A few shots from the weekend...
Pamelia found a mussel shell that looked to us like a globe—perhaps one showing the world hundreds of millions of years ago, when the continents were joined in a different configuration.
In the warmth on Saturday, legions of spiders skittered around the cove beach near us. Can you spot the spider camouflaged by this dried rock weed?
Olympic track champion and Notebook friend Lynn Jennings snapped this swirling shot of her companion Towhee during a brisk Sunday hike through Forest Park in Portland, Oregon. Towhee, an Olympic-caliber trail runner and nature observer, celebrated her 11th birthday last Friday.
Yellow lichen on rocks along our shore. Lichens are lovely but strange. They're actually two organisms living in combination—algae cells linked with filaments of fungi.
Our 15 wild turkeys were in full strut on Saturday afternoon.
This one is courtesy of NASA. It's a new, false-color, ultraviolet shot of the recently stormy Sun. It's in 3-D, so if you have the glasses you should be able to see the solar flare jumping out at you. At least in theory.
Answers to the Last Puzzlers
1) The grackle gets its name from gracula, the Latin word for the European jackdaw.
2) Abraham Lincoln is the one who said, “All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.”
Today's Puzzler
1) Did the bird known as the cardinal get its name from Catholic cardinals, who wear red, or did Catholic cardinals get their name from the bird?