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Starling murmur at sunset in Italy ☀️🇮🇹
A starling murmur, also known as a "starling cloud", is a spectacular phenomenon in which thousands or even millions of starlings fly in coordinated groups, forming complex patterns in the sky.
It's a flocking behavior that can be observed during migrations or when starlings gather to rest or search for food.
It's always a strikingly beautiful sight!
📹 Zéfiro82
 
A superb photograph of the Xico crater in Mexico, the "Navel of the World".
The crater measures 100 meters in height and 1400 meters in diameter, making it one of the largest volcanoes in the world.
Its perfect shape can be explained by the fact that it is a ring of tuff, a geological phenomenon resulting from the interaction between magma emerging from a volcano and water.
The formation originates from Lake Chalco, created by run-off from the Sierra Nevada.
Located just 40 km south of downtown Mexico City, the volcanic crater has been swallowed up by urban expansion.

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4800 years old
The world's oldest tree is 4800 years old. Its thick, dense trunk has been twisted by the centuries without succumbing to disease or the elements. Named Methuselah, it stands in the ancient Bristlecone pine forest in the heart of a dry, mountainous area of California.

He's seen it all, experienced it all, and with him, the expression "Old as Methuselah" takes on a literal meaning! For the Methuselah tree surpasses in age the overwhelming majority of living beings on Earth. Jonathan, the 190-year-old tortoise, pales in comparison...

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Wow, so spectacular indeed!
One other place in Guizhou where I haven't been but where I would very much like to go next time I visit the province is a place that I'm pretty much certain no-one outside China has ever heard of called Pingba (平坝樱花): the world's largest gathering of cherry blossoming trees: an incredible 700,000 trees! All of this in islands and peninsulas on a lake. This place looks like the closest thing there is on earth to the garden of Eden!

It's a shame Guizhou is rarely visited by foreign tourists. In general in my experience it's the number 1 mistake people make when they visit China: they tend to spend all their time visiting cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an, etc.) when the countryside is in my humble opinion in some ways more impressive, with so many absolutely breathtaking sites.

A fun anecdote I recently read in the French press (20minutes.fr/publicommuniqu…) which illustrates this is that there's this French guy called Jean Bottazzi who's the Vice President of the French Speleology Federation (FFS). One day he decided to visit China and Guizhou specifically (since the place is filled with mountains and huge cave networks, including the Shuanghe cave network, the longest one in China) and... he literally stayed there, he now lives in China!

Beautiful!
 

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