Public Domain Image: Ostern am Walchensee (translated English title: Easter at Walchensee), oil on canvas landscape painting (1922) by the German painter Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), dimensions 57 cm x 75 cm, located currently at Sammlung Berend-Corinth, New York.
Public Domain Photo: Multnomah Falls, a waterfall on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, located east of Troutdale, between Corbett and Dodson, along the Historic Columbia River Highway - the third tallest year-round waterfall in the United States.
PD Photo 2: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, USA, before the footbridge was built, photo dated 1914 (or before), colorized from black-and-white photo
PD Photo 3: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, with footbridge and showing the upper falls and the lower falls, looking 100 degrees east, photo taken in June 1994
PD Photo 4: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, a view from the base showing the lower falls and part of the upper falls in April 2006
PD Photo 5: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, showing the base, the lower falls, footbridge, and part of the upper falls
Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in the State of Oregon, drops in two major stages, upper falls of 542 feet (165 meters) and a lower falls of 69 feet (21 meters), with a 9 feet (3 m) drop in the elevation between the two. The total height is conventionally stated as 620 feet (189 meters).
PD Photo: Adult Brown Booby on Tern Island in French Frigate Shoals (the largest atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands).
PD Photo: Brown Boobies building a nest on the ground with sticks/ stems of creepers in Coral Sea islands, Australia.
PD Photo: Brown Boobies returning to nest at sunset, Coral Sea Islands, Australia. This bird is being TRACKED; enlarge the photo (CLICK) and see a wring-like numbered device on its leg.
The Brown Booby (Sula leucogaster), a large seabird of the gannet family, Sulidae, grows to about 76 centimeters / 2.5 feet in length. The Brown Boobies’ heads and upper bodies are black or dark brown and their bellies and the rest of the bodies are in contrasting white. Their beaks are very sharp with many jagged edges. They have short wings and long tapered tails. They have powerful webbed feet to help them in swimming and diving, just like a frogs limbs, but with three fingers in the front with web between them and a toe on the back.
Brown Boobies are mostly silent, but bird watchers have reported hearing sounds similar to grunting or quacking made by these birds. Brown Boobies dive deep in water, plunging into seawater at high speed.
They mainly eat small fishes, squids and leaping fish. They are agile fliers and use strong winds and high perches to assist their takeoffs, as they are clumsy in takeoffs and ladings.
Brown Booby pairs or couples are known to stay together for many seasons and they perform elaborate greeting rituals and dance-like movements. These birds nest in large colonies, laying two chalky blue eggs on the ground. They generally breed on islands and coastal plains in the pan-tropical areas of Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean. They frequent the breeding grounds of the islands in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea islands.
PD Image: The cave of Orpheus' oracle in Antissa, Lesbos, Greece
Orpheus has a special importance in Greek mythology, with the inspiration for Orphic cults, literature, poetry and drama of ancient Greece and Rome and Western classical music.
According to one myth, in the later part of his life, Orpheus disdained the worship of all gods except the sun, whom he called Apollo. One day he went to the oracle of Dionysus at Mount Pangaion to salute the sun at dawn, but was rent to pieces by Thracian Maenads for not honoring his previous patron (Dionysus) and buried him in Pieria.
Ovid’s account of his death gives it a bizarre twist: the Ciconian women, Dionysus' followers, killed him, when they were spurned by Orpheus, who had hated women after the death of his wife Eurydice, who died of a snake bite, after which he had taken only boys as his lovers. First the women threw sticks and stones at him, but his music was so powerful and beautiful that even the stones and sticks refused to hit him. However, finally, the enraged women tore him to pieces. In an Albrecht Dürer drawing a ribbon high in a tree is lettered ‘Orfeus der erst puseran’ (‘Orpheus, the first sodomite’); an interpretation of the passage in Ovid where Orpheus is said to have been ‘the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.’
