It’s Albatrossity Monday! We’ll have a special birds of spring OTR from Albatrossity tomorrow, and then we finish out the week with ema, Elma, and Dextrous.
By the end of the week, we will have published 985 OTR posts in the three years that I have been shepherding OTR. That’s a lot! If you’ve been thinking about submitting something to On the Road, this would be a great time to do it.
Albatrossity
This is the third batch of photos from day one in Serengeti National Park, so I plan to give you all a break next week and post some pics of springtime migrants and locals back here in Flyover Country. We’ll return to Africa for day 2 of Serengeti critters after that. I can’t yet tell you how many OTR posts (with 10 photos each) that will be, but I can promise that there will be pics of another species of jackal!
We’ll start with an iconic east African species, the Fever Tree (Acacia xanthophloea). The specific epithet means “yellow bark”, which is quite visible in this picture. The colloquial name comes from the observation that folks in proximity to a grove of these trees were much more likely to get malaria, and at the time the cause of the malarial fever was attributed to the trees themselves. Now we know that mosquitoes, which also favor the low swampy areas where these trees grow, transmit the malarial parasite that causes disease and fever. But the name persists! Click here for larger image.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Serengeti Day 1, Round 3Post + Comments (11)