Scratching that itch

My garden.
The poison ivy is having fun this year, stretching along in 20-foot runs everywhere. I usually manage to get infected, for which my remedy of choice is over the counter generic allergy pills.

But I've got other things, like the soap Tecnu, which is made for poison ivy and oak. James Fallows swears by it, and notes the history of it:
Tecnu was originally developed in 1960, during

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Immigrants in the garden

Worms ahoy! Yikes!
Earthworms, especially the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, did not exist in North America before 1492, Charles C. Mann writes in The Wall Street Journal.
To feed the demand for tobacco, English ships tied up to Virginia docks and took in barrels of rolled-up tobacco leaves. Typically 4 feet tall and 2½ feet across, each barrel weighed half a ton or more. Sailors

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I can hear you

Unlike our Congress, a rain forest vine and nectar-feeding bats know how to work together.

The vine, Marcgravia evenia, has dish-shaped leaves that bounce back echoes that are easy for the bats to identify through echolocation.
“They have a very special kind of echo,” says Ralph Simon, a biologist at the University of Ulm in Germany. “This echo is very loud and has a constant signature from

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Occasions for hope

"Nearly every fly fisherman I know is a celebrator of the absurd. You have to be to spend years of your life standing in cold water, flogging it endlessly with a plastic stick, hoping to outsmart a fish with a chickpea-sized brain by duping it with feather and fur. If you’re successful and conscientious, you will punch a hole through its mouth with sharp steel, play it to hand, admire its beauty

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Friend and foe

Among Nature's Best Photography Magazine's wildlife photograph winners for 2010:
Tom Warren of Dobbs Ferry, New York, took this photo of a Western Lowland Gorilla and Mallard Duck at the Bronx Zoo, New York.

"Upon arriving at the Bronx Zoo's Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit, I noticed there was an excitement among those viewing the animals," Warren said. "We all watched with amazement as a tiny

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Take it and leaf it

I recently noted that you can now order earthworms using your smart phone, and now comes another app for the high-tech naturalist: it allows you to identify leaves.

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software

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In the tulip fields

In Lisse, western Netherlands.

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The future is ordering earthworms on your smartphone

They look happy to me!
A few weeks ago I saw that you can buy earthworms from Amazon. In intended to try it, although I couldn't imagine how the little guys would survive the shipping. Then I came across a blog post by Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor at The Atlantic, and I'm now a believer. She writes:
Last week, on a pleasant spring evening, the Official Asymmetrical

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