This is mostly just photos as a follow up to my diary last week showing bird photos from Ecuador.  This week I will show some examples of the non-avian fauna of eastern Ecuador.  I'm going to use two themes to hopefully make this diary a bit more substantive: our perception of wilderness and what the current biodiversity loss really means.

Last week I posted a Macaw story in a comment in lineatus' wonderful Saturday morning birding diary.  She expressed an interest in seeing pictures which I was unable to supply at the time but promised her for this week.  I realized this morning that she may have meant for me to post a diary rather than just post the pictures in a comment in her diary (as none has yet appeared).  So I will post a short diary about my birding experiences in Ecuador with the Macaw pictures.

Someone once said that the reason that academic politics were so vicious was that the stakes were so low.  In 'real' politics the greatest howls of outrage often seem to revolve around the trivial: lapel pins or flag buring.  One of the things that I liked about this site when I first came here was that people seemed to be reserving their energy for things that matter (the constitution, cats, war crimes, recipes).

Like a lot of other people I haven't been very happy about the nature of DK recently.  I'm not unhappy that there is a lot of vitriol/passion swirling around.  I am unhappy that so much of the outrage seems directed at comparatively trivial matters.  What do I mean?  How dare I say this?  To find out you will need to continue below.

Yesterday at noon, my wife and myself were leaving Chicago after a brief visit, returning to our home in the heart of the great corn desert. We stopped for a picnic in Palos Hills Forest Preserve, a large tract of woods and lakes and, hard though it may be to believe, actual hills in the southwestern suburbs.  In the parking lot I noticed a women cajoling her terrified daughter from the car.  Once outside, the girl placed her hands over her head and sprinted for the nature center.

What dire menace had caused this fear?  Anyone living in northern Illinois or adjacent areas in neighboring states can probably guess.  One of the great natural wonders of the eastern United States is in full swing: an emergence of periodical cicadas.  Sheddhead had a great pictorial diary about them earlier.  I wanted to post something more for a couple of reasons: disparate reactions to these insects and the simple fact that periodical cicadas are really, really cool.

More below.