This donkey sure reminds me of Eeyore with his head down and the ‘woe is me’ look. The Winnie-the-Pooh books has Eeyore portrayed as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, old grey stuffed donkey and usually expects misfortune to happen to him, accepts it when it does and rarely even tries to prevent it. His catchphrases are “Thanks for noticin’ me” and “Ohhh-kayyy”.
I wonder if this donkey said “Thanks for noticin’ me” when I stopped to take its picture. Probably said leave me alone!
It is always a nice treat to see a rainbow and a double rainbow is an added bonus. A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection of light in water droplets in the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky.
In a “primary rainbow”, the arc shows red on the outer part and violet on the inner side. This rainbow is caused by light being refracted while entering a droplet of water, then reflected inside on the back of the droplet and refracted again when leaving it.
In a double rainbow, a second arc is seen outside the primary arc, and has the order of its colours reversed, red facing toward the other one, in both rainbows. This second rainbow is caused by light reflecting twice inside water droplets.
The road ditches are presenting a ray of colors from orange, purple, white, and yellow. And here the yellow and black of the native Black-eyed Susans are sharing the ditch with the purple Bee Balm. The Black-eyed Susans were attracting green inch worms and the Bee Balm was enticing bees and butterflies.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
