On top of loving wildlife, mushrooms, nature, being outside, illustration, art and wooly mammoths, I LOVE music. I love playing it (in my rather limited ways), listening to it and learning about it. And one of the things I love most is WFMU radio. If you’ve never tuned in, you’ve got to give it a shot. Listen on the radio (91.1 fm in New York, at 90.1 fm in the Hudson Valley, USA) or listen to it online from around the world at www.wfmu.org.

Lemme tell you something. I’ve lived in 4 major cities in the last 4 years spanning 2 countries, across one ocean, including 2 islands and places cross- and mid-continent. It’s thrilling yet exhausting, each time finding a new place to live, new job, new friends, new communities, new geography, and new flora and fauna. Besides my husband to make each new home feel like home, there’s also WFMU. “A radio station makes you feel that way?! Really, are you serious??” you might say. From wherever I am, I tune in and it’s like plugging into a live pulsing heart of music love. And yet it’s not familiarity and nostalgia that makes me feel this way. Sometimes the music is jarring, irritating and absurd, and most of the time it’s unfamiliar to me. But I hear and learn amazing things on WFMU, I love the DJs and it has made me laugh so hard I’ve cried. And that’s what’s so GREAT about it.

There are other wonderful things about WFMU too, besides the music. But that is for another post. In the meantime, WFMU needs our support. Pledge to the marathon and keep independent listener-supported freeform radio ALIVE. Thank you for your support!

Contest ends January 18, 2012 so get yours in quick!

Eusssssssstace Tilley

I dance too. Click the images to view. Dance along. Wooly mammoth jazzercize!

For three field seasons (ranging from 3 to 6 months), I’ve worked as a Biological Field Technician for the National Park Service at Gateway National Recreation Area, a coastal National Park located in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, NY and Sandy Hook, NJ. One of the projects I worked on was herpetological monitoring, the monitoring of amphibians and reptiles in the park, specifically Floyd Bennett Field and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. We used methods such as coverboards, anuran sound calls, and incidental encounters. This past summer produced the most snake activity I’ve experienced in my three field seasons there. We turned up eastern garter snakes the most, with nearly every check, and eastern milk snakes a close second. Fowler’s toads appeared commonly in the North Forty of Floyd Bennett Field, even on the hottest of days. And every now and then we were treated to the sight of a eastern box turtle, diamondback terrapins and woodcocks (not a herp, I know). Great summer at Gateway NRA!

morels on the brain bag, color pencil and marker by Anne Yen

is it true or false, watercolor by Anne Yen

Russula, watercolor by Anne Yen

I love Russulas.  There’s something so solid about them, something so sure.  I love the colors of their caps, in all shades of warms and cools, atop a stout stem.  There’s a certain lack of ambivalence about them that makes them so assuredly Russulas when you find them in the forest duff.  Just don’t ask me to tell them apart by species.  And as I learned last night at a New York Mycological Society talk by Noah Siegel, co-president of the Monadnock Mushroomers Unlimited in New Hampshire, some mushrooms (I forget which) we never considered as Russula, are indeed, thanks to DNA sequencing.  According to the talk and recent science news in the media, DNA sequencing is rearranging relations of all kinds of taxa, resulting in renaming and rethinking of where things are on the evolutionary tree.  Much confusion and head-scratching among the scientific community results.  So maybe this post should be called, Not So Sure the Russula.

Regardless, Russulas are a fun way to indulge and experiment with rich colors when painting.  And I will still be excited to find them in the urban forest.