Ten Little Celebrations – January 2021

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And 2021 is off to a roaring start. Even with the jarring events of Jan. 6 and the pandemic still raging, there were plenty of reasons to celebrate in January 2021.

Bluebirds at our bird feeder –I celebrate when a bluebird group comes to our deck since it doesn’t happen very often. They seem to show up most frequently when there is snow and ice!

Piliated woodpecker in our forest – They don’t come to our deck…but are in our forest. I see them a few times each the winter when the leaves aren’t in the way. Their red heads are like flames. I think I saw a bald eagle a few times too this January. Even the fleeting sight of these birds is a celebration.

Amanda Gordan and the transition to a new President – A young poet and a shift toward hope for our troubled country toward a ‘forming a more perfect union’

Tennessee Crane Festival (virtual) – Lots of good webinars….dreaming about going to the place in January 2022. Celebrating learning about the place this year…and anticipating a visit.

Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival (virtual) – We went in 2019…hope to go to Florida again in January 2022. Celebrating the virtual version this year.

Success making a cheese omelet – I tend to make scrambled eggs but have omelet pans to cook them.  This month I opted to try making an omelet – perfect on the first try…celebrated the accomplishment (and the meal)!

Steak lunch – Our January days have been pretty cold, but my husband grilled on one of the warmer sunny days. A special lunch.

Carrot – coconut – chicken salad – I’ve discovered that if I layer a spoonful of orange marmalade, carrots, canned chicken, and coconut in a bowl….microwave it for a minute…stir…it makes a warm version of a favorite salad to enjoy in winter. Celebrating warm salads!

Howard County Sustainability Legislative Breakfast – Getting an update of what is happening locally re sustainability. I celebrated that good things are being worked at both the county and state level!

Tree trunk macros – It was a short project that I enjoyed a lot. The color and texture of winter tree trunks in our yard were celebration worthy!

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 30, 2021

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

I am featuring videos this week….including the newest baby panda in the US and historic houses. I discovered that a lot of house-type museums have increased their virtual content during the pandemic. The historic houses I picked for this post are ones I have visited in the past. Some I have visited more than once (Mount Vernon and Monticello, for example). It’s fun to savor them virtually!

Panda Cub’s virtual debut – From the National Zoo…video is just over 2 minutes

Virtual visits to the Newport Mansions -  3D tours From the Preservation Society of Newport County. Includes The Elms, Marble House, Hunter House, Isaac Bell House, Chateau-ser-Mer, Chepstow, and Kingscote.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT – 3D tour

Mount Vernon – George Washington’s house. 3D of the gardens and mansion

Lyndhurst – Several 3D views….including at Christmas and Halloween

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens – Florida. 3D with links to historic photos of the same area

Monticello – Thomas Jefferson’s house. 3D tour. There is also a Google Arts and Culture tour with video/photos.

Olana’s Historic Landscape Video Tour – Frederic  and Isabel Church home.

Val-Kill tour – Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site from Google Arts and Culture

Wilderstein – Online exhibit, aerial tour, and landscape tour. The house was the Suckley residence for 3 generations from 1852 to 1991.

The Royal Natural History from the late 1800s

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The Royal Natural History series was published in the mid-1890s by Frederick Warne & Co. – the publisher of Beatrix Potter’s books a few years later in the early 1900s.

These natural history books were edited by Richard Lydekker with a long list of illustrators. I enjoyed browsing through 5 of the volumes back in November: one, two, four, five and six. Two sample images from each volume are below.

As I was looking at these volumes again for this post, I discovered that there were a lot more books to look at. They were published as 6 volumes, 12 sections….many of the ‘volumes’ are multiple books! So – I’ve bookmarked the Internet Archive list again…planning to go back to look at the books I missed on the first pass!

Bluebirds Visit

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On the 26th – we had bluebirds at our birdfeeder! I heard a lot of chatter coming from the birdfeeder so got up to look. There was quite a crowd around the feeder with birds jostling for a perch. It was a cold icy day too. I took a few pictures from my office window then went downstairs where I took pictures through the panes of the French door in the breakfast area. The birds were moving so quickly I didn’t get a good count…but there were probably 6-8 birds…maybe only one male (he is the one that has the brighter blue feathers).

The birds that were not on the feeder were often directly below looking up!

