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Two nights ago I awoke while it was still dark, enjoying the relative cool of early morning. Through the window I saw an orange-tinged crescent moon surrounded by a handful of stars. The sky was ever so slightly touched by color, faintly purple. I dozed and woke again to see morning light seeping into the darkness and listened to a lone bird greeting the morning. Stars still freckled the sky, but they were fainter, and the line of the Acteon Ridge glowed pink. Dusk drains the landscape of light and color. Dawn reverses this emptying, refilling the sky, mountains, forest and meadows with blues, grays and greens that are chased by orange and pink: green seeps into the foreground; blue-gray soaks through the blue-black mountains in the background; and the meadows combine green with a sprinkle of reflected pink and orange. I doze again this time when I wake my eyes smart from a burning circle of sun that is accompanied by a cacophony of birdsong. June 29, 2010  Chalk talk drawing of rare "White Elephant" (elephant of importance)
This has been the year of the elephant for Whiteblack Correspondents. Correspondent Clara Rowe has been studying the impacts of African elephants on the forest in Krugar National Park in South Africa (see her photo below). Nat and Whiteblack the Penguin enjoyed a special training in Thailand earlier this year, learning how to work with elephants (right — Nat giving a bath to his elephant). Sadly, both Asian and African elephants are endangered species.
Above: Sandwich Mountain and Sandwich Notch from the Curious Gourds Garden and Studio. Below: the Gourds for the gourd house are growing! Plenty of peas.
Whiteblack Correspondent Erin Honeycutt reports from Sweden. Wanas (pronounced Vanos), in southern Sweden, is basically a wonderland. On the land is a medieval castle, an organic farm, an art gallery, and a sculpture park. Everything outside IS part of the art gallery, as artists come from all over the world to create site-specific installations, eliminating the need for climate-controlled galleries and costly transportations. It has been raining for the past week so as we walked around everything was wet and glistening. Some of the pieces had common themes like breaking out of shells, molds, fossilization, birth and rebirth, so the fresh rain on the different kinds of metals gave them a very lively feeling… To read more from Erin’s blog, click here
Whiteblack Corespondent Clara Rowe takes a break from her research in Kruger National Park in South Africa to catch a World Cup game between Honduras and Chile (Chile won 1 – 0). To see and read more on Clara’s blog, click here.
Dear friends, I write to you from a place other than my usual venues of mountains, meadows, forest, gardens and travels with Whiteblack the Penguin. Tuesday I briefly flew — over the handlebars of my bicycle — on the steep Bunker Hill Road in Tamworth, NH. This was followed by a crushing impact: nine fractures in five ribs. This has resulted in postponing the opening of the Curious Gourds Studio and Garden until Saturday, July 10. Fortunately, the injuries were NOT on my drawing side, and I am already back at it (as you see below). Many thanks to the staff at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, NH.
*Curious George is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt  African Darter at Sunrise It’s a sunny day in South Africa nd everyone is glowing with excitement after the opening World Cup match yesterday: South Africa (ranked 83rd) and Mexico (ranked 17th) tied 1-1. Pretty great! We’ve dedicated our whiteboard (which previously was used for data collection notes) to soccer updates. Soccer takes over the world… In the last few days we’ve seen a young leopard bound across the road, a half-eaten impala hanging from a tree (probably left by a leopard), three lions lounging in the sun, an elephant stand up on its hind legs to reach a huge branch 8 m up a tree, and a beautiful sunrise at the Lake Panic bird hide. We spent our day off down at the Sabie River (luckily with no crocodile encounters) and read in the sun and had a picknick lunch. We got permission to fish (catch and release only, of course) and so a few people tried their luck with worms dug from the compost pile (I think the biggest fish caught was 10 cm…)
The Community School/Rey Foundation course Monitoring Climate Change is, alas, coming to its end. This week we continued to walk the beautiful 300 acres the Perkins’ Farm and Forest, and continued to see changes in the pheno-phases of the flowers we are monitoring: Canada Mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), hobblebush (Cypripedium acauleto), and bunchberry (Cornus canadensis). All were fruiting (but not ripe). But plants weren’t the only things we found… To see more photos from this walk, click here.
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