Category: Nature

Confederate Troops, Manassas, Virginia 1861

LIfe Book s Lincoln
Life Books – Lincoln

I don’t know about y’all, but I love jumping inside Civil War photos. Not that war is fun, but it’s so interesting to see images from when photography was in its infancy, 155 years ago.

By the late 1850s, most American artists had switched from taking mainly portraits made with the daguerreotype process to large glass-plate negatives (allowing them to capture entire scenes) that combined the clarity of the daguerreotype and the endless reproducibility of paper-print photography (metmuseum.org).

And aren’t those two little boys dressed as soldiers just precious? I bet that was a sight for them to see. I wonder if the taller one enlisted, a few years down the road.

Silverback Gorilla

gorillas silver

Imposing, grand, primitive, huge…yet with human eyes and expressions, enormous black fingers delicately and expertly stripping away thorns from vegetation, possibly ignoring you altogether or looking you straight in the eye.  Respect and awe is given, from human to ape. 

These are the words my aunt wrote of her trip to Rwanda earlier this month, in which she was able to witness some of the last remaining mountain gorillas on the planet.

“A silverback gorilla is the mature, experienced male leader of a group of mountain gorillas in the wild. Named for the silver saddles across his back, the silverback is responsible for the safety of his group. A group of gorillas, also called a troop, can contain from 5 to 30 gorillas. The silverback decides where the troop travels, where it forages for food, where it will rest and where it will sleep at night.” (http://animals.mom.me)

 I thought these images she and her husband captured were too awesome not to share with my readers!

image1