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Barred Owl (Strix varia) in Mansfield, Ct, December 2019.
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You can tell that this owl photo is from a couple of winters back, because it was actually snowing then. The winter of 2022-23 has been practically snow-free so far, with January temperatures running about 10 degrees (F) above normal, and only two severe but short-lived cold snaps, one last weekend and one around Christmas.
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Maple sap collection, Feb 11, 2023
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I wasn't certain how to handle maple sugaring in a winter like this, and held off on tapping any trees until after the cold outbreak last week. The sap has been flowing like gangbusters the past few days, with my one tap yielding about two gallons per day. I probably could have gotten started in January; I hear that some local sugar shacks started their operations weeks ago. The weather looks good for sugaring in the immediate future, with freezes most nights and some more unseasonably warm days, but I'd also expect the season to end early if this pattern continues.
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Just in time for Darwin Day, researchers in the Yuan Lab here at UConn have published a prestigious cover article in the journal Science. The work deals with the mechanisms of speciation within the genus Mimulus (Monkeyflowers), where a novel gene that produces small, regulatory RNA molecules, is involved in the evolution of changes in flower color and pollination syndrome. There is a less-technical article on the research in UConn Today. The Science editors apparently didn't think that the Yuan lab's photos of Mimulus flowers were quite of the quality that they wanted, so they had a professional photographer poking around the greenhouses last month to get some additional illustrations, which is how I first learned about the new publication.
