![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Explosion Of Life
Apr. 10th, 2016 11:13 pmBack from the crystal empire, and it's true! The bogs are in bloom, the Taiga is swarming with life, and no pony has seen the like in living memory. I mean the living memory of the crystal ponies, since life was very bleak around there for a thousand years.
We really did need those belly-waders. The moss-key toads were everywhere and hopping over to anything that moved. We attracted so many nosy-ems and butterflies that we soon couldn't see where we were going and our head-to-tail netting was collapsing. I used the repellent spell, which kept most of them far enough away to see again, and a strengthening spell on the netting as well. Quite a few nosey-ems just wouldn't take 'no' for an answer and their combined weight was making the net sag. I could see that Fluttershy was sad to see the butterflies repelled, so I modified the spread of the spell on her net so that the butterflies wouldn't be repelled from her pith helmet. It was the friendly thing to do.
Before we went out to raised bogs of the Crystal Empire to see this wonder for ourselves, we went calling on the castle. Princess Cadence had time to see us, and while my niece tottered about and drooled on Applejack, she told us that the Crystal Ponies are worried about their crops this year. On one hoof, it has been unusually warm and everything is growing like wildfire. They are already harvesting wild berries, the crystal corn is three ponies tall, and all the ewes are producing twins when usually it's one lamb every three years. But there are such huge swarms of creatures of all descriptions that it's possible that they'll eat all the Empire hay before it's ready to cut. I promised to bring that consideration to the attention of the Ponyville Hay Board next meeting and ask our Hay Board to send out requests that other jurisdictions also plan to put aside hay in solidarity and friendship in case of a crop failure in the Crystal Empire.
Princess Cadence looks more rested than she had last time we saw her. I think my parents talked them into getting nanny and foal sitter help.
Fluttershy and Amethyst Star were itching to get out into the field, so we said goodbye to Princess Cadence. Starlight Glimmer went off to find Sunburst. Apparently he's been spending a lot of time in the castle library, doing some research and reshelving books by classification. That library is going to need a lot of reorganization. So Starburst went down to see if she could find him there. We left the castle and took the same street north that we'd taken on the Biome Management Conference field trip last year.
We passed the last of the cultivated fields and paused at the sight of what lay ahead. The riot of plant life, the colors, the swarms of every living thing, it was breath taking, and amazing! Fluttershy took pictures, Amethyst Star collected specimens of berries, flowers and aromatic herbs for her herbarium, and Applejack remarked that all this growth was springing from an apparently poor soil that was either a thin layer of dirt and moss on weathered rock, or just peat and water. I picked some fur-leaf for Zecora and took notes as they dictated them to me. I managed to get moss-key toad bites on my nose. They're pretty potent, there's still a bit of swelling. They're also huge and diverse and some are quite pretty. Amethyst Star was very excited about those, and Fluttershy kept rattling off names of butterflies, it was hard to keep up.
There were also what looked like miniature tatzlwurms, a flower I'd only seen once before when Discord sent me and Princess Cadence to collect one a while back. That tatzlwurm was gigantic, so these are probably a different species. They were lunging out of the ground, writhing about and snatching moss-key toads left and right, moss-key toads that had been following us and were now fleeing madly in all directions. It was in patches of these voracious plants that we found crystal hares. We could get quite close, much to Fluttershy's delight. They didn't want to leave the safety of the miniature tentacled flower patches. Fluttershy had me note that the crystal hares were cooperatively joining up to raise their young in small groups. In each and every instance she observed, the creche kits were at the center of a circle of adults. Fluttershy suggests that this is to protect the small kits from the tentacled flowers and perhaps from the moss-key toads as well.
Amethyst Star and Fluttershy chose a belt transect method to conduct some random sampling and data collection. That took us through patches of enormous picture plants, lush blue berry bushes, fluffy white cotton grass and soft, tasty pussy willows, where we flushed out gangs of bright yellow lemnings, running like liquid gold for cover in some other thicket of greenery. Applejack got bored with the data collecting process and left us to go to the Crystal Empire corn fields to talk with the farmer folk.
We kept going until late afternoon, gawking and recording, but we had to stop. We hadn't had anything to eat since this morning and we were due to meet up with Applejack and Starlight at the train station. We found them there, and we all went to the same restaurant that we'd gone to when we'd come back from our expedition to find Moondancer. The food was still excellent and, no surprise here, on our plates we became reacquainted with wild plants like those we'd been admiring today out in the Taiga. Applejack sighed wistfully at a missed opportunity and in jest, Amethyst Star told her that under no circumstances were her herbarium specimens to be eaten.
We finished our meal and made our way to the train station in the evening light. It was late by the time we rolled into Ponyville. Starlight and I bid a good night to Fluttershy, Applejack and Amethyst Star, and we went home, to the castle. It was a long day of walking on springy moss bogs and my legs are tired. I think I'm going to turn in now.