I was using my new camera and took advantage of the zoom and vantage point of our first floor to capture some bluebird portraits…all females (not sure where the male went….the birds were very active).

I looked at the All About Birds entry for Eastern Bluebird – and found that the birds usually don’t come to feeders because they eat primarily insects and fruits. These birds must have been hungry! One of the foods they like is raisins so I’ve put some on my list for the next grocery pick-up!

Back in January 2016, I posted about bluebirds coming to our birdbath. It was a similar kind of day from a weather perspective. There were about the same number of birds in that group. There are many nesting boxes in our area which helps support the birds’ nesting. But we probably need to have more native bushes that have berries for our birds in winter; something to consider for an upcoming landscaping project.

Through my Office Window – January 2021

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I seemed to be busy with other things during January…so I was a little surprised that there were enough pictures to make a ‘through my office window’ post this month. This time of year, the heated bird bath is popular with many birds. I managed to get pictures of blue jays, Carolina chickadees, and a mourning dove there.

 Both the male and female northern cardinals are coming to the deck and feeder. The male prefers the seed under the feeder, but the female takes her time there…stays on the feeder perch of minutes rather than seconds.

The gold finches come to the feeder in small flocks. There are often 2 or 3 of them at a time.

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The white breasted nuthatch comes to the feeder but has started checking around the shingles of the covered part of the deck. I wonder if the bird stores seed there or there is something else the bird is looking for there.

I photographed the red-bellied woodpecker at the feeder but also in the maple tree. There is one in this series where the bird is getting ready to take off from the maple to make a run at the feeder. We only have a female around right now. I hope a male shows up by the spring.

Deer come through our yard frequently. Their route is always on the south side of our house – either heading to or coming from the forest. Sometimes they seem to be looking right at the camera. I saw two males butting heads at dusk, but the light was too poor to get a picture.

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There is a small flock of house finches in our area. They enjoyed nibbling the red maple buds on a warm afternoon, but they are often at the feeder this time of year as well.

My favorite pictures this month were of a group of crows finding tasty things in the back yard. They were digging down into the leaf mulch and grass; note that one of them has dirt on his beak! Also – one has white feather.

Mini Road Trip: Mt Pleasant for Skunk Cabbage

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I am realizing that I haven’t driven very much in the last 6 months. There are at least 2 problems with that: the almost full tank of gas is about 6 months old and I’m getting out of practice when it comes to driving. If my plan is to make some road trips after I get vaccinated and the pandemic begins to fade, I need to keep my car operationally sound and my skills honed. My solution for now is to start making some mini road trips. The first was to Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant to see if the skunk cabbage was blooming yet.

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There were cars in the parking area when I got there…but no people around. I put on my masks and gloves and set out toward the Community Garden…turning into the path through the forest

Toward Hodge Podge Lodge. It’s gotten some fresh paint on the trim and curtains on the inside.

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I crossed the bridge to continue toward the largest stand of skunk cabbage in previous years – taking a picture of the small stream below with some ferns on the banks. The water made pleasant trickling sounds. I noticed some areas of lighter sediment through the water– cleared of the darker colored debris.

I always look for shelf fungus. The two prettiest I found had green markings. Is that the fungus or a partner organism?

As I walked along the path, I checked the stream periodically and soon found some cones of sprouting skunk cabbage.

Once I got closer to the marshy area, there were a lot more plants. The reddish cones will eventually have the flowers inside them (they look like golf balls). I didn’t see any that were that far along. Right now, the plants are growing slowly – speeding up with it is warmer, slowing down and sometimes pulling themselves down into the muck when its cold.

I’ll make another mini road trip to see them again next month.

I hiked back toward the parking lot and made a stop at the witch hazel near the drive to the farmhouse. The flowers haven’t opened yet, but the buds are large. I’ll check them again too since the tree typically blooms in late winter…or very early spring.

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30 years ago – January 1991

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In January 1991 – we went down to the Smithsonian on the 1st. I didn’t note which museums we saw…just that our 16-month-old daughter walked across the mall on her own – stopping to exam interesting pebbles and clumps of grass, etc.

We had more snow that January than we have this year. There are pictures of our daughter sledding down the driveway in a plastic tub; her snowsuit is a little tight and she does not look happy at all…maybe because I forgot to put on her mittens! She was much happier indoors eating spaghetti.

