An Evening in Washington, D.C.

This afternoon, we rode the Metro into DC with our friends Eric and Ginny.  Our two goals were to visit the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and to stroll over and inspect the National Christmas Tree, which had been lit last night.

The museum is an impressive building.  You enter a large, vaulted, 3-story lobby with a large elephant exhibited in the center of the rotunda:

This branch of the Smithsonian has perhaps a dozen separate exhibits, each dealing with a different facet of natural history.  The first exhibit we visited deals with the oceans and shorelines.  Here, you see a great blue heron with Kathy faintly visible behind her.  We agreed that killing and stuffing a heron does something to it (other than make it dead), so that it isn't nearly as colorful as a living original:

Another exhibit featured dinosaurs native to the United States, and - LO! - we ran into our good friend Triceratops:

 
A third exhibit - and one of David's favorites - deals with the ancestry and migrations of humans and humanoids.  It seems the most critical limb of this special family tree was Homo Erectus, who was the longest living of our ancestral species:



The museum had an interactive exhibit that allows you to have your photograph digitally modified to show what you might have looked like as any of numerous ancestral species.  David picked Homo Erectus, and so, here he is as his great-great ancestor Erectus:

Another spectacular exhibit showed 60 nature photographs that were the award winners in a national competition.  Many of the photos were gripping, but this photo of a kestrel preening itself on a snowy branch was so colorful, delicate and almost painting-like, that David elected this his favorite of that exhibit:

Hidden away elsewhere in the museum was another exhibition of about 50 photos featuring the National Wilderness Areas of the country.  This, too, was a photo competition.  David most enjoyed this photo, which communicates something about the experience one has in an encounter with wilderness:

Yet another exhibit featured butterflies.  Here are two photos of one butterfly.  The first photo is taken with a flash and shows the colors the butterfly reveals in reflected light:

Yet the same butterfly, when photographed without flash, reveals completely different colors when backlit:

Having sated our "natural" curiosity, we started our walk over to the Ellipse in front of the White House, where the National Christmas Tree stood with 50 miniature live fir trees, each representing one of the states.

On our way, we passed the Washington Monument, a ghostly spirit flanked by two trees in the evening light:

The National Christmas Tree itself seemed almost unreal, together with its little state minions gathered in a large circle around it.  We can assure you that all of them are live trees - but a framework of lights has been dropped around them that makes them each just a little too perfect to seem real:

...and, of course, what visit to a national monument is complete without a selfie to memorialize the event?

Happy DC Holidays to all of you!