Survival

 There was a great story this morning from Reuters: 

Colombian children found alive in jungle weeks after plane crash

The details of this epic story were slim, but the opening line contains the vital clue: "Four children from an Indigenous community in Colombia..."

That the children survived the crash while all the adults perished was a great stroke of luck, but their subsequent survival can be attributed to a lifestyle based on very early learning about the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.

As it happens, I am familiar with the area where the plane went down in southern Colombia  from a youthful adventure many years in the past.  I have written here several times about my travels there and one of those posts briefly deals with the indigenous survival techniques which are provided to children from the time they began to walk.  (I am reminded of the fable of Br'er Rabbit and the Brian Patch.)

The Reuters story has the makings of a great book or a film.  It would be nice should such a project be undertaken if some of the benefits could accrue to the children and their community.  The danger is, of course, that such exposure will ultimately result in an erosion of cultural traditions and a degradation of environmental integrity.

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UPDATE (5/18/23)

Well, it appears now that the story might not have a real happy ending.  An article in La Prensa says that the President of Colombia has announced the the children have not been found.  We'll just have to hope for the best...

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UPDATE (5/19/23 - La Prensa)

Los militares hallaron el biberón del bebé y encontraron huellas recientes de pisadas de los niños cerca de un caño. Según fuentes de la zona, hay esperanzas de que hayan sobrevivido debido a que están familiarizados con la selva y sus recursos. La búsqueda es aún más difícil porque la lluvia hace que los rastros se borren más rápido.

The military found the baby's bottle and encountered recent footprints of the children near a stream. According to sources in the area, there is hope that they have survived because they are familiar with the jungle and its resources. The search is even more difficult because the rain makes the tracks disappear faster.

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The children were found forty days after the crash with no injuries and in good health, thanks to the care and skills of the oldest girl.

Hunting for Wildflowers

 We took a morning walk through the Piedras Marcadas section of the Petroglyph National Monument.  The sky was spectacular.

The only things we found in bloom were a lot of Phacelia and one lonely Sotol plant.

Cable barriers currently prevent close access to most of the rock art panels, though a few are still visible from the trails.

On the way back to the car Margaret found a small jaw, as yet to be identified.

I did a 3-shot panorama which I stitched together in Photoshop CS2.  That worked pretty well, so I'll try more of that in the future.

Digital Color

 I've decided to not shoot any more color film because of the outrageous prices being asked.  I'll go on shooting black and white in my film cameras, but any color from now on is going to be from my digital cameras.  With that in mind I took a walk this morning to the nearby Natural History Museum which has a well tended native plants garden.

Most of the garden's cacti are specimens native to southern New Mexico as there are few that grow naturally  at Albuquerque's altitude.

I walked back through Tiguex Park across the street from the museum and caught a bee having his way with a dandelion. 

I'm hoping to get up to the foothills of the Sandias in the next couple of days to see what kind of wildflowers are blooming there.

Two Natives

We planted a Desert Willow in front of our bedroom window about five years ago.  It is a popular yard tree all over the State because it requires little care and produces nice flowers.  The Desert Four O'clock also produces copious flowers early and throughout the Summer, but it is often seen as an invasive weed that is very hard to get rid of because of its deep tap root and rapid growth.  

 I am especially fond of both plants because it was such a treat to find them both in bloom during long hikes in the Chihuahuan Desert arroyos around where we lived in southern New Mexico.

Reflections

I went by my favorite local used bookstore recently and found Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus.  The text seems very familiar, so I'm pretty sure I read it originally just before we went to Greece nearly twenty years ago.

I first became acquainted with Durrell's work through his Alexandria Quartet which I read while in school in the 1960s.  That seemed revolutionary then to me in its style and content.  Looking back on it now I'm thinking maybe the issue was more my own literary naiveté at the time.  Durrell was in the employ of the Foreign Office during his time in the Dodecanese Islands and his views and opinions seem to reflect a now stale colonialist viewpoint.  To be fair I should probably go back and re-read the Quartet which he put together a decade afterward.

Thinking about Durrell and Greece got me thinking about pictures I had made there.  I posted a few on my photography blog over the years, but most were archived on Photonet.  When I looked at them there recently I found that the text of the photo essays I did had disappeared and accessing the photos was a slow process which augurs poorly for their preservation there.  So, I collected the lot and posted them on my Photography & Vintage Cameras blog in three parts labeled Rhodes, Symi and Athens.