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Her new skill was taking off her shoes and socks. Her father called me one morning after I’d gotten to work with the news that I was going to have to do something about her…he had gotten her ready to go to day care and was putting on his coat…turned around to discover that her shoes and socks were not on her feet anymore! Her day care provider said the same thing happened all day long. Once she discovered she could do it – we all had to be patient until the novelty wore off…or her feet grew a little and the shoes were not as easy to pull off. I also started putting her in tights, so she had at least one layer on her feet.

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We all enjoyed the Cats musical that we taped from PBS. Our daughter made the connection between the characters of the show and our cat. The cat slept through most of the video viewings.

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My husband and it were worried about events in the Middle East (Desert Storm); after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there had been such hope that the world was heading toward a better time, but the optimism did not last. I was feeling the physical distance between where I lived in Maryland with the rest of my family in the Dallas just as I am now. Maybe it was a little better in 1991 because I could travel – not something that can happen in January 2021.

Tree Trunk Macros – Part 2

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A few days ago, I posted some macro images of our sycamore and cherry tree trunks. Today the macro images are of our Thundercloud Plum and Red Oak tree trunks.

The plum tree bark has fissures and a reddish tinge – maybe from the same pigment that makes its leaves red purple in summer. There are small growths of lichen. The tree is not as well colonized as the cherry but seems to have some the same type of lichen.

The red oak is a mini-ecosystem complete with the lichen (some with a dendritic type of growth) and moss. I appreciate the moss in the winter because it is the greenest thing in our front yard!

The oak also supports some Virginia Creeper vines…with moss and lichen growing under them. The suction cup like attachment to the tree are covered over by the moss.

Overall, this photographic project in our yard has encouraged me to try it someplace else. Maybe I’ll do some tree trunk photography down by the neighborhood pond or into the forest behind our house. Stay tuned.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 23, 2021

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Ice sheet uncertainties could mean sea level will rise more than predicted -- ScienceDaily – There are warning signs that the current models aren’t accurately predicting ice sheet dynamics.

How mail-order frogs could save Colombia's amphibians - BBC Future – Carefully breeding frogs to keep them from going extinct in the wild.

Meet Amanda Gorman, the U.S.' Youngest Inaugural Poet | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – Leading with eloquence and hope for the future….pushing us to strive for a country that is a ‘more perfect union.’

House Agrees Saguaro National Park Should Grow By 1,200 Acres – Hope this happens…when my daughter was in Tucson we enjoyed this park many times.

Diet and lifestyle guidelines can greatly reduce gastroesophageal reflux disease symptoms -- ScienceDaily – Exercise seems to be important – perhaps because it helps clear stomach acid that causes heartburn symptoms.

Top 25 birds of the week: Wild birds Photos! - Wild Bird Revolution – Birds – always great to look at in the wild and in photos.

How Codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman Broke Up a Nazi Spy Ring | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – Some history…about how a woman did work she wanted to do…made significant contributions…didn’t get credit or pay that she should have. It happens again and again. We can’t assume that it isn’t still happening just because we have some very visible examples of women with power, recognition, and pay.

Are sleep trackers accurate? Here's what researchers currently know – It’s not always good to track sleep….particularly if it causes anxiety. I am in the group that generally has good sleep, so the tracker data doesn’t cause me anxiety, but it probably doesn’t improve anything either!  I might get a much simpler tracker next time that doesn’t provide sleep metrics.

The Wintertime Wonder of Unusual Ice | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – The short video of hair ice forming is interesting.

How Africa's largest city is staying afloat - BBC Future – Lagos, Nigeria. Part of the city is known as the ‘Venice of Africa.’ And there is a ‘Great Wall of Lagos’ to reinforce the coast.  The claim is that Africa’s largest city is leveraging its ingenuity to stay afloat….but whether it succeeds in the coming decades will be the real test.

Tree Trunk Macros – Part 1

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A sunny day in the thirties…I decided to take a quick walk around the yard with my new camera for some landscape pictures and my phone with a 2x magnifying lens with a built in LED light (and clicker) for macro shots. The best images of the morning (before I got too cold) were the macro shots of tree trunks. My gear is simple. I wear both the clicker and the phone with the magnifier around my neck. I can easily hold the phone close to the tree trunk with one hand (often bracing my hand on the tree) and use the clicker to take pictures with the other.

