2010年7月15日
We sat on the edge of a high cliff on the island of St. George facing north to watch the return of the least auklets that live in a great colony among the boulders. These little seafowls, called by the native Aleuts “choochkies” (pronounced chewtskie), are plump in body, but not much larger than an English sparrow. You see them sitting on the rocks of the boulder beaches, bowing and chattering. Having their legs at the end of their bodies, they prop themselves upright on their little webbed feet and walk around like little old men. During the day they feed off at sea, and now we were watching the flocks returning home.
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Here below me were the fur seals, gathered from the four corners of the wide Pacific Ocean. They set flipper on these islands only during the summer time, for the purpose of breeding. The bulls arrive first, and then the females come later and select their own masters. Once a lady seal has taken unto herself a husband, she is under his power and dominion for the season.
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The white and blue foxes of St. George Island in the Bering Straits are not different species, but merely represent two color-phases of the same animal, just as a black bear may sometimes come into the world with a brown coat. At the back of the village the land sloped away toward a high rocky hill with the summit nearly a thousand feet above the ocean. The slope was strewn with rocks, between and over which spread a mass of moss and rank vegetation.
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Crowded along above the wave-washed shoreline in the Bering Straits, the whole slope seemed to be covered with brown-looking rocks that came to life and wobbled. In my eagerness for a picture, I approached an old seal bull perched on a rock, and started cranking my camera. Suddenly, Mr. Seal, puffed up in rage, flopped humping toward me like a fellow in a sack race with his feet tied.
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The average heights attained by various species of tree differ widely. The eucalyptus towers four hundred feet or more above the ground, twenty times as tall as the common dogwood. These characteristic heights are determined by the ability of the species to draw water from the reluctant soil and to raise it to great heights. The stature attained by the eucalyptus and the giant sequoias is possible only because of an unbelievable power to raise a column of water.
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We clambered aboard our boat against the pitch of the waves and just before dusk, the fog lifted a bit and showed the dark outline of a rocky shore, the island of St. George. The gateway to this second forbidden island in the Bering Straits could not have been better designed by Nature to discourage the fainthearted. A jagged reef lies low along the front where, even in calm weather, the rollers from the Arctic gain their momentum over many hundred miles to tear in white rage at this rocky approach.
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“April showers bring forth May flowers,” runs the homely rhyme of the old-time country folk. And in truth there is nothing that seems quite so life-giving as a warm rain in April, when all the earth is filled with springing vegetation, awaiting only the warming sun and moisture from above to encourage it.
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Experiment has shown that if heat is allowed to accumulate in the leaf of a tree unchecked by evaporation the temperature rises at a rate of twelve degrees centigrade a minute. The results, of course, are very rapidly fatal to the tree, or indeed plant. The amount of water taken from the soil by a tree in the course of an active summer day is enormous.
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As a student of nature, I often call the leaves on trees “laboratories”. They are, in fact, something more. They serve as chemical factories where the lifeless, inorganic material taken from air, sunshine, and soil is transformed into the living, organic material that makes up the plant.
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When you decide to go on holiday with your kids it can sometimes be hard to figure out what exactly you should do and where to go. A summer holiday should be a fun experience for all the family this is why we have to think long and hard before you make a decision.
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