20 August 2020:

Today’s Picture of the Day at Wikimedia Commons is an aerial photo of the 154-foot-long geoglyph called the Spider, one of the Nazca Lines of Peru.

The Nazca Lines are hundreds of enormous lines and figures in the Nazca Desert, created about 2,000 years ago when people cleared the reddish pebble surface from the underlying soil. The desert’s stable windless climate has kept the lines visible to this day, helped by the fact that the underlying soil contains lime which hardens when exposed to morning mist.

Many of the Nazca Lines are long straight lines or geometric patterns but more than 70 are animals. The most frequently depicted are birds. Some of the birds are local, some from far away. Naturally the Nazca people depicted an Andean condor though it appears to have a hummingbird’s beak.

If you find it difficult to see the condor click here for an outlined image or compare it to the Andean condor below.

My favorite of the birds, and perhaps theirs too, is the hummingbird whose geoglyph is 305 feet long!

Learn more about the Nazca Lines, see the hummingbird and others from the air in this vintage article: A 2000-year-old Drawing of…

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)