Today it’s mostly famous for what it looks like on the inside.

It has an equestrian staircase though it’s so smooth it’s really just a gentle slope more than a staircase. It was build like that so our lazy bum king could ride his horse all the way to the top (king not in photo)

And naturally people have also driven cars up the tower

And held a bike race

For a while it was just sort of abandoned by the authorities and became a sloping marketplace

But today it has been restored and become a tourist spot as well as a popular destination for school trips. And yes, you can still watch the cosmos at the top.

Laura Boswell（British）

Dorsal view by the same photographer:

And from the side:

Mountain plovers are rapidly declining due to loss of short-grass prairies in western Kansas, as well as low survival rates of eggs due to increasingly warm, wet weather.

Hudsonian Godwit (mislabeled at first, oops)

Chestnut Collared Longspur

Thick-billed Longspur

Like the mountain plover, Longspurs are also declining due to loss of shortgrass prairie land. We have lost over 80% of shortgrass prairies to farmland or other uses over the last century, which means shortgrass birds like the Chestnut-collared Longspur and Thick-billed Longspur are losing huge swaths of their ranges.

Thick-billed Longspurs are not endangered yet, but it's estimated that we've lost 80-90% of their population in the past 50 years. While their population is still fairly large, it is declining extremely rapidly.

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Coccotrema maritimum 

Getting into lichens has been such good exposure therapy for my trypophobia. Five years ago, I wouldn't have been able to look at this little guy for long. But now, after years of staring at lichen apothecia of all sizes and colors and levels of hole-ish-ness, this little guy instead appears quite charming. C. maritimum is a crustose, saxicolous lichen native to the pacific coast of Canada and Alaska. Its habitat is restricted to the salt-spray zone of costal rocks, and while its range is limited, its abundance in that narrow habitat niche can be unprecedented in the right conditions:

See that white band just below the vegetation zone? That's ALL Coccotrema! Can you believe that? Just the perfect mix of sea-salt deposition, rock chemistry, and light availability. This little guy can be recognized by its thick, whitish-gray to creamy-pink thallus dotted with pinkish-brown cephalodia and verrucose apothecia.

images: source | source

Au of the hobbits if the Shire was more in line with the 1920s instead of the 1800s!