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The sycamore bark is full of texture…fissures old and new. Some parts of the trunk are very smooth, but I am more interested in the cracks and crevices.

I noticed some Virginia Creeper stems on the painted surface of the exterior wall of our basement. They retain some reddish color even in winter. The way they attach to the brick looks like a suction cup!

The cherry tree has lichen and moss growing on it…and a different texture than the sycamore even though there are some occasional curls of bark.

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A larger branch had fallen from the tree and I took a picture of the end of the branch.

I’ll post the macro images of other tree trunks in our yard next week. I’ve also added ‘pick up sticks/branches’ to my list of chores!

The White House in 1940

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As I watched the Inauguration, I remembered an old magazine I’d browsed through recently on Internet Archive – the July 1940 edition of House & Garden that included an article about the White House as it was in 1940…and some history of the White House up to that point. I clipped some of my favorite images (click to get an enlarged version of the image).

Much has happened to the building in the intervening 80 years. The White House is still the architectural symbol of the Executive Branch and home of the President for his term. I hope that President and Dr. Biden quickly acclimate to the place…make it into their home…and forge ahead in their roles for the country from its rooms.

The article also included images of some of the other building of Washington DC. Some things have changed since 1940…some not.

I am relieved that the we have a new President as I write this….that we have survived the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th and anticipating a positive path forward. Amanda Gorman, the youth poet laureate, was the highlight of the event with her “The Hill We Climb” at the Biden inauguration! And now the work begins for the new administration….

New Camera Experiments – Creative Filters

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I got a new camera for Christmas – a Canon PowerShot SX70 HS. It’s a slight upgrade from a previous camera but I am taking time to browse through the manual to try a few things. The Creative Filters Mode is the topic of today’s post. The mode provides a series of image effects that are can be easily selected. My experiment was to try the different ‘filters’ with the view from my office window.

Filter 1: black and white, rough and gritty

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Filter 2: soft focus, gentle ambience

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Filter 3: distorting fish-eye lens

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Filter 4: art bold, like oil painting

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Filter 5: watercolor painting

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Filter 6: miniature effect, blurring of image outside a selected area

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Filter 7: toy camera with vignetting and different color balance

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I took a second series with the bouquet of flowers…using the art bold

And then the watercolor painting filters.

These are fun to play with but I’m not sure how often I will use you them in the field. At least I am more aware they are a feature of the camera after experimenting with them. I might try them in a garden or forest…but make some notes for myself so I remember what I used; they skew reality….and I am usually trying to capture what I am seeing rather than going for a special effect image.

Tennessee Sandhill Cranes

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The Virtual Celebration of the Cranes hosted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is history…but there are videos available on their Facebook page. My favorite video is the hour-long Coffee with Cranes; it includes the morning activity of the cranes near the confluence of the Tennessee and Hiawassee Rivers and the intermittent commentary about cranes…a wonderful virtual field trip. I appreciated that I was warm inside while watching the birds in the light snow (with the bundled up commentators occasionally chiming in with sandhill crane info). The high point of the video is near the end – a large number of birds were startled from another field and flew into the mowed corn/millet field they were filming in the last 3-4 minutes of the hour!

I am full of plans for next January…attending this festival in-person and making a side trip down to Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama (further down the Tennessee River and another location where there are lots of cranes in the winter).

If we wanted a road trip to see cranes earlier in the season – we might visit the Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area in Indiana. The peak number of birds at that location usually occurs in December and the birds migrate further south as it gets colder.  

We could do a themed birding travel year around sandhill cranes:

  • September for Yampa Valley Cranes (Colorado)

  • November for Bosque del Apache Festival of the Cranes (New Mexico)

  • December for Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area (Indiana)

  • January for Hiawassee/Tennessee River confluence and Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge (Tennessee and Alabama)

  • March for Platte River migrating cranes (Nebraska)

Of course – there are other birds (lots of waterfowl and some raptors) to see along with the cranes at the various locations…and we’d see both western and easter flocks…mostly greater sandhill cranes but some lesser sandhills in the west. There might be some whooping cranes with the sandhills in the east!

Maybe I’ll find other locations to add before we set out – or maybe this turns into a multi-year series of trips. It’s post-COVID travel to look forward to! We know a lot more after all the virtual festivals we’ve enjoyed during our ‘stay at home as much as possible’ time since last March.

