What is it?

Click to enlarge

A big attaboy and the warm glow of victory goes to the first reader to correctly identify the subject of the above shot.

It's nothing exotic, in fact you probably saw it today.

If it proves tough, clues will follow.

Update: Within about 30 seconds of my posting this, YoungDem503, the little whipper-snapper, correctly identified the subject. (heavy sigh) This led me to believe that it may be too easy. (either that or YoungDem503 may be just that sharp.)

At any rate, I decided to crop the shot down a little and hopefully make it a bit more challenging. We'll see.

And the winner is YoungDem... for guessing it instantaneously before I made it harder, and Anonymous (yawn) for first to guess correctly afterwards.

Yes, it is indeed the amazing whirly-bird maple seed. How a tree managed to figure out how to encapsulate it's seeds in a container which happened to form a perfectly aerodynamic wing which gently wafts the seed to the ground and also, since it lands seed down, manages to sort of insert the seed into any suitable surface.

These things are a real pain if you have a tree or trees around which dump them by the millions. They get into EVERYTHING and they are extremely hard to clean up. The cover a yard like miniature lawn darts so hundreds of thousands of little wings are standing straight up in the grass. And they manage to get into every crevice of a car, or anything else that happens to be near them.

Here's the oringinal shot.

The seed is amazingly built. It sends out these tendrils which are tightly packed together and form the leading edge of the wing, but then they each descend like tiny veins to add support to the membrane of the wing without adding much weight. Amazing adaptation.

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