Baby Robins Fly Away

I had been noticing this robin's nest at the edge of our terrace. The mother was coming to feed the babies quite often. I didn't see them poke out until Saturday.

This may be the mother foraging on our lawn.

Yesterday, one of the babies flew away. I didn't have my camera nearby to see it try its first flight. Here is the second baby, before it, too, flew away.

South Mountain Speakers - Conserving Treasured Landscapes in the Chesapeake

Last night I attended the South Mountain Speakers event in Getttysburg on the Chesapeaker Landscape Initiative by Jonathan Doherty of the National Park Service. Lo and behold, I found the presentation on Slideshare! It was a very well crafted PowerPoint, with some beautiful images and transformations. Chesapeake Landscape Initiative

View more presentations from Choose Clean Water
As for the NPS program, it is an advisory effort to help states and local communities in the Watershed conserve their important faces. Although there are goals, such as increasing public access to waterfronts, there are few federal funds available. Those will depend on Congressional action.

There are plans to create an online, interactive map of conserved areas in the Chesapeake Watershed.

Sharing Skydrive Files

I am looking for ways to share content in files, mostly for my classes. Here is an embedded One Note file.

Chernobyl

I have been hearing on the news that this is the 25th anniversary of the infamous Chernobyl disaster. At the time we were living in Senegal and heard all the news through the BBC World Service. It was all on the radio. Our only pictures of the disaster came from news magazines, no TV.

A few months after the accident we started to notice frozen turkey wings going on sale in the market and grocery stores all over Dakar. They were also available in Dakar. When I saw some of the boxes I noticed that they were from North Carolina. They were certainly a good deal. An American turkey wing could be as big as a normal African chicken's whole leg.  I remembered buying them quite often.

I didn't realize, thought, that the Senegalese were mystified by this item for sale. In Africa, pretty much all poultry is bought live and whole. Even the well off people buy whole birds, even the already slaughtered ones, in the grocery stores. Selling parts, like we do in the USA, is almost unheard of. 

At one point, a friend I worked with, asked me if there was anything wrong  with the turkey wings. He said that there was a rumor going around that they came from Chernobyl! Maybe people thought they were all that was left. It took me a while to explain that in America, agriculture was industrialized and that it was very common to buy poultry parts. He understood, although I got the idea that he still thought we were crazy in America. You can never underestimate the power of cultural differences!

Posted via email from Black Gap Road

Spring Color

These tulips in the Mont Alto 9/11 Memorial Garden were are real standout, today! I guess all those rainy days paid off.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from Black Gap Road

Buds coming out.

P_Linehan's photostream on Flickr.

This past week has been unseasonably cold. We even had some snow! But now the buds of the plants around the yard are ready to burst out.

Blackbirds at dusk

Blackbirds at dusk, a set on Flickr.

Every evening I hear these birds squawking as they all come to perch in the oak trees up the hill. It's a little like Hichcock's The Birds