Kittens act all tough and brave, at least until a dog walks by and then they are a scaredy cat!
Scaredy Cat
Picture of the Day for July 23, 2013
Old Crooked Tree
Old dead tree stands all gnarled and worn,
Its brittle limbs all battered and torn.
The passing centuries it has seen
When it was still mighty strong and green.
The marvelous stories it could tell
When critters would stop to rest a spell.
The youthful days when life was prime
Has withered since near the end of time.
Wind and storms try to force it to fall,
Old crooked tree barely standing tall.
Sheri Erickson, 7/23/13
Old Crooked Tree
Picture of the Day for July 22, 2013
“O beautiful for halcyon skies, For amber waves of grain,” was a start of a poem written by Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor, who took a trip in 1893 to teach summer school in Colorado Springs.
Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, and they found their way into her poem, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the “White City” with its promise of the future contained within its alabaster buildings; the wheat fields of America’s heartland Kansas, through which her train was riding on July 16; and the majestic view of the Great Plains from high atop Zebulon’s Pikes Peak.
On the pinnacle of that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel. The poem, Pikes Peak, was initially published two years later in The Congregationalist, to commemorate the Fourth of July in which the poem was titled America.
Amended versions were published in 1904 and 1913, in which the “O beautiful for halcyon skies” was changed to “O beautiful for spacious skies” and the music we have associated with the poem was composed by a church organist and choirmaster, Samuel A. Ward.
Just as Bates had been inspired to write her poem, Ward too was inspired to compose his tune. The tune came to him while he was on a ferryboat trip from Coney Island back to his home in New York City, after a leisurely summer day in 1882, and he immediately wrote it down. He was so anxious to capture the tune in his head, he asked fellow passenger friend Harry Martin for his shirt cuff to write the tune on. He composed the tune for the old hymn “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem”, retitling the work “Materna”. Ward’s music combined with Bates’ poem were first published together in 1910 and titled, America the Beautiful.
Ward never met Bates as he died in 1903, and he never realized the national stature his music would attain. Bates was more fortunate, as the song’s popularity was well established by the time of her death in 1929.
Amber Waves of Grain
ain, Barn
Picture of the Day for July 21, 2013
Since it is Sunday, we need a sunny picture and this yellow flower is a sunny type of flower.
Sunny Flower
Picture of the Day for July 20, 2013
The cooler dawn ushered in a very vocal choir of birds this morning although the hummingbird just added some ‘chee-dit’ and buzzing to the mix. The Ruby-throated Hummingbird, which beats its wings about 53 times a second, is eastern North America’s sole breeding hummingbird.
Scientists place hummingbirds and swifts in the same taxonomic order, the Apodiformes. The name means “without feet,” which is certainly how these birds look most of the time. The extremely short legs of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird prevent it from walking or hopping. The best it can do is shuffle along a perch. Nevertheless, it scratches its head and neck by raising its foot up and over its wing.
In 1980, the hummingbird, known as “the bird of hope”, became the official symbol of the International Diabetes Federation, partly because of its association with sugar, and party because of its association with control and precision.
And this guy certainly had the control and precision to chase away any other hummingbird that approached the feeder he was guarding.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Picture of the Day for July 19, 2013
I’m not sure if the smiley face is because it is Friday or because the temperature is supposed to get cooler today. But for whatever reason, you can’t help but smile too.
Smiley Face
Picture of the Day for July 18, 2013
Sometimes when going in close for a flower picture, you might encounter something else besides the flower. These flowers were attracting a lot of honey bees and this longhorn beetle. Commonly known as the Red Milkweed Beetle, it is also called Milkweed Borers and Four-eyed beetles. The “four eyes” refer to the way the socket of an antenna divides each compound eye in two, resulting in a “lower eye” and an “upper eye”.
Normally this beetles are found on milkweeds, hence their name, but this guy seems to find this leaf very tasty. It is said that these beetles will “squeak” when held and purr when feeding on milkweeds. I didn’t hold him to see if that is true so I guess I will have to try that the next time I see a Red Milkweed Beetle.
About the time that milkweed buds are swelling and beginning to flower, these small black-dotted red beetles will emerge looking for a mate and the female will lay her eggs on the stem near ground level. The young will bore into the stem to feed and eventually bore to the roots to spend the winter emerging in the spring to start the cycle again.
Milkweeds have fairly potent toxins, and the insects that eat milkweed become, in turn, toxic. Such insects are often colored in bright red or orange to advertise that fact and less likely to be eaten by birds.
Red Milkweed Beetle
Picture of the Day for July 17, 2013
It appear this is the ‘dog days of summer’. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists the traditional period of the Dog Days as the 40 days beginning July 3rd and ending August 11th, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. These are the days of the year with the least rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere. And it is definitely hot here this week.
Dog Days were popularly believed to be an evil time “the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.” according to Brady’s Clavis Calendaria, 1813.
The Romans sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather. So it is a good thing this dog is black and white!
Dog Days of Summer
Picture of the Day for July 16, 2013
On hot summer days, even the sunsets appear ‘hotter’ than normal even if they might give rays of hope that the weather would return to more comfortable temperatures.
Hot Summer Sunset
Picture of the Day for July 15, 2013
Last night I took my cat for a walk down by the pond and he was busy trying to catch frogs, tadpoles and dragonflies. One frog was pretty smart and jut stayed perched on a floating cattail in the water instead of staying by the shore like the other frogs who would have to jump back into the water on the next loop my cat made around the pond.
When approached, green frogs will typically leap into the safety of the water while letting out a loud cry. Hence, the old nickname ‘the screaming frog’. Their normal call is explosive, prolonged, and low-pitched producing a twang similar to the sound of plucking the bass string of a banjo, usually given as a single note, but sometimes repeated several times. Usually I see the ripples in the water after their croak and spot them that way more than the sound.
Northern green frogs will eat any living things they can capture and swallow and are opportunistic feeders, who normally sit patiently in the water or close to shore and wait for prey. Apparently they couldn’t swallow my cat since he passed by several times without being eaten.
My pond is always full of tadpoles and now I know why since after the eggs hatch in 3 to 7 days, the green frog tadpoles take 2 to 22 months to metamorphosis into full grown frogs. And since there were so many in my pond that my cat had to try to catch, he was a rather muddy cat and I refused to carry him home so he wasn’t allowed to play that ‘I have a broken leg and can’t walk’ trick last night.
Perched Green Frog
