Ken Britten

Close-up of a large bird with an orange head and green body against a background of blurred green. It has a black stripe across its black eye and a black patch at the top of its chest, along with a turquoise patch under its long and wide bill.

Broad-billed motmot #portrait from La Selva Biological Station in Sarapiqui, Costa Rica
#BirdOfTheDay #birds

No surprise. One talk of Pinker's that I attended was at UC Davis, Valentine's Day, 1998. He was typically glib and arrogant, dismissing love as just pair-bonding, and necessarily irrational. Hmmm... it fits a pattern, doesn't it?

Sunrise over Lake Superior near Grand Marais, Minnesota

Wilderness untamed & pure, touching every core of your being, unbridled power, furious gale force winds, churning clouds, horizontal sleet, bitter cold. I wouldn't have it any other way! Yukon, Canada.

#photography #travel #nature #bluesky #landscape #sunset #landscapephotography #naturephotography

Today, Minneapolis had their annual Powderhorn Art Sled Rally. A community organized event that this time featured de-Icer sleds and bowling pins named for world leaders.

A very Minnesotan way to protest ICE. 😍🙌🏻

The Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica is a great place to be off-grid. Sunny, rainy and steep. This is the control center for the Luna Lodge power system, which can host maybe 30-40 clients at a time. 9 kW solar, 6 kW hydro, and a small battery.

NGC2335, the Seagull nebula, another ongoing project I’ve been working on for about three weeks. In this case as well, this image was obtained by capturing the radiation emitted in the ionized hydrogen spectrum and partly in oxygen, with about 15 hours of integration time. >>>

🔭
#Astrophotography

Small falcon in flight, with his wings held diagonally out from his body at the upper left and lower right. His head is gray-blue across the forehead. His face is white with two vertical black stripes, below and behind the black eye ringed in yellow. The area around his gray beak is also yellow. His back is rust-colored with black hatching. His wings are black with white hatching on the far section and gray with black hatching on the near section. His tail is rust-colored on top and black at the tip. The background is blue sky.

American kestrel male shot from my deck in California
#BirdOfTheDay #BirdsInFlight #birds

Ahhh, wonderful. The intersection of two critical, hard-to-measure elements of behavior, neither of which has an accepted definition, and both multifaceted. Yes, there's work to do! (But I'm glad it's not me doing it... too damn hard!)

YouTube video by Wolfgang's Grateful Dead Grateful Dead - Cassidy - 10/31/1980 - Radio City Music Hall

RIP, Bobby. You were amazing, we will never forget you. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZOi...

Tree glowing red after sunrise reflected abstractly in a frozen canal. There are some patterns in the ice that look a bit like a bird’s wing.

Took quite a lot of images over the last week so difficult deciding on which to post for #ShareMondays2026 but I just adored the icy Grand Union Canal and golden reflections of the trees :)

#Berkhamsted #abstract

A bit of serendipity this morning - didn’t feel safe going out in the car so went to the canal instead and saw this. My comedy moment for the year 🦢🤪

[Vertical video so needs a click]

#sillyswan #iphone15pro

Two tidal height curves for the last 48 hours, with the observed height in red consistently above the prediction in blue.

Tides coming in a foot above the prediction is kind of a big deal. But for sailors who have run aground, it's a blessing.

At least it's not a couch.

Never before seen footage‼️

Tornado genesis of the Clear Lake, South Dakota tornado earlier this year.
@myradar.bsky.social
#tornado #weather

Maybe they were named fascia, after the membrane around a muscle. Only slightly less scary.

Your pictures always make me want to get a drone with a better camera.

A white sand beach seen from directly above. There is a line of messy rocks at the bottom - mostly black but some red ones (gneiss) and from them are some channels which are vaguely pink, leading to the sea (not in shot).

The thing I love about drone photography is finding patterns that look so much better from above!

Bilton Beach, Durness #Scotland

Check out the threads from Nicole Rust on this platform. She's a brilliant, quantitatively-minded neuroscientist who is working on this kind of question. I think she would agree.

Daniel Swain thought some of those cells should have formed waterspouts, that would have been cool. Until it came ashore, anyway.

Abstract and colorful pattern, with a central patch of bright oranges and yellows, surrounded by patches of blue and pink. It is all laced through with fine, branching dark-gray lines.

When dampness and mold create abstract art ... or something. Found some old family 35 mm slides in a wet corner of my shop, where they had been for years. I have no idea what the subject was, and I don't think it matters anymore.

A momentary pause

'Dunluce Castle In Golden Light'

Majestic conditions at Dunluce Castle, when the last light of the day illuminated the iconic landmark perched on the edge of the cliff. A dramatic sky above with a half moon as I got extremely lucky.

Two snow depth maps showing the Sierra Nevada range. On the left, early one, there's just faint blue shading, indicating just inches of snow only at the highest elevations. On the right, there are big swaths of dark blue and purple, indicating 4 feet of snow in many places, and considerable snow at lower elevations too.

This was the present California wanted. We must have been nice. Left: Christmas eve; right Boxing Day.

Summer tanager male standing on a bare branch in profile against a blurred green and gray background. He's bright red, with a black eye and a gray beak.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! I got you a tanager from Portal, Arizona.
#birds

A volcano in Chile captured at twilight, with a dark double ring cloud at its peak, which is illuminated from the center by the bright orange-red glow of an eruption.

My favorite of Nature's best science shots of the year.

All-white bird in flight, shown in quarter profile from underneath, with its wings spread to the side, against blue sky. Its eye is black. The base of the bill is dark gray-blue, and the end is black.

Blue-billed white tern on Suwarrow in the Cook Islands for Day 19 of #ArtAdventCalendar. One of my favorite birds in the world.
#Flyday #birds

The external test paper: www.medrxiv.org/content/medr...

Already in a doctor's office near you. Scary, since it fails the specialty boards, according to external testing. I checked against my own area of expertise, and it wrote naive summaries like an enthusiastic undergrad would. How would we know if our doctors are using it in our care? We wouldn't.

Green, hilly landscape with striking clouds. There's a well-lit bank of low clouds or fog in the lower distance, and higher clouds coming overhead from the west, behind the view.

Incoming Pacific system caught in the act of pushing out the tule fog in the Central Valley. Good riddance, I say! The view is looking SE over the bottom of the Berryessa Gap, where Putah Creek breaks out of the Coast Range. The weather station in view is KCAWINTE11 on Weather Underground.