365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Natural Art
Day 65: As a scientist, I am always picking things up to get a closer look, maybe using a magnifier, sometimes even nicking a small sample for examination under the microscope. However, that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate natural art when I find it. While most of Mother Nature's handiwork seems rather random to the human aesthetic sense, occasionally she elects to bridge the gap with something more to our tastes: balanced arrangements, colours which compliment one another, mixtures of visually appealing textures, etc. Admittedly, sometimes the line between science and art is blurry, and in those cases, I nearly always allow the right brain its moment of appreciation before permitting my analytical tendencies to dominate. In this particular instance, I'd been looking closely at a specimen of fungus, but when I raised my head and noticed this fragment of lichen (Evernia prunastri) perfectly laid out on a bed of decaying cottonwood leaves, science took a back seat. Its dichotomously branched lobes were artfully displayed, as if to illustrate the definition of the term on its page in the living encyclopedia of the forest.
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