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Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Come take a walk with me up the path towards Mont Sainte Victoire. Let’s start down here by the dam…

mont st victoire

and we’ll take this path…

the path to mont st victoire

The first surprise was seeing a helicopter collecting water from the lake

collecting water

and practising dropping it again

spraying water5

On the way to the top I stumbled across these strange tree roots….

roots

…and these tiny, tiny acorns…

acorns

These pine cones were unusual too….

pine cones

This was high enough for me to go today

mont st victoire

On the way back down I came across the first butterfly of the year

butterfly

and this lovely little ladybird. Look how red it is! Hardly any black spots!

ladybird

The sun was hot and some of the trees were oozing their sap

sap
sap

There was lots of rosemary and thyme, but very few flowers so I was really pleased to come across exactly these four crocus plants!

crocus
crocus
crocus

What I can’t share with you is the warmth of the February sun, the sweet, fresh smell of the air, or the almost total silence of the countryside up there. You’ll need to go yourself to appreciate that.

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Natural inspiration

Which of these creatures inspires you? What, if anything, could you learn from them?

busy bees
snails pace
morning rabbits

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butterfly
butterfly and bee

While wandering around yesterday I stumbled across this lovely butterfly. It’s not easy to get a photo of a butterfly cos they don’t stay still for very long, but this one seemed to be taking its time more than the others. It got me wondering. What do butterflies eat? And how do they fly the way they do? Their flight seems most erratic, apparently lacking the consistency of movement that you see in bird flight for example. I realised I don’t know very much about butterflies at all! I certainly don’t know anything about butterfly classification! What “kind” of butterfly is this?

Well, when I got back home I checked out wikipedia. Turns out butterflies only eat liquids which they suck up through their long, tube-like “probosci”. They live on nectar and they can drink water from puddles. I would have guessed they lived on nectar but I hadn’t realised they had a fluid only diet. As for how they fly, well, that’s even more interesting…….it turns out nobody understands it. Their mechanism of flight – the aerodynamics and the physics of it – has never been fully explained. About four different ways of flying have been described but they don’t provide a full explanation and nobody knows how they manage to switch between the different flight modes so quickly.
I’m quite happy about that. I do like to learn but I also enjoy having that feeling of wonder and amazement. What I like best is a mixture of understanding and marvel. Butterfly life fits the bill!

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golden seedhead

Has anyone any idea what this plant is? I just stumbled across a few of these on a walk (I’m staying just outside of Aix en Provence in the South of France just now). I’ve never seen anything quite like this and there were quite a lot of them growing in twos or threes straight out of the ground, about a foot high. The seedhead itself is about the size of a clenched fist.

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