Professor VJ: Species Watch

I recently posted a new entry at Mark Amerika Nature Photography featuring the Hawaiian black-crowned night heron.

Color Me Ready

An excerpt:

There is some ritualistic stretching and hissing and then when push comes to shove their legs turn from red to pink and soon the new season's brood is upon us. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we fight against our temptation to exploit the sexy image reservoir provided by the ongoing origin of the species. Even big gorgeous birds, exhibitionists at heart, deserve their right to privacy.

Also, I have a sad update on the Hawaiian Monk Seal I wrote about in January. The beast on the beach whose rare and elongated molting process on our local beach triggered this:

As we all continue shedding away layers of old skin with increasing gain, force, speed, and intensity, and our "outer self" keeps disappearing faster than ever before, we inevitably become hyperaware of the fact that we will never really truly get to the core of the matter because the core of the matter does not exist as a core but is an all-encompassing source material that we thrive in. These layers of past life as manifested in the skin we keep wearing and keep shedding and discarding over time, suggest a creative molting process that becomes a never-ending quest to reveal to ourselves everything we don't know and will never know until there is nothing left but the sensation of dreaming-molting, of continually searching for what hides just underneath the surface of our role-playing avatar as it shakes everything off and goes back to first skins, best skins, every only skins. Meanwhile the rumble of our deep interior anticipates our next inside-out creative eruption and somewhere in the middle of this molting-lava striptease where our inside is out and our outside is in, we ask ourselves "What is it that seeks?"

was found dead on nearby Rabbit Island. Cause of death unknown, but some new disease seems to be the culprit. Similar "unknowns" are causing the bats in upstate New York to die off en masse as well as the bees whose colony collapse disorder we have covered here before.