His severed head and lyre, still singing mournful songs, floated down the Hebrus River (Maritsa or Evros) to the Mediterranean Sea, and the winds and waves carried them on to the shores of Lesbos island (now in Greece), where the inhabitants buried his head and a shrine was built for him near Antissa. There his oracle prophesied, until it was silenced by Apollo.
Lesbos, the Greek island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea, is the third largest Greek island and the largest of the numerous Greek islands scattered in the Aegean, and separated from Turkey by the narrow Mytilini Strait.
Interestingly, one meaning of the word lesbian is derived from the poems of Sappho, who was born in Lesbos and who wrote with emotional content towards other women. It is due to this that Lesbos and especially the town of Eresos, Sappho’s birthplace, are a hot destination for lesbian tourists/ LGBT tourism. But, the deeply conservative Greek Orthodox population of the island disapproves of it strongly. In 2008 the Lesbian islanders lost a court battle against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece. The Lesbian islanders had requested a legal injunction to bar homosexual groups from using the word ‘lesbian’ in their names, because the petitioners’ claim it violates their human rights as it is ‘insulting’, and the usage of the word ‘lesbian’ to refer to certain sexual preferences of women disgraces the people of Lesbos island.
PD photo: Cozies Forbidden, photo dated 1 August 2007 featuring a sign at a swimming pool showing no clothing is to be worn, and other forbidden things/ requirements.
It is believed that the word ‘naturism’ was first used in a notable manner in 1778 by the French-speaking Belgian Jean Baptiste Luc Planchon (1734-1781) for promoting the natural style of life and health. The international definition adopted by the XIV Congress of the International Naturist Federation (France, 1974) defines for naturism as ‘a lifestyle in harmony with nature, expressed through social nudity, and characterized by self-respect of people with different opinions and of the environment.’
It is generally felt that in the United States, naturism and nudism have very similar meanings, but in Britain there is more specific. In Britain ‘nudism is the act of being naked, while naturism is a lifestyle which at various times embraced nature, environment, respect for others, self-respect, crafts, healthy eating, vegetarianism, teetotalism, non-smoking, yoga, physical exercise and pacifism as well as nudity’.
Photos: Views of Eshtaol Forest areas in Israel, photographed on March 18, 2006.
Eshtaol Forest, a popular recreation area and one of the largest forests in Israel, is located north of Beit Shemesh and near Ta'oz and Neve Shalom. Like many other forests in Israel, it was planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
The Jewish National Fund, a non-profit organization founded in 1901 to buy and develop land in Ottoman Palestine (later Israel) for Jewish settlement, owned 13 per cent of the total land in Israel by 2007. Since its inception, it has built 180 dams and reservoirs, developed 250,000 acres (1,000 squire km) of land and established more than 1,000 parks. In a period of over fifty years, the JNF planted over 260 million trees mostly in semi-arid, rocky, hilly terrain where agriculture is almost impossible and the risk of land degradation is very high.
There are critics who accuse JNF on various counts, including for planting non-native pine trees rather than local species such as olive trees. While some forests have been planted for security reasons, others are for demarcating Israeli areas. Forests in the Negev Desert are said to have been planted to restrict herding by the Bedouins. After the 1948 war, forests were planted on the sites of abandoned Arab villages whose inhabitants left the areas or were expelled from their homes.
Image: Woman Standing in Front of a Mirror (1841) by Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), oil on canvas, dimensions 33.5 cm x 26 cm (13.19” x 10.24”), current location at Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, often referred to as the Father of Danish painting, was born in Blåkrog, now in the southern part of Jutland in Denmark, to painter and carpenter Henrik Vilhelm Eckersberg and Ingeborg Nielsdatter. He is credited with laying the foundation for the period of art known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting. His greatest contribution to painting was during his professorship at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He used to teach students by taking them out into the field and encouraging them to study from nature. He, thus, introduced direct study from nature into Danish art and encouraged his students to develop their individual strengths and to create their own unique styles.
