A species of syrphid fly on a California poppy at the ranch.
A species of mason bee.
Honey bees on the comb.
Enter Dow and Monsanto, intent on helping lazy, industrial scale, corporate farming to produce uniformly flawless produce. You know the story. It's been told for years: monarch butterflies, bumble bees, honey bees, and all the other less showy pollinators are crashing.
Home Depot has folded to the pressure from the top. They are doing the evil bidding of the chemical companies. All of their flowering plants are impregnated with the highly toxic NEONICOTINOIDS fatal to all insects and the birds which feed on the insects, which come into contact with the poisoned plants. The seeds themselves are coated with the poison, which then, on a cellular level, is transmitted through the tissues of the plant, toxifying everything from root to pollen.
Just check the little plastic labels which are stuck in the containers with every plant at Home Depot.
Approved by the EPA? And to whom is the EPA listening? Pollinators and birds?
Ace Hardware, on the other hand, along with other companies, is trying to do the right thing by banning the sale of neonicotinoid-contaminated plant stock.
A bluebird day in the hammock, because I needed to rehabilitate for a moment after the preceding bad news.
Now for more horrifying news:
The gorgeous valley to our immediate West at the foot of the Hopland Grade is in imminent danger of being taken over by a "development" corporation based in New Zealand. The plan is for an entirely new town of at least ten thousand people, which would make it the second largest population center in Mendocino County after Ukiah.
This project has green-wash painted all over it. But local farmers see through the ploy and are fighting hard to preserve our rural open space.
In several ways, the project is the opposite of green. The town would be completely car-dependent since services such as medical, automotive, etc, and employment opportunities are at least twenty miles to the north or south in Cloverdale and Ukiah.
Views from the Hopland Grade of the beautiful McDowell Valley.
Poppy meadow in Big Valley.
A native penstemon
Red shouldered hawk feather. This year they are nesting in the valley oak canopy eighty feet straight up from the kitchen sink.
A scrub jay fledgling was run over by a car the minute it hopped into the road.
A badger, having evolved for millions of years to be the special being that it is, met a tragic end on Highway 20 in the Central Valley just East of Lake County.
Sunflower heads.
Our wood piles, comprised of the big limbs which fall from the Valley Oaks.
Walnuts swelling at Summer Solstice.
Walnut orchard.
Evening light in late June.
