Click image to enlarge.
Believe it or not, this is what I saw outside the upstairs bedroom window the other day.
ADDENDUM
In compliance with the Truth In Blogging Act of 2004, Vleeptron confesses that this image is Not 100% Natural & Organic.It is indeed the view from our bedroom window.
But Vleeptron uhhhh Photoshopped out the satellite dish.
Satellite dishes are not natural components of the Great Boreal Deciduous Hardwood Forest.
(Actually, not Photoshop ... Vleeptron distorts its images and tells its visual untruths with down-and-dirty free MSPaint.)
This is Our Big Moment, the color explosion of the leaves of the great boreal deciduous hardwood forest. We do okay for tourism in all seasons, but Autumn is our big Tourist Trap -- cityfolk from New York book New England ye Olde Countrie Inne rooms a year in advance to see this. And it sure is something to see.
What's happening is that the trees know Winter is coming soon, and to survive during the Dark Months, they need to capture all the light they can. By turning their leaves into these lurid colors, they selectively filter for the most energetic sunlight photons -- which they then turn into sugars via photosynthesis.
If you have a more accurate explanation of what the hell is going on here in our Big Moment, please Leave A Comment. But S.W.M.B.O., who actually studied this stuph at the University of New Hampshire, tells me "deciduous" means trees which drop their leaves and are bare during Winter.
When Jeanie (an Iowa native) visited us, she took dozens of photos -- all from the inside of the house out the windows. There's nothing remarkable about our house, but Jeez -- check outside! (Our black bears, wild turkeys, raccoons, owls and eagles like it, too.)
2 comments:
Of all the photos of the change of colors of leaves, this one stands out this season.
I think they have found that as there is hot and cold it is the wet and dry that causes leaves to change and fall.
One especially cold night in a tent the leaved awakened me with a steady falling covering everything in a yellow layer soon to hide my camp again in the bare branches with snow.
hiya L. Edgar!
one local bit of lore says a frost or early freeze triggers the color changes in the leaves. Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry" is largely just a visual tone poem of the Vermont autumn forest in gorgeous Technicolor, worth watching in as good a print as you can find.
Oh uhhh ... "The Fifth Element" ... it's different and original and unexpected, but I just caught Luc Besson's early cult flick "Big Blue / le Grande Bleu" for the first time, and WOW is that one verrrry strange flick. Let me know what you think. I was so startled I've been planning a "Cahiers du Vleeptron" post about it.
Ian Holm, the High Priest in "5th Element," has a great recent film, "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which Napoleon ... well, just rent it, I think you'll enjoy it.
All my cold weather and snow camping experiences have been (luckily) great, special. In New Mexico, starving deer worked up the nerve to come up to the campsite and let us feed them bread.
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