2 Mornings in January

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It is easy to catch the sunrise this time of year from our house: the leaves are off the trees so we have a better view of the horizon and sunrise happens well after 7 AM. I’ve discovered that the view is better from the second floor of our house rather than the first – even though that means the pictures are taken through a window. I’m sharing 2 recent sunrises in this post:

The first is from the 15th. The east was getting brighter, transitioning from red to orangish hues (left image)…but the pink haze of reflected light in the west (right image) was my favorite of the morning since it only happens occasionally…it was a great way to start the morning in my office.

On the 17th, the east had more cloud texture than on the 15th and it was a little redder…earlier in the sunrise sequence.

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Ten minutes later, the view from my office (looking toward the west) caught the special morning light ‘coming down from the trees’ as it came over the roof of our house. Most of the trees looking full of orange light are tulip poplars. The dark trees in the foreground (in shadow) are pines, black walnut, and red maple. The forest is lovely all the time…but the early morning is probably my favorite during the winter…do drab browns in sight!

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Large Zentangle® Tile

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I found some 11-inch square pieces of white cardboard while I was cleaning out…not sure where they came from…I immediately started using one of them to make a large Zentangle tile.

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I started out with a traditional frame and string made with pencil…non-traditional since I used a ruler. Then I started filling in the spaces with some of my favorite patterns – gingo, crescent moon, poke root and leaf, tipple, etc. There was a pattern to how I added the patterns into spaces…so patterns with patterns. Once I filled all the spaces with patterns (using a fine point black Sharpie),  I started to add color moving from the outer spaces toward the center with various colors of fine point Sharpies. The last ‘layer’ was some highlighting with white and light green gel pen. It took me a few days to do the whole surface and was a good experience. I still like the smaller tiles best – something I can finish in one or two sittings.

Enjoy the time sequence below!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. “Zentangle” is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 16, 2021

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Wingspan and Other Tabletop Games for Naturalists – A new indoor activity for during the winter?

Square Structure Detected Under Monte Albán’s Main Plaza - Archaeology Magazine – The plaza was in use for 1,000 years….and evidently the structure detected with ground penetrating radar, electrical resistance and gradiometery is 60x60 feet…and about 3 feet thick. More study of the data might reveal if the building had stairs, tunnels, and columns.

Leaf microbiomes are a neighborhood affair in northern forests -- ScienceDaily – The microbes associated with trees have been an active research area in recent years. This study looked at Sugar Maples and discovered that their microbiome was similar to the trees around them…whether it was other sugar maples or conifers….other species entirely.

A warm pool in the Indo-Pacific Ocean has almost doubled in size, changing global rainfall patterns | NOAA Climate.gov – The impacts on large-scale atmospheric circulation and rainfall are expected to intensify in the future.

Top 25 birds of the week: January 2021 – This collection includes a photo of a red-breasted nuthatch…a bird we’ve seen at our feeder this year!

Photographer Nathan Myhrvold Captures Snowflakes in High Resolution – I enjoy trying to photograph snowflakes…but I do it close to home where the challenge is higher temperatures. That tends to cause them to clump rather than be easily separated into single flakes. It’s still a fun activity for snow days.

New mammogram measures of breast cancer risk could revolutionize screening -- ScienceDaily – Improving the way mammograms are analyzed…giving results at the time of screening instead of later then moving toward personalized screening thereafter rather than ‘one size fits all.’ I wonder how long it will take for this to trickle through the industry.

Flapper style | Europeana – Our family has a picture of one of my grandmothers in a flapper dress. She probably made it herself – as the article indicated…they were easy to make and patterns were available. The dresses have a timelessness to them even though they are associated with the 1920s. They look great as party dresses even 100 years later!

'Sparkling' clean water from nanodiamond-embedded membrane filters -- ScienceDaily – The problem the researchers are addressing is filtering of the hot water from oil recovery and other industrial processes. We’ll need more technologies like this to clean up water we can’t afford to leave polluted forever….but we should concurrently move toward technologies that don’t leave toxins in water. Technologies should be designed with the goal in mind of 0 waste.

Researchers Catch Oldest Tropical Reef Fish Known to Science | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – An 81-year-old midnight snapper! They also caught a 79-year-old red snapper in the same area. Climate change is already warmed the reef enough that the life-span of the fishes there is expected to be shorter in the future. The record for oldest known vertebrate in the world is also a sea creature – a 400 year old Greenland shark.

