lot of stuff. Rita will love some of the details of bird's anatomy.

Subject: RE: BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website
From: Ebbie
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 03:18 PM

You're right, kat- it is fascinating - and endless. I forwarded it on to a couple of friends who have spent quite a bit of time in Mexico's back country.

When I have the time I'm going back to read some more.

Subject: BS: Backyard Nature - incredible website
From: katlaughing
Date: 08 Oct 07 - 01:15 PM

A few months ago I read a wonderful story online and followed the links to the author's website: Backyard nature. Since then, I have been getting his email newsletter which he sends from Mexico where he lives at the moment. I have been consistently amazed and delighted by his knowledge, writing about what he sees and experiences, and his photos. I don't think there's much in the natural world that he doesn't know something about. Thought some of you might enjoy his stuff, too. For you birders, be sure to check out his extensive Birding Trip through Mexico.

There's just tons of stuff...a person could get lost in there!*bg*

enjoy,

kat