Sunday, April 17, 2011 - Utah Rt 12, East of Escalante UT
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Desert Catfish, Dead, with Toes, Escalante UT, April 17, 2011
Dang, I did it again
You may recall I lost most of my nesting Great Blue Heron pictures a while back to that certain fuzziness caused by forgetting to turn the auto stabilization off when I had the camera on the tripod, trying my darndest to get some nice clean shots from farther away than I would have preferred.
Well, this morning I went walkabout with the camera, took some neat shots... and forgot to turn the stabilization ON. The sun was low in the sky and the shutter speed was adequate with image stabilization. But not without!
Tomorrow morning, maybe I'll go walk the route again - or maybe not. Clouds are rolling in. I think there's a storm brewing. If so the light won't be worth a darn. Darn.
Night camp
Boondocked - Utah Route 12 East of Escalante UT
- Adequate Verizon cell phone 1x service is available here - no broadband.
- Locate on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.