Sea Dreaming - Rusalka

Elephants being elephants

Lek Chailert

One more Elephant trekking camp has joined our Saddle Off program . Here are some of the 20 beautiful ladies who live in this camp which is joining our freedom program called " Elephant Keeper " .

The visitor will enjoy taking the herd to walk in the jungle, to feed them, watch them eating and foraging, swimming and playing in the mud. If you want to help more elephant out of the riding work, to take the saddle off of their backs, please help to support this program at Mae Pin elephant camp, Mae Wang district. More details on the program soon.

You can read more about Elephant Nature Park at their FB page and their website.

There is also a wonderful Nature program on PBS worth watch entitled Soul of the Elephant.

They are such remarkable beings - sensitive, intelligent, soulful - and it pains me greatly to read about them being poached and poisoned for their tusks.  Humans have so much to be ashamed of...

Pileated Woodpecker

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

 

A simply stunning shot of a male Pileated Woodpecker in flight—notice how he has twisted his neck around so that his head is upside-down relative to his body. Thanks to David Mintz in Florida for the photo.

I was fortunate to see a Pileated Woodpeck back in 2007 - walking in the woods with my dog, Kylie, I head the drumming and looked up to see one in a dead tree by the river.  I gasped and gave thanks to Nature for allowing me that opportunity as they are rare what with all of the development in the area.

Dance in the Graveyeards

Dance the fire of your longing...

(Image from here)

Reclaim what has been forgotten.
Dance the fire of your longing
under the waxing moon of your full presence.
Carry the seeds of your dreams
awhile longer in the womb of Nature’s being.
Let the Earth incubate
your wild if onlys
in its embryonic embrace
as you re-member the self you were so many eons ago
when you were forest and moonlight.

~by Edveeje Fairchild

(Poem found on Tree Sisters FB page)

RIP Meamar

This beautiful male Amur Leopard was killed by an automobile - you can read the story here.

I had zero idea that there was even an Amur Leopard and had to read a little about them.  Apparently, there are only about 80 left in the world, so losing this beautiful male is very problematic for the species. 

You can read the Wiki entry here.

Reddish Egret

 

Birdwatching

Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) in Florida, USA by ER Post on Flickr.

I'm late, I'm late for a very important date...

(Image from here)

No time to say Hello, Goodbye! I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!

Australian Pelicans

Birdwatching

Australian Pelicans in breeding colors. In the breeding season the large bills take on brighter colors and are used as flags to attract the opposite sex when they flap in the breeze. 

Kangaroo Island, South Australia by Grame Guy. 

Eagle Huntress

                          

Ashol-Pan, the now 14-year-old Mongolian/Kazakh celebrity who rose to fame online, is a primary example of the potential of new media technologies to transform the lives of nomadic women. In January, 2016, Ashol-Pan will star alongside her family in Eagle Huntress, a documentary that follows her life in the remote mountains of Tsambagarav Uul National Park. The film will also call attention to the rapidly disappearing tradition of eagle hunting.

A day earlier, Ashol-Pan’s mother, Almagul, had sat in front of the camera and talked about her daily life, oriented around caring for livestock and making dairy products and food for her family. She has never eagle-hunted, although she often feeds and cares for her daughter’s and husband’s eagles. She has a cellphone, which she uses infrequently, and watches television occasionally with her family — especially films in Mongolian. She likes technology, but is in no way attached to it. She is proud of her daughter’s fame, but then, she is proud of all of her four children. And while she feels that technology has played a role in her daughter’s celebrity status, she does not have a desire to use technology more regularly. She is satisfied with her life.

At the end of the interview, I asked: “How has fame changed your daughter’s life?” Almagul smiled. “We’ve been very lucky. I’m very proud of my daughter. But, I also worry about her. In Mongolia, we have this belief that fame is bad luck. So, I worry that too much fame will bring my daughter bad luck.”

You can read the rest of this article here.

 

You can see more pictures of Ashol-Pan here, along with more information about her and Mongolian nomad culture.

Wizardry

(Click to enlarge)

Merlin catching a dragonfly

Photo by Carl Woo

Audubon Photography Awards 2015

(where you can find the top 100 amazing photos)

Reasserting her willdish nature...

(Image from here)

When women reassert
their relationship with the wildish nature,
they are gifted with a permanent
and internal watcher,
a knower,
a visionary, ...
an oracle,
an inspiratrice,
an intuitive,
a maker,
a creator,
an inventor,
and a listener who guide,
suggest,
and urge vibrant life
in the inner and outer worlds.
When women are close to this nature,
the fact of that relationship glows through them.
The wild teacher,
wild mother,
wild mentor
supports their inner and outer lives,
no matter what.

~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes -Women Who Run With The Wolves

Mom needs a nap

(Image from FB)

Fortune cookie

Image from FB.

Sand Angel

Australia.com

"Wanna make sand angels with me?"

Cheeky Australian Sea Lion at Seal Bay Conservation Park / Quentin Chester - Photography

Black Cockatoo

Animal lovers

Beautiful young Black Cockatoo.

Image & Text: David Whelan Photography

Learn more about these beautiful birds here (PDF). Click on image to enlarge it.

Putorana Plateau, Siberia

The Siberian Times

The second largest store of fresh water in Russia by capacity after Lake Baikal, and certainly one of the most remote & stunning areas of Siberia, the Putorana Plateau in pictures by Sergey Gorshkov. 

If by any chance you are in Moscow, exhibition of Sergey's pictures goes until 16 October; see more here.

Thresholds...

ShamanTube

"At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope.

This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross."

-John O'Donohue 

Art by Douglas Smith

Starry starry night

The Siberian Times

Starry night over Altai region, by Barnaul-based photographer Alexey Ebel

Listening to our non human siblings

Design inspiration comes in a lot of forms. When it comes to solar panels, engineers sometimes look toward the butterfly. One may not think this little insect is a powerhouse for harnessing solar energy, but a butterfly's beautiful wings offer far more than flight.

Scientists from the Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) and the Centre for Ecology and Conservation of the University of Exeter employed biomimicry, or using patterns and techniques from nature in applied science, to help develop a more efficient way to turn light into power, also known as photovoltaic energy.

On cloudy days, a Cabbage White butterfly positions its wings in a v-shape and holds this stance for several moments before taking flight. This posture reflects heat downward, allowing the sun to warm up the insect's "flying muscles" before take off, thus utilizing and converting solar energy into kinetic energy.

Scientists assumed that if this unique positioning works for the butterfly, the same positioning might help solar panels soak up more energy from the sun. This theory proved to be right, as mimicking the Cabbage White butterfly's v-shaped pose increased the solar panel's energy production by 50 percent and making the power-to-weight ratio 17 times more efficient than other structures, according to the study published in Scientific Reports.

Perhaps if we humans listened more to what the rest of our non human siblings were telling us, we might be able to get out of this cluster*uck that we've created and which is sucking us into a sinkhole like this:

It's good to be multilingual!

You can read the rest of the article here, which is where the butterfly image is from.