We really did need those belly-waders. The moss-key toads were everywhere and hopping over to anything that moved. We attracted so many nosy-ems and butterflies that we soon couldn't see where we were going and our head-to-tail netting was collapsing. I used the repellent spell, which kept most of them far enough away to see again, and a strengthening spell on the netting as well. Quite a few nosey-ems just wouldn't take 'no' for an answer and their combined weight was making the net sag. I could see that Fluttershy was sad to see the butterflies repelled, so I modified the spread of the spell on her net so that the butterflies wouldn't be repelled from her pith helmet. It was the friendly thing to do.
Before we went out to raised bogs of the Crystal Empire to see this wonder for ourselves, we went calling on the castle. Princess Cadence had time to see us, and while my niece tottered about and drooled on Applejack, she told us that the Crystal Ponies are worried about their crops this year. On one hoof, it has been unusually warm and everything is growing like wildfire. They are already harvesting wild berries, the crystal corn is three ponies tall, and all the ewes are producing twins when usually it's one lamb every three years. But there are such huge swarms of creatures of all descriptions that it's possible that they'll eat all the Empire hay before it's ready to cut. I promised to bring that consideration to the attention of the Ponyville Hay Board next meeting and ask our Hay Board to send out requests that other jurisdictions also plan to put aside hay in solidarity and friendship in case of a crop failure in the Crystal Empire.
Princess Cadence looks more rested than she had last time we saw her. I think my parents talked them into getting nanny and foal sitter help.
Fluttershy and Amethyst Star were itching to get out into the field, so we said goodbye to Princess Cadence. Starlight Glimmer went off to find Sunburst. Apparently he's been spending a lot of time in the castle library, doing some research and reshelving books by classification. That library is going to need a lot of reorganization. So Starburst went down to see if she could find him there. We left the castle and took the same street north that we'd taken on the Biome Management Conference field trip last year.
We passed the last of the cultivated fields and paused at the sight of what lay ahead. The riot of plant life, the colors, the swarms of every living thing, it was breath taking, and amazing! Fluttershy took pictures, Amethyst Star collected specimens of berries, flowers and aromatic herbs for her herbarium, and Applejack remarked that all this growth was springing from an apparently poor soil that was either a thin layer of dirt and moss on weathered rock, or just peat and water. I picked some fur-leaf for Zecora and took notes as they dictated them to me. I managed to get moss-key toad bites on my nose. They're pretty potent, there's still a bit of swelling. They're also huge and diverse and some are quite pretty. Amethyst Star was very excited about those, and Fluttershy kept rattling off names of butterflies, it was hard to keep up.
There were also what looked like miniature tatzlwurms, a flower I'd only seen once before when Discord sent me and Princess Cadence to collect one a while back. That tatzlwurm was gigantic, so these are probably a different species. They were lunging out of the ground, writhing about and snatching moss-key toads left and right, moss-key toads that had been following us and were now fleeing madly in all directions. It was in patches of these voracious plants that we found crystal hares. We could get quite close, much to Fluttershy's delight. They didn't want to leave the safety of the miniature tentacled flower patches. Fluttershy had me note that the crystal hares were cooperatively joining up to raise their young in small groups. In each and every instance she observed, the creche kits were at the center of a circle of adults. Fluttershy suggests that this is to protect the small kits from the tentacled flowers and perhaps from the moss-key toads as well.
Amethyst Star and Fluttershy chose a belt transect method to conduct some random sampling and data collection. That took us through patches of enormous picture plants, lush blue berry bushes, fluffy white cotton grass and soft, tasty pussy willows, where we flushed out gangs of bright yellow lemnings, running like liquid gold for cover in some other thicket of greenery. Applejack got bored with the data collecting process and left us to go to the Crystal Empire corn fields to talk with the farmer folk.
We kept going until late afternoon, gawking and recording, but we had to stop. We hadn't had anything to eat since this morning and we were due to meet up with Applejack and Starlight at the train station. We found them there, and we all went to the same restaurant that we'd gone to when we'd come back from our expedition to find Moondancer. The food was still excellent and, no surprise here, on our plates we became reacquainted with wild plants like those we'd been admiring today out in the Taiga. Applejack sighed wistfully at a missed opportunity and in jest, Amethyst Star told her that under no circumstances were her herbarium specimens to be eaten.
We finished our meal and made our way to the train station in the evening light. It was late by the time we rolled into Ponyville. Starlight and I bid a good night to Fluttershy, Applejack and Amethyst Star, and we went home, to the castle. It was a long day of walking on springy moss bogs and my legs are tired. I think I'm going to turn in now.