Insects make up more than two-thirds of all extant animal species, and most insect species use sex for reproduction. Many species have sexual dimorphism. Insects have diverse mating strategies. Some of them make dance-like movements, while others may use sounds and chemical substances to attract their mating partners. The photo shows insects, probably beetles mating on a liatris flower head. Liatris (common names: Blazing-star, Gay-feather or Button snakeroot) is a genus of flowering perennial plants in the Asteraceae family, found in North America and the Bahamas. Their flowers are used as a popular summer flowers for bouquets.
Mayapur, located on the banks of the River Ganges, at the point of its confluence with the Jalangi, near Navadvip, West Bengal, India, has the Head Quarters of ISKCON. Though Mayapur is considered a holy place by a number of other Hindu traditions, it is of special significance to the followers of Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition as the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, regarded as a special incarnation of Krishna. Mayapur is visited by over a million pilgrims annually.
The white-throated kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis), also known as the white-breasted kingfisher or Smyrna kingfisher, is a tree kingfisher. The birds are widely distributed in Eurasia from Bulgaria, Turkey, South Asian countries to the Philippines. Though mostly found near water bodies, it can also be found away from water where it feeds on a wide range of prey including small reptiles, amphibians, crabs, small rodents and even other small birds. During the breeding season they call loudly in the mornings from prominent perches, and even the tops of buildings in urban areas.
Local names of the white-throated kingfisher include: Aspi Chidok (Baluchistan), Dalel (Sindhi), Dao Natu Gophu (Cachar), Kalkaliyo or Safedchati Kalkaliyo (Gujarati), Khandya (Marathi), Kilkila or Kourilla (Hindi), Lakmuka or Buchegadu (Telugu), Masroka (Assamese), Neela Machhrala (Himachal Pradesh), Pilihuduwa (Sinhalese), Ponman (Malayalam), Rajamatsi (Kannada), Sandabuk Machhranga (Bengali), Vichuli (Tamil), Wadda Machhera (Punjabi).
Photo: Praia da Marinha, an image of the Algarve region
Praia da Marinha, meaning ‘Beach of the Navy’ is a beach located on the Atlantic coast in the civil parish of Carvoeiro, in the municipality of Lagoa, Algarve, the southernmost region of mainland Portugal. It is one of the most beautiful and symbolic beaches of Portugal. This beach is quite famous for its cliffs and for the pristine quality of the water. In 1998, it was the distinguished with the ‘Golden Beach’ award by the Portuguese Ministry of the Environment because of its outstanding natural qualities. The pictures of the beach have been used in promotional material for ‘Guides to Portugal’ distributed around the world. Photos and visuals of Praia da Marinha have been used extensively by advertising agencies and by television producers in advertising campaigns.
The Camel Spiders (Solifugae), also known as wind scorpions, jerrymuglum, sun scorpions and sun spiders, are not true spiders, which are from the order Araneae.
Most Solifugae inhabit arid habitats, including all deserts in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, including in Afghanistan, Mongolia, India, South Africa, and Middle East countries like Iraq. They are carnivorous or omnivorous; feed on termites, darkling beetles and other small arthropods. Solifugae have been recorded feeding on snakes, lizards and rodents. They do not normally attack humans, but their large chelicerae can penetrate human skin and cause much pain.
The larger species grow to 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) in length and have a leg span of 12 centimeters (5 inches). They have large chelicerae, each of the two chelicerae has two articles forming a powerful pincer and each article bears numerous teeth.
There are many legends about them. In the Middle East, soldiers of the American and coalition military forces believe that Solifugae will feed on living human flesh, stories as scary as vampires sucking blood and killing the victims. They say believe the creature will inject anaesthetizing venom into the skin of its sleeping victims and then feed voraciously, leaving the victim to awaken with a gaping wound. But these creatures do not produce such an anaesthetic or poison, and they do not attack unless they are threatened.
