Tag: biology

Ants

I spent the Labour Day weekend at the home of some friends at Crooked Lake. The weather was beautiful and so was their yard, and so we ate lunch outdoors, observing and being observed by cats, humming birds, bees, butterflies, hawks–and ants. Of all of them, it was the ants who were most interested in …

Continue reading

Insect repellants

An anthropologist who knew nothing about our culture might well be fascinated by our traditional summer folk dance. You know the one: it’s where we jump about from foot to foot, waving our hands in the air and occasionally slapping parts of our body. It’s called the “Mosquito Mazurka.” Our hypothetical anthropologist might also note …

Continue reading

Eggs

It’s eggciting for me this week to be able to eggspound on that most eggcellent eggsample of nature’s eggsquisite bounty: the egg. (For one thing, few other topics lend themselves to such eggceedingly eggscruciating eggsamples of eggcessive wordplay.) I’m going to focus on the chicken egg, although scientifically speaking the chicken egg is only one …

Continue reading

Perennials

Despite the fact that snow covers the ground as I write this, it is, in fact, spring; and spring means, among other things, the appearance of plants, sometimes from garden beds where you’d swear there was nothing but a few dry sticks. Suddenly green shoots spring up, and before you know it, flowers are growing …

Continue reading

Wood

“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” asks the familiar tongue-twister, to which the reply would have to be, in parts of southern Saskatchewan, “Not much.” The prairies just aren’t known for their abundance of trees. Northern Saskatchewan, however, is an entirely different matter. My continuing travels around the …

Continue reading

Flowers

It’s a warm, it’s sunny, it’s spring, and the ’60s musical Hair is coming to town. What better time to celebrate flower power? The use of flowers for gifts and decoration has a long, long history (the ancient Romans and the ancient Chinese were both wild about roses, for example), but to a plant our infatuation might …

Continue reading

Fertilizer

Just so I’m not operating under false pretenses, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t garden. I don’t seed, I don’t weed, I don’t plant, I don’t compost, and I don’t spread manure (this column excepted). My one connection with the plant world is mowing the grass, and I wouldn’t do that if I had …

Continue reading

Heredity

“She’s got her father’s eyes.” “He’s got his mother’s nose.” From the moment a baby is born, expect children to look like their parents. But how does it happen? An Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel took the first step toward our modern understanding of heredity in 1866, when he published a theory of inheritance based …

Continue reading

Coffee

Ask the average coffee drinker where coffee comes from and he’ll probably say “South America.”  Coffee actually originated in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant grows naturally.  Coffee has been drunk in Arabian countries for centuries, but was only introduced to Europe in the mid1600s.  Plantations established in European colonies in Indonesia, the West Indies and …

Continue reading

Christmas trees

It’s that jolly time of a year again when we celebrate new life by murdering 40 million trees. Which, I hasten to add, is simply a dramatic opening and not the beginning of a manifesto for the Evergreen Liberation Front. Fact is, I’m a big fan of the custom of having a Christmas tree. For …

Continue reading

Bones

Our bones, being hidden away inside our skins, are not something that we normally think about much. But once you break one, it’s hard to think about anything else. I had an early introduction to the subject when I was seven years old and my big brother broke my arm. Not deliberately: we were rolling …

Continue reading

Tea

  I think my first experience with culture shock came as a small boy when, shortly after we moved here from Texas, a woman we were visiting for supper asked me what I wanted to drink and I said, “Tea.” To my horror, she brought me steaming-hot tea in a small china cup, a beverage …

Continue reading

Easy AdSense Pro by Unreal