my son found this little short tailed shrew in the tall grass beside the pond. shrews? who knew? we see a lot of field mice around here. and we have effectively handed sovereignty over our yard to the moles that dig networks of tunnels just under the grass. but shrews? they weren’t on my radar. apparently this little guy’s dusky beauty hides a voracious predatory appetite, as well as a little groove on the back side of each lower incisor that injects his poisonous saliva into his victims. and i just thought he was cute…

northern short tailed shrew found in my backyard

saint paul, minnesota

growing organic apples often involves adjusting expectations about what a beautiful apple looks like. these untended beauties from the corner of a friend’s back yard hide perfect apple-crisp tartness behind their only slightly blemished skin. beauty is much more than skin deep.

untended apple tree branch with apples

northeast minneapolis, minnesota

these fallen splashes look ready for a brush to dip into them and begin painting autumn. in our part of the world, shoreline trees are just beginning to pale, partly from drought, but mostly from cool evenings telling the trees it’s time to pull all that sap back out of their leaves to be stored for next spring, when the big outward push will begin again.

assorted early fall leaves

saint paul, minnesota

the days are warm and the nights are cool now.  autumn is the prettiest time of year here in the upper midwest. my husband’s favorite time of year.  but i have a more complicated relationship with fall–the threat of so many months of deep cold, and early darkness weighs on me. i know it is not very zen of me, but I wonder, if the buddha had grown up in minnesota, whether a little bit of worrying about the future, putting up some firewood and root vegetables, wouldn’t have been considered a path to enlightenment.

river willow leaves

rice creek regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

this fragment of bark, looking like the skin around an elephant’s eye, was falling off of a long-dead pine tree at a little over 8000 feet outside park city utah. the trunk was mostly bare and there were no needles, so identification has eluded me, especially since we live among eastern tree species here in minnesota, and with this specimen, i find myself in the realm of western species growing up near the tree line. if i had to hazard a guess, i would say whitebark pine. the altitude is right, but i can’t confirm definitively. i know it looks like poplar bark but it was definitely not a poplar or an aspen, based on the the shape of the trunk and the growth pattern of the very pine/spruce like branches. can anyone help me solve this mystery?

whitebark pine?

deer valley, utah