The retina specialist says I should keep eating lots of leafy greens and omega-3s, and come back in a year. Now that’s a prescription I can get behind.
ocular
Month: September 2025
Phainopepla nitens
I’m not really a birder. I don’t have a life list. But I was pretty excited to see my first phainopepla.
Phainopeplas live in the southwestern U.S. and into central Mexico. They eat mostly berries, along with small insects. One of their cool traits is a special mechanism in their gizzard that separates berry skins from the rest of the fruit, sending the skins to a different part of the intestine to help with digestion. So far, they’re the only bird known to do this.
Their favorite food is the fruit of the desert mistletoe. These berries don’t have a lot of nutrients, so phainopeplas need to eat a lot of them—sometimes many hundreds in a single day. The berries move through their intestines in just about 12 minutes. They rarely drink water, getting almost all the moisture they need from the mistletoe berries.
Phainopeplas are also great mimics and can copy the calls of around a dozen other bird species.
Corethrogyne filaginifolia
My friend Kristine told me about Headwaters Corner; Kim and I checked it out as a location for our next nature journal club meetup. It’s lovely!
Histioteuthis
There are many weird creatures in the ocean, especially as you go deeper. Cock-eyed squids, as their name suggests, have two very different eyes—each detects a different type of light, and points in a different direction. The mesopelagic zone starts at the depth where just 1% of sunlight penetrates and extends down to the point where no light reaches at all; so this is a cool adaptation that allows the animals to survive in a very low-light environment. Interestingly, the eyes are the same at birth, but the left one morphs as it grows.
collage
I plucked the gesture-sketched bird from the trash and made it the star of a collage. Don’t read too much into it.
blanco-fombona
I spun the WikiRoulette wheel again, and learned about this guy. Is he famous in Venezuela, I wonder?
laundry day
Romneya coulteri
I made this page over a week ago; yesterday I saw that the remainder of the plant had disappeared, before I got a chance to dig it up and cage the roots.
I want to plant a lot more natives in the front yard, so I’m going to have to come up with a tactic to protect them while they get established.
mixing it up
Playing with tempera sticks and wax oil pastels makes me feel like a kid again. Nice!
Schistocerca nitens
Reading up on this grasshopper, I learned that it is a problematic invasive species in Hawaii. In 2004, a major swarming event on the island of Nīhoa devastated approximately 90% of the island’s vegetation. Likely introduced to Hawaii several decades ago, it has since spread throughout the archipelago, aided by its ability to fly over 300 miles across open ocean!
That last fact blew my mind. 🤯
hashiworks 