Subject: [Tweeters] The Sap Also Rises
Date: Apr 16 07:19:54 2012
From: Rolan Nelson - rnbuffle at yahoo.com


Excellent, Jeff!? Thanks.

Rolan Nelson
Fircrest, WA
rnbuffle at yahoo.com

--- On Sun, 4/15/12, jeff gibson <gibsondesign at msn.com> wrote:


From: jeff gibson <gibsondesign at msn.com>
Subject: [Tweeters] The Sap Also Rises
To: "tweeters" <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012, 10:48 PM







On Friday the 13th the sun was out and I was feeling lucky. Circumstance brought me by Fields Riffle Park (just downstream from Snohomish) so I stopped for a brief walk.
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I have a sort of vague notion of how the Earth works. Biologically it pretty much seems like one big Solar Powered Sex Show. The Sun, as it's power increases in our Northern Hemispheric Spring and Summer, draws up the sap in all living things. This "sap" as I refer to it in my 'Basic Sap Theory' activates the urge to reproduce. Each species responds a bit differently, which is why life is so interesting.
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Of course not everybody likes sex. There's always the Asexual out there - quite a few of them as it turns out. Why just the other night I had a dream about Amoebae. The streets were full of about a trillion of em' holding placards that read "Divided We Stand!". They were swaying to the tune of Darol Anger's "Dysentery Stomp". Thank God I woke up.?Reading up more about microbiology online I realized that the simple days of Animal Vegetable Mineral are over. There's life out there that seemingly nobody can quite define. I like that.
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And then there's the Budder's, and Cloner's and stuff. No sex involved. Seen an Aspen grove??Quite likely?one big?clone. If John Denver was still around he might have written lyrics like "Colorado Rocky Mountain Clones, their bark is as White as my Bones....". Or something like that. And?in the mountains?here we have all sorts of clumping cloning conifers like Mt. Hemlock and such. Local mountaineers thrashing through such dense growth?might refine the term 'bushwacking' into 'cloning around'.
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Back to Fields Riffle on a sunny sappy April day. Sex was in the air - several hundred?horny Chorus Frogs were croaking off in the distance. They weren't honkin' their horns for nothing. Since it was so warm out I was excited to check out the local sand patch just over the dike. In warm weather all sorts of interesting bugs emerge there, particularly many types of bee's and wasp's.
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In the first action I've noted there this year were two types of?little wasps zooming around just an inch and a half above the dry sand. I imagined myself as being tiny down there on the sand with these bugs zooming overhead. I supposed it might be like having a small plane flying over about 50 ft off the ground at about 200 miles an hour. Really fast little things. Although I didn't have my close-focusing binocs, I finally held still long enough to get a look and discover that indeed there were two species, one sort of greyish wasp about 1/4 inch long, and one striped bee-looking type about 3/8 inch long. They both seemed to 'beehave' in about the same way with their zippy reconnaissance flights over the sand. Then all of a sudden a bunch of them, both types , coalesced out of nowhere into a big 'pig pile', like a little mini rumble and thrashed around for about 8 seconds. They all dispersed leaving a single 'bee type' behind digging a hole in the sand
at amazing speed. I'm sure sex was involved somehow, some sort of pheromone kegger going on.
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Getting up off my knees I continued down the path. I was glad to see a Mourning Cloak butterfly - a real beauty and the first I've seen this year. Soon after I saw my FOY Rufous Hummingbird - a female feeding at bright magenta Salmonberry Flowers. A FOY Orange-crowned Warbler sang up in the willows. On the way out a female Anna's hummer was feeding at the blooms of that shrubby honeysuckle ,Twinberry.
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Frogs, flowers, wasps, showy butterflies, singing birds - it was all about sex largely. I hope they enjoyed as much as I did.
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Yup, another day on the Solar powered Sex Planet. And did I mention that the Earth is also Bipolar? That's a whole other story.
?
Jeff Gibson
Everett Wa
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