Kate Greenaway’s Queen of the Pirate Isle Illustrations

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Project Gutenberg has the 1885 edition of Bret Harte’s The Queen of the Pirate Isle with illustrations by Kate Greenaway. I was looking at it more for the illustrations than the text since I was working my way down the list of books she illustrated. She set a style for children’s clothes in her illustrations (see the Wikipedia entry for her and then look for the books in the ‘Books Illustrated’ list in Internet Archive…it’s a good way to look at the work of an illustrator when the works are old enough to no longer be under copyright). She died in 1901 so books are out of the copyright window.

For girls – the clothes seem more for ‘dress up’ play that for everyday activity. I’ve clipped 6 images from the book to provide a flavor of the book….and Kate Greenaway illustrations of children.

Anniversary Celebration

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My husband and I have been married for 48 years! We celebrated a day early with red velvet cake (for me) and carrot cake (for him) that we enjoyed a day early because that is when we did a pickup of other items from a store that included a bakery that makes good cakes.

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I’m thinking back to the decades of our marriage

We spent the 1st 10 years in Texas. We were both in college – he was full time and I was part time. My career in computer programing was becoming well established. At the end of the 10 years, he had a PhD in Physics and I had a Masters in Mathematics.

Early in the 2nd 10 years we moved to Virginia for his post doc and I went to work for IBM. During the decade we moved to Maryland (after his post doc ended) and had our daughter.

The 3rd decade saw us moving in Maryland to the house we are in now. Our lives were focused on our daughter and our careers…trying to blend everything together at every opportunity. For several years, my work required trips to Colorado once a month. My husband and daughter joined me for before or after the workdays so often that my daughter thought everyone got on an airplane for Colorado frequently – was surprised that she was the only one in her Montessori class with Colorado t-shirts and sweatshirts. Our daughter was old enough to consider putting her on a plane to see her grandparents in Texas by the time 9/11 happened; we delayed that milestone to well into the next decade.

Our careers were important during our 4th decade – but the milestones of our daughter took the fore in our family: driver’s license, high school graduation, Cornell for undergraduate degree, internship at Northern Arizona, beginning graduate school at University of Arizona, marriage. My husband began his glide path to post-career. My last grandparent died. We dealt with some health issues of our own that slowed us down temporarily. I retired in the last year of the decade.

In the past 8 years, I’ve settled into post-career activities including volunteer gigs. My husband continued to work part time for a few years and ramping up of post-career. We both enjoy traveling (birding festivals in particular) until the pandemic stopped that; we’ll pick it back up in a year. Our daughter’s milestones were ones we shared vicariously: PhD in Astrophysics/her husband’s PhD in Biology, post docs at Penn State/University of Pittsburg, tenure track faculty positions at Missouri State University. Our health has been stable, but my sisters and I are partnered to assist our aging parents as they face health-related challenges.

We’re enjoying the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s Online Celebration of Cranes right now and are tentatively planning to be at the in-person festival next year to celebrate our 49th anniversary!

Moon in the Morning

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Last Sunday morning, I noticed the moon just before sunrise and grabbed my camera for a few pictures. It was cold standing on the front porch in my stocking feet – not taking the time to put on a coat or shoes because I wanted the photograph with the light as it was. Things change fast at that time of the morning.

I zoomed in for a final group of pictures. In the evening I loaded the pictures onto my computer to check what I got. The pictures like the ones above didn’t surprise me but the zoomed ones did. There are craters visible right at the edge of the shadow! I was pleased that my small Canon Powershot SX730 HS did the job….that my hands were steady enough for the camera’s image stabilization to do the rest.

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Starling Shelter

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Our neighbor’s house is missing a triangular cover on part of their eaves…and it appeared that some starlings moved into the protected space on the last day of 2020.

Fortunately, the birds are almost to heavy to get seed from our feeder so I see them more on the gutter and roof of our covered deck.

I saw one that came to the top of the feeder while the female red-bellied woodpecker was there and the woodpecker became very territorial…moving toward the starling and making threatening sounds/moving its open beak like a pair of open scissors toward the starling. The starling made a hasty retreat!

There are times that I appreciate the look of the starlings. Their feathers do have a green or purple sheen ….and the black tipped beak is interesting too.

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