With more snow headed this way, I’m thinking more and more about summertime and some other color besides white. The Wild Geranium is a common plant of woodlands and are a later spring or early summer flower and the chipmunks love to eat the seeds. Maybe that is why I have so many chipmunks, it’s the flowers bringing them to my place.
Wild Geranium
I’m a bit of a chicken this morning! I don’t want to go out in the below zero temperature to shovel the snow drift in the driveway. And I think this chicken looks a bit grumpy too about the weather.
Chilly Chicken
It appears that Paul Bunyan hasn’t straighten out this river like he had done with the crooked river that was causing log jams for the loggers. Besides straightening rivers, the mythic folk hero Paul was also responsible for creating the 10,000 Lakes of Minnesota when Paul and his blue Ox Babe left footprints when they wandered blindly in a deep blizzard. The Great Lakes were also formed by Paul to have a watering hole big enough for Babe to drink from.
When Paul Bunyan dragged his axe behind him one day, he created the Grand Canyon and when Babe and Paul were roughhousing and shoving each other around, they created the Grand Tetons. And when Paul needed to get clean afterwards, he made a shower but forgot to turn it off when he finished and it is still running as Yellowstone Falls.
From the five storks that took to deliver Paul to the Mississippi River running backwards when Babe took a big swallow, the mythic legend and stories live on. What is mythic or a mystery to me is how a river doesn’t freeze over in below zero temperatures like last night when the river doesn’t appear to be flowing very fast. But then maybe Paul is upstream washing his feet as they could be hot from his wool socks and lumberjack boots.
Crooked Creek
Many people have the day off for Presidents’ Day but I’m celebrating a different event. February 18 is also the Elm Farm Ollie Day which the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin celebrates every year. They even have a three mustard set as tribute to the three most famous cows in history — Elm Farm Ollie, Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, and the Cow That Jumped Over the Moon. The mustard connection? According to their web site, “Here in Wisconsin, we have a saying: ‘A cow who cuts the mustard is a cow who can be trusted.'”
Who is Elm Farm Ollie? Elm Farm Ollie (known as “Nellie Jay” and post-flight as “Sky Queen”) was the first cow to fly in an airplane, doing so on February 18, 1930, as part of the International Air Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The two year old Guernsey cow was also the first cow to be milked in flight in the Ford Tri-Motor airplane. Wisconsin native Elsworth W. Bunce milked her, becoming the first man to milk a cow mid-flight.
Elm Farm Ollie’s milk was sealed into paper cartons which were parachuted to spectators below. Charles Lindbergh reportedly received a glass of the milk. Ollie’s stunt proved so popular that a large crowd, apparently thirsty for milk, gathered on the field where her plane was to land, forcing it to be diverted to another site.
In addition to having her praises sung in such works as “The Bovine Cantata in B-Flat Major” (from Madame Butterfat) and the stirring “Owed to Ollie,” she has been the subject of stories, cartoons and poems. E. D. Thalinger even painted her portrait for posterity.
So grab your glass of milk (or the jar of mustard) and raise a toast to Ollie.
Celebrating Elm Farm Ollie Day
The red barn might look pretty against the white snow, but to me, it would look prettier with green grass and leaves on the leaves as I had my quota of winter this year.
Looking for Green & Red
The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are. The 16th annual GBBC is Friday, February 15, through Monday, February 18, 2013.
The visitors to my yard the last two days have been Mourning Doves, Chickadees, Red Polls, Pileated Woodpecker, Nuthatch, Purple Finch, Downing Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Crows, Red Bellied Woodpecker and the Gold Finches but the Gold Finches aren’t so “gold” right now with the male displaying its dull olive winter plumage.
The Gold Finch molts its body feathers twice a year, once in late winter and again in late summer. The brightening yellow of male goldfinches each spring is one welcome mark of approaching warm months so I’m looking forward to the ‘gold’ color again.
‘Golden’ Gold Finch
I don’t think these Mourning Doves like the new snow either as now their perches in the trees are snow covered again.
Mourning Doves is one of the most abundant and widespread of all North American birds with population estimated at 350 million. They are the most frequently hunted species in North America with more 20 million shot each year. But I only shoot the doves with my camera and not with a gun. But since the Mourning Doves feed on the ground, approximately 1 in 20 will ingest lead shot in the heavily hunted areas and lead poisoning is another threat to the doves.
The nesting pair will have one to six broods a year with normally two eggs in each brood. Mourning Doves eat almost exclusively seeds, but the young are fed crop milk by their parents which is a secretion from the lining of the crop (enlargement of the esophagus) of parent birds that is regurgitated to young birds. It resembles and smells like cottage cheese.
Its plaintive woo-OO-oo-oo-oo call gives the bird its name and the wings can make an unusual whistling sound upon take-off and landing. The bird is a strong flier, capable of speeds up to 55 mph.
Primarily a bird of open country, scattered trees, and woodland edges, the Mourning Dove can survive in the desert as they can drink brackish water that is almost half the salinity of sea water without becoming dehydrated the way humans would.
The Mourning Dove was named Wisconsin’s symbol of peace in 1971.
Chilly Doves
There are different theories about the origins of Valentine’s Day, with some placing the origin with the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia that occurred February 13th to the 15th. The festival included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be coupled up for the duration of the festival and maybe even longer, if the match was right.
In the 3rd century, the Roman Emperor Claudius II thought marriage was not good for war since men wanted to stay home with their wives, so he outlawed marriage. At the time there was a Christian priest named Valentine who felt sorry for the couples and married people in secret. When Claudius found out, he threw Valentine in jail and executed him on February 14. Before his death however, Valentine wrote a letter to the jailer’s daughter, who had become his friend and signed it from your Valentine.
St. Valentine’s Day began as a liturgical celebration of one or more early Christian saints named Valentinus. The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.
Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine’s didn’t begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife.
Whatever the origin, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year.
Happy Valentine’s Day
On February 13, 2000, the last original “Peanuts” comic strip appeared in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz died. The comic strip, written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, but re-runs continue on.
And while this acorn isn’t a ‘peanut’, it is a nut that squirrels like but this acorn might need some digging out from the ice and then the squirrel might only find the acorn cap (or cupule) and no nut!
Frozen Acorn
Next Monday is President’s Day celebrating the birthday of George Washington but there is no national holiday for Abraham Lincoln who was born February 12, 1809, the second child of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Lincoln, in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. His father Thomas, owned two 600-acre farms, several town lots, livestock, and horses. However, in 1816, Thomas lost all of his land in court cases because of faulty property titles. The family moved north across the Ohio River made a new start in what was then Perry County but is now Spencer County, Indiana.
Besides Abraham Lincoln, several actors were born on February 12, and some of them played in western movies like Wallace Ford who played in the movie ‘The Man From Laramie’, Joe Don Baker who played in the ‘Guns of the Magnificent Seven’, Clifford Tobin DeYoung who played in ‘Centennial’ and ‘Glory’, and Forrest Tucker who played in many movies like ‘Chisum’.
A Canadian actor, Lyon Himan Green, better known by the stage name Lorne Greene was also born on February 12 in 1915. Lorne Green made Ben Cartwright come alive on the TV series Bonanza from 1959 to 1973 with his faithful horse Buck.
And while this horse is not a buckskin like Buck, I think he is saying happy birthday to everyone and secretly wishing someone would take him south for the winter as you can see his frosty breath on his chest.
Red & White