Other stories about them include tales that they leap into the air, disembowel camels, scream, and run alongside moving Humvees and other military vehicles. These stories are dismissed as baseless by biologists. But for because of their bizarre, scary appearance many people are afraid of them. The only threat they pose to humans is their bite in self-defense, mostly when they are hurt. There is no possibility of death due to their bite. However, due to the strong muscles of their chelicerae, they can cause large wounds prone to infection.
Solifugae apparently have no venom, with the possible exception of one species found in India. A published study of one species, Rhagodes nigrocinctus, carried out in India in 1978 by researchers found what they believed to be epidermal glands. Extracts from these glands were injected into lizards, on which it induced paralysis in 7 out of 10 tests.
But this study has never been confirmed by peer verification or research. While other researchers have been unable to locate similar glands in other species, this particular species found in India may possess venom.
However, insect bites of any type can be toxic and even dangerous if not treated, and the bites or injuries caused by camel spiders also need medical attention to avoid any complications. Also, there is nothing as dangerous about them as the westerners holed up in Afghanistan may like to tell others.
The largest known pearl in the world, Pearl of Allah, was found in Philippines in 1934. It is a natural, non-nacreous, calcareous concretion pearl from a giant clam. It did not grow in a pearl oyster and hence it is not pearl-shaped, but instead, it has a porcelain-like surface, or glossy like a china plate. Other pearls from giant clams also exist, but this is a very large one.
This pearl is the product of a giant clam, Tridacna gigas, which cannot be grafted. The pearl is also a whole pearl, not a mabe pearl, and whole pearl culturing technology is only 100 years old.
Pearl of Allah is not a gem-quality pearl, but a rare very costly natural pearl. It measures 24 centimeters in diameter (9.45 inches) and weighs 6.4 kilograms (14.1 lb). It is an interesting piece of natural history surrounded by extraordinary stories and legends.
It was discovered by an anonymous Filipino Muslim diver, off the island of Palawan in 1934. According to legends, a Palawan chieftain gave the pearl to Wilbur Dowell Cobb, an American, in 1936 as a gift for saving the life of his son, who was stricken with malaria. The pearl was named the ‘Pearl of Allah’ by the Muslim tribal chief, as it resembled a turbaned head.
After Cobb took the pearl to USA, it was exhibited at the ‘Ripley's Believe It or Not! Odditorium’ in New York, and it was valued at $3.5 million. Gemologist Michael Steenrod in Colorado Springs has appraised the pearl at $60 million in 1982 and $93 million in 2007. Another 1982 appraisal, by Lee Sparrow of the San Francisco Gem Lab, value the pearl at $42 million.
Photo: The famous Pearl Market in Beijing, dated March 24, 2006. Dimension: 1600 x 1200 pixels, size: 373 KB. Click on photo for an enlarged view and save the photo.
A pearl is a hard, generally spherical substance formed within the soft tissue, specifically the mantle, of a living shelled mollusk, and made up of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The finest natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones for many centuries.
Precious pearls occur in the wild but they are very rare. Cultured or farmed pearls from pearl oysters make up the major chunk of pearls sold in the market. Seawater Pearls are more valuable than freshwater pearls.
Imitation or fake pearls are also widely sold in inexpensive jewelry. Pearls have also been crushed and used in cosmetics, medicines, or in paint formulations.
In 1914 pearl farmers began growing cultured freshwater pearls using the pearl mussels native to Lake Biwa, the largest and most ancient lake in Japan, near the city of Kyoto. Japanese pearl farmers recently developed a hybrid pearl mussel, a cross between Biwa Pearl Mussels and a closely related species from China, Hyriopsis cumingi, in Lake Kasumigaura.
Japanese pearl producers also invested in producing cultured pearls with freshwater mussels in Shanghai, China, which is currently the world's largest producer of freshwater pearls, producing more than 1,500 metric tons per year.
