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8 September 2014
Grizzly pig
Archaeotherium skull, on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: I love these beasts since I first encountered mention of them at Badlands National Park, and reading them dubbed “grizzly pigs” in the excellent book Cruising the Fossil Freeway really stuck with me – these were pigs filling a predatory ecological niche we don’t really see them in today.
9 November 2013
Fishers are back in Virginia!
I got word yesterday that the fisher, a medium-sized mustelid (Like a marten, an animal that I’ve seen once up in the Adirondacks of New York), has begun re-colonizing wild parts of Virginia. This is pretty exciting news – a friend from high school shared the image below with me: That’s from a wildlife camera on my friend’s family’s land in northwestern Shenandoah County, in the Cedar Creek Valley. That’s …
23 October 2013
The business end of the limb
Last week, we had two wildlife deaths at Fort Bentley. The first was a mole (cause of death unknown), and the second was a screech owl (hit by a car). Here’s the mole: A look aft, at the digging apparatus: What astonishing “paddles” it possesses! There forelimbs are easily five times the size of the hind limbs, and equipped with such extraordinary claws… Here’s an iPad (i.e. low quality) photo …
30 May 2013
Springy stuff in my yard this morning
It’s been a busy week. Hardly any free time. Here are a few pictures from my yard, taken this morning. Please accept them in lieu of a real blog post: Eastern cottontail: Mountain laurel: The cicadas are trilling in a mad, constant, siren-like noise. It’s intense, and otherworldly. Talk to you later…
7 January 2013
Hoerikwaggo Trail 1: the hike
Callan begins a week-long recounting of his five-day backpacking trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Town, South Africa, along the Hoerikwaggo Trail. Today, we examine scenery and logistics of the trail.
10 December 2012
Monday macrobug: Batfly!!
UPDATE: This isn’t really a bat fly. It’s a deer ked. Back in October, I was weed-whacking in the yard, cutting down some 1-meter-tall grass and then picking up bundles of the fallen grass to put on our compost pile. I was out in the yard doing this for about an hour, then I came inside to have dinner with Lily and Baxter. Halfway through dinner, I felt something crawling …
5 July 2012
Floe Lake hike
Last summer, my wife and I spent some time in the Canadian Rockies. One of the things we did was to take a three-day backpacking trip to Floe Lake, in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. We picked a rough couple of days for hiking – We got a lot of Canadian Rockies precipitation out there: we got rained on, hailed on, and snowed on during those three days. Here’s our …
24 May 2012
Swimming with great white sharks
This is Dyer Island, off Gansbaai, southern South Africa, a little west of Cape Agulhas: Those are seals, a huge, crazy crowded colony of Cape fur seals. They are loud. They create a God-awful stink with all their fishy excrement. It was like being in a BBC nature program to see this firsthand. I could hear David Attenborough’s voice in my head, raspy and accented: “Dyer Island, South Africa. Home …
12 January 2012
Rock hyrax
The charming rock hyrax, a cuddly-looking fellow whose nearest living relative is the elephant: This is in the coastal town of Hermanus, a lovely place for whale-watching, in season. We were there at the wrong season, but the hyrax provided a mammal sighting that made us happy. The little fellow seemed to really be enjoying the sun on his seaside perch… A while later, we met a second one